Gibberish

Circe ensures that Odysseus' men speak gibberish, or is that piggerish?

Gibberish: 1550s, imitative of the sound of chatter, probably influenced by jabber. Used early 17c. of the language of rogues and gypsies. -Online Etymology Dictionary 

What is etymology [late 14c., ethimolegia "facts of the origin and development of a word," from Old French et(h)imologie (14c., Modern French étymologie), from Latin etymologia, from Greek etymologia, properly "study of the true sense (of a word)," from etymon "true sense" (neuter of etymos "true, real, actual," related to eteos "true") + -logia "study of, a speaking of" Online Etymological Dictionary] good for? 

Aleister Crowley was a keen student of etymology and Walter William Skeat.



The Encyclopedia Britannica (and Wikipedia, which quite plagiarizes the EB) tells us:

Walter William Skeat (21 November 1835 – 7 October 1912), FBA English philologist, was born in London on the 21st of November 1835, and educated at King's College School (Wimbledon), Highgate School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in July 1860. He was an expert on Middle English and produced editions of Chaucer and William Langland's Piers Plowman. His four volume Etymological English Dictionary is of most interest to us and was a favorite of Uncle Al.
Let us quote and quote again the Master Thelemite to get an idea [IDEA, a (mental) image, notion, opinion. (L., —Gk.) 'Idea is a bodilesse substance,'  Holland, tr. of Plutarch, p. 666. ' The fayre Idea;' Spenser, Sonnet 45. — Lat. idea. — Gk., the look or semblance of a thing, species.— Gk. iSitv, to see.— .^W ID, to see ; cf. Skt. vid, to perceive, know. See Wit, verb. Der. ide-al, from 0. F. ideal,' ideall' (Cot.), which from Lat. idealis; whence ide-al-ly, ide-al-ise, ide-al-ism, ide-al-ist, ide-al-is-at-ion, ide-al-ist-ic, ide-al-i-ty (most of these terms being modern). - Skeat] of his use of etymology.

“The fact is that very few of us know what words mean; fewer still take the trouble to enquire.  We calmly, we carelessly assume that our minds are identical with that of the writer, at least on that point; and then we wonder that there should be misunderstandings!” - Aleister Crowley Magick Without Tears, Chapter XXVI: Mental Processes—Two Only are Possible

“Indeed, I want you to go even further; make sure of what is meant by even the simplest words. Trace the history of the word with the help of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary.  ..  This will soon give you the power of discerning instantly when words are being used to hide meaning or lack of it.” - Aleister Crowley, MWT

"Would you describe your system as a new religion?"  A pertinent question, you doubtless suppose; whether it may happen to mean anything is—is—is—well, is what we must try to make clear.
True, it's a slogan of A∴ A∴  "The method of science—the aim of religion.&  Here the word "aim" and the context help the definition; it must mean the attainment of Knowledge and Power in spiritual matters—or words to that effect: as soon as one selects a phrase, one starts to kick holes in it!  Yet we both know perfectly well all the time what we do mean.
But this is certainly not the sense of the word in your question.  It may clear our minds, as has so often happened, if we examine it through the lens of dear old Skeat.
Religion, he says, Latin: religio, piety.  Collection or paying attention to: religens as opposed to negligens, neglecting; the attitude of Gallio.  But it also implies a binding together i.e. of ideas; in fact, a "body of doctrine."  Not a bad expression.  A religion then, is a more or less coherent and consistent set of beliefs, with precepts and prohibitions therefrom deducible.  But then there is the sense in which Frazer (and I) often use the word: as in opposition to "Science" or "Magic."  Here the point is that religious people attribute phenomena to the will of some postulated Being or Beings, placable and moveable by virtue of sacrifice, devotion, or appeal.  Against such, the scientific or magical mind believes in the Laws of Nature, asserts "If A, then B"—if you do so-and-so, the result will be so-and-so, aloof from arbitrary interference.  Joshua, it is alleged, made the sun stand still by supplication, and Hezekiah in the same way cause it to "go back upon the dial of Ahaz;"  Willett did it by putting the clock back, and getting an Act of Parliament to confirm his lunacy.  Petruchio, too "It shall be what o'clock I say it is!"  The two last came close to the magical method; at least, to that branch of it which consists of "fooling all the people all the time."  But such an operation, if true Magick were employed, would be beyond the power of any magician of my acquaintance; for it would mess up the solar system completely.  (You remember how this happened, and what came of it, in a rather clever short story by H.G. Wells.)  For true Magick means "to employ one set of natural forces at a mechanical advantage as against another set"—I quote, as closely as memory serves, Thomas Henry Huxley, when he explains that when he lifts his water-jug—or his elbow—he does not "defy the Law of Gravitation."  On the contrary, he uses that Law; its equations form part of the system by which he lifts the jug without spilling the water.
To sum up, our system is a religion just so far as a religion means an enthusiastic putting-together of a series of doctrines, no one of which must in any way clash with Science or Magick.
Call it a new religion, then, if it so please your Gracious Majesty; but I confess that I fail to see what you will have gained by so doing, and I feel bound to add that you might easily cause a great deal of misunderstanding, and work a rather stupid kind of mischief.
The word does not occur in The Book of the Law. -Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Chapter XXXI: Religion–Is Thelema a "New Religion"?

