Tintinnalogia

Tales from the New Isis Lodge

2009-08-05T22:01:19Z

The blurb for the new English Heretic, the fruit of many moons labour by Dr. Sharp:

Probably the first Musical inspired by the creative occultism of Kenneth Grant, Tales Of The New Isis Lodge presents 65 minutes of lush and occult exotica issuing from a transplutonic transmitter. Drawing its structure from the ultra decadent and ornate rituals described in Grant's book Hecate's Fountain English Heretic guide you through Egyptian pre-history to the fungi of Yuggoth, re-imagine flower power in an Indian Tantric idiom, describe the workings of Chinese sorcerers, realise the neither-neither hidden within the jump rhythms of Count Basie and invoke Choronzon in the Crimson Desert. Aeons in its reification and packaged in delicious artwork, stylised as a homage to Grant's Typhonian tomes.

CD Track Listing: 1] Typhonian Museum Piece 2] She Comes In Kalas 3] Tales Of The New Isis Lodge 4] Earth's Lament To The Stars 5] Cult Of The Ku 6] Vevers Of The Void 7] Les Voltigeurs 8] Secret Organization Of The Zotzil 9] Rite Of Kepra 10] Demon Feast / The Dagger Of Bou Said

Out now from the English Heretic Souvenir Shop £8.00

Syrian Dews

2009-07-25T22:39:52Z

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.

The Pyrognomic Vinyl

2009-06-03T20:39:46Z

It's been a while, but hopefully worth the wait! The vinyl reissue of The Pyrognomic Glass, ably handled by Memoirs of an Aesthete is now here! Comes with a 28-page chapbook ruminating on the myth and magic of dew with some knowing nods to 17th century alchemical types like Eiraneus Philalethes and John Heydon.

More info here and here. Also there's a nice half-page article about XETB in the latest edition of Zero Tolerance!

More very soon - I feel another dew-related post coming on...

English Heretic lecture

2009-03-15T23:35:50Z

Quick note for Southerners to say that my friend Andy Sharp (English Heretic) is participating in the second of the Stanley Picker Gallery public lectures on Art: sex, magick, utopia, money. Essential details here, flyer here.

Interbellum Psychogeography: Violet Paget

2009-02-26T21:34:38Z

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!)

Thelema - A Tone Testament

2009-02-12T21:48:48Z

This music for violin was written by Leila Waddell (1880-1932) and published in The Equinox I:8. I've recently made a newly typeset version of the score (- message me if you want it) but thought that my fairly rough digital realisation of it may be of interest to those curious as to how the 'dots' might sound! Waddell also wrote several pieces for Crowley's Rites of Eleusis, which seem to have been lost.

Wolf-whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad

2009-02-10T20:14:19Z

The Fates wouldn't be doing their job it they didn't occasionally deliver brain-boggling moments of completely incomprehensible weirdness. I refer to Juicy Couture's forthcoming range of English Heretic clothing and jewellery.

Shame that the photos on their site weren't taken at Felixstowe (M.R. James' fictional Burnstow) or Dunwich. Here's an artists impression of what could have been:

I hereby make a public request for them to start producing XETB Gore-Tex jackets and a range of Ashtray Navigations hats.

Addendum: The Genuine Article also have a new album out - The English Heretic Collection Issue 2: A Drone for Joe Kennedy... plus more fashion tips here.

An Ode to Gravity

2009-01-08T23:30:37Z

I found myself, a few weeks back, talking to a couple of friends about 'acceptable' New Age music and one of them mentioned the Crystal Vibrations blog, particularly recommending the celestial tones of Iasos and a record by ex-Brainticket man Joel Vandroogenbroeck. However, the greatest discovery this blog had for me came by way of a post about Joanna Brouk's overtone music, which appeared on a radio programme called Ode to Gravity in 1972. Either a producer of this programme or listener has done me a great favour by uploading many of the shows to Archive.org. Each one runs for at least an forty minutes and covers a wide range of experimental music from the 70s and 80s. Highlights including: Annea Lockwood in conversation with Pauline Oliveros; Luc Ferrari on Monologos I; John Cage; the amazing Bob Cobbing; Peter Michael Hamel (previously mentioned on this blog); Conlon Nancarrow; Eno; Charlamagne Palestine; Robbie Basho (circa Zarthus!); Trevor Wishart; and many, many more.

