Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:23:14 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/ Pentacle News en-us http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/images/logo.gif http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/ admin@pentaclemagazine.org http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2485 The front page of the Ely Standard for August 28th 2008 Carried the story that a Witch by the name of Kevin Carlyon was to Put a spell on the anniversary celebrations for Oliver Cromwell’s death on September 6th. This is the latest public in a series of curses put out by Witches, Since the W.W.II curses against Hitler, Then in 2006 the curse against Tony and Cherie Blair, for betraying Britain and the Bombing of Iraq, and now the spell to stop the Cromwell celebrations. The accusation is that Oliver Cromwell saw and did nothing to help people from all over the country but particularly East Anglia from being imprisoned, tortured and hanged, under Mathew Hopkins the Witchfinder general, with over 300 people are said to have been murdered Between 1645 and 1647 Twenty people were charged with witchcraft alone in and imprisoned in Ely jail, now the museum. The Bible written largely in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, is not clear on what a witch actually is, the Hebrew word for Witch is kaskah, which meant a poisoner, liar or keeper of serpents, what sounds nowadays like a politician. There is no doubt that King Charles the first did not value or respect his subjects, and needed to go, and love him or hate him, in order to finance the New Modal army in the civil war, Cromwell from his H.Q. at the Inn at Saffron Walden, allowed back the Jewish moneylenders who were thrown out of Britain centuries before. The only time Christ in the bible lost his temper and smashed the place up, was over the money changers in the temple, the crime of usury cuts deep in Christianity yet this was actually condoned by Christian clerics. At Cromwell’s death on Sept 3rd 1658 a flock of crows was seen cawing round the house, a bird of ill omen it was said at the time it was a sign he would go to hell. Oliver Cromwell on horseback and the Military enactments will be on the Cathedral green from 10 until 4 Saturday Sept.6th. Curses notwithstanding ! Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:23:14 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2484 Ken Campbell, who has died suddenly aged 66, was one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in the British theatre of the past half-century. He was a writer, director and monologist, a genius at producing shows on a shoestring and honing the improvisational capabilities of the actors who were brave enough to work with him. Sat, 06 Sep 2008 08:29:12 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2483 Government declares trial that led to woman's 1782 death was ‘nonlegal’ BERN, Switzerland - Anna Goeldi was executed for being a witch more than 220 years ago — the last witch beheaded in Europe. On Wednesday, the Swiss decided the least they could do was clear her name. Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:32:46 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2482 Harry Price, pictured in 1932, showing a slate covered with 'spirit writing' Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:31:28 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2481 An ancient species of tree is helping Britain's birds survive the effects of climate change, scientists have found. Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:51:43 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2480 Responding to a letter of protest from the National Secular Society, Stephen Hughes, the Chief Executive of Birmingham City Council, says that the Council has never blocked websites dealing with atheism and nor does it intend to – even though it is installing the new Bluecoat filtering system from the USA. Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:51:02 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2479 SPELLING CONEST: Massey University's new magic and witchcraft paper allows students to make voodoo dolls or 'magical curse tablets' for their first assignment. Students rarely receive an A for sending a curse to their lecturers, but that is what Massey students are being encouraged to do. Sat, 16 Aug 2008 10:06:06 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2478 Switching from beef to kangaroo burgers could significantly help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, says an Australian scientist. The methane gas produced by sheep and cows through belching and flatulence is more potent than carbon dioxide in the damage it can cause to the environment. Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:39:51 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2477 Israeli archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of a Roman temple beneath the foundations of a church. The building, which dates to the second century AD, was found during an excavation at Zippori, the capital of Galilee during the Roman period. Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:39:01 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2476 The extinction of many ancient species may be due to humans rather than climate change, experts say. Large prehistoric animals in Tasmania may have been wiped out by human hunting and not temperature changes, a team of international scientists argue. Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:38:38 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2475 The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius's eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secrets STORED in a sky-lit reading room on the top floor of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples are the charred remains of the only library to survive from classical antiquity. The ancient world's other great book collections -- at Athens, Alexandria and Rome -- all perished in the chaos of the centuries. But the library of the Villa of the Papyri was conserved, paradoxically, by an act of destruction. Lying to the northwest of ancient Herculaneum, this sumptuous seaside mansion was buried beneath 30m of petrified volcanic mud during the catastrophic eruption of Mt Vesuvius on August 24, AD79. Antiquities hunters in the mid-18th century sunk shafts and dug tunnels around Herculaneum and found the villa, surfacing with a magnificent