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Cogito Libre...
The Silures Still Speak: How the Valleys of South Wales Keep an Ancient Spirit Alive image The Romans thought they could tame the Silures. They came with their legions and their roads, their fortresses and their laws. But in the rugged lands of South Wales, they met a people who would not bow easily. The Silures โ€” fierce, proud, and deeply tied to their valleys โ€” fought Rome to a standstill for decades. Long after the empire faded, something of their defiance lingered in the mist of the Usk and the smoke of the coal seams. image Today, that same spirit still runs through South Wales. You can hear it in the rolling vowels of the Valleys accent, rich and musical. You can see it in the solidarity that binds communities together, in rugby clubs and choirs, in food banks run by volunteers who refuse to let their neighbours go hungry. The mines have closed, the steelworks have struggled, and politicians have come and gone โ€” but the instinct to endure, to stand shoulder to shoulder, remains. image Itโ€™s tempting to romanticize ancient tribes, to project modern virtues onto lost peoples. But in the case of the Silures, the continuity feels real. Their descendants still live on the same hillsides, still draw strength from the same ground. The Silures fought to preserve their home against a vast empire; today, South Walians fight for dignity in the face of economic neglect and cultural misunderstanding. The enemy has changed โ€” no longer Roman soldiers, but bureaucracy, inequality, and indifference โ€” yet the resistance remains as stubborn as ever. image To walk the Valleys is to feel history humming beneath your feet. Itโ€™s a place that remembers. The Silures may be long gone, but their spirit has never left. image #silures #wales #romans #history #nostr #bitcoin #freepalestine ๐Ÿ‡ต๐Ÿ‡ธ
The Hidden Thread of the Western Mystery Tradition image Human history has never been purely material. Beneath every empire, scripture, and scientific revolution runs a current of mystery โ€” the persistent human urge to touch what lies beyond the visible. Whether we call it shamanism, magick, or religion, this current is not a straight line but a spiral: ancient instincts dressed in ever-changing forms. ## The First Magicians: Fire, Drum, and Spirit Long before the word **religion** existed, the world was alive. Trees whispered, stones spoke, and animals carried messages from the unseen. The first shamans โ€” healers, dreamers, and mediators โ€” learned to navigate this living cosmos. Through trance, rhythm, and symbol, they sought not power for its own sake, but harmony: healing the sick, guiding the dead, interpreting the will of the spirits. This is where all later mysticism begins โ€” in the raw experience of presence. Every later system, from the priesthood of Egypt to the monasteries of Christendom, inherits this core impulse: to bridge the worlds. ## The Rise of Gods and Orders With civilization came structure. Temples replaced caves; priests replaced shamans. Yet magic persisted in the margins โ€” in the incantations of Babylonian astrologers, the rites of Isis, the whispered formulas of the Persian magi. The sacred became bureaucratized, but the desire for personal contact with the divine never disappeared. In the classical world, the โ€œmystery cultsโ€ โ€” Eleusinian, Dionysian, Orphic โ€” kept initiation and inner knowledge alive. To be initiated was not merely to believe, but to *know* โ€” to undergo death and rebirth within a ritual framework that revealed the universeโ€™s hidden architecture. ## Hermetic Dawn As Greek philosophy mingled with Egyptian religion, a new synthesis arose: **Hermeticism**, the belief that the universe mirrors itself in all things โ€” **as above, so below.** The Hermetic mage did not worship passively; he participated in the cosmic process, invoking divine powers through intellect, symbol, and will. This worldview became the backbone of what we now call the **Western Mystery Tradition** โ€” the lineage of mystical, magical, and initiatory systems that sought personal transformation rather than dogmatic salvation. From **Neoplatonism** to **Gnosticism**, from **alchemy** to **Kabbalah**, the thread remained the same: the divine is hidden within matter, and manโ€™s task is to awaken it โ€” and himself. ## The Age of Secrets and Symbols The Middle Ages buried much of this knowledge under orthodoxy, yet it smoldered in secret. Jewish Kabbalists, Sufi mystics, and Christian alchemists each spoke a common symbolic language: the ladder between heaven and earth, the union of opposites, the transformation of the soul. When the Renaissance