This is a good opportunity to point interested parties toward Donna Weston's doctoral thesis on Music and Musical Thought of the "New Age", completed at the Queensland Conservatorium. Particularly interesting are chapters four and six, which discuss how 19C Spiritualism, Mesmerism, Transcendentalism and Theosophy would come to influence the New Age movement. Some 19C schemes of the music of the spheres are discussed therein, along with the work of Bailly, whose Chant des Voyelles I have briefly discussed here, along with a digital realisation.

Fanfare for the Cunning Man

2008-11-29T00:40:26Z

"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 Astral Bell

2008-11-02T23:04:06Z

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.)

A Pyrognomic Update

2008-10-30T23:26:55Z

Busy days! The research into Frederick Hockley that Dan Harms and I are pursuing is turning up some interesting and unexpected material - there'll be more on this presently, on a subject highly pertinent to this blog. Meanwhile, musicing, writing and childrearing continue apace. The English Heretic gig in Leeds seemed to go pretty well: a decent audience and we got through the set without any disasters thanks to Shem's excellent PA. Third time lucky! I even had a friend, amused by our choice of between-set music, tell me that he used to know Black Widow's bassist!

My 2005 recording, The Pyrognomic Glass, is getting a vinyl re-release, hopefully before Christmas. This will include the booklet Abital, a sequel of sorts to Psychogeographia Ruralis. I've just finalised the text for this. Anyway, here's a preview of what I hope will be available before Christmas:

The final chapter of Abital gives instruction on the use of The Prism for Annwn, incorporating this design:

Stuff and Nonsense

2008-09-25T20:24:26Z

Busy days working on various things means I've not been able to write some of the things I've intended for this blog. Anyway, here's a quick summary of what I've been up to and what is to come.

The period of autumn to spring has always been the most productive months for XETB work. The latest recordings are almost exclusively nocturnal, including a set of improvisations around John Dowland's Flow My Tears recorded by a couple of dark and stagnant pools either side of the Washburn valley.

Timo and Jani at Ikuisuus have done a great job on the release of The Crooked Pool, which compiles various tracks from 2007-08. I've also been pointed toward this XETB 'music video' on Youtube - I'm very grateful to whoever put this together! While on the subject of sound, Phil Todd recently reissued Ashtray Navigations' Red Culture on nice red vinyl for a very reasonable £7.

I've almost finished the second of my trilogy of psychogeographic booklets. ABITAL: Conferences with the Genii of Nocturnal and Diurnal Dew has been difficult to realise. Although I've long wanted to present accounts of the original visionary experiences that provided the impetus to record The Pyrognomic Glass, the manner in which to do it vexed me. After trying to present the material in terms of poetry, storytelling, and ceremonial magic literature it's finally come together in the style of a 16/17C tract on natural philosophy, in the style of Philalethes and the genii-obsessed 'Roguie-Crucian' (and pimp-master general) John Heydon. The format for ABITAL is currently undecided - the first edition may be published as an accompaniment to a vinyl reissue of The Pyrognomic Glass, or if that falls through then a first edition of 50 copies will be put out through Larkfall Press.

English Heretic are playing a rare gig on October 19 in Leeds. Andy and I will be putting together a programme of our favourite esoteric music to play between sets. If all goes to plan this should make up for our drastically attenuated performance earlier this year. See the flyer here for more info.

