Tintinnalogia

The recent translations of the complete Arabic Picatrix by Hashem Attalah and Geylan Holmquest (published by Ouroboros Press) have come in for quite a bit of, admittedly deserved, criticism due to the translators' lack of knowledge in the domain of Arabic philosophical and astrological terminology. This is unfortunate since Picatrix is by-and-large an astrological textbook filled with complex instructions for electing the correct times to make talismans and call upon celestial powers. However, the translation does pick up in the less specialist parts, such as those dealing with invocation of planetary spirits and their ritual requirements. It is a worthy achievement on Attalah and Holmquest's part, but it's a real shame that there weren't another couple of other heads involved in this to compare their work with the masterful 1962 German translation by Ritter and Plessner, which would have resolved a number of the ambiguous renderings and also to bring the translators' rather awkward and literal rendering of the text into something more easily digestible. This said, it stands as the only English version of the Arabic Picatrix on the market.

As an aside, Warnock and Greer are working on a translation of the Latin Picatrix, a tome that had pride of place on the bookshelves of many a Renaissance astrologer, although it does unfortunately omit rather a lot of material present in the Arabic original (the Latin having come via a Spanish translation commissioned by Alfonso X). However, I've been thoroughly impressed by their efforts on the first two books which are an amazingly clear and lucid rendering of what is at first a rather forbidding work of technical astrology.

To return to Ouroboros' translation, I noticed one particularly intriguing passage while reading Book III, chapter 11:

Azeem the Indian was another famous wise man that had made this pond on the entrance of Nubah city with black marble that had water that never decreases or changes and it stayed at the same level. Some think that was possible because of the humidity in the air. But the people of this town they knew that the water stayed in the same level because of the spiritual powers and the charm that Azeem made for them and no matter how much they drank of it the water never decreased. This Indian wise man had made this pond for the people because they were too far away from the Nile and too close to the salty water. […] The way it works is that the sun vaporizes the water and with the spiritual power this pond captures this water vapour that is in the air and turns it into water that keeps the level in the pond always the same with no changes. (pp.151-2)

This particular passage jumped out at me since it seems to describe one of my favourite subjects: the dew pond. The earliest written record of dew-pond construction that Philip Hesleton, a former Ley Hunter editor, was able to find is dated to 1687, although records of Saxon dew-ponds go back to the 9th century. However, it is interesting to see that the knowledge of the dew pond was also current in 10th century Syria, presumably referenced in the Nabatean Agriculture of Ibn Wahshiyah, to which the Picatrix owes a considerable debt. I know little about medieval agriculture on the African continent, but it would surprise me if such technologies were not in use, considering the proposed prehistoric roots that European writers have attributed to dew ponds.

I note that Ouroboros will shortly be producing a brand new edition of Ibn Wahshiyah's tract on Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphics: a perennial favourite of mine, preserving many alleged antedeluvian writing systems, and an interesting take on Egyptian hieroglyphs. It will be a pleasure to have a new edition of this underrated work on the shelf; I also think that this may have been influential on archetypal (though rather late) Renaissance man Athanasius Kircher's own conception of Egyptology.

Tonight I was going through a folder of material photocopied from various libraries and came across some selections from Violet Paget (aka Vernon Lee), an art historian who wrote several books on aesthetics from the 1880s to 1930s. She also did a couple of books of travel writing, one of which I could not resist taking a look at, entitled as it was The Golden Keys and other Essays on the Genius Loci (1925). This is a book of short pieces about various locations in England and Europe, many of which have a peculiarly reflective, receptive quality about them that I could deeply relate to with regard to my own perception of place and landscape. From her dedicatory note:

Well, what I now want to say is as follows: the war brought home to me (with sundry weightier matters) that the Genius Loci, under whose invocation I have so often placed what at first sight might seem mere jottings of an idle wanderer, is, when you understand him, really the most decent, as he is the youngest and humblest, of the indwelling gods whom we make for ourselves. […] [T]he genius of places exists not in the consistent, hence so often ruthless, Outer Reality, but in the human heart, as Milton put it, upright and pure. […] [E]ven at the moments when he lurks in mere woods and waters, and in relics of centuries so remote that the careless eye mistakes them for stocks and stones, the Genius of Places has taken his being in our contemplation of times and peoples not our own, but felt by our imagination and sympathy to be cosubstantial with ourselves in whatever in us is not trumpery, deciduous or abominable.