dawned, Europe rediscovered its forgotten Hermetic heritage. The magician was reimagined as a philosopher โ€” Ficino, Pico, Bruno โ€” attempting to reconcile magic, science, and faith. Later, the Rosicrucians and Freemasons clothed these ancient ideas in allegory and architecture, building spiritual temples of initiation and symbolism. ## Magick and Modernity By the 19th century, as science dethroned religion, a new occult revival emerged to fill the spiritual void. The **Theosophists** looked Eastward, blending Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies with Western esotericism. The **Golden Dawn** organized magical study into a system of ranks and rituals. And **Aleister Crowley** redefined *Magick* as โ€œthe Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.โ€ The 20th century democratized mystery. Wicca, neo-paganism, and New Age spirituality reintroduced ritual and nature worship to modern seekers, while **Chaos Magick** stripped away dogma, treating belief itself as a magical tool. In the digital age, esotericism thrives again โ€” not in temples, but online. Memes, art, and subcultures remix Hermetic and shamanic symbols into a kind of **occulture**: a modern language of meaning-making amid chaos. ## The Spiral Continues From the first drumbeat in a darkened cave to the flicker of a sigil on a smartphone screen, the same impulse endures: to touch the unseen, to find coherence in the invisible patterns that shape our lives. Religion gave structure; science gave explanation. But **esotericism gives participation** โ€” the idea that consciousness is not an observer but a co-creator of reality. Weโ€™ve changed costumes, symbols, and gods, yet the dance remains the same. The shamanโ€™s drum has become the magicianโ€™s wand, the philosopherโ€™s pen, the coderโ€™s keyboard. And the mystery? It was never lost. It only changes its name. #shamanism #wmt #history #esotericism #development #nostr #bitcoin #freepalestine ๐Ÿ‡ต๐Ÿ‡ธ
Listen, listen, my frayntlach โ€” we gotta put Israel first, okay? Nobody puts Israel first like me, believe me. Such a country, gevaldig! America? Also good, sure, but Israel โ€” oy, the best deals, the best people, tremendous Torah, absolutely fantastic. Baruch Hashem, weโ€™re makinโ€™ it happen! image #trump #israel #policy #nostr #bitcoin #freepalestine ๐Ÿ‡ต๐Ÿ‡ธ
image Austin Osman Spare (1886โ€“1956) remains one of the most originalโ€”and quietly revolutionaryโ€”figures in the Western Mystery Tradition. An English artist and occultist, Spare bridged the worlds of magic, psychology, and visionary art, developing a personal system that anticipated many of the ideas later known as chaos magic. image Spareโ€™s philosophy, which he called the Zosโ€“Kia Cultus, centered on two principles: Zos, the embodied self, and Kia, the universal consciousness or infinite mind. His goal was the union of these forces through the direct use of the subconsciousโ€”a rejection of ceremonial magic in favor of intimate, psychological practice. image His most enduring contribution is sigil magic. In this technique, a desire is reduced to a symbolic design, charged through states of intense focus or trance, and then deliberately forgotten. The unconscious mind, freed from conscious interference, becomes the agent of manifestation. Spareโ€™s approach treated belief not as doctrine but as a flexible instrumentโ€”something to be created, used, and discarded at will. This radical notion of belief as a tool, rather than a truth, would become central to chaos magic decades later. image As an artist, Spare saw drawing and painting as magical acts. His automatic, dreamlike imagesโ€”produced without conscious controlโ€”were both art and spell, visual gateways to the subconscious. Long before the Surrealists, he practiced what they would later call automatism, using art as a language of the hidden self. image Though marginalized in his lifetime, Spareโ€™s influence has since spread widely. Chaos magicians such as Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine hailed him as a visionary precursor, while artists like Alan Moore have drawn from his ideas to fuse creativity and esotericism. His writingsโ€”particularly The Book of Pleasure (1913)โ€”remain dense, poetic manuals for those exploring the intersection of magic, mind, and imagination. image Today, Spare is remembered as a magician of the self: a solitary innovator who stripped away dogma to reveal a direct path to the numinous within. His legacy endures wherever magic is seen not as ritual theater, but as the art of transforming consciousness through will, imagination, and belief. #aos #chaos #nostr #bitcoin
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