Words ("In the beginning was the word.") have ancient roots through different languages from different lands.  Etymology attempts to discover those roots and those places. At times the time and place are relatively recent and can be specifically determined and cited.  We also know that some words are incredibly old and may find their births in the grunts of the most ancient men. 



Gibberish [GIBBERISH, nonsensical talk. (E.) Holinshed speaks of • gibberishing Irish;' Descr. of Ireland, c. I. ' All kinds of gibberish he had leamt to know;' Drayton, The Mooncalf (R.) Formed from the old verb gibber, to gabble; Hamlet, i. I. 116. This is merely an imitative word, formed as a variant of jabber, and allied to gabble. The suffix -er is frequentative, and the base gib- is a weak form of gab. See Gabble, Jabber, [t]- Skeat] is noise from a mouth that may totally lack such roots, or perhaps gibberish is an atavistic return to those most ancient times when men made noises that became indicators of things both material and conceptual.


We have the phenomena of the gibberish spouting newsreader. Youtube allows us to study the spectacle of a human being, who is paid to speak clearly and understandably, suddenly finding this essential skill in full flight from his grasp. The human voice is revealed as a generator of noise without meaning. I find it ghastly and terrifying. Here are some:

Serene Branson at the Grammies got a lot of attention. 

 

Last year Texas Rangers announcer Dave Barnett lost it.

Gibberish can be funny. This is a scene from Blazing Saddles.  This kind of gibberish consists of recognizable words that do not make obvious sense.  Professor Irwin Corey was a master of this art. The next video shows him performing in 2011, well into his nineties. He has internalized and become his character.

There are inevitable conspiracy theories to be found about these events. Government microwave weapons are said to be aimed at us. And this could very well be true.  But I do not know. 

What do Jim Carrey and Charles Manson have to do with this?

Some blame migraine headaches for this. Some attribute it to strokes.  People need to explain these things in a materialist way.  The alternative is frightening.
In a religious context we can claim that gibberish is glossalalia [from Greek glōssa, “tongue,” and lalia, “talking”].

Speaking in tongues is said to be a gift of the Holy Spirit.  Does God want us to be incomprehensible? Perhaps.  Maybe just letting go and giving up all pretense of meaning is good for us. There is a lot of settled junk in the mind and stirring it all up may be useful. 

Do I have any answers? No.  I am merely musing on the horror of  finding no meaning exactly where we expect it the most: language.  There is the obvious horror of gibberish and the subtle horror of those who speak real words which obscure rather than illuminate. Too many of those people are in positions of authority in our world.

It is also very easy to consign what one does not understand to the category of gibberish. 