Other projects on the go at present include a paper exploring the harmonics of Dee's Monad and speculating upon his possible musical education, a fact finding mission relating to a London-based esoteric group that flourished during the 50s, and doing some research toward one of English Heretic's future projects. Maybe I'll get round to some of the things I've promised on this blog when the muse comes to me...

Gig tonight!

2008-08-23T09:41:07Z

A rather late post to say that Ashtray Navigations are playing the first day of Rowf Rowf Rowf 4 at Islington Mills, Salford today, along with:

More info here.

Sound Tech III – Musarithmatics Revisited

2008-07-27T22:09:04Z

Very quick post to say that as part of a larger project, I recently began work on some software to output music inspired by Gaspar Schott's take on the Musarithmic Organ. I've discussed at length in an earlier post, but thought I'd just post an extract of some of the first output since I think it's starting to sound quite nice… listen here.

Trivia Time: John Dee & XETB

2008-07-04T21:37:37Z

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.

Picture Post

2008-06-24T22:27:44Z

A very quick and visually oriented post catching up on various things - it's been a busy time and I'm currently involved in moving house to somewhere hopefully a little more permanent. It's very quiet place that should suit the babies for at least a couple of years…

My copy of Waning Moon's edition of Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus arrived a couple of weeks ago. More images presently, but I must say I'm very impressed by the book's construction - quality printing and paper with great materials, sensitively brought together. As someone previously commented, my chapter is somewhat contradictory compared to the more overarching speculations on either side of it, but I am thankful to Terri and John for giving me the opportunity to submit my opinions on a text that has held sway over various aspects of my life since one fateful day in 1998.

Shortly to be released on Ikuisuus is XETB's The Crooked Pool. It's a double CDr, around an hour and twenty minutes in total. It could have been a single proper CD (which would have been my first) but I don't really agree with the trend for filling CDs with as much material as possible. 40-minute sections are perfect to my mind and ears. One CD is very modal, static and acoustic, the other a bit more experimental.

To follow up my post on Lenkiewicz' book binding: I've adapted this technique with some success. I made a prototype of the kind of thing that could be coming out of Larkfall Press later this year:

Abital, the follow up to Psychogeographia Ruralis, will definitely be in this kind of format - an A6 hardcover book, roughly and rustically bound. The final part of the trilogy concerning the urban genii locorum will most likely be similar in feel to old stapled & photocopied anarcho-punk zines.

Andrew Sharp's essay on Wyrd in Poetry, Theory and Praxis will be a joint collaboration with English Heretic and incorporate supplementary material putting Sharp's original lecture in context, along with supplementary material from other contributors.

More soon - a post about the influence of John Dee on XETB and a considered review of R.J. Stewart's Music and the Elemental Psyche already on the cards, along with some belated Heydoniana. While you wait, why not listen to Melvyn Brag, Peter Forshaw, Angela Voss and Jim Bennett discuss my favourite subject: The Music of the Spheres?

Did You Feel the Gnosis?

2008-05-23T22:51:09Z

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.

Prospero's Books

2008-05-12T22:47:37Z

Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002) was undoubtedly one of the great figurative painters of the latter half of the 20th century and a man who seems to have lived his life to the Muses. He became notorious for opening his studio to vagrants, many of whom sat as models. Among them was Edward "Diogenes" MacKenzie, Lenkiewicz' close friend who he later embalmed and kept in a drawer after his death.

Along with his art, relationships with with those on the fringes of society and fathering at least eleven children by different wives and mistresses, Lenkiewicz' is also well known for his library; occupying a large portion of his labyrinthine studio space it overflowed with works on occultism, philosophy, art and eroticism.

