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Divine Mysteries in the Enochic Tradition – Andrei A. Orlov

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Categories: enochian, mesopotamian, Tags:

Divine Mysteries in the Enochic Tradition coverAt Scriptus Recensera we are avid fans of Andrei A. Orlov and his rather singular focuses on Jewish Pseudigraphia; and in particular the apocalyptic literature of the Second Temple period. Whereas the previously-reviewed Demons of Change, like many of his other books, drew significantly on the second century Apocalypse of Abraham, here the texts of choice, whilst still being associated with or indebted to Second Temple Apocalyptic literature, are from, quelle surprise, the Enochic tradition. Four of these Enochic works provide the book’s triadic structure of three long chapters, though these act more like sections, considering that the total page count for this book’s copy is 223 pages. Chapter one largely addresses the Book of the Watchers from 1 Enoch, whilst 1 Enoch also provides the focus for chapter two, and then 2 and 3 Enoch are the source for chapter three.

With each of these chapters considering how wisdom and the divine mysteries are treated in their respective texts, chapter one’s focus is on the role of the watchers or fallen angels as the holders and transmitters of often forbidden knowledge, as seen in the Book of the Watchers, and two other smaller Enochian booklets included in 1 Enoch, the Book of Similitudes and the Astronomical Book. Orlov shows how the watchers, prior to their fall, were closely associated with cosmological phenomena such as stars, objects whose cosmic immutability denoted a divine order and law. 1 Enoch 8:3, for example, relates that Kokabel taught the auguries of the stars, Ziqel transmitted knowledge about the signs of the shooting stars, Shamsiel unveiled the signs of the sun, and Sahriel taught the signs of the moon. Other verses from the corpus, or the etymology of their names, show the Watchers as having knowledge about matters meteorological, calendrical, geographical, elemental, and most dangerously, onomatological in regard to the divine names of God. When 1 Enoch describes how the Watchers “transgressed the word of the Lord from the covenant of heaven” it underscores how the concept of wisdom was intertwined with cosmic order, the transgression of which provides an Enochic aetiology for evil. The Watchers were not only the guardians of nomological and cosmological order, of this astronomical Torah, but the first offenders against it when they abandoned their posts, escaping from heaven with the divine knowledge.

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The theme of the Watchers as now disgraced custodians of divine knowledge meshes wonderfully with the role Enoch plays in Enochian literature, in which the formerly mortal patriarch is depicted being elevated to a divine status. With that apotheosis, Enoch seemingly takes over many of the past nomothetic functions of the Watchers, almost as if heaven despaired of their prior distributed-responsibility low-level employment model and found a singular, trusted upper middle management power-user more palatable. Indeed, Orlov argues throughout that the corruption caused by the Watchers’ illicit revelation of heavenly mysteries is mitigated by the way in which Enoch is given access to thematically similar clusters of secrets.

Enoch’s reception of this knowledge is not immediate like a file download or reading of a scroll, and is instead, experiential, travelling to otherworldly realms to witness the phenomena over which he is to have suzerainty. When Enoch travels through different heavens in order to view each zone’s peculiar cosmological content, Orlov argues, it suggests that such knowledge is sui generis and can only be acquired directly in these locations, via the intimate interaction with this ‘epistemological topology.’ This stands in contrast to how the same knowledge is transmitted as purely information from the Watchers to humanity, prioritising the episteme over the techne, to use the nomenclature of Greek philosophy.

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Orlov spends considerable time affirming his thesis, patiently drawing each specific example from Enochic literature, and in particular emphasising the way in which Enoch’s encounters with celestial knowledge directly calls back to their former possession by the Watchers. When 1 Enoch 8 mentions the knowledge of precious stones, antimony, metals, and the roots of plants as some of the corrupting revelations giving to humans by Asael, Shemihazah and the other fallen angels, the same text later details Enoch visiting the mountains of precious stones (1 Enoch 18:6–9), the mountain of antimony (1 Enoch 18:8) and the mountains of vegetation (1 Enoch 32); whilst also receiving, in the Book of the Similitudes, a revelation about the mountains of metals. Finally, in 1 Enoch 33:2, the patriarch observes and counts the stars of heavens and the gates from which they emerged, documenting their positions, times, and months, which is then written down, including “their laws and their functions.” As Orlov argues, if the Enochic tradition sees these movements of stars and the luminaries as commandments or halakhot, then Enoch’s recording of this information is effectively copying the heavenly Torah and its halakhot, adopting a divine role that mirrors God himself, given that the Psalmists writes how “He counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by name.” (Psalm 147:4-5).

This is an extensive chapter that goes well beyond what is covered in the summary here, and is indicative of Orlov’s approach throughout the book. He uses the theme of celestial wisdom to present a thorough image of Enoch’s role within divine order, and the increasingly important responsibilities he was given, rising inexorably until in 3 Enoch he ultimately became, as the angel Metatron, the very voice of God. Orlov credits Enoch’s reception of celestial knowledge as the fundamental catalyst for this ontological metamorphosis, with the transformative nature of the law of the stars endowing the patriarch with a new celestial identity and an otherworldly nature, including omniscience. Conversely, the Watchers, in abandoning their posts as caretakers of the divine wisdom, lose their divinity, with the acquisition and dispersal of divine knowledge closely corresponding to specific vectors of topological progression: upwards for Enoch, downwards for the fallen Watchers.

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In his final chapter, The Mysteries of Enoch in 2 Enoch and 3 Enoch, Orlov continues his exploration of Enoch as an elevated celestial figure, particularly in regard to his soteriological role, which in both 2 Enoch and 3 Enoch is further enhanced with new otherworldly features. This is particularly true of 3 Enoch, also known as Sefer Hekhalot and The Elevation of Metatron, which, as one of its titles conveys, documents Enoch transmogrification into the King of the Angels, as The Zohar calls him, Metatron. Orlov draws attention to the soteriological role of Enoch/Metatron as someone who then transmits, with full divine permission, the wisdom and torah of the stars to humanity. This Enochic Torah differs from the Mosaic Torah, particularly in the latter’s rigid spatial ideology, as demonstrated by the scriptural aversion to having protagonists travel to heaven to receive revelation as Enoch does: Moses ascends only the earthly Mt. Sinai when he receives the law, and Ezekiel experiences his vision of the Merkavah, not in heaven but beside the river Chebar. 3 Enoch does bridge this gap, though, combining the two torah when it describes Metatron as the one who transmitted it to Moses, bringing it out from God’s storehouses and giving it to Moses. It then lists the Torah’s traditionally given Mishnaic chain of descent that continues to Joshua, the Elders, the Prophets, and the Men of the Great Synagogue, but ends with two final groups of recipients, the unspecified Men of Faith and in turn, the Faithful.

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Orlov is always a joy to read, with his casually comprehensive knowledge of his sources facilitating a convincing, internally coherent thesis. As with other Orlov titles, he goes crazy with the footnotes, featuring not just citations but entire, sometimes multiple paragraph, notes that can stretch to almost a full page; making reading the main body a brisk page turner in places.

Published by de Gruyter

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Magic and Witchery in the Modern West, edited by Shai Feraro and Ethan Doyle White

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Categories: paganism, witchcraft, Tags:

Magic and Witchery in the Modern West coverPart of the Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic series, this anthology published in 2019 celebrates the then twentieth anniversary of Ronald Hutton’s seminal study of modern Wicca and witchcraft, Triumph of the Moon. With great affection, editors Shai Feraro and Ethan Doyle White acknowledge the impact of that book and the debt owed to Professor Hutton whose work inaugurated wholly or partly the now vibrant field of contemporary esoteric studies. Contributions are provided by Hugh B. Urban, Helen Cornish, Jenny Butler, Sabina Magliocco, Sarah M. Pike, Léon A. van Gulik, Manon Hedenborg White, and Chas S. Clifton, as well as editors Feraro and Doyle White, whilst the esteemed professor himself wraps everything up with an afterword.

In The Goddess and the Great Rite: Hindu Tantra and the Complex Origins of Modern Wicca Hugh B. Urban takes a road less travelled in the consideration of the core influences in the formulation of modern Wicca. Rather than the usual nods to ceremonial, Urban turns to the then growing interest in Eastern mysticism and especially tantra, notably the works of Sir John Woodroffe, aka Arthur Avalon, whose ground-breaking translation of core tantric texts introduced them to the West and made them accessible to anyone within the esoteric milieu. Urban draws particular attention to Avalon’s 1918 work Shakti and Shakta, in which he describes the chakra puja, a circular ritual that ultimately resembles Gerald Gardner’s Wiccan Great Rite: an identification of the priest and priestess with the male and female deities, the organising of participants in a circle of alternating genders, and the central role of transgressive practices (the apex being ritual sexual union). As Professor Hutton points out in his afterword, the influence on tantra on nascent Wicca was a filtered one as it came not via direct encounters with the original texts, but through the guiding pen of Arthur Avalon. Recourse to such a mediating function was a feature, not a bug, in the foundation of Wicca, with information being sieved through literary filters, be they Margaret Murray’s witch cult hypothesis (rather than direct witch trial records), or as is discussed in later entries, conceptions of nature, or fairies, both of which were indebted to Romantic idealisation of a pagan past set against an industrial future.