Young Mr. Crowley

Monday Morning EDT/
Monday Evening Japan Time
It Is Ever So Much Worse Than Anyone Could Possibly Imagine Update


With Verbal Punctuation 
From the "Wickedest Man In the World" 
Aleister Crowley 1875 - 1947

"It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade. It is the Holy of Holies, whereof each man is his own High Priest, and none knoweth the Name of his brother's God, or the Rite that invokes Him."
Book 4, One Star in Sight

Hidden, hidden, hidden away in a small little story today in the Daily Yomiuri Online  we find the information that radiation from plant 1 alone is leaking into the atmosphere at 154 terabecquerels per day. Previously, on April 5,  authorities from the Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission had assured the world that radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi complex was "less than 1 terabecquerel per hour."  Our imagination flies to the stars meditating on the nature of the occult knowledge the nuclear priests are guarding from the eyes of the uninitiated. 
Garnered from Japanese blogger EX-SKF via Natural News. 

"The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach." 

Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan is under pressure to step down after his Japan Democratic Party suffered defeats in local elections Sunday. A new puppet may be pulled out of the trunk but the Wizards behind the curtain will continue to pull the strings. 

“‘All in this kind are but shadows’ says Shakespeare, referring to actors. The Universe is a Puppet-Play for the amusement of Nuit and Hadit in their Nuptials; a very Midsummer Night’s Dream. So then we laugh at the mock woes of Pyramus and Thisbe, the clumsy gambols of Bottom; for we understand the Truth of Things, how all is a Dance of Ecstasy.”
-Commentary to the Book of the Law, II:9

High resolution photographs reveal in all its splendour the nuclear plant complex at Fukushima Daiichi. Blogger Lucas Whitfield Hixson walks us through the photographic evidence which reveals the extremely dangerous nature of the damage at the MOX fueled reactor at plant 3. He deduces that the top of the reactor and the containment vessel itself was blown off by the hydrogen explosion that occurred within the reactor itself, releasing plutonium and spent fuel into the atmosphere. 

"The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing."

The fishing industry in Japan may have been dealt a fatal blow by the tsunami and its related issues reports the San Francisco chronicle:
"Thirty years ago we used to think Japan was the number one fishing country in the world, with the best catching and processing methods, but that's really no longer the case," Ryosuke Sato, chairman of the Kesennuma Fisheries Cooperative Association, said in an interview in the town, 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of Tokyo. "We've been in terminal decline."


"Every serious or spiritual thought is made a jest; poets are thought "soft" and "cowardly," apparently because they are the only boys with a will of their own and courage to hold out against the whole school, boys and masters in league as once were Pilate and Herod; honour is replaced by expediency, holiness by hypocrisy. Even where we find thoroughly good seed sprouting in favourable ground, too often is there a frittering away of the forces. Facile encouragement of a poet or painter is far worse for him than any amount of opposition."

- Energized Enthusiasm


The market for silver has taken off. The $1500 per ounce price of gold is at an all-time high in our magick fiat dollars, yet many have just realized that the price of silver related to the price of gold is at a historical low, despite the fact that at $44 an ounce, silver is also at an all time high. This reveals about a 34:1 gold to silver price ratio. Over the centuries this ratio has coursed around 14:1. This fact alone tells us that silver has a long way to go before it reaches its natural value. (The cynic might say that gold has a long way to fall.) Silver is more important industrially than gold in our day and it is required for many of our electronic toys, your high definition TV and cell phone being two of them.
Silver has also been the precious metal whose value has been repressed for a hundred and fifty years by the teeter-tottering modern banking system headquartered in the City of London.
$100 an ounce silver is a very reasonable expectation.
Some are predicting much higher prices. 

There, in that sanctuary of silences,

There is a Word,

The Word that built the city, never heard

By any of those archangel phalanxes,

Unuttered even in the holy heart

Of God, or breathed by its own lightning breath,

Since from all being it stands ever apart,

Its name being Life, and that name's echo Death.

 The City of God

We find out that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and his colleagues proposed in 2010  that the early universe had one dimension and acquired more as the universe developed and expanded until it reached the three dimensional nature we are familiar with today. The Universe may assume a four dimensional nature in an expanded future. 

"Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty."