Having been intrigued by his character since reading about him shortly after his death, I was interested to see a few books from his collection surface at Weiser Antiquarian last year, among them various hand-bound texts that he'd photocopied from journals or transcribed himself. Being on the lookout for ways to bind future Larkfall Press books I decided that I'd have to take a look at exactly how he made these. Here's a couple of images of the book that arrived today:

Basically the covers are two sheets of light plywood board, bound by a linen strip upon which the title has been pasted on. The pages of the book themselves are made from five sheets of folded A3 onto which the article has been photocopied. The quire has been stitched to another linen strip, which has been in turn been pasted to the inside cover. I'll certainly be experimenting with this method for binding some of my own photocopies that I've amassed over the last decade and maybe try and make something suitable for a future Larkfall Press book - I personally find the rough and ready nature of this book very aesthetically appealing.

As an aside, one of the most intriguing of the books that came from Lenkiewicz' library was a hitherto unpublished Renaissance magical manuscript, notable for a prescription involving the use of a toad-bone charm (for some related information to toad-charms see the essay here). The manuscript itself was once owned by an astrologer called Raphael and is attributed to Roger Bacon and Thomas Drowre. It seems that this was the the latter half of a manuscript, the first half of which is preserved by the Folger library. It made a televised appearance on Richard and Judy (of all places!) and was auctioned by Sotheby's for more than £40,000, finally becoming reunited with its other half in the Folger collection. What a happy ending!

Midnight Rambler

2008-04-29T20:50:34Z

I went for a night-time walk on Ilkley Moor on Saturday and snapped this image of chthonic energy emanating from the Swastika Stone... either that or some grass obscured the lens.

Bibliotheca V: Voarchadumia - Fire and Hageralzernad!

2008-04-19T19:40:54Z

Voarchadumia is a curious work on alchemy and metallurgy that influenced the work of John Dee, amongst others. It is known that he had an extensively annotated copy, and even referred to the art of the voarchadumacis in the prefatory letter to his Monas Hieroglyphica. As with Dee's opus, Pantheus also accommodates numerological and Cabalistic speculations into his art.

First published in 1530 at Paris, Pantheus declares his art of Voarchadumia to be apart and superior to alchemy - evident in the full title of his work: Voarchadumia contra alchimia. Pantheus draws from an impressive list of authorities: Tubal Cain, Hermes Trismegistos, Geber, Artephius, Avicenna, the Turba Philosophorum, Hortulani, Rosini, Albertus Magnus, Arnoldus de Villa Nova, Raymond Lull, Maria the Prophetess, Morieni and Christophorus Parisiensis. Perhaps there is also the influence of the Aesch-Mezareph, although it is not known whether it had been composed by this date.

In a section discussing those things that possess something of the nature of argent vive, Pantheus tells us the various names of this principle. Since I'm a fan of obscure words I've decided to listed them here with some tentative notes as to their meanings:

Argentum Latin: Silver
Argyrion Greek: Silver; silver-plate
Bos Latin: Bovine
Caspa
Chesseph Hebrew: Silver
Essentia alba Latin: The white essence
Fada
Foemina Latin: Female
Forma mulieris Latin: The form of a woman
Gallina Latin: The hen
Giumis
He Hebrew: The letter Heh (5)
Hypostasis Greek: Being
Luna Latin: The moon
Olus Latin: The vegetable
Ouis Latin: The egg
Septem Latin: Seven
Smerata Looks like a Greek word…
Et alium idem sunt Latin: and there are others for the same!

As an aside, another great word for mercury comes via Zosimos of Panopolis: phugadodaimôn - the fugitive spirit.

A similar list is presented for the "red stone":