Whilst the majority of entries in Magic and Witchery in the Modern West approach their theme via words, be they source texts or interviews and survey results, Helen Cornish provides arguably the most interesting contribution here by turning to objects. In Other Sides of the Moon: Assembling Histories of Witchcraft, Cornish considers witchcraft’s reappraisal of itself and its history in the wake of Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon, coming to reprioritise the physical evidence of yesteryear’s cunning folk and folk magic over the largely baseless and wishful theoreticals of Murray and Gardner. The principle site of this ethnographic appraisal is the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, particularly its Wise-Woman’s Cottage exhibit which features a wax mannequin representing a nineteenth century wise woman, Joan, her idealised occult expertise and reputation made real as she sits at the table in front of the fire, surrounded by the tools of her trade. Cornish notes the impact this tableaux has on observers whether they have an occult affiliation or not, but for those identifying as witches this is made stronger by the way in which her tools and just vibe align with their own praxis, being “met with emotional senses of recognition by many visiting witches, especially those who see themselves as inheritors of these traditions.” In searching for meaning and antecedents in the objects of past cunning people who would have had wildly different beliefs to them, modern pagan witches feel little different to pre-Hutton believers in Gardner’s witch cult, but Cornish is never overtly judgemental in her assessment, keeping an anthropological realness if you will.

Playing the Pipes of PAN by editor Feraro explores the anti-nuclear group Pagans Against Nukes and the intersection of Wiccan-derived paganism with Ecofeminism in Britain, 1980–1990. Being somewhat Feraro’s academic focus, and a relatively obscure one at that, this is a subject also explored in his later book Women and Gender Issues in British Paganism, 1945–1990, the review of which notes the indebtedness to this essay. The theme of the environment is also considered in Sarah M. Pike’s Wild Nature and the Lure of the Past: The Legacy of Romanticism Among Young Pagan Environmentalists. Pike builds on one of Hutton’s core themes in Triumph of the Moon, the considerable influence of early nineteenth-century English Romanticism on what would become modern witchcraft. Essentially, the Pagan revival was part of Romanticism, indebted to its belief in an idyllic pagan past and a personification of the divine in nature that stood in contrast to the world’s burgeoning urbanisation and industrialisation. Pike traces this legacy into contemporary environmentalism which can often have a pagan veneer, either because participants are capital ‘P’ Pagans, or lowercase pagans who simply have an affinity with paganism as a broad counterpoint to ideas Capitalist, Christian and Imperialist. Pike gives a brief history of environmental Paganism, with Starhawk and the Church of All Worlds as the movement’s twin primum movens, before calling on her own research amongst contemporary environmental protesters.

Sabina Magliocco follows a somewhat similar approach to Pike, taking, as her starting off point, Hutton’s thesis concerning the relationship between literary and oral tradition, and exploring how the twelfth and the seventeenth century proliferation of works about fairies influenced how they were perceived in the popular imagination; a perception ultimately owing as much to literature as it did to oral tradition. In The Taming of the Fae: Literary and Folkloric Fairies in Modern Paganisms, Magliocco extends this consideration into the modern pagan revival, arguing that that modern Pagan conceptualisations of fairies is heavily influenced by the ways in which they were imagined by the Victorians and Edwardians, ultimately resulting in belief in a race that is tamed and approachable, even affable, rather than wild, inscrutable and capricious. Using surveys from pagan respondents who claim interactions with the fae as children, Magliocco shows how the conception of these fairies has been irrevocably shaped by such literary precedents as Tinkerbell from J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan, and Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies series of illustrated books, with an emphasis on childlike and diminutive magical playmates. The idea of fairies as elemental guardians of nature also have literary antecedents, with Magliocco highlighting how this topos of the fae as an antidote to the Entzauberung afforded by urbanisation and industrialisation, was established by Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and the William Besant and James Rice novella Titania’s Farewell, both of which deal with the fae leaving England due to being fed up with changes. There’s an interesting process at play here, with the disenchantment of the modern world being course corrected by a romanticism that elevates the fairy, and yet the process of taming the fairy in order to facilitate this, making them friend rather than fiend, is itself a result of the same disenchantment.

In the closing trio of entries to this anthology, the focus turns away from specifically Wiccan interpretations of witchcraft to other, usually darker hued, occultists who have embraced the designation of witch. Manon Hedenborg White explores what she defines as the Post-Thelemic Witchcraft of Jack Parsons and Kenneth Grant in The Eyes of Goats and of Women. Beginning with a brief survey of references to witchcraft amongst Crowley’s oeuvre, effectively providing context within which Parsons and Grant sit, Hedenborg White then gives an overview of Parson’s Babalonian-themed witchery, identifying its core anti-authoritarian theme as one of female liberation, a proto-feminist, nature-romantic worldview that foreshadows “later articulations of feminist witchcraft in the 1970s and 1980s.” Hedenborg White draws attention to some of Parsons’ literary influences, merging Crowley’s prose with Romantic and Gothic antecedents, as well as, potentially, pulp author Jack Williamson’s 1948 novel Darker Than You Think and the weird fiction of R. W. Chambers. The same confluence of the occult and fiction is found in Kenneth Grant, as is the use of the figure of the witch as a sex and female positive interpretation of magic, in a “systemic critique of perceived androcentrism within Crowley’s sexual magic.” Hedenborg White credits much of Grant’s interpretation of witchcraft as coming from Austin Osman Spare, but regrettably she doesn’t spend too much time on this, or on Grant in general compared to Parsons.

Ethan Doyle White’s dark witchery person of interest is Andrew Chumbley, founder of the Cultus Sabbati whose influence on modern strains of traditional witchcraft stands in contrast to his relatively short life. In Navigating the Crooked Path, Doyle White provides a comprehensive biography of Chumbley, pulling together seemingly everything that is known about him, documenting his involvement with other occultists and organisations, and gently prodding around his influences and self-myth-making. Up until now, the best concentrated discussion of Chumbley was, perhaps, the chapter on the Cultus Sabbati in Children of Cain by Michael Howard (a Cultus initiate and friend of Chumbley’s), but Doyle White has taken that crown, and this entry alone makes this book worthy of procurement.

Chas S. Clifton brings this triad of traditional witchcraft to a close with Witches Still Fly: Or Do They? Traditional Witches, Wiccans, and Flying Ointment, in which he positions the idea of entheogen use, particularly the flying ointments of witches, as a totem for those calling themselves traditional witches. Clifton argues that the embracing of entheogens as part of witch praxis enables self-identifying traditional witches to mark themselves as distinct from the more straight-edge Gardnerian Wicca for whom flying ointments are only briefly mentioned. Clifton uses three people as exemplars of this traditional witchcraft wing: Robert Cochrane (leader of the Clan of Tubal Cain), Michael Howard (editor The Cauldron magazine for 39 years) and Peter Grey (one of the founders of Scarlet Imprint Press and the author of Apocalyptic Witchcraft). Clifton takes a pretty cynical approach to all this, ultimately labelling claims to familiarity with flying ointments as a type of ‘secretism,’ employed by traditional witches wishing to be seen as having secrets that only they are privy to, thereby engendering kudos and respect within the occult milieu. It’s a valid point, but Clifton does lay the snark on a bit thick at times (rich coming from this reviewer), going so far as to spend half a page reprinting part of Seth David Rodriguez’ blogpost How to Be a Traditional Witch on the Internet, which just gives vibes of an excited boomer reposting on Facebook.

In all, Magic and Witchery in the Modern West makes for a fun read, with a variety of entries that ensures everyone should find something that aligns with their favourite kind of witchery.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan

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Lightbringers of the North: Secrets of the Occult Tradition – Perttu Häkkinen & Vesa Iitti

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Categories: esotericism, hermeticism, paganism, satanism, Tags:

Lightbringers of the North coverIt often seems that the field of occult publishing is a perpetual recycling station, producing a supererogatory glut of books that wander down far too well-trodden paths and offer little that is new. How many books have been written in recent years that give the same basic overviews of the runes, Western magic, or witchcraft, differing little from the ur-texts first published decades ago? It is a genuine joy, then, to come across Perttu Häkkinen and Vesa Iitti’s Lightbringers of the North, which in its 400 or so pages provides a thorough history of the occult traditions of Finland from the late 19th century to the present day. This is a veritable unexplored land from the limited perspective of Anglo-centric occultism, and seems even more unfamiliar than that of its Scandinavian neighbours.

