Is Jay-Z an occultist, a freemason, a member of the secret Illuminati? Seems like a crazy question to me, but apparently some of the symbols in his videos are raising eyebrows.
The question is crazy because – who cares? At least that’s my take. But I guess some people do. And I’d have to agree that some of the symbols in his videos are also symbols used by various ‘occult’ or secret/hidden societies. In fact, you can find most of them in a single pack of Tarot cards. But so what?
If Jay-Z is part of some secret group, it’s still a secret. His videos haven’t shown me where to sign up for the Occult. And I could only dream that he’s a Tarot reader. If he is, we definitely want him on Beyond Worlds or Psychic Friends Live.
Take a look at what occult expert Mitch Horowitz has to say about the whole thing. He’s recently published a book about the Occult in America and is especially good at finding hidden codes and other open secrets.
In Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, Dean Radin looks at psychic phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis and the astounding amount of scientific research that’s been done on it. Thousands of controlled lab tests have been done and Radin surveys the lot.
Entangled Minds
The book is fascinating and I recommend it to psychic practitioners and skeptics alike. Not to mention, all those in between. But that’s not really what I wanted to write about here.
The reason I mention the book is that in it, Radin describes a website called Got Psi? It’s run by the Boundary Institute, a nonprofit scientific research organization mostly interested in mathematics, computer science and physics.
But they’re also interested in questions like “Can Causal Influence Propagate Backwards in Time?” and how we might use quantum randomness to send messages into the past.
On their Got Psi? website, they’ve developed a series of informal tests for ‘Psi’ functioning based on the same techniques used in more formal laboratory experiments. And you can do them from your own computer.
They’re great fun. Three different card tests, two remote viewing tests, and a lottery and location test. You get immediate feedback about your performance and can see your scores relative to other testers.
The website reminds us that getting a high score on any of the tests might be due to chance and not your brilliant psychic abilities. Just as getting low or medium scores doesn’t mean you have no ability.
You’ve got to do many runs to get any sort of useful average. As they put it, “Only repeated testing can distinguish between luck and genuine skills.”
So when you’ve got a little time on your hands and feel like some psychic experimentation – go see for yourself? Got Psi?
On the block will be first editions of books like Francis Potters’ 1642 classic, An Interpretation of the Number 666 and the earliest treatise on cryptography from 1561, Polygraphie et Uniuerselle escriture Cabalistique by Johanne Trithemius.
The definitive book on the theory and practice of witch hunting, Jean Bodin’sLa Demonomanie des Sorciers, from 1598 will be there. As will the more devotional, and significantly more expensive, illuminated 15th century manuscript of the Book of Hours in Latin and French, on vellum in colours and gold. This one comes with a bonus 2 large and 13 small miniatures. I bet they’re gorgeous!
There’s also a set of the second Estienne Hebrew “pocket” Bible from the French Renaissance. You’d need quite a pocket though. This Bible has 17 parts in 8 volumes. And among several early medical and scientific books is a first edition of the first complete textbook of astronomy in Hebrew.
Not many of us can afford books like these, but if you’re in NYC November 5th, 6th, 8th or the morning of the 9th, you can go to the gallery and take a look at them. If I were there, I might.
There are thousands of books for you to download, absolutely free. You won’t find anything new there. All the titles are part of the Public Domain. But it’s actually the ‘old’ nature of these books that is so attractive.
The Tarot
Maybe I could find affordable original copies of Ouspensky’s The Symbolism of the Tarot (1913) or Foli’s Fortune-Telling By Cards (1915) in an old book store, on Amazon or at eBay. But here they’re at my fingertips – for free!! No shipping charges.
You can become a member of the site for a one-time charge of either $49 or $69. With that you get ‘clean’ downloads. It’s not a problem for me, but the free pdf’s have a line running through them and are a little splotchier than the members’ downloads. But don’t worry, they’re very readable.
Also, if you’d prefer reading a book with a cover, they’ll print one up for you at a very nominal fee. I actually discovered them by ordering one of their books from Amazon.
This sounds like an ad I know, but it’s really just an unsolicited endorsement of a fabulous site (and idea). I’ve already downloaded six books from them for free. If after I read them, I feel like I must own a hardcopy, I’ll get one. But really … this is just great!!!