Acidum Latin: Acid
Acutum Latin: Sharp
Adam Heb: Man/Earth
Almagra Arabic: Red earth
Altum Latin: High/Deep
Alzernad
Aries
Aurum alteratum Latin: Altered gold/Altering gold (?)
Tinctum Latin: Colouring
Cadima
Cancer
Carmeth
Chibur Hebrew: Joining
Cholera
Cinistartari
Corsufle A sulphurous tincture (see Turba Philosophorum)
Dehab
Deheb
Dextera Latin: Right
Aes aestas Latin: Summer copper/money (?)
Forma viri Latin: The form of a man
Falco Latin: Falcon
Fex
Gallus Latin: Cock
Gophrit Heb: Sulphur
Granusae Thiops - Granus Aethiops?
Hageralzernad
Infinitum Latin: Boundless
Kibrit Arabic: Sulphur
Lapis Indus Latin: The Indian Stone
Indrademus
Lazuli Azure
Mane Latin: The morning
Mars
Masculus Latin: Male
Marthek Divine will (Pantheus' own word?)
Oliua perpetua. Latin: Everlasting oil (!?)
Oriens Latin: The east
Petrastellata Latin: The Starry Rock
Phison
Residentia Latin: Residing
Rex Racon Latin/Hebrew? Pantheus uses Recon Elohim to indicate divine will.
Sol Latin: The sun
Subsolanus Latin: Eastern
Tamuz Heb: Summer month
Tertius decimus Latin: Thirtieth
Thelima Greek: Will
Thion Greek: Sulphur
Thita Greek: Letter Theta?
Vau Hebrew: The letter Vau (6)
Vena Virago Latin: Blood-vessel of the Virago (?)
Toarch
Xit
Zahav Hebrew: Gold
Zumech
Zumemelazuli

Forensic Voodoo: A Queasy Listening Retrospective

2008-04-11T23:00:55Z

I've been meaning to write something about the Queasy Listening label for quite some time. As far can be ascertained, QL has been decommissioned in the last year or two, the core members now comprising the English Heretic organisation, with whom I occasionally collaborate. Since the catalogue is (with one exception) out of print I feel that it might be appreciated- with the permission of English Heretic - to make some small part of the QL discography available online. Therefore I present my personal choices from those recordings I have, along with a little commentary.

I first came into contact with QL in 2000 or early 2001 when Jack Babylon got in touch enquiring about an album I'd recorded called Black Brotherhood. I could see from some of the themes in the QL catalogue that we shared some common interests: the unusual occultism of Kenneth Grant, surrealism, and a general sense of amusement at the absurdity and excesses of so-called 'Industrial Culture'.

Those interested in reading further may like to visit the Queasy Listening website and read the philosophical statement of the label; for the remainder of this post I'd like to share some of my thoughts on the tracklist for the aforementioned compilation of personal favourites from the QL back-catalogue.

Re-uploaded if you missed it first time! Download the compilation by clicking here - a track-by-track breakdown follows below.

Forensic Voodoo: A Queasy Listening Retrospective

I) False Order of the True Paths, from Experience the Charisma of Dr. Andrew Sharp & His Forensic Voodoo String Orchestra (QLCD002)
This comes from the earliest QL CD I own, never - as far as I know - released to the public. It's heavy on the industrial kitsch: the artist appears on the cover wearing a uniform, the lamen of the OTO on his armband, the spectral visage of Myra Hindley floats in the sky above, while the inside bears the kitschy slogan "The oak panelled Armageddon has begun." Many of the recurrent obsessions are already evident on this disc - 60s and 70s British horror, Grantian mysticism and the compulsion to twist 70s rock and pop classics into absurd forms (Thank you for the Industrial Musik, Mama We're All Criminally Insane Now).

II) Earth as Suffering: Ere the Noon Day Sun Swings His Sword, from Music for the Fireside (QLCD010)
Released in 2001, Music for the Fireside was a compilation of various QL works in progress. I can't do any better than quote from the accompanying Cabala of the Hearth regarding the themes of this track: "an acoustic introduction depicting a domestic harmony is a serrated by the phrase 'Ere The Noon Day Sun Swings His Sword.' This marks a sudden demise, a slash of scythe and a rapid descent into the furnace of the crematorium. A requiem of ritualistic drum and wrenching uber-glam riff all overlaid by aphorisms from First World War Poetry, cast us into a world of tragedy on microcosmic and macrocosmic scale, the (h)earths or herds sleep arrested by catastrophe. Indeed it is complacency's torpor that is shaken by insight of death - for "though we have our lives we know what sinister threat lurks"."