Originally released in Finnish in 2015 as Valonkantajat: Välähdyksiä Suomalaisesta Salatieteestä, this 2022 edition from Inner Traditions is its first appearance in English. Perttu Häkkinen and Vesa Iitti have backgrounds in academia, with respective master’s degrees in philosophy and comparative religion, as well as, fun fact, a past in music, with the now-deceased Häkkinen having been one-half of the electro duo Imatran Voima, whilst Iitti is a former member of the grindcore band Repulse and its later incarnation, Xysma. The more you know.

As something of a serious study, things start a little dryly with perhaps the least glamourous of occult streams, Theosophy, in connection with the father of esotericism in Finland, Pekka Ervast, a founding member of the Theosophical Library of Helsinki, serving as the General Secretary of the Finnish Theosophical Society from 1907–1917 and 1918–1919, before creating his own Rosicrucian order, the Ruusu-Risti, in 1920. The second chapter follows a similar path, and the familiar esoteric figure in this instance is Georgij Gurdjieff who had an outré influence on Finnish esotericism, inspiring individuals and groups since at least the late 1960s. Karatas-kirjat began the publication of translations of works by him and his pupils in 1969, and the similarly-named Karatas society formed in 1979 to disseminate his and J.G. Bennett’s ideas.

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It’s not all hoary old-head occultism here, and Häkkinen and Iitti do not shy away from the more lurid and scandalous side of sortilege. The first of these, The Hand in the Spring: The Mystery of Tattarisuo, documents the grisly incident from the 1930s in which human remains were found deposited in a spring in the rural outskirts of Helsinki. The remains had been collected by a small black magic group from graves in the Malmi Cemetery and used in ceremonies intended to contact spirits.

Speaking of scandalous, the book’s longest entry is dedicated to the neo-Nazi and Satanist Pekka Siitoin, grandly referred to here as the Archbishop of Lucifer. Like the Tattarisuo case, this represents a grottier side to occultism, with Siitoin appearing as an unappealing and unsympathetic 1970s edgelord whose base embrace of transgressive politics and esotericism was seemingly in lieu of having any intellect or class. This distain is engendered and exacerbated by the interminable 63 pages that are spent on him, exhaustively documenting someone who simply sounds intolerable. Plus, with his portly figure and rotund face, he looks eerily like Benny Hill, and when he is seen raising his arm to give the Hitlergruß he seems to embody Hill’s character Fred Scuttle giving an adorable forehead-pressing salute, rather than some Führer of Finland or Archbishop of Lucifer.

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Siitoin’s association with nationalism allows Häkkinen and Iitti to take a slight diversion from these chronologically-ordered individual case studies and dedicate a chapter to the broader connections between Occultism and Finnish Nationalism. This showcases a range of figures, each a little bit nutty, including the artist, pseudo-linguist and, erm, ‘Fenno-Egyptologist’ Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa (who believed that Finnish was the world’s proto-language and that Finns came from Ancient Egypt). Then there’s the writer Esko Jalkanen (who gave the Finns an Atlantean origin), anthropologist and Ahnenerbe-member Yrjö von Grönhagen (who, we learn, once washed Karl Maria Willigut’s back with a magical stone from Karelian seer Pekko Shemeika), and Siitoin associate Väinö Kuisma (who blended Finnish mythology with Esoteric Nazism and Evolian magical fascism, and notoriously features in the 1994 documentary Sieg Heil Suomi).

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Strange and singular individuals are very much a currency throughout Lightbringers of the North, with chapter after chapter dedicated to odd men with equally odd ideas, each given an endearing or enigmatic sobriquet by the authors. There’s Jorma Elovaara, referred to as the Wellington Boot Prophet, who was the publisher of Tähti magazine and a significant counter cultural figure intersecting experimental music and art with Ufology, gay rights and esotericism. Then there’s Kauko Nieminen, the Santa Claus of Kulosaari, a self-taught physicist with all the scientific credibility engendered by that job tile, whose grand theories about ether vortices recalls speculative science several centuries older than him (and yes, he self-published his poorly reproduced works and sold them on the street, as is tradition). Not beating the weirdo allegations, we can’t forget Docent Hannu Rauhala, who claimed to have been initiated into voodoo in Nigeria and who offered his services in curing young women of their frigidity; and who in photos looks like a mercenary or Eugène Terre’Blanche.

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One of the most interesting of these biographical subjects is Ior Bock, whom Häkkinen and Iitti delightfully refer to as the Sperm Magician of Gumbostrand, and the only participant in this parade of odd fellows that this reviewer was previously aware of. Rivalling Bock’s magnificent title as the Sperm Magician of Gumbostrand is the Sex Magick Soldier of Turku, known variously as dhLin gHa-Rej or Aswa Haidar el-Hayyat, or simply Reima Saarinen to his mum and dad.

As the narrative moves into more recent times, author, musician and former Setian Tapio Kotkavuori gets pretty much a whole chapter to himself. As the most prominent Finnish member of the Temple of Set, this makes sense, and Häkkinen and Iitti provide a brisk biography, charting Kotkavuori’s early formation of the Kalevala Pylon, his rise through the Setian ranks, followed by a temporary relocation to the United States and the eventual departure from the temple. It concludes with his death, or at least the death of the name Tapio Kotkavuori (suitably eulogised in a newspaper obituary in order to make it official) as the occultist formerly known as Tapio went on to new things. Other than Kotkavuori, Häkkinen and Iitti’s take on modern Finnish esotericism is pretty brief, with far too short sections on the Star of Azazel and other smaller Satanic groups, and no mention of a publisher like Ixaxaar.

The definition of occult within Lightbringers of the North is fairly broad and it is not, regrettably, all sperm magicians and sex magic soldiers, with Häkkinen and Iitti covering more Fortean paranormal pursuits as well, such as ufology, parapsychology, hypnosis and the psychic Aino Kassinen. One’s mileage may vary with regard to the appeal of such topics, but for this reviewer, they elicit a weary ‘pass.’ Throughout the book there is a palpable mix of writing styles, perhaps reflecting entries written solely by either Häkkinen or Iitti. The chapter The Clairvoyant of the Nation, with its biography of the aforementioned psychic Aino Kassinen, feels markedly different in tone to what precedes it, with a hint of a naïve school report or a first attempt at a marketing profile piece.

In all, this makes for a valuable work, providing important insight into magic beyond the Anglo-centric myopia of the United Kingdom and the United States. Lightbringers of the North has been formatted with layout by Virginia Scott Bowman and text design from by Debbie Glogover, using Garamond for the body face with Espiritu and Gill Sans as display faces.

Published by Inner Traditions

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Reading the Runes: A Beginner’s Guide – Kim Farnell

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Categories: germanic, runes, Tags:

Reading the Runes coverEsoteric publishing is awash with beginner’s guides to the runes. Indeed, that neophytic designation is true of almost every popularly-published book about the runes, with advanced texts being few and far between. For some reason, Kim Farnell, and Red Wheel/Weiser imprint Hampton Roads Publishing Company, felt the world needed another one. From a mercenary publishing perspective, this is understandable because of the required minimum effort for maximum reward. It is a simple formula, one that we’ve seen here at Scriptus Recensera before: broadly introduce the runes, fill that page count with individual entries for each rune, maybe throw in some spread and exercises at the end, finishing off with some tables of correspondences to push the pagination to, in this case, 146 pages.

Farnell is an established author, with a significant body of work that principally considers astrology but also includes other forms of divination such as the I Ching. Bizarrely, this 2019 title isn’t her first beginner’s guide to the runes, with 2016’s Runes Plain & Simple, also published by Hampton Roads, and subtitled with the preposterous claim to be The Only Book You’ll Ever Need. That title was a new edition of Simply Runes that was published by Sterling in 2006 and has since been republished again by Hampton Roads in 2024 as Runes: An Introduction, and may be the same as the 2016 Runes, published as part of Orion Publishing’s Plain and Simple series. Given that those books are based off the same 2006 or earlier manuscript-that-keeps-on-giving, constantly cycling through editions and titles, one wonders how different that rudimentary text is from the content of this book. There is certainly a clunky, redundant quality to the writing that suggests an ur-text that has been tweaked over time without a proper editorial overhaul, but then this could just be the writing style.