To give you a taste of her style, here is the complete twelth chapter, The Gorgons in the Surrey Lane:

I have been staying at a village among the Downs, walking along the yew-trees of the Pilgrim's Way, and at the same time reading Mr. Hewlett's more mystifying than mystical Lore of Proserpine.
I do not like this new-fangled seeing of Faries and Oreads, and am well satisfied I have never seen any; and that for me the spirits immanent in lawns and trees and waters should have remained trees and lawns and waters, disdaining human shape.
Among these chalk hills, in a deep lane between the ripening cornfields, I came a few days since on a mysterious aspect: two vast interlacing systems of coils and tentacles, clinging to the bank, tunnelling into the field's side, spreading with vigorous thrusts from the great central plexus of heart-like fibrous bosses, into the smooth erectness of the great trunk and limbs, the swelling, almost visibly palpitating, arteries laid bare on the banks surface; a sight which made my heart beat just a little faster, in somewhat of the awed amazement with which, last Easter, I looked at the denizens of the Naples Aquarium. The thing was but the roots of two big beeches which the lane's scooping had spread naked upon its escarpment. Nor could they possibly have been mistaken for anything else. Yet instantly that obvious and never-lost reality of theirs was overlaid, entwined, even as they themselves were coiling in a clear but inextricable pattern, with recollections of Gorgon's heads: the beautiful classic ones and the grotesque tongue-lolling ones of the oldest metopes of Selinus, and, more vivid still and terrible, the Gorgon shapes of the octopus vases of Cnossos. And these inner visions possessed, moreover, a fringe of uncertain images, and emotions sinking deep into my spirit like those roots' invisible suckers. Now what would have been the gain of seeing in the place of these mysterious and potent layings-bare of trees' hidden, subterranean, chthonian life an efforts, a real Gorgon, a snake-woman or woman at all, however snaky?
Similarly, at the top of that selfsame lane (it led to the village school!), and with those Gorgon beech-coils but some hundred yards behind me, I came unexpectedly into a level and fairly open piece of wood, set with huge pines, as a spacious church is set with its vaulting-piers, and even as in a church, the enclosed space and light seeming far more spacious and clearer than the open. Here again was a very deep emotion; indeed, a deeper one, with lees of associated images (I have introduced the church only as an after-thought and an illustration) and more of the immediate, intrinsic sense of the trees rising, spreading, enclosing that space, windowing that sunshine; more of such feeling also as architecture and music give by their very lack of suggestion of anything beyond themselves. Now, supposing that I, like Mr. Hewlett and his shepherds and bank clerks, had grown aware of some elf or sylvan among those trees, some shape copied vaguely from a picture or statue, but not worked in, as Böcklin works his Oreads and Nixes, with the lines of the trees, since that would require immobility like the picture's; on the contrary, a creature with the quite dissimilar scheme of lines and accents and pressures, of even the loveliest unsculptured or unpainted human body? Would this intrusion of a bit of Russian Ballet have brought me any nearer to the living heart of Nature? Nay, suppose that instead of a robin, recognized suddenly within grasp of my hand, I had found myself face to face, as Mr. Hewlett did, with a small nude model torturing a rabbit, what deeper emotion should I have been enriched by? Rather, I should have had the horrid start of being faced suddenly by a fellow-creature where none is expected, surely one of the most devitalizing of possible experiences.
Intrusions and profanations, I should feel such occurrences, of that innermost sanctuary wherein lives mirrored in ourself all that is not ourself; vile bringing-down of our freed fancy to its stale haunts, assimilating things not to our essential modes of moving and willing (intensified, brought home by such comparison) but to our anecdotic experience of self and neighbours!
It is, I grant you, of such base assimilations that all primeval religion is made, with its oblations of tripe and mutton smoke to human-mawed bogies. But saints and artists and philosophers have all been working to cleans this too-too human element out of religion, bidding us lift our eyes in serene contemplation, nor heed the ancestral queasiness of bodily fear, the creeping horror premonitory of the panic sent by the shaggy Goat-God. And this is, I cannot help thinking, the cultus not of the Universe's austere abstract divinities, but of such skulking gods symbolising our turbid kinship with the beasts, which Mr. Hewlett celebrates; ritual lore not of Proserpine, great Goddess of Life in Death, but of Pan and the rout of Comus sheltered in the creeping slime-darkness of our - may I call it by its true name? - visceral consciousness. For the mysticism of our day, or rather our day's mystery-mongering, hankers after corporeal hauntings and half-disembodied materialities, rather than cherishes the clarified existence which dreamed-of things lead in the serene spheres of our imagination.