III) Buddhist or Assassin: Suvasini in Denim, from Limerence Story (QLCD-lo005)
This album developed from the a near fatal onset of limerence experienced by Mr. SM. This episode resulted in a psychic descent through the 17th Tunnel of Set - an area of mystical geography associated with the tarot Arcanum of The Lovers. The genius Zamradiel, banshees and spectral hyenas haunt this tunnel of love. Its landscape battered by the storms of obsessive sexuality. An exotic and romantic document which was part of the Lost Object series of recordings, intended to be 'lost' at meaningful places: in this instance left on train platforms at midnight or cast from the top of lovers' leap.

IV) Bo-Thaam: Escape, from Music for the Fireside (QLCD010)
Bo-Thaam inhabit a parallel dimension in which English cricketers indulge in ritual-electronics. Perhaps it's best to quote once more from the Cabala of the Hearth: "Over the surreal "chance meeting" of Tibetan Drukpa Sect chant and the simpering irony of Rupert Holmes' classic Escape (Piña Colada Song). A Cenobitic Voice mocks hyprocisy of the royal wedding. "Do you take this soul and devour The Heart". Again we see the fractured synonyms of the hearth firstly in the name of Rupert Ho(l)mes and secondly in the devoured heart. Was not Diana, The self styled Queen of Hearts and did she not die of a severed pulmonary artery - literally a broken heart? The piece ends fittingly with the Late Cardinal Runcie warning the royal couple of ..." the dreadful day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed"."

V) Buddhist or Assassin: Music to Trap Ku By, from The Cellar of Niantiel (QLCD0011)
Perhaps instrumental to his recovery from the ravages of limerence was Mr. SM's investigation of the opium-clouded dens of the Cult of the Kû - practitioners of ancient Chinese witchcraft - and also his psychically shattering investigations into the outer reaches of thanatology. Here's the opening track of The Cellar of Niantiel: a journey through occult rock accompanied by Eros and Thanatos.

VI) Aossic Argonaut: Hymn to Lam, from The Rhyme of the Ancient Marina (QLCD-lo6)
Recorded in the churchyard of Brundish, final resting place of the East Anglian Wyard family. Margaret Wyard was accused of witchcraft in 1645, and according to some sources consorted with the Devil and entities from beyond this world in Rendlesham forest. This short, improvised prayer was recorded in the church porch and addressed to LAM - gateway entity to extraterrestrial gnosis.

VII) The Last Mushrooms: Panarchy in the UK, from Invasion of the Energy Spectres (QLCD008)
Thus far the only Last Mushrooms recording - so far as I am aware. Invasion of the Energy Spectres took its inspiration from Kenneth Grant's hypothesis that "the malefic sonic vibrations inherent in rock music, that are manifestations of radioactive energy spectres released by the nuclear explosion of Horishima." EVP and other methods of mantic audio were used to give voice to these otherworldly spirits who seek to influence the human sphere via the rent in the universe opened by nuclear warfare. An anonymous source tells me that The Last Mushrooms have recently returned to the studio to record a concept album concerning the rituals of the New Isis Lodge…

VIII) Roger & Hal Hunt: The Dunwich Tapes I, from The Dunwich Tapes (QLCD-lo002)
The first Queasy Listening recording I ever heard - a very sparse and primitive production, but quite a powerful set of recordings. "In late January of 2001 two respectable businessmen and brothers, Roger and Hal Hunt, rented a cottage in the ancient Suffolk village of Dunwich, and set about recording a rock album on digital hard-disk apparatus … eleven days later they had inexplicably vanished from the face of the earth."

IX) Buddhist or Assassin: She's Riding Necheshtheron, from The Cellar of Niantiel (QLCD0011)
Another from the second Buddhist or Assassin outing: a journey through the spectral precincts of Niantiel.