Despite the extensive (though possibly recycled) bibliography, Farnell’s writing lacks finesse and flow, often consisting of paragraphs of sharp, staccato sentences that do not connect with their fellow constituents. One paragraph, chosen at random, contains eight sentences, with one of those consisting of just ten words, creating a stop-start statement-stabbing motion when reading. And then there’s the less than convincing history Farnell provides for the runes, flitting all over the place geographically and temporally, broadly mentioning things that often fail to ring true, as if she is misremembering half-heard facts or writing a book report about a title she’s never read. It all gives the sense of a subject matter that one is not familiar with, dropping names but not knowing the context; which is then compounded by the lack of references. She says “Anglo Saxons are credited with spreading the runes throughout Europe” without explaining who credits them with this, or even how it would work, with these English orthographers undertaking proselytising tours of the continent. She describes Óðinn as the father of creation, despite Norse cosmology being autogenous and Óðinn himself being a product of that process. She conflates the use of rune to refer to Germanic runic letters with references in which the word is clearly used to mean any magical symbol, imagining that Kramer and Sprenger in Malleus Maleficarum are talking about witches using runic letters, or claiming without evidence that “the magician John Dee worked with runes.” Inexplicably, she writes that in 1937, “runes gained ground in the UK with the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit,” as if the subtle use of the futhark on the book’s dustjacket kick-started some sort of runic revolution.

Finally, there’s the bizarre claim about the survival of runes in Iceland when in chapter two Farnell writes “As Christianity spread into the northern realms, the development of the Nordic mythologies began to fade. However, the Vikings colonized Iceland where Christianity had a much weaker influence.” Overlooking the fact that the word ‘vikings’ refers to what were effectively Scandinavian pirates and not the general populace, Farnell seems to imagine a weakly Christian Iceland being invaded by pagan ‘vikings’ from, I guess, an ahistorically still-pagan Norway, which made it “possible to preserve the pre-Christian myths” when they were written down for the first time. For the record, the previously unpopulated Iceland was first colonised in the 9th and tenth century CE by pagans from Scandinavia and, perhaps surprisingly, the Irish and British Isles, and the country converted to Christianity in 1000 CE when the Althing declared it the official religion. Perhaps the whole thing was just poorly worded on Farnell’s part, but what really draws attention to it is that she brings it up again in chapter three, confirming the general fallacy by writing “With the Vikings colonizing Iceland, which was less influenced by Christianity, their ancestor’s religion was preserved.” Giving that the man credited with this scriptural preservation, Snorri Sturluson, was born 179 years after Iceland’s official conversion to Christianity, this doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Farnell’s potted history of the runes ends in the modern era where she mentions their mass-market popularisation by Ralph Blum and his introduction of the ahistorical blank rune, adding a little dig by saying “many regard it as showing a misunderstanding of the runes and upsetting their balance.” Naturally, we don’t know who these ‘many’ are, but take that Blum! Actually… forget that, because when it’s time to list all the runes, Farnell goes and puts the blank rune in there anyway, sticking it at the end and giving it the typical fallacious association with wyrd.

It is funny that Farnell should mention Blum because her grasp of runic history seems as broad and unspecific as his, or rather, much of this history is his. On the first page of her second chapter, she writes “When the high chieftains and wise counselors of Anglo-Saxon England met, they called their secret deliberations “Ruenes.” When Bishop Wulfila made his translation of the Bible into fourth century Gothic, he rendered St. Mark’s “the mystery of the kingdom of God” using the word “runa” for “mystery.” With the exception of a few edits and the misspelt and meaningless word ‘ruenes’ (possibly the result of poor transcription or bad OCR process) this is almost word-for-word transcription of a paragraph from page 17 of Blum’s 1985 Book of the Runes in which he paraphrases, and, to his credit, cites, Ralph W. V. Elliott. Blum then continues, talking about Herodotus’ encounter with Scythian tribes who cast sticks for divination, and what do you know, Farnell does the same, copying and pasting with a couple of superficial edits, but leaving in a lot of Blum’s original sentences, including quite idiosyncratic phrasing like “crawled under blankets, smoked themselves into a stupor.”   

Anyway, as to the rest of the book, Farnell puts off giving the standard list-the-runes/give-each-one-a-blurb and instead spends the page space on assigning deities to them, handily taking up eight pages. Some of these associations make sense given their names (Tiwaz was always going to be Tyr) but just as many are arbitrary or a bit of a stretch. Things get super stretchy by the end of the futhark when Dagaz is assigned to Ostara, who Farnell defines as one of the Vanir, despite her being merely a theorised continental goddess for whom mere evidence of existence is lacking, let alone anything that would attest to her being someone who “is a friend to all children, and to amuse them she changed her pet bird into a rabbit. The rabbit brought forth brightly colored eggs, which she gave to the children as gifts.” There’s a lot of doubling up here, so some deities are assigned to multiple runes, and here, once again, Farnell’s reliance on shortcuts raises its head as she cuts and paste the very same descriptions of each deity, word for word; and often within pages of each other so that it’s impossible not to notice.

Nine pages are handily consumed by reprinting the various rune poems, sans any commentary or insight. Then a chapter on making your own runes manages to pad some more by giving an extensive listing of types of wood to use, along with lots of unverifiable folklore and mythological claims, my favourite being this canard: “In Norse mythology, the Goddess Freya chose the black elder as her home.” If only a source for such a claim existed somewhere. Oh wait, it does, a page on a now defunct website tarahill.com, online since at least 1999, which, wouldn’t you know it, contains the same list of trees with almost the exact wording for each entry; and which explains why, in her entry for the alder, Farnell suddenly mentioned Bran as if we should know who that Welsh mythological giant is.

At page 61, we finally arrive at full considerations of each of the runes, followed by some divination spreads. This is all the typical stuff, an origin, a contrived positive oracular interpretation, and the corresponding negative or reversed import. Given the track record established by the book, these all probably come from somewhere else, cut and pasted with a little tweaking for barely plausible deniability. The spreads, at a cursory look, are indebted to Blum, which is once again unsurprising.

Writing is inconsistent throughout Reading the Rune and without a bibliography at the back, or far too much time on one’s hands, it’s impossible to know if this is because even more of its contents have been lifted from other writers, What can be said though is that there’s a general sloppiness to it all, whether that’s simply from carelessness or from the aforementioned lack of thorough understanding. Spelling errors abound, with Bestla losing her ‘l’ in one instance, Surtr being rendered as Sutr, Hvergelmir being reassembled as Hvregelmer, Yggdrasil becoming Yggadrasil over the course of one paragraph, and the collective plural of Æsir being given as Aesirs, shudder.

Thoroughly impossible to recommend and shockingly brazen in its plagiarism, Reading the Rune is proof that we don’t need any more introductions to the runes, it’s all been written before and in the case, and cut and pasted into this sorry tome.

Published by Hampton Roads Publishing Company

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The Dionysian Mystical Theology – Paul Rorem

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Categories: esotericism, hellenic, religion

The Dionysian Mystical Theology coverPaul Rorem is the series editor for Fortress Press’s Mapping the Tradition, a collection of compact guides to pivotal thinkers in Christian history, divided into eras of Early Christianity, Medieval, Reformation, Early Modern and Modern. Part of the Early Christianity grouping alongside works on Irenaeus of Lyon, Athanasius and John of Damascus. The Dionysian Mystical Theology is Rorem’s contribution to the series, providing an overview of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and his apophatic mysticism.

The unknown author referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius was a late fifth and early sixth century CE theologian who wrote under the guise of the first century CE St. Dionysius the Areopagite, a member of the Athenian judicial council whose conversion to Christianity by St. Paul is described in the Acts of the Apostles. Rorem draws attention to the events surrounding this conversion, and how it was initiated by Paul’s sermon in which he remarked on an Athenian statue dedicated to the Unknown God, effectively identifying this Agnostos Theos with his god, whose name was forbidden to be said. Centuries later, this story provided a fitting hook, as Rorem terms it, for the adopted name of the author and its intersection of themes around Neoplatonist ideas of divine knowability and unknowability.

Rorem divides his book into two parts, first providing an overview of Pseudo-Dionysius’s cosmology and apophatic theology using the Areopagite’s own miniature essay, The Mystical Theology, progressing through each statement with commentary. The Mystical Theology is very much a condensing of the ideas in Dionysius’s longer works, and is used here as a particularly good example of his incorporation of negations in an apophatic theology that recognizes the transcendence of God beyond human words and concepts, seeing God in the absence and darkness. Each of the three chapters of The Mystical Theology are analysed section by section with extensive notations.