Authorities in Malaysia are sending boys with feminine mannerisms to a boot camp designed to train them in proper masculine behaviour reports OnIslam.net

"This is a character-building program,” Daud was quoted by The New Straits Times as saying.
“We hope the students will emerge stronger, physically and mentally, after attending the camp.
The minister said that the camp is the first of many series in the program.
“The first batch is made up of boys, aged between 13 and 17, who happen to display some feminine characteristics."
Daud said the camp does not aim to change the students' sexual preferences and has nothing to do with anti-gay sentiments.
"These boys were without many friends before but chances are, after the camp, they will be much stronger and emerge with a higher level of self-confidence." The minister denied that the camp was a military-style, adding that students only march in unison every morning.
"But the rest of the day would be filled with activities such as jungle trekking, paintball, aerobic workouts and several other fun activities," [State education department director Razali] Daud said.
The program also includes religious lectures, visits to local mosques and interaction with local residents.
"They would be divided into groups and each group would be assigned tasks, including hoisting the national flag and reciting the Rukun Negara (a national ideology which is supportive of religion),” the minister said.


 This is a heartwarming tale. The boys will make friends for life at this camp. 

SWEET, sweet are May and June, dear,
        The loves of lambent spring,
      Our lamp the drooping moon, dear,
        Our roof, the stars that sing;
      The bed, of moss and roses;
        The night, as long as death!
        Still, breath!
      Life wakens and reposes,
        Love ever quickeneth!

Sweet, sweet, when Lion and Maiden,
        The motley months of gold,
      Swoop down with sunlight laden,
        And eyes are bright and bold.
      Life-swelling breasts uncover
        Their warm involving deep --
        Love, sleep! --
      And love lies with lover
        On air's substantial steep.  

  Venus, TANNHAUSER

"Lam" 1918, portrait by Aleister Crowley of the extra-dimensional entity he invoked, used as the frontispiece to his commentary on Blavatsky's, The Voice of the Silence, with this description: "LAM is the Tibetan word for Way or Path, and LAMA is He who Goeth, the specific title of the Gods of Egypt, the Treader of the Path, in Buddhistic phraseology. Its numerical value is 71, the number of this book."

Final Part: The Cry of the 16th Aethyr, Which is Called LEA,  taken from The Vision and the Voice by Aleister Crowley. 


"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgets to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." - Karl Marx

"The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell."- Bertrand Russell

The Larch, photo by John Bonanno, Hiram, Maine 2003

Clouds Without Water III/IX

As one entranced by dint of cannabis,
Whose sense of time is changed past recognition,
Whether he suffer woe or taste of bliss,
He loses both his reason and volition.
He says one word -- what countless ages pass !
He walks across the room -- a voyage as far
As the astronomer's who turns his glass
On faintest star-webs past the farthest star
And travels thither in the spirit. So
It seems impossible to me that ever
The sands of our ill luck should run so low
That splendidly success should match endeavour ;
Yet it must be, and very soon must be :
For I believe in you, and you in me.-Rev. C. Verey (Aleister Crowley)

This sonnet is from Crowley's collection, Clouds Without Water. Crowley wrote to Israel Regardie, his personal secretary in 1930 as follows:

"Please send a copy of "Clouds Without Water" to Aldous Huxley Esq., Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall (with prospectuses etc.) with my compliments-we had a gorgeous 3 days with him in Berlin. Also please set up a figure [astrological chart] for him. Goldalming 4 A.M., July 26 '94"

In my Think Or Be Eaten Radio discussion with Vyzygoth on Huxley I stated that I could find no evidence that Huxley and Crowley had met. The above quote is from Richard Kaczynski's formidable biography of Crowley, Perdurabo, The Life of Aleister Crowley, New Falcon, 2002. AC may have been exaggerating his association with Huxley to polish the apple for Regardie, but this is indeed evidence that they had been in contact. If anyone can provide citations from Huxley's works mentioning Crowley, I would appreciate the information.

An Historic Sonic Document!

Here is an unedited reading of Liber Al Vel Legis Sub Figura CCXX performed by yours truly in 1986. It was done in a single take. There are a few slips but all in all, it is not a bad reading. The music in the background was playing during the recital. I believe it is a César Franck organ composition. I found this cassette in a box in a closet yesterday. I thought it had been lost. In a certain sense I wish it had been lost. I created a slight portentious echo with Audacity before converting to mp3.
You may fear the Book of the Law or you may despise it, and perhaps you should. But it is important to be aware of it.
Listen!
It is worth a few laughs.