X) The Timeless Cocktail Piano Of Colin Holman: Recovered Memories are Made of This, from The Other World Of Val Doonican (QLCD-lo4)
From one of my favourites, and not just because the original edition was left in charity shops, disguised as a Val Doonican album. Recovered Memories are Made of This is a monologue based in imagery dredged up from the psyche through methods of active memory and depth psychology. I hope you can appreciate it even in this format, which is not book-ended by Val Doonican's classic.

Mithras in London

2008-03-06T23:54:59Z

For those down south... for one night only - do come and say 'Hail!' to...

English Heretic will be performing a set of ritual electronics on March 20th at The Carpenter's Arms, Kings Cross Road, Kings Cross London. A celebration of the Mithraic festival of the Taurobolium, the order of service is (provisionally):

Kings Cross Black Magick Night
Black Venus In Furs (A setting to ritual electronic rock of The Tuba Veneris)
The Mystic Art, Anthem of English Heretic
Prise Open The Mithraic Sarcophagus (A rendering of the Mithraic Liturgy)
Taurobolium AD 2008

English Heretic for this ceremony will be:

Dr. Alain Champagne - guitar, electronics, gong and vocals
Sebastian Copely-Syle - guitar,flute,singing bowl and vocals

This event is ticket only. If you are interested in attending contact The English Heretic box office at mail@english-heretic.org.uk

Also, I'll be playing as part of Ashtray Navigations, supporting Family Underground in Leeds on the 9th - more info here.

Pretty Maids

2008-02-24T12:48:18Z

In my review of Sweet William's Ghost by George Deacon and Marion Ross I mentioned the tradition of Holdworthy's Pretty Maids Charity. Yesterday I picked up a second-hand copy of photographer Homer Sykes' Once a Year: Some Traditional British Customs (Fraser, 1977) and was surprised to see a photograph of the award included. Hopefully the recipient of this one was more fortunate than the girl in Deacon's song!

There are selected photos from the book online here - lots of favorites such as the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance and the Burry Man, along with curios such as this creepy fancy dress costume... and apparently striptease is also a traditional British custom. These photos of England 1968-78 are also definitely worth taking a look at.

Esoteric Miscellanea

2008-02-03T23:22:37Z

While I'm posting, here are a couple of esoteric curiosities that I meant to post in some-form-or-other quite a while back…

First, on the meaning of the word Gamaaea:

We have already said, that they (wonderful virtues) are found in three sorts of things; in Stones, in Plants, and in Living Creatures. Those that are found in Stones, are called Gamahes; a word derived, in my opinion, from Camaïeu; by which name, in France, they call all Figured Agats: so that from this Particular name, there is now made a Generall Appellation, serving to expresse all sorts of Figured Stones. To give an account now of this word, and to tell whence it is Originally descended, is something a difficult thing: no one Author that I have met with, having resolved this Doubt, or indeed so much as proposed it: only this one thing I do assuredly know, that it is no French word, but a Stranger. And I have sometimes thought; that, as the Jewes, who lived a long time in France, have left us many of their Words; (as I prove elsewhere:) they might peradventure have left us this also: and this Conjecture seemes all the more probable, in that this People traficks much in precious Stones. Now the word [Heb: CMYVH] Chamaieu, may have been corrupted from [Heb: CMYYH] Chemaija, which signifies, As the Waters of God: because that you shall see some Agats streaked in such a manner, as that they perfectly represent the Figure of Waters: and the word, God, is here added, according to an Idiotisme, frequent in the Hebrew Tongue; which, when it is to speak of any thing of Excellence, usually addes this Holy Name after it. (Unheard of Curiosities Concerning the Talismanical Sculpture of the Persians. Written in French by James Gaffarel. Englished by Edmund Chilmead, 1650. (pp.110-111))