In the second part of this book, Stages of Dionysian Reception and Interpretation, Rorem turns to discussing how Dionysian thought has been received and interpreted by theologians and church historians, compiling four previously published essays. As this body of work would suggest, this is not Rorem’s first Pseudo-Dionysian rodeo, having, in addition to such essays, written a significant commentary on the corpus, published by Oxford University Press in 1993, and with John C. Lamoreaux translating the Dionysian scolia of John of Scythopolis, also published by OUP under the Clarendon Press imprint as part of their Oxford Early Christian Studies series. Prior to that, in 1980, a sprightly Rorem completed his doctoral dissertation on the Pseudo-Dionysian Synthesis, which was then published in 1984 as the book Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo Dionysian Synthesis by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto.

In the first of these essays, The Doctrinal Concerns of the First Dionysian Scholiast, originally published by Études Augustiniennes in their 1997 Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en Orient et en Occident, Rorem begins with the Byzantine theologian, lawyer and bishop John of Scythopolis whose most significant contribution to early theology was the penning of several works, now lost, in opposition to the Monophysite heresy. Bishop John, writing a mere generation after Pseudo-Dionysius, composed an extensive set of scholia to his predecessor’s works, prefaced by a long prologue in which he set out his reasons for commenting on the corpus, principally as a defence against the Apollinarism and Eutychianism forms of Monophysitism. Using minute points of grammar, vocabulary, and biblical sources in his comments on the Dionysian corpus, John affirms that Christ assumed an earthly body and a rational soul, against Apollinaris and other Monophysites, and that final salvation is of the soul and the body.

The second chapter, The Early Latin Dionysius: Eriugena and Hugh of St. Victor, was originally published under a slightly different title in Modern Theology (2008) and also a year later in Wiley-Blackwell’s anthology Re-thinking Dionysius the Areopagite. Here Rorem considers the exposition and appropriation of Pseudo-Dionysius’s work in ninth and twelfth century Western Europe, where the Areopagite was conflated with a third century local saint, the cephalophoric St Denis of Paris. For those looking for responses to apophatic theology, there’s little here, with Pseudo-Dionysius instead being called upon for his role as a, as Hugh describes him, “theologian and describer of the hierarchies,” with few traces of Dionysian influence being found in his work.

In Martin Luther’s Christocentric Critique of Pseudo-Dionysian Spirituality, previously published in Lutheran Quarterly 11 (Autumn, 1997), Rorem very much enters his Lutheran wheelhouse, turning to the theologian who dismissively referred to “Dionysius ille, quisquis fuerit” (‘that Dionysius, whoever he was’), describing him as pernitiosissimus (‘most pernicious’). The practical Luther was dismissive of Pseudo-Dionysius’s idle speculation about celestial hierarchies, calling his “hodge-podge about angels” dangerous and accusing him of being more a Platonist than a Christian; not an unfair assessment, if a little mean. The same was true of Luther’s approach to apophatic theology, countering the Areopagite’s vision of the darkness of God with an incarnational theology of the cross in which God is hidden, concealed in the darkness of humanity, where he could not be seen but only heard.

Finally, in Negative Theologies and the Cross, Rorem delineates the intellectual legacy of apophatic thinking, dividing it into a triad of streams: the progressive apophatic, the complete apophatic, and the incarnational apophatic. First published in Harvard Theological Review 101 in 2008, and then reprinted a year later in Lutheran Quarterly, this expands on the previous chapter, comparing Luther’s interpretation to others which centre Christ, the incarnation, and the cross. The progressive apophatic is based on Exodus 33, with its imagery of Moses ever advancing morally and spiritually by following the hidden God in everlasting time, with negations lead to more negations. The complete apophatic understands Sinai’s darkness of unknowing as a mystical union with God in ecstatic eternity, with negations leading to a union with God. Finally, the incarnational apophatic explicitly turns from such Sinaic darkness, following John 1 and Philippians 2, to the incarnation and cross of Christ in salvation history.

Due to the nature of the format as a compact overview, with a page count of a mere 141 pages, there’s a feeling that Rorem races along, never dwelling on anything for too long, brevity trumping considered reflection. While he is a largely impartial presenter, it is clear that Rorem favours incarnation over negation, and there are multiple moments in which he comes across as flabbergasted with Pseudo-Dionysius’s apodictic embrace of the apophatic, palpably telling him off back down through the centuries. Despite having written so extensively on Pseudo-Dionysius throughout his career, there is no sense of Rorem merely regurgitating what he’s previously written and augmenting it with a couple of editing changes. Even the straight-up textual analysis of the corpus in the first half of this book, which clearly mirrors, by its very nature, some of the content in his 1993 A Commentary On The Texts And An Introduction To Their Influences, by no means feels beholden to that ur-text. There are some limitations in the consideration of the broader influence of Pseudo-Dionysius’ apophaticism, borne out Rorem’s status as a Lutheran theologian, where the historical trail ends with Luther and the strain of negative theology within Dominican mysticism. In his closing sentence, Rorem underscores what might have been, bowing out and leaving more suitable others to consider what modern and postmodern minds make of Dionysian apophaticism. He does give a few suggestions, referring to philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, as well as from the theological side of the aisle, Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Published by Fortress Press

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Drawing Spirit: The Role of Images and Design in the Magical Practice of Late Antiquity – Edited by Jay Johnston and Iain Gardner

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Categories: classical, egyptian, hellenic, Tags:

Drawing Spirit coverDrawing Spirit is a study of the art, production and social functions of Late Antique ritual artefacts and their visual role in ritual practice, with case studies on exemplars drawn from the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri and the Heidelberg Magical Archive. Its stated aim is to establish a new approach that provides a holistic understanding of the multi-sensory aspects of ritual, and to explore the transmission of knowledge traditions across faiths. Editors Jay Johnston and Iain Gardner contribute most of the entries here, with credits for two essays each, but Julia Kindt and Korshi Dosoo also add to the mix. This line-up makes for something of a Sydney University showcase, with all contributors, save for Dosoo, being professors in either its religion or classics departments.

Co-editor Jay Johnston opens the proceedings with the supremely prolegomenal Magical Images: An Esoteric Aesthetics of Engagement, setting out in a dry manner ideas of images and their interpretation. In what may seem counterintuitive to a work that is focused on the analysis of images, Johnston advocates for an Esoteric Aesthetics, a new approach to interpreting texts and images that challenges empirical and essentialist representationalism. Instead of having a prescribed set of definitions by which text and images can be interpreted, Esoteric Aesthetics opens itself to a multiplicity of interpretations. Inherent in this approach is the idea that ritual objects were read on multiple levels by practitioners, rather than simply looked at.

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In Evoking the Supernatural: Text and Image in Graeco-Egyptian Magical Papyri, Julia Kindt considers the presentation of images and drawings in some of the papyri from what is known as the Theban Magical Library, a body of material from the third to fourth century CE, acquired in the early nineteenth century from art dealers in Luxor by the Swedish-Norwegian consul Giovanni Anastasi. Kindt proffers two case studies, both involving evocatively drawn figures whose exact-as-possible replication by a magical practitioner is essential for ritual efficacy. The first of these from PGM II, provides procedures for invoking Apollo in order to acquire prophetic revelations and features a depiction of a scarab beetle and of the headless daemon Akephalos. This Akephalos is the same Headless One invoked in what is known as the Headless Ritual from another papyrus, PGM V. 96-172 and which, thanks to a mistranslation, has in modern times be rebranded by the likes of the Golden Dawn and Thelema as the Bornless Ritual. Akephalos is as enigmatic as ever, carrying some sort of device in his right hand, his missing head replaced with a row of five symbols resembling the letter ‘q’ or stylised bird heads, while his torso is covered with tattoo-like voces magicae.

Given that Setians such as Don Webb have identified Akephalos with the Egyptian god Set (see the previously reviewed Seven Faces of Darkness), it is interesting that Kindt’s second case study is a charm of restraint in which Set/Typhon is summoned. His chimerical image is to be inscribed on a lead tablet along with various names of power and placed near the person to be restrained, giving evidence, as the Akephalos charm does also, to Kindt’s premise that such illustrations are by no means secondary in this form of magic and perform a fundamental function.

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Co-editor Iain Gardner makes the largest contribution to this volume with the next two chapters, both of which act as surveys of the formatting of collections of magical texts conserved at the Institutfür Papyrologieat at Heidelberg University. One is a set of artefacts acquired through two purchases in 1930 and 1933 and now designated as P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 678–686, whilst the other, P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 680–683 and 685–686, is a tenth century archive of Coptic handbooks and exemplars for the making of amulets and gaining ritual power. The entries in both essays follow a similar pattern, opening with catalogue title of the respective manuscript, a perfunctory material description and a bibliography of previous related literature, before giving a supremely thorough analysis of the text in terms of it literary content and its decorations and illustrations. The first and shortest of these two chapters deals only with the aforementioned P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 678–686, as an exemplar, with the rest of the chapter acting as an extensive and highly technical introduction to the Heidelberg Magical Archive, its origins, content and purpose.