Hear, hear! (- although I should add that Hewlett's work is also splendidly evocative and worth spending some time on, regardless of what one thinks of the credibility of the tales therein!)

"He met with one Cantle, or Cantlow, a Person noted in those Days for a Wizard; and he tells him how the Vicar had serv'd him, and begs his help to be even with him. The reply Cantel made him was this; Does he not Love Ringing? He shall have enough of it: And from that time, a Bell began to toll in his House, and continued so to do till Cantel's Death." - Beaumont, Treatise of Spirits (1705), p.185

The cunning man, village wizard, or cantel is an intriguing character. In early modern England Keith Thomas quotes Reginald Scot as saying that 'every parish had its miracle-worker, and that some had seventeen or eighteen' and further notes that 'at the turn of the sixteenth century well-informed contemporaries […] thought the wizards roughly comparable in numbers to the parochial clergy.' (Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p.245) Although their numbers declined over the centuries which followed, the cunning man was still a vital part of village life into the early 19th century and remained a colourful part of local folklore even when a widespread belief in magic had waned, as is shown in the articles recently reprinted by Caduceus Books under the title Marsh Wizards, Witches & Cunning Men of Essex.

In her thought-provoking book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, Emma Wilby has examined what she believes to be evidence of visionary or 'shamanic' experience in the confessions of witches and cunning men who were part of the illiterate masses of early modern England. As such the practices of these cunning people represent a strange mix of inherited 'folk' wisdom and more elite concepts - the belief in fairies and tutelary spirits meets a shaky grasp of Christian theology, imitation of church ritual, astronomical and medical concepts. With the influence of Protestantism and the increasing availability of the printed word in broadsides and chapbooks it seems that a more literate breed of village wizard replaced this generation of cunning folk. Political and theological circumstance also stimulated the printing of magical works in the mid-17th century, with the works of the English astrologers such as William Lilly, Robert Turner's translations of magical literature and a whole host of popular books on chiromancy, physiognomy and dream divination entering circulation. Most notorious are the magical portions of Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, which seem to have become core texts in the cunning 'tradition' (as previously mentioned on this blog). Owen Davies' thesis on the The Decline in the Popular Belief in Witchcaft and Magic catalogues the libraries of several cunning persons (this information doesn't seem to be reproduced in the published version Witchcraft Magic and Culture: 1736-1951 (1999)). Manuscript copies of material from Scot and the English translations of Agrippa are common along with the more rare material like Heydon's Theomagia or Porta's Natural Magick.

Regardless of their level of literacy the stock and trade of the cunning man remained the same throughout the ages: finding lost items, casting horoscopes and geomantic charts, divination by shears (coscinomancy), healing people and livestock, writing charms and so on.