And though they have a huge metaphysical section, that’s not all. They also have classical fiction, art, philosophy, science, religion, folklore, mythology and sacred texts.
Who knew that Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, was crazy for Tarot? I didn’t.
I just got Mary K. Greer’s latest blog update (if you’re not subscribing to her blog yet – do it now) and she’s written about a BBC broadcast of Burgess’ short story Chance Would Be A Fine Thing. The story is about a not-so-wise woman who looks to the cards for some gambling advice. And it’s fabulous!!
Burgess himself designed a Tarot deck and was apparently fascinated by prediction. His biographer, Andrew Biswell describes him as having, “had a strong interest in horoscopes, tarot cards and predictive dreams.” In volume two of his autobiography, he claimed to have predicted Kennedy’s assassination a year before it happened.
This cautionary Tarot tale is brilliantly read by John Sessions. It’s only 20 minutes long, but don’t wait to listen. It’s only going to be available till this Friday, October 29th. After that it’ll disappear till 2013 when we can see it again in the Collected Short Stories Biswell is editing.
My most recent shipment from Amazon has arrived and I can hardly wait to dig on into my new books! I got The Chicken Qabalah by Lon Milo Duquette, and Tarot for Beginners by Barbara Moore.
Tarot for Beginners
I’ve been reading a long time now, so I’m not really a Tarot beginner, but I’m always looking for fresh ways to teach the cards. Barbara Moore is a fabulous writer and teacher and I’m excited to see how she lays things out for people just starting.
Within the first few pages, I’m already liking what I see. In her Tarot History section she doesn’t weigh the new reader down with lists of dates and deck developments, but instead focuses on the ‘fluidity’ of what has become Tarot. It’s alive, not an old text to be memorized.
And in her Reading section she gets the student to jump right in, proving from the start that they already have what it takes to read Tarot cards.
Straight forward, information packed and modern. I think I’ll be lending this one out to friends asking to learn about the Tarot. Not to mention, I’m looking forward to finishing it myself.
So it’s with hopes high that I’ll be delving into this one. The back cover promises “Learn the basics of Qabalah in spite of yourself and laugh your way up the Tree of Life!”. Now that’s how I want to learn!
Lon Milo Duquette is a world class occultist with a truly wicked sense of humour. If anyone can keep me entertained while teaching me the ‘hard stuff’, I think it’s him. This is going to be really good.
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Social psychologist Dr. Daryl Bem of Cornell University has been conducting experiments on the human potential to anticipate future experiences. In other words, he’s trying to figure out if we can really see into the future or not.
Over the course of 9 experiments, soon to be published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Bem took commonly accepted effects like ‘studying improves memory’ and ‘priming decreases response time’ and turned them upside down. The results are intriguing.
In one of the experiments, a group of college students were given a list of words to read over. When they finished reading the list they were given a surprise recall test to determine how many words on the list they could remember. When the test was done, a computer randomly generated a selection of words from the list of tested words. These words were given to each student as ‘practice’. The students were asked to retype the practice words several times.
Now here’s the fun part …. in the original surprise recall test, the students did better on the practice words randomly selected by the computer after they took the test than they did on the words the computer didn’t pick and they didn’t retype.
It kind of spins your head, but as Psychology Today reports, “According to Bem, practicing the words after the test somehow allowed the participants to ‘reach back in time to facilitate recall.'” That’s pretty wild stuff.
I’ll be interested to see how the scientific community responds to Bem’s study. The comments posted after the Psychology Today article might give us a taste.
I haven’t had the chance to read Jimmy Carter’s newest book, White House Diary yet, but apparently, he has some good things to say about the CIA using parapsychology for intelligence gathering.
According to Politico.com, an entry from his diary on April 11, 1979 says “Both we and the Soviets use these parapsychologists on occasion to help us with sensitive intelligence matters, and the results are unbelievable.”
Later in the book while reflecting on this point, Carter comments, “The proven results of these exchanges between our intelligence services and parapsychologists raise some of the most intriguing and unanswerable questions of my presidency. They defy logic, but the facts are undeniable.”
Of course the CIA is adamant that they no longer engage in any sort of parapsychology research. But I wonder … did they tell us they were using it last time they did?
Anyway, good stuff Jimmy! I can’t wait to read the book.
Having Marc with us talking about everything from field theories to syncronicity was enormously enlightening, not to mention, entertaining. And he did readings too!