With his second essay alone running to 61 pages, Gardner’s sedulity is admirable, uncovering every detail and marking every observation for each entry, but it does make it hard work to get through. Gardner defines his exhaustive analyses of the six exemplars as consisting of notes and discussions undertaken at different times, and sequenced here without any greater editorial intent, and this is very much how it feels, making them a little disconnected and lacking in focus. This isn’t helped by the scission between this lexical and visual material and its broader origin within each manuscript. Although Gardner does include smaller photographic details of the various scriptural elements he is describing, there are no immediately accessible complete views of the entire pages to provide context. These are included as full-page plates in a comprehensive and valuable appendix at the end of the book, but it is exhausting having to flick back and forth betwixt the two. With that said, as a resource this is a nonpareil analytical reference worthy of coming back to when seeking to understand the content and in particular the minutiae of some of these Coptic manuscripts.

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Korshi Dosoo continues the thread of Australian academia amongst this volume’s authors, having completed his doctorate at Macquarie University, Australia. He is now one of the two principal investigators for CoMaF (the Corpus of Coptic Magical Formularies project at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg), a project whose members, fun fact, also includes another Macquarie alum, David Tibet of Current 93. Dosoo brings his Coptic expertise to his contribution, Two Body Problems: Binding Effigies in Christian Egypt and Elsewhere, providing a broad, summary of the use of effigies, both two and three dimensional, in the magical practices of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia, before getting into the weeds with three brief case studies. The first of these is Miracles of Mercurius, a story from the Coptic magical texts in which a boy offers to pay a magician for a love spell. Dosoo’s other case studies are direct magical instructions found in the manuscripts P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 679 and P. Würzburg 42.

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Co-editor Johnston wraps everything up with Image Play: On Angels and Insects, in which he applies his framework of Esoteric Aesthetics to a single image, this volume’s cover star, drawn from The Exaltation of Michael the Archangel P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 686 fol. 4r. The same image was also considered by Iain Gardner in his exhaustive chapter, but Johnston defines his own analysis as an experiment in provocation, rather than a presentation, using it as an example of a wildly speculative but internally coherent interpretation. Rather than seeing the image as being of St. Michael as simply a humanoid angel, Johnston asks, what if the depiction is of a winged insect, with what is usually taken to be Michael’s haloed head being a moth or butterfly emerging from its chrysalis or cocoon. Johnston enables this exercise in Esoteric Aesthetics by calling on textual examples of butterflies and other insects as spiritual figures (such as the belief in moths as ‘soul-birds’), as well as explaining the obvious associations with resurrection that one can make for lepidopteran metamorphosis. While Johnston is thorough in this analysis, there’s never a sense that it’s an interpretative hill he would die on, and in the end, it is what it is, a diverting and enjoyable exercise in theoretical what ifs.

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Drawing Spirit incorporates twelve monotone illustrations and 69 coloured ones, with 32 of the latter being full page plates (on regular, non-gloss stock) placed as an invaluable appendix at the back. The variety of contributions makes this an intriguing read, but with Gardner’s extensive analysis taking up so much space, its true value seems to be as a reference, rather than a digestible collection of essays.

Published by de Gruyter

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Old Norse Folklore – Stephen A. Mitchell

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Categories: folk, germanic, middle ages, paganism, runes, Tags:

Old Norse Folklore coverPart of Cornell’s Myth and Poetics II series, in which literary criticism is integrated with anthropological approaches to mythology, Old Norse Folklore is a collection of essays by Stephen A. Mitchell, the Robert S. and Ilse Friend Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at Harvard University. Almost all of the essays have been previously published across a variety of books and journals, so anyone familiar with Mitchell’s output, and Norse academia in general, will probably have come across at least one of them before. It’s a joy to have all of them in one place, and this feeling is aided by the inclusion of some of the essays being made available in English for the first time.

Joy may seem a strange emotion to attach to academia but it is palpable here, with Mitchell celebrating his tenure at Harvard through this collection of work, noting that the selection process was a joyous albeit daunting one. He details how it involved casting the net wide not just in terms of topics but theories and approaches, testifying to experimenting with a variety of theoretical pathways over the years, unwilling to dismiss any method out of hand. This positivity is echoed in the wonderful sense of blithesome collegiality to be found in Mitchell’s introductory acknowledgements, taking the opportunity afforded by a collection such as this to reflect on the many people he has met along the academic way. There’s gratitude for the inspiring (and “occasionally unintentionally terrifying”) teachers, for academic organisations and libraries, for the faculty at Harvard (with Mitchell in his fifth decade as a member), and for all the remaining but otherwise previously unmentioned Nordicists from across the field, listed alphabetically for completeness across half a page from Adalheidur to Zachrisson.

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Old Norse Folklore is divided into three sections, Orality and Performance, Myths and Memory, and Traditions and Innovations. The first of these groupings is something of a technical grounding, with four essays previously published in the books Folklore in Old Norse – Old Norse in Folklore (University of Tartu Press), John Miles Foley’s World of Oralities (Arc Humanities Press) and the heretofore-reviewed Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies (de Gruyter), as well as Harvard’s Oral Tradition journal. There are no in-depth considerations of mythic elements here, and instead the focus is on the mechanics of folklore, poetry and its performance. It is this intersection betwixt myth/folklore and performed poetry that looms large within the pieces collected her, with these themes consistently arising across the pages. Equally prominent is Sturla Þórðarson’s Sturlu þáttr, which is used as a significant source text in Mitchell’s Performance and Norse Poetry, as it depicts the poet retelling the now lost Huldar saga before King Magnus VI of Norway to much acclaim. Being such a prime example of poetry as performance, Mitchell returns to the þáttr throughout Old Norse Folklore, having recourse to it in each of the book’s three sections.

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Myths and Memory, the second section of Old Norse Folklore, splits its themes of myth and memory evenly across six entries, the first two of which briefly give unique interpretations to minor mythic details, one an object, the other a goddess. Originally published in Gudar på Jorden, a festschrift dedicated to Lars Lönnroth, Skirnir’s Other Journey considers the riddle associated with the creation of Gleipnir, the near-impossible bond forged to bind the cosmic wolf Fenrir. The second of these entries, originally published in the 2014 issue of Saga oc Sed, is perhaps the longest ever assessment in print of Gna, a messenger spirit associated with Frigga. Mitchell patiently goes through the slight material that is extant concerning Gna, both in saga sources and in academic literature, with the former consisting solely of Snorri Sturluson’s comment on her in the edda, and three unhelpful skaldic kenning. However, by comparing her role to similar figures, Mitchell is able to convincingly position Gna as a spirit of prophecy related to the omniscience seen in figures such as Frigga, such as those summoned in Eiriks saga rauda to attending the oracular volva Þorbjörg. 

This mythonomic trinity of Myths and Memory is completed by Óðin, Charms and Necromancy, an essay that was one of the highlights in its previous appearance as part of the weighty anthology Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives and this remains true here, amongst these new companions. Like the consideration of Gna, the theme here is a mantic one and Mitchell looks at Óðinn’s association with necromancy, in particular his claim that he could make a dead person speak by using runes, relating it to a matrix of similar ideas of death speech from across Norse folklore and myth.

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The remaining three essays in Myths and Memory move the focus to anamnesis, particularly the intersection betwixt memory and the landscape, a popular area of academic consideration in recent years. Mitchell begins broadly by considering the act of remembering in Medieval Scandinavia and how, as a phenomenon that exists between individuals, rather than inside a single person, this experience could be mediated through performance, finding particularly useful examples in the colophon to Yngvars saga vidforla and in Sturla Þórðarson’s well received performative retelling of the lost Huldar saga (as recorded in Sturlu þáttr). The other two essays in this section focus on locations, with Mitchell considering the role of memory in the collective conception of two islands: the Danish Samsø and the Swedish Gotland. Whilst Samsø has a certain charm as the site of the final battle between Hjalmar and the berserker Arngrim, and as the location where Loki accuses Óðinn of seiðr, the more intriguing of these two loci is Gotland. In an essay previously published in the book Minni and Muninn: Memory in Medieval Nordic Culture, Mitchell shows how Gotland has always attracted ideas of primacy, as a point of origin, within collective, but largely constructed, memory.

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The book’s final Traditions and Innovations section features just three entries, beginning with a consideration of onomastics and the parricidal narratives of heroic tradition as conveyed through the valorised Halfs saga and Das Hildebrandslied and their historical corollary on the Listerby runestones. This section also sees Mitchell returning again to Sturla Þórðarson’s eponymous þáttr as an example of the evolution of performative Old Norse literature in Courts, Consorts and the Transformation of Medieval Scandinavian Literature. Things are then wrapped up with a brief discussion and full translation of the enigmatic Old Swedish poem known as Tröllmote (‘Troll Meeting’).