Tales of the village wizard James 'Cunning' Murrell (1780-1860) persisted for almost a century after his death according to the article reprinted in Marsh Wizards, Witches & Cunning Men of Essex. The first of these items concerns a meeting with Murrell's son which appeared in The Strand magazine, 1900. It was written by Arthur Morrison, who also wrote a fictionalised account of Murrell's life entitled Cunning Murrell: A Tale of Witchcraft and Smuggling along with a number of adventure and mystery stories - most famously Tales of Mean Streets. This is a charming and amusingly written account of country life at the start of the 20th century and the legacy of a cunning man. It seems that Murrell was a 'self-made cunning man' - possibly becoming acquainted with texts like Francis Barrett's The Magus while working for a chemist in London. Returning to rural Hadleigh he set up as a cobbler and cunning man - one of the last of that generation of cunning men whose knowledge had been augmented, if not completely derived from the printed word. Forty years later, discovering the wizard's chest, filled with the books and tools of his trade, Morrison finds a heavily annotated edition of Culpeper's Herbal, books of astrology and ephemeredes and three manuscript books in Murrell's hand. One concerning conjurations, probably derived from The Magus and the other two consisting of astrological and geomantic forecasts respectively. The first of these items is interesting in that it shows Cunning Murrell continued the tradition of the wizard's book, or Liber Spirituum. One of the most famous engravings from The Magus shows the magic book with angelic seals and conjurations written in it, and it appears that Murrell imitated this in the production of his own book, a page of which Morrison reproduces in his article.

As with his precursors in the art of village sorcery, Murrell possessed not only cunning in the sense of a seeming belief in his own supernatural powers, but also a more down to earth variety. He had spies and informers and undoubtedly a pair of sharp ears himself, with which he would gather gossip that he could use to his own ends, astonishing his clients by revealing personal information, in much the same way as the 17th century cunning woman Alice West would eavesdrop on her customers, later recounting the information as though it has been delivered to her by the Queen of the Fairies (Wilby, p.211). This doesn't necessarily indicate that the cunning people were frauds, but as Wilby points out, anthropological research into shamanism shows that such seemingly contradictory elements - a belief in one's own supernatural power, combined with more obvious methods of manipulation and coercion - are all part of the wizard's toolkit.

Morrison's account of Murrell also sheds some interesting light on the tradition of the witch-bottle. Merrifield's Archaeology of Ritual and Magic discusses the findings of several of these often found buried in riverbeds or beneath houses and believed to be anti-witchcraft charms. Such bottles were often filled with bent pins, nails and human hair, nail pairings and urine of a bewitched party. Murrell apparently used his bottles on the fire, causing, as his hapless son found out, an explosion, which Merrifield associates with indicating the death of the witch who cursed the afflicted party (Merrifield, pp.171-2). Merrifield also gives an instance of a witch who came to the house screaming having been afflicted by the cunning man's use of a witch-bottle and a very similar anecdote occurs in relation to Murrell in one of the essays by Eric Maple that comprise the second half of Marsh Wizards, Witches & Cunning Men of Essex. As Merrifield notes, Murrell's particular innovation in the use of the heating method was to have his witch-bottles cast in iron, reducing the danger of flying glass shards and ensuring the bottles could be used again and again (ibid, pp.178-9). Interestingly Merrifield also mentions an article in The Times, 15 Dec, 1960 entitled Death of a Wizard which apparently mentions that rumour had it Murrell's death was itself caused by a witch-bottle (ibid.).

The essays by Eric Maple have, unlike Morrison's article, previously been easily available to people with access to either JSTOR or membership of the Folklore Society, whose journal originally published the works. Maple presents a lot of interesting oral traditions collected from the elderly residents from 'the ague-ridden Essex Hundreds.' As well as providing additional information about Murrell, Maple also briefly discusses the intriguing George Pickingill of Canewdon (1816 -1909) who lived until the age of 93, was allegedly served by imps in the form or white mice (the keeping of which by witches seems to have been a widespread in the folk tradition in Essex), was not above the use of 'black magic' and possessed the power to 'whistle up witches'.

Interesting fragments of oral lore abound in Maple's investigations. These range from the surreal tales of bewitched concertinas and washtub boats to legends with a universal persistence that I remember from my childhood in 1980s Yorkshire. Among these fragments of childhood lore I recall that to dance around the oldest grave in a churchyard would have result in abduction by the devil, while walking around the church at night was a sure way of meeting witches. I hope that children share the same traditions with each other even today.