booty of bronzes and marbles. Most of these, including a svelte seated Hermes modelled in the manner of Lyssipus, now grace the National Archeological Museum in Naples. The excavators also found what they took to be chunks of coal deep inside the villa, and set them alight to illuminate their passage underground. Only when they noticed how many torches had solidified around an umbilicus -- a core of wood or bone to which the roll was attached -- did the true nature of the find become apparent. Here was a trove of ancient texts, carbonised by the heat surge of the eruption. About 1800 were eventually retrieved. A cluster of the villa's papyrus scrolls, in much the same state as they were found 250 years ago, lies in a display case in the Biblioteca Nazionale's Herculaneum reading room. The individual scrolls, which extend in some cases to 9m unrolled, look not unlike charcoaled arboreal limbs left at the bottom of a campfire. A group of six rolls, compacted by the weight of volcanic debris, has emulsified into one unsightly pile. In a corner of the room stands a device invented in 1756 by the abbot Antonio Piaggio, a conservator of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, to unroll the papyri by suspending them from silk threads attached to their surface with a paste of fish oil. These were fixed in place by a slice of pig's bladder. Piaggio's machine, though painstakingly slow, was used successfully until the beginning of the 20th century. The room also contains a 3m length of scroll unrolled by Piaggio's machine, with 40 columns of Greek text in a rhythmic procession. Scholars today, using multi-spectral imaging technology, are able to decipher the otherwise inscrutable surface of black ink on black fabric of the papyrus scrolls. A multinational team has assembled to transcribe the collection. But work has stalled as they await refinement of a new technique, an application of the CT scan, which will allow some of the untouched texts to be deciphered without exposing them to the risk of further damage. When I ask to view a papyrus fragment from the vaults, a librarian pauses to absorb the request, returning my gaze a little blankly. Just as I begin to frame a withdrawal of this possibly audacious demand, she blinks, smiles amiably, and disappears down one of the library's vast corridors. She returns carrying a gun-metal tray on which a sheet of papyrus, older than many a classical fluted column and as brittle as a desiccated insect wing, has been laid out with reverential delicacy. The glitter of ink is clearly visible under the lights. But the material itself has been scorched in antiquity, then torn and tattered in an effort to prise it open. I am looking at one of the Dead Sea scrolls of classical antiquity: a shard of half-recovered time. It belongs, I realise, to a genre of accidental art that speaks of our relationship to the past more precisely than any intact work; it is the art of the fragment, an art that yields to us, but never surrenders. The Villa of the Papyri is believed to have been owned by Roman statesman Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar. He was a man of wealth and refined taste. Like many members of the Roman elite of the time, Piso looked back fondly to the glories of ancient Greece. His library, written mostly in Greek, was dominated by works of the Epicurean school, which sought a salve for the troubled soul in the taming of runaway desire. Epicurus, the creed's founder, was a fourth century BC atomist philosopher with an atheistic bent and a medicinal aim. He wanted to remedy human pain in this life rather than prepare sufferers for the next. "Nothing to fear in God," he wrote, displaying a talent for pithy distillation. "Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured." Shortly before 300BC Epicurus withdrew his followers to a commune outside Athens, known to all as The Garden. Friendship and frugality were its guiding principles. In fact, Epicurus would regard the modern use of the adjective epicurean as a travesty of his ideals. "Plain fare gives us as much pleasure as a costly diet," he said. True pleasure for Epicurus was a "pot of cheese", though he was thought to enjoy a tipple from a wineskin. Ancient gossip links him with a fellow communard called Mammarion (big breasts), which only shows that the sage was human. Epicureanism takes up a radical position in the Hellenistic world, standing apart from the philosophical mainstream. When Paul addresses the Athenians, in Acts 17 of the Bible, he speaks of Epicureans and Stoics in the same breath. Christianity, naturally, set itself firmly against Epicurean materialism and its implicit atheism. But the Stoics were equally stern disputants. Epicureans, as a result, found themselves traduced by their fellow pagans and damned by the early church. The Garden, nevertheless, flourished for some eight centuries. "Epicurus's philosophy exercised so widespread an influence that for a long time it was touch and go whether Christianity might not have to give way before it," writes Lawrence Durrell in a tone of lament. One consequence of Christian hostility, a kind of passive resistance, is a broken tradition. Epicureanism was ignored by the monastic scribes who transferred the works of approved authors from the school of Athens, particularly Aristotle and Plato, from papyrus to parchment and vellum. Only a few letters, sayings and principles survive from the 300 scrolls attributed to Epicurus in antiquity. A few fragments from Epicurus's lost work, On Nature, inspiration for the Roman poet Lucretius's magisterial poem, On the Nature of Things, have been unearthed at the Villa of the Papyri. But the Herculaneum scrolls are mainly the works of an Epicurean sage named Philodemus, previously known as the author of some rather racy light verse. These finds are contributing to a revival of scholarly interest in Epicureanism, Europe's first green philosophy, at a time when the West urgently seeks advice on living with less. Epicurean counsel sounds at times like contemporary wisdom; it provides the philosophical language for an eco-friendly art of life. A few lines from Lucretius, penned at the apogee of paganism, are equally applicable in the age of the plasma screen: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:38:04 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2474 Scientists have grown a tree from what may be the oldest seed ever germinated. Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:41:51 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2473 AN unexpected sexual curse has reportedly uncovered by archaeologists at Cyprus's old city kingdom of Amathus. Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:41:32 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2472 A gay man who suffered "grotesquely discriminatory conduct" from the Presbyterian Church in Wales has been awarded £37,000. Stephen Price, 25, of Clydach near Abergavenny, was bullied out of his job at Coleg Trefeca in Brecon by his manager Mair Jones, aged 40. A Cardiff tribunal heard Mrs Jones called him a "stupid poof" and gave him pink fairy toilet paper as a gift. The money was awarded for constructive dismissal and injury to feelings. The church had denied Mr Price's claim for sexual harassment, constructive dismissal and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:41:08 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2471 Council ban on atheist websites A city council has blocked its staff from looking at websites about atheism. Lawyers at the National Secular Society said the move by Birmingham City Council was "discriminatory" and they would consider legal action. The rules also ban sites that promote witchcraft, the paranormal, sexual deviancy and criminal activity. Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:39:28 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2470 A tiny tree-shrew that lives on alcoholic nectar could - pound for pound - drink the average human under the table, scientists have discovered. Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:38:35 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2469 People in Central America were drinking beverages made from cacao before 1000 BC, hundreds of years earlier than once thought, a new study shows. Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:38:15 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2468 A series of DNA analyses conducted on ancient wheat samples have led scientists to conclude that the oldest known wheat was grown in Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia. Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:48:28 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2467 In the Italian countryside, the ancient Roman feast of Vestalia is being revived. Six modern Vestal Virgins have presided over an event that used to mark the end of the harvest. It's part of a growing trend of "experimental archaeology," to teach history in a more interactive way. Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:48:12 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2466 Pierce the Darkened Veil of Mystery with ISIS Paranormal Radio On July 6, The first ISIS Paranormal Radio Show aired on blogtalkradio.com/isisparanormal. The ISIS Paranormal Radio Show is co-hosted by Dayna Winters and Patricia Gardner, the co-founders and co-directors of ISIS Paranormal Investigations, a team that investigates paranormal claims in the New York, Vermont and Massachusetts areas. The first show involved an extensive interview with the successful film director Michael Baker of New Gravity Media, the director of 14 Degrees: A Paranormal Documentary, which has sold in every state and in 16 countries around the world. Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:47:52 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2465 Double double, toil and trouble Where did Harry Potter get his spells from? Britain has a rich store of charms and folk magic, and in the not so long ago most likely you would have gone to see a local folk-healer rather than a doctor if you had some problem that troubled you. Some healers could cure simple things from warts and cuts to skin diseases, while others offered charms against witchcraft and could find lost or stolen goods. Fortune tellers are still with us, of course, but the art of reading tea leaves or the cards is an old one. A new exhibition at Horsham Museum, ‘Double double, toil and trouble,’ explores the intriguing world of folk-magic and witchcraft, a world that was still familiar in our great-grandparents’ day though today is much less well known. Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:46:30 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2464 An ancient fortified wall which formed the north-west frontier of the Roman Empire has been made a World Heritage Site by Unesco. Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:45:39 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2463 A new book is due to be published on 5th July 2008 that exposes the world of traditional witchcraft beliefs and associated folklore in Cornwall in the period before Gerald Gardner announced to the world his revival of witchcraft. The Cornish Witch-finder—William Henry Paynter and the Witchery, Ghosts, Charms and Folklore of Cornwall Selected and Introduced by Jason Semmens Published by the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, 2008 ISBN: 978-0-902660-39-7 256 pages £11.95 Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:51:34 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2462 We have just received the following press release from O.T.O. We assume this means that there will only be one Order calling itself O.T.O. in future, which will lessen the confusion many new people feel when they enter the world of Thelema… News from International Headquarters June 17, 2008 e.v. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. We have legal news on two fronts to report. UK TRADEMARK CASE I am happy to report that OTO has prevailed against Starfire Publishing Ltd.’s opposition to our trademarks for “OTO” and “O.T.O.” in the United Kingdom. In her decision of June 8, Anna Carbone, the Appointed Person hearing OTO’s appeal, found in favor of OTO, overturning a previous decision in favor of Starfire. OTO’s registrations of the marks “OTO” and “O.T.O.” are now proceeding normally in the UK, joining our previous registrations of “Ordo Templi Orientis” and the OTO Lamen. Under UK law, there can be no further appeal of a decision by an Appointed Person, in either the Trademark Registry or High Court. Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:01:36 +0100 http://www.pentaclemagazine.org/pn760/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2461 An extremely precious statuette of Venus - 15 cm high was found in archaeological excavations in Rome's Trimamium. Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:01:16 +0100