Old Norse Folklore is an immensely readable anthology, with a variety of themes that ensure there should be something for everyone. Mitchell presents his subjects with a joy, combining deft expertise with an effortless, approachable manner that nevertheless maintains an academic rigour. Old Norse Folklore has a second volume which at time of writing is to be published early 2025 and will explore medieval and early modern Nordic magic and witchcraft, in terms of syncretism, continuity, survival, as well as the reconstruction of pagan beliefs and cultic practices.

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Complementing Mitchell’s clarity of prose, is the functional but beautifully formatting of Old Norse Folklore, with body copy set in a refined serif that is aided in its placement on the page by the perfect amount of airy leading and tracking, making for an effortless read. Chapter titles are rendered elegantly in a small caps version of the same face, while at the footer, bountiful footnotes receive a similar treatment to the body, all space and readability, but at a smaller point size.

Published by Cornell University Press

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Dreams in Old Norse Literature and Their Affinities in Folklore – Georgia Dunham Kelchner

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Categories: folk, germanic, Tags:

Dreams in Old Norse coverGeorgia Dunham Kelchner’s Dreams in Old Norse Literature and Their Affinities in Folklore.was originally published in 1935, and this 2013 edition by Cambridge University Press marks its first ever printing as a paperback. The result of research gathered during her seven years studying at Girton College, Cambridge, under the direction of Dame Bertha Phillpotts, Kelchner’s landmark work examines the role of dreams in Old Norse literature. Of particular note is how the concepts of dreams evolved with the coming of Christianity, with Kelchner noting parallels and changes in later post-conversion folklore to further inform an understanding of the importance of dreams to the pre-conversion Norse.

Kelchner categorises the dreams found in Old Norse literature and folklore into three classes: dreams of adversity and prosperity, dreams containing symbolic imagery, and dreams in which living or dead persons appear to the dreamer. She spreads her work across just seven chapters, with the largest being the fourth, fifth and six ones, in which she catalogues the various images that appear in the dreams. Following an introduction, curiously titled Chapter 1, Kelchner provides a brief five page-chapter of historical context, followed by an equally scant chapter on the two overriding themes found across the corpus of Norse oneirism, adversity and prosperity, with considerably more of these dreams dealing with trouble than they do with good fortune. She notes that the source of adversity differs between the dreams recorded in Old Norse literature and later folklore, with the former often involving conflicts between people, whereas the latter features the predations of supernatural forces (such as spirits of the dead) and natural ones too, such as famine and epidemics.

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The fourth chapeter, Symbolic Images in Dreams, is the book’s longest entry and documents the various entities encountered, each with their own section. This makes for an effective dream bestiary, if you will, and covers fetches, guardian spirits (such as hamingja, dísir and spamadr), trolls, and the gods; with Kelchner noting that few of the Norse gods appear in connection with dreams, with even someone like Óðinn being absent from any dream experienced by god or human.

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While the various supernatural figures that appear in these dreams might have some inherent allure, chapter five reveals some unexpected delights in its overview of the various material objects that appear in dreams, often weighted with broader cultural significance than their mundanity might suggest. There’s visualisations of family trees as literal trees, or children being represented by an arm ring that breaks, or the missing toes of their father. This use of symbolic objects in which sign intersects with signifier makes a fitting correlation with the creative use of kennings in Norse literature in which skalds would blend metaphor and metonymy.

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The main content of this book runs to only 76 of its 154 pages, with the remainder being filled with a bibliography and an extensive appendix of source texts and their translations. The presence of this 66 page appendix accounts for the lack of any in-body quotes within the primary section of the book, with Kelchner merely describing each dream instance and never giving the actual wording as they appear in the texts. Whilst this does have the benefit of keeping the pace prompt and the page count low, it can also, nevertheless, make everything run together, with the summary she provides being divorced from the vivid wording of the originals. With that said, compiling the sources into a comprehensive appendix makes for a valuable source, especially as each reference is presented side by side in both Old Norse and English.

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In a similar fashion, Kelchner is pretty light on analysis, with the dreams within each category being presented as little more than an info-dump, with few of the specific dreams getting any deeper consideration. What this ‘just the sources’ approach does have going for it is the showcase it provides of dream accounts in Old Norse culture, with the concatenation of over 100 dreams from different sagas revealing a rich diversity of imagery, and one that speaks to the thematic and symbolism-rich lexicon embedded within the culture.

Published by Cambridge University Press

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Creating Places of Power – Nigel Pennick

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Creating Places of Power coverSubtitled Geomancy, Builders’ Rites, and Electional Astrology in the Hermetic Tradition, Nigel Pennick’s Creating Places of Power was originally published in 1999 by the now defunct Capall Bann press. That edition had the ambiguous and open-ended title of Beginnings, and was accompanied by a subtitle that referred to the European tradition instead of the Hermetic one. As it turns out, that earlier subtitle is more accurate, because the brief here is one that embraces folklore and traditions from across Europe, rather than anything that could be specifically categorised as Hermeticism per se. For what it’s worth, Hermeticism does seem to be quite the thing as the moment for Inner Traditions, with this being one of several recent books up for review that mention it in their title.

This is not the only geomancy-themed work that Pennick has published in recent years, with his Magic in the Landscape, another reissue of an older title, being released in 2020 by the Inner Traditions imprint Destiny Books. Perhaps expectedly, there is some thematic overlap here, with Pennick having the same concerns across both titles, though his tone is remarkably different. As is his style, Pennick begins in opposition, positioning the themes of his book against the modern world. This is a typical and de rigueur screed against modernity, though it contrasts with Magic in the Landscape by virtue of its vituperative tone. While, as our review documents, Pennick has an almost resigned and philosophical manner when discussing the desacralisation of the landscape in Magic in the Landscape, here he lets fly with a condemnation of modernity, aiming his fulmination quite far back with a particularly impassioned and scathing attack on the Italian Futurists, and their love of speed and the machine. Such is the disproportionate level of excoriation that it almost seems personal, as if Pennick’s childhood puppy had been run over by an automobile recklessly driven by Filippo Marinetti doing his best Toad of Toad Hall impression, or something.

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Speaking of speed, Pennick proceeds at a fair click, dividing his book into fourteen chapters, each formatted with a large point size, lots of space, and plenty of images; with at least one across almost every spread. He opens with Patterns of Existence: Consciousness, the Gods, and the Stars, a chapter principally of theory, considering ideas about place within the cosmos, including the aforementioned condemnation of modernity and Marinetti.

The following second, third, fourth and fifth chapters feel very much like pieces cut from the same cloth, quite literally creating the book’s foundations with a consideration of how special locations might be found, prepared and built upon. In Ceremonial Beginnings, Pennick briefly presents the ways in which a potential place of power could be found and marked, while Foundation discusses the use of offerings and sacrifices to imbue a site with a spirit of place. Whilst Consecration, Evocatio, and Blessings addresses the sacred and the profane in terms of consecrating such locations, while Symbolic Foundation deals with traditions surrounding the laying of the First Stone within structures.

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Due to its surfeit of images, this section flies by, with the chapter divisions barely noticeable. Indeed, such is the wealth of pictures that it can be hard to follow the main body text in places, broken up as it by the many large and full page illustrations and photographs that are sometimes followed by still more similarly sized pictures, each annotated with their captions. The end result is a literal, if not literary, page turner, in which handfuls of pages can be knocked out in seconds. Pennick does also keep the written pace coming though, pulling temporally diverse examples from across Europe, with barely a moment to breath. This does, inevitably, create a sensation much discussed in previous reviews of Pennick’s work, where it seems like information is being dumped ungracefully onto the pages, instance after instance, with little exegetical cartilage to tie it all together or slow the pace for a breather. This is compounded by a lack of consistent citing, with a few works being sourced within the body with author and title, whilst the less worthy (accounting for the majority of the information here) remains citation free. There is a bibliography and list of sources at the end of the book, but without any connection between that and the main text it’s largely useless.

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The structure of Creating Places of Power is logical and considered, meaning that, having now established the foundation in the preceding chapters, Pennick turns his focus towards the centre, looking at centriole cosmic symbols like the omphalos, as well as axial devices such as the World Column and the World Tree. Then, in the following two chapters, the journey continues out from the centre, with considerations of the eightfold division of the world, and the symbolism of the eight wind as embodiments of these directions.