Limited to 100 copies (now sold out), Caduceus Books' edition of these articles makes for a handsome volume bound in black cloth and stamped with designs from Murrell's book of conjuration/The Magus in 22-carat gold. Nicely bound and produced, it was a joy to read and, although it has since sold out, is worth tracking down for Morrisson's colourful narrative alone, which is augmented by some beautifully evocative engravings from the period.

See also Dan Harm's review.

The research that Dan Harms and I pursuing into the 19C Rosicrucian and Spiritualist Frederick Hockley is turning up all kinds of interesting things, which we hope to present formally at some point. One of the things of greatest personal interest that we've come across is Somerset surgeon John Beaumont's An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits ... Containing An Account of the Genii or Familiar Spirits (1705). This is a lengthy tract dealing with historical and contemporary accounts of the personal genius, or daemon (- English Heretic may be interested to know that he also reproduces the confessions of the witches Hopkins interrogated at Manningtree and Mistley). Obviously the notion of genii, particularly the genii locorum, is integral to much of the creative work I've been doing in the last seven years so I'll hopefully be delving into this work for some future postings, but, since this weblog takes its name from an antique text on the art of bell-ringing I thought it would be appropriate to present some material on magical bells.

Beaumont himself believed that he had experienced second sight, claiming that for several months two spirits in the form of three-foot brown women lived with him, and others would often come calling round for them. Furthermore, he once asked a visiting spirit who came in the form of a young boy and rung a bell in his ear for its name: Ariel, the spirit replied. Eventually his visitors turned against him, threatening to kill him if he revealed their whereabouts or slept. After four sleepless nights Beaumont eventually took a stand against his visitors and slept soundly, ignoring their threats. It's interesting to read these accounts of an obviously intelligent and well educated man having relations with such spirits, features of which overlap significantly with some of the accounts of ghosts, spirits and fairies presented by Emma Wilby as possible evidence of genuine visionary experiences in accounts of witchcraft from the 16th and 17th centuries, as indeed do many of the second-hand anecdotes recounted by Beaumont which are rich in contemporary folk- and magical lore.

Returning to the subject at hand, chapter seven of Beaumont's work deals with the relation of the genii to the sense of hearing, to which he appends the following curious magical-alchemical material from Paracelsus:

I shall conclude this Chapter, with a Relation somewhat in this kind from Paracelsus; tho' how far Spirits may be concern'd in the Matter, I shall not determine.

He begins the Sixth Book of his Archidoxes, thus. No Man can deny but Compositions of Metals, may Work wonderful things in Supernaturals, which may be made good by many Proofs, as I shall clearly shew beneath; for if you Compound all the Seven Metals in a due Order and fit time, and melt them together, as it were into one Mass, you will have such a Metal, in which all the Virtues of the Seven Planets are joyn'd together; you will find all these Virtues in that one Metal, which we call Electrum. And beneath he writes; you must know that our Electrum (which is Compounded of the Seven Metals) drives away all evil Spirits; for in our Electrum, the Operation of the Heav'ns, and Influences of the Seven Planets are stor'd up. Therefore the Ancient Persian Magi, and the Chaldaeans found out and perform'd many things by its means. I cannot here conceal a very great Miracle, which I saw wrought by a Spanish Necromancer, who had a Bell not exceeding two Pounds Weight, which, as often as he rung, he could cause to appear about him many Spirits and Spectres of various Kinds; for when he pleas'd, he drew some Words and Characters on the inward surface of the Bell, and afterwards, if he rung it, a Spirit presently appear'd in any Form he would have him: By the sound also of the said Bell he could draw to him also, or drive from him many other Visions and Spirits, and even Men and Beasts; as I saw with my Eyes many of these things done by him: But as often as he would undertake some New thing, so often he renewed his Words and Characters; but he would not reveal to me the Secret of these Words and Characters; though deeply considering the thing my self, I, at length, casually found it; which I shall not here disclose: but I plainly enough observ'd, there was more Importance in the Bell than in the Words, for the Bell was certainly made of our Electrum. So far Paracelsus.