The magus can transport many meadows of heaven into a small pebble, which we call 'Gamaheu' or 'Imago', or 'Character'. For these are containers in which the magus keeps sidereal forces and virtues in a box. (Paracelsus, Astronomia Magna oder die Gantze Philosophia Sagax, 1603)

When this Gamaaea has (by God's will) been concluded (which word to the Parisians, I have interpreted as [Gr: Tes games aian], i.e. as the earth of marriage, or as the terrestrial sign of a union performed in the realm of astral influences), the monad can no longer be fed or watered on its native soil, until the fourth, great, and truly metaphysical revolution be completed. (John Dee, Monas Heiroglyphica, Preface to Max. II (p.135 of the Josten translation))

Second - on his excellent Esoteric Archives site, Joe Peterson hosts his transcription of Robert Turner's 17C translation of the Ars Notoria. To be honest the appendices intrigued me more than the main work, but unfortunately Joe didn't include them. So, here's one of them - a sort of magical precursor to the telegraph. Willy Schrodter has a discussion of such devices in his Rosicrucian Notebook (pp.24-31):

An excellent Invention, done by the Magnetick Vertue of the Load-Stone

A certain Magnetick Experiment, how every Man or Woman may by the virtue of the Loadstone, and the use of this Chard, exactly discover their minds one to another, at any time night or day, be they never so far distant one from the other, in any parts of the World: the rarest secret in Nature, of the greatest use for all persons whatsoever.

The way to use this, is thus: let the form of a Needle be made of pure steel, as you see here in the Figure; such as are used in the sea-mens Compasses; but of the double Magnitude, that it may be cut asunder into two pieces: after it is formed and fashioned, let it be very well toucht with the Loadstone, in the manner as other Needles are; and afterwards cut into two Needles of a like Magnitude; which being both together touchet again, let them be placed in two several boxes or Chards, as in Sun-Dialls is used, having 24 Letters written round about, as you see in this Figure:

[Illustration of a wheel with the alphabet around the perimeter]

Then the use thereof is, that by the Magnetick virtue of the Loadstone, as the one Needle moves, so will move the other, and rest where he rests; so that if one man were about to go into any far Country, having two of these thus made, one for himself, and the other for his friend at home, they may agree and appoint one another at what hours they will speak together, and acquaint one another with their conditions, by the one going to his Chard, and turning the Needle with his finger to every Letter, as they make the Words he would speak; and the other observing, the motions of his Needle will be the same, and rest still at the same place, or upon the head of the same Letter the other points to; which he may presently write down with a Pen and Ink by him, and there make a perfect Letter; and when the other rests, if he will, he may immediately answer the same turning, the Needle himself to what Letters he would write. Laus mirabilia Deus et Natura fecerunt ad usum filiorum hominis.

Quiet time

2008-02-03T23:04:51Z

Things have been pretty busy recently. Expect a post with more interesting content presently in the form of a summary and a few comments on John Heydon's book The Harmony of the World.

Meanwhile, here's a quick résumé of what I've been up to recently and what to expect in the next couple of months:

Making a set of 8 linocuts to illustrate an Anglo-Saxon charm for bringing fertility to the fields. Will probably be the next Larkfall Press release in 15 hand-printed copies (I would do more, but that's at least 120 prints in total - not counting ones that mess up!)

Finishing a XETB double CD entitled The Crooked Pool. 11 tracks, 80 mins… probably a Larkfall release unless anyone makes an offer.

A new Neon Death Slittes recording - a 3" tribute to Hawkwind and Throbbing Gristle - to come out on Firstperson sometime…

Slowly starting to acquaint myself with the environs of Edward Fairfax (more on this later!)

…I also find myself a bit more involved in trying to help out with The Termite Club, starting with a website overhaul. The Termite is pretty much a Leeds institution, but has been on the skids since 2005 - under the new chair of Mel Delaney it could turn into something pretty remarkable.