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This focus on the centre and its emanations continues into the two subsequent chapters and their documentation of two methods of understanding the world: physical measuring (in particular the use of units of measurement derived from nature), and the telling of time (primarily from the shadowy interaction betwixt gnomon and sun). It is here that Pennick kicks it into curmudgeon mode, having otherwise kept it largely in check after the opening invective against the Futurists. Pennick really seems to have it in for the metric system, which he emotively describes as having being imposed upon people as part of a program of rationalisation, with the “decimalization of the world” having grown apace since the French revolution whose revolutionaries believed it was the only way to live. Rather than these new-fangled ‘globalist’ methods of measuring, Pennick prefers it old school and natural, where things were measured by the other things around it, rather than in abstract units. The most obvious being the original and rather literal unit of a foot, which rather than being the standardised 12 inches (boo, hiss, begone Satan) was whatever the length of the measurer’s foot. Given the innate variance associated with that appendage, I think I’ll stick with standardisation if it’s all the same. Understandably, Pennick is also rather unimpressed with modern time keeping, and predicates olden days local solar-derived time over the modern world’s standardised time zones. The most vociferous ire is saved for daylight saving time, described as a ‘confidence trick’ ‘devised by propagandists’ that “still works today, unquestioned by the vast majority of people” – wake up, sheeple, do your own research!

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Pennick concludes with a handful of other chapters circling similar ideas to that which has preceded them, discussing the use of centriole symbolism in street designs, favourable days in the calendar, and the principles of electional astrology and their use in determining the correct time for rites and ceremonies. At 328 pages including appendices, index, glossary and bibliography, Creating Places of Power looks like it should be a weighty read, but due to the aforementioned wealth of images, and generously proportioned text formatting, it’s a deceptively brisk undertaking. In some ways, it is a very specialised book whose thematic appeal may be limited but Pennick approaches his subject matter with the vigour and detail of someone for whom it most certainly does appeal; which may account for those moments when the passionate invective feels, to this layperson, just a tad disproportionate.

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Text design and layout come at the hand of Debbie Glogover, who sets the body type in Garamond, with Grand Cru as the title face, and Gill Sans, Kapra Neu and Nexa as the other display faces. The illustrations are a combination of photographs and archival graphics, with a large proportion of works contributed by Pennick himself, notably a series of well-executed escutcheon-based diagrams mapping out concepts like the wheel of the year or the eight winds.

Published by Inner Traditions

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Dark Enlightenment – Kennet Granholm

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Categories: esotericism, grimoire, luciferian, magick, nightside, qabalah, tantra, typhonian, Tags:

Dark Enlightenment coverReaders of Kennet Granholm’s Embracing the Dark, a study of the Swedish magical order the Dragon Rouge published in 2005 by Åbo Akademi University Press, may experience a sense of déjà vu when opening Dark Enlightenment. Released as Volume 18 in Brill’s Aries Book Series, this is effectively a revised version of Granholm’s PhD-thesis, but one that has been a long time coming. Initially intended to be finished by 2007, this title would take seven years to be completed due to the constant revisions necessitated by Granholm’s acquisition of new information, resulting in a book that feels far more fleshed out and well rounded.

Granholm presents Dark Enlightenment as a consideration of contemporary esotericism, in which the Dragon Rouge is a particular exemplary case study. But with that said, considerably more time and ink is spent on the order specifically, rather than the general occult milieu from which it emerges. The book keeps much of the broad structure of Embracing the Dark, sharing many of the same chapter titles and sub headings, as well as the general content, but this is not simply an exercise in tidying up and adding a few more bits of information. Instead, much if not all of the content has been rewritten, with an improved and more considered flow, with less of the feeling of brisk literature reviews and the covering off of theoretical models that are seen in, and are characteristic of, the thesis.

In the first half of Dark Enlightenment, Granholm does present a somewhat dry overview of esotericism leading up to the modern day. The first chapter is effectively a literature review, documenting the growth of esoteric studies within academia, marking off historiographical and sociological approaches, as well as the emergence within more recent years of what Granholm and Egil Asprem have termed a ‘new paradigm,’ as typified by the approaches of Wouter Hanegraaff, Christopher Partridge and Kocku von Stuckrad. It’s all essential academic grounding, but there’s no denying the sense of having to wade through the theoretical models to get to the good stuff. The same is also true of the following chapter on major trends in post-Enlightenment esotericism, beginning with Theosophy and the rest of the Nineteenth Century Occult Revival, and ticking off Neopaganism and Satanism before ending with the New Age and the mainstream popularisation of occultism. Once again, it is all necessary for context, but it is well-worn territory for anyone familiar with the Western history of occultism from across the last two centuries.

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In Embracing the Dark, Granholm began his first chapter on Dragon Rouge by discussing its philosophical tenets, a decision that resulted in the order being somewhat temporally unmoored. Here, though, the chapter begins with the history of the order, acknowledging that any comprehensive consideration of Dragon Rogue needs to start with founder Thomas Karlsson. Indeed, one of the areas in which Granholm has added further details is in the story of Karlsson’s youth and what lead up to his founding of the Dragon Rouge. In Embracing the Dark, this section felt brief, even though all the significant moments were there, but here they are a lot more fleshed out. Notably, an early friend and occult influence for Karlsson, ten years his senior, who was previously unnamed and little credited, is now given a pseudonym (the suitably mysterious ‘Varg,’ would you believe) and receives multiple mentions as a formative influence. Similarly, further context is given to a story, briefly recalled in Embracing the Dark, about how a Draconian baptismal ceremony held by the order was mispresented by Göteborgs-Posten as a Satanic baptism, due, not to any content in the ritual, but because the parents themselves were Satanists. Now the previously unnamed father is identified as the singer of black metal band Dark Funeral (presumably Magnus Broberg, AKA Emperor Magus Caligula), which is just neat.

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Granholm also has a slightly broader dataset than just the questionnaires and interviews from 2001 and 2002 that he drew upon for Embracing the Dark, now boosted with further interviews from between 2007 and 2012 with Karlsson and other Dragon Rouge members, as well as representatives of the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Rosicrucian Order of Alpha+Omega. The bibliography is also larger, reflecting the growth in esoteric academia, with references to Granholm’s own works, limited to just two entries in Embracing the Dark, now running to over a page.

In all, there seems to be a greater attention to detail throughout Dark Enlightenment, and with that comes a more circumspect and critical element added to Granholm’s assessment of the Dragon Rouge. While the 2005 iteration could feel overly-immersed in the order, all starry-eyed and accepting, now there’s more of an anthropological aloofness, an awareness that occultists should not be entirely trusted when it comes to anything, especially their own mythmaking. In one example, Granholm takes time to fact-check some convenient but inaccurate etymology in the order’s vision of the Dark Feminine, critiquing an article on Vamamarga Tantra from the order’s Dracontias publication in which ‘Vama’ is translated as ‘woman’ in order to emphasis the system’s feminine focus. This is a pleasing idea, but despite being superficially similar to an adjective used in compounds to denote female characteristics, the Vama component in Vamamarga is etymologically distinct and means ‘left’ or ‘adverse;’ as is appropriate for its use in the designation of left-hand path Tantra. In highlighting this little faux pas, Granholm questions the order’s choices, defining it as ‘interesting’ that the Dracontias author prioritises a tenuous etymology over more thorough evidence such as the many tantric texts that relate directly to the feminine.

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Granholm peppers his analysis of the Dragon Rouge with quotes from its members who often come across as just a little insufferable. This is due to what one could call left-hand path arrogance, an undeserved confidence that comes from believing that your affiliation to an organisation that prioritises an antinomian spirit makes you unique and outside the bounds of normality; as if merely saying it makes it so. There’s the dismissive attitude to more light-aligned occultists, or the boasting about black magicians actualising by breaking free of imposed morality, ‘loving honestly’ with “a love for the living and not for the meek and dying.”

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In his concluding remarks, Granholm does a reviewer’s job by mentioning gaps in his work, briefly discussing themes that could have been explored were it not for the constraints of time, space and focus. The first of these finds us in agreement over the missed opportunity to more closely examine Dragon Rouge within the broader Left-Hand Path milieu. Whilst there are passing references to other groups like the Temple of Set and the Church of Satan, these are largely confined to the overview provided by the Major Trends in Post-Enlightenment Esotericism chapter, and beyond that, Dragon Rouge seemingly stands alone. Less vital but still of interest, Granholm laments the missed opportunity of discussing more fully the intersection betwixt Dragon Rouge and academia, while its relation to pop culture (briefly touched upon when discussing its role in metal music) and gender theory are also acknowledged as areas that could have warranted more consideration.

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As one would expect, the extra time spent on Dark Enlightenment makes it a fine replacement of the formative thesis version, and an essential text as a case study of modern esotericism. It runs to 230 pages and is hardbound, with type setting in Brill’s unremarkable but readable house-style, with typeset in their custom eponymous typeface. Black and white photographs dot the Dragon Rouge section as well as a few black and white sigils.

Published by Brill

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