I may here note, That some Persons have told my self, that they have seen a constellated Plate here in London, made of such Electrum, which, if put under a Man's Pillow at Night, will make him hear Heavenly Musick.

The description of the magical bell immediately made me think of something I'd seen a few years back at the Henry Moore Institute, which in 2005 showed and exhibition of bronze from the collections of Emperor Rudolph II. Among the objets d'art on display was a curious bell, supposed to have been cast in electrum magicum. The exterior, shown here, was embellished with florid images of the celestial powers, while - if my memory does not mislead me - there were magical sigils on the interior.

Later I was to find similar bells of electrum magicum mentioned in connection to Girardius parvi lucii libellus de mirabilibus naturae arcanis (for necromantic experients) and discussed in some detail in L. von H.'s Magia Divina (for angelic experiments), while one is employed in the Faustian Magia Naturalis to coerce devils to reveal the whereabouts of buried treasure. In one of the 'Solomonic' works (appearing in Sloane 3847), the bell replaces the trumpet and is rung toward the east before the magician begins his invocations.

Personally the most interesting item above is Beamont's note about the 'constellated plate'. Perhaps there is an element of 'suggestion' here, relating to the phenomenon of auditory hallucinations that often occur when one is in the hypnagogic state preceding sleep (for further anecdotes on this see Sacks' Musicophilia, Mavromatis' Hypnagogia, Zusne and Jones' Anomalistic Psychology, and so on). The story of the constellated disc also reminds me of the commonly recounted belief that Tibetan singing bowls are composed of an alloy of seven metals. Whether there is truth in this notion, which is often banded about in New Age circles, I am unsure, but it indicates that the fascination with the notion of electrum magicum as having peculiar and magical resonant qualities continues to the present day. Perhaps the connection between Tibet and the magical alloy can be traced at least as far back as Crowley's Liber 860, an account of a 1908 Parisian magical retirement, which mentions a Tibetan bell apparently cast in electrum magicum along with its striker of human bone. This same bell is also mentioned in Liber 418 (17th Aethyr) and described in detail in Book Four, which sounds something like a description of a Ting-sha cymbal:

This Bell summons and alarms; and it is also the Bell which sounds at the elevation of the Host
It is thus also the 'Astral Bell' of the Magician.
The Bell of which we speak is a disk of some two inches in diameter, very slightly bent into a shape not unlike that of a cymbal. A hole in the centre permits the passage of a short leather thong, by which it may be attached to the chain. At the other end of the chain is the striker; which in Tibet, is usually made of human bone.
The Bell itself is made of electrum magicum, an alloy of the 'seven metals' blended together in a special manner. [...] The sound of this Bell is indescribably commanding, solemn, and majestic. Without even the minutest jar, its single notes tinkle fainter and fainter into silence. At the sound of this Bell the Universe ceases for an indivisible moment of time, and attends to the Will of the Magician. Let him not interrupt the sound of this Bell. (II.14. The Bell, p.111, Symonds-Grant ed.)

[I]n experience no bell save His own Tibetan bell of Electrum Magicum has ever sounded satisfactory to the Master Therion. Most bells jar and repel. (III.9. Of Silence and Secrecy, p.199, Symonds-Grant ed.)

 

I've been meaning to put together a list like this for some time. Since I will shortly be re-releasing Gamaaea on Larkfall I thought this would be an appropriate time. So… here's an undoubtedly incomplete list of direct and indirect references to John Dee in the music of XETB. Some of the following was extracted from a lexicon of XETB influences that I began in 2005 after Dave Colohan asked me whether I'd be putting out any maps or documentation to accompany my music. While the lexicon is still a work in progress I think a few of the entries below may tie together some of the seemingly disparate articles on this blog. Less self-indulgent posts to follow in the next fortnight!

Aldaraia (Under a Soular Moon)
Aldaraia, or The Book of Soyga was a work on magic belonging to John Dee, who thought it to be of Arab provenance. Dee was obsessed with 36 magical tables contained within and lamented to the angel Uriel "Oh, my Great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those Tables of Soyga" (Mysterium Liber Primus). The mystique of the tables and Dee's obsession with them seem to have been a direct influence on Dee's "Enochian" magic, filled as it is with alphabetical squares and incomprehensible language. The tables themselves are in fact algorithmically generated sequences, as cryptographer Jim Reeds proved in his paper John Dee and the Magic Tables in the Book of Soyga (1998). Reeds shows that the tables are constructed by a simple algorithmic technique. I wrote a program to replicate the technique (available on request) and reconstructed the 36 tables. The patterns formed by the letters on these tables are quite hypnotic when neatly written out or colour coded and it was while contemplating the table of Taurus that the track Aldaraia was recorded.

I have since learned that the composer Jerry Hunt (1943-93) not only used Dee's "Angelic Tables" as compositional devices, but also created a piece entitled Tabulatura Soyga for 0-11 instruments and electronic system (1965), which remains unperformed.

EDIT: In one of those strange coincidences I now find that the name Aldaraia itself is a corruption of Al-Thurayya, the Arabic lunar mansion that begins in the last degree of Taurus.

Dai Amaeth (Toadsman's Bell)
I frankly find Dee's conversations with angels the most tedious chapter of his life, but have always been struck by his reconstruction of the so-called Sigillum Dei Aemeth - the Seal of God's Truth. Ultimately this comes from the thirteenth century Sworn Book of Honorious and is employed as part of a magical ritual for the beatific vision - and afterwards it is implied that it has the power to summon angelic aid. Post-Dee, Athanasius Kircher made some particularly scathing comments about the Seal. Since Dee was a Welshman and since that language holds a particular sway over my imagination, I corrupted the phrase Dei Aemeth into two phonetically similar Welsh words - Dai, apparently derived from the old Celtic 'to shine', and Amaeth, 'husbandman' or 'tenant farmer'.

Dew Transmitter (Hieroglyphic Mountain)
Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica has an allegorical/alchemical subtext concerning dew and the appearance of manna to the Israelites in the wilderness. Dew in all its forms has since been a particular inspiration to me.

Gamaaea/Earth Gamathei (The Crooked Pool)
The meaning of gamaaea has been discussed here.

Hieroglyphic Mountain
A play on Hieroglyphic Monad - thinking of Monas as Mons, or mountain - a common alchemical symbol. Could the Hermetic mountain be a symbol of that 'one thing' in which gold or the philosopher's stone may be found?

Horizon of Eternity (XETB & Jani Héllen split)
The title comes from a particularly enigmatic diagram in Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica. The music itself was abstracted from an alchemical-geomantic preparation in The Rosicrucian Secrets, attributed to John Dee, but most likely by 17C occult compiler Peter Smart, who later attributed his works to one 'Dr. Rudd'. Smart most likely copied this material from John Heydon's Rosicrucian Infallible Axiomata (which I'll post about later!). Given Heydon's reputation for flagrant plagiarism this may not even be the original source of the geomantic diagram, although on the other hand he was wont to cast geomantic charts along with horoscopes as a complement to almost everything he did believing geomancy to be the natural counterpart to astrology (to the amusement of his critics).

Pyrognomic Glass
A reference to the prefatory letter of the Monas Hieroglyphica, in which Dee mentions that the angles of the Monad contain the basis for the construction of a lens that will burn to an infinite distance. This reminded me of a diagram in Porta's Natural Magick which the plan for a parabolic burning glass is given, which looks strikingly like the upper portion of Dee's Monad. The cover of the album, showing an extract form Dee's letter alongside Porta's diagram is intended to illustrate this.

Thalia (The Crooked Pool)
This track on the forthcoming double CD came from thinking up acrostic poems for the spirits of the Tuba Veneris while walking through Appletreewick Pasture at dusk. The verse for Mogarip mentioned the silent muse in the first line. The words were dropped, but the music I made around them remains. Agrippa, discussing the music of the spheres quotes this verse:

Silent Thalia we to th' Earth compare,
For she by Musick never doth ensnare…

Voarchadumia (Stella & Astrophel)
The Voarchadumia of Pantheus is an alchemical tract that first appeared in 1530. Dee was particularly obsessed with it and a copy containing his annotations is still held by the British Library. Dee made several passing references to Voarchadumia and the art of the voarchadumacis in the prefatory letter of his Monas Hieroglyphica. Before recording this I was particularly thinking of one of the early chapters in Pantheus' companion work to the Voarchadumia - the chapter entitled Sermon on the Unity of Metals which attempts to set out the great chain of being extending from god, through the planets, metals, musical intervals and so on. As I set foot on the mound upon which Kirklington Church stands, I knew that this would be the song of a voarchadumacis.

Unless you're an avid NME reader you're probably unaware that a new Neon Death Slittes 3" came out on FirstPerson a month or two back… Copies are now available for around the same price of a pint of Guinness over at Norman Records.

A couple of people have asked about the title of the EP - The Grim War of Chaos Magick… It's basically a pun on The Grimoire of Chaos Magick, a book of magical and meditational exercises written by a guy called Julian Wilde and published by Sorcerer's Apprentice in the 80s. I remember reading a newspaper article about the book being implicated in an 'occult' murder in the 80s, although the prosecutor repeatedly referred to the tome as "The Grim War of Chaos Magick" - a phrase that stuck with me. Unfortunately, I'd never been able to track down the article or anything relating to it since briefly seeing a copy of it around ten years ago…

… until last month when I went book shopping with English Heretic, who picked up a copy of Brian Lane's Encyclopaedia of Supernatural and Occult Murder. He opened it and almost immediately pointed out a reference to The Grim War of Chaos Magick.

So, although it pains me to quote from a book that is complete trash and serves little purpose other than to capitalise on the misfortunes of others, here's the extract in question. It concerns the case of one Andrew Newell, who seems to have commited his crime at the height of the 1980s 'Satanic Panic' in Britain during which anyone who listened to Iron Maiden might be plausibly considered part of a dangerous global Satanist conspiracy:

According to his own evidence, twenty-one-year-old Newell fled from the flat he shared with Philip Booth after Booth became violent and attacked him with a knife after a bout of heavy drinking and eating quantities of 'magic' mushrooms. When he returned to the house at Telford in Shropshire, so he said, he found twenty-year-old Booth had unaccountably been stabbed to death.

Not so, claimed Crown prosecutor Mr. Timothy Barnes QC when Andrew Newell appeared before Shrewsbury Crown Court, charged with murder in December 1987. According to prosecution evidence, Newell was a practising devil-worshipper who had deliberately knifed his unsuspecting friend after they returned from a Guy Fawkes' night bonfire party the previous year. Not only that, but it was believed that after bludgeoning Philip Booth with a heavy chain and repeatedly plunging a knife into his body, Newell performed some homespun Satanic ritual over the dying man's body. Police had found a 'black magic box' (in reality a modest plastic record storage holder) at the scene of the crime, which contained Newell's paraphernalia - candles, a ceremonial dagger, an altar cloth, and a number of books on ritual magic, including the Grimoire of Magick and The Grim War of Chaos Magic [- Lane obviously has his facts wrong here, and Lord knows where else in this mess...]. It was suggested that the box also served as a makeshift altar; painted on to the base of it in blood was an inverted cross.

Aside from his excursion into murder - for which, incidentally, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment - it seems that Andrew Newell was more generally, how to put it … unstable. His diary, found in the murder flat, recorded how he would gaze into a mirror while 'turning into a werewolf'. Scene-of-crime officers had also recovered a slip of paper bearing the words of his favourite heavy-metal band Iron Maiden's song The Number of the Beast, one verse of which read, appropriately, 'The sacrifice is going on tonight; I am coming back; I will return.' [- again some misinterpretation since the lyrics seem to be akin to Tam O'Shanter: the protagonist in the song stumbling upon a diabolic gathering. Lane is quoting selectively from the middle and end of the song.]

It may possibly have been just as Newell's bewildered family claimed, a drunken prank, but his sleeping inside a centuries-old tomb in the disused graveyard at Stirchley 'to be surrounded by the dead', could hardly have helped the jury accept his father's claim that Andrew was not involved in black magic.