ScriptusScribe | Scriptus Recensera

November 16, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Supernal Serpent: Mysteries of Leviathan in Judaism and Christianity – Andrei A. Orlov

Categories: mesopotamian, qabalah, typhonian, Tags: Oxford University Press,

In the previously-reviewed Demons of Change, Andrei A. Orlov devoted one of his chapters to the idea that the sash worn by the Hebrew High Priest symbolised Leviathan, participating in a sub-microcosmic representation of the cosmos that also mirrored the microcosmic design of the temple at Jerusalem. That relatively slight chapter touched on the cosmological and eschatological qualities of the primordial serpent, but here, in Supernal Serpent, Leviathan receives the full-length hardback treatment with an extensive study that includes both Judaism and Christianity. As is Orlov’s wont, though, the lens for this endeavour is provided by the Slavonic recension of The Apocalypse of Abraham, a pseudepigraphon, written sometime in the first or second century CE that acts as a frequent touchstone for him. It is genuinely remarkable how much material Orlov has managed to generate using The Apocalypse of Abraham as his source, with the aforementioned Demons of Change drawing strongly from it in its consideration of demonic and angel antagonism, while two earlier, but as yet unreviewed, titles, Dark Mirrors and Divine Scapegoats, both drew on the pseudepigraphon for their assessment of Satanael. This approach is particularly evident in how although the apocalypses’ references to Leviathan are so slight, something that could have been missed in passing, Orlov is able to use these cosmological gems as a gateway into far wider explorations.

Orlov divides this supernal serpent into just five parts, the first of these chapters opening with a discussion of Leviathan’s theophany, using as its thematic seed a scene in the Apocalypse of Abraham in which the patriarch experiences a cosmogonic vision. Gazing downwards, Abraham sees the earth and the underworld below him, seemingly created as a mirror of heaven, with Leviathan identified as a foundation upon which this world lies: “Leviathan and his domain, and his lair, and his dens, and the world which lies upon him, and his motions and the destruction of the world because of him.” Orlov seeks confirmation of this distinctive imagery in the biblical book of Job, addressing not, for now, the idea of Leviathan as a cosmological force but rather as a divine one, a mirror of God with whom he seems to share theophanic characteristics. In Job and in later mystical Jewish and accounts rabbinic speculation, Leviathan appears not simply as a monstrous creature but a numinous one, a being of aureate light and luminescence, breathing fire and exhaling smoke (attributes associated with gods throughout the Levant).

The cosmic centrality afforded Leviathan in the Apocalypse of Abraham provides the basis for the second chapter’s discussion on his role as the Axis Mundi. Despite the brevity of references to this function in the apocalypse, this is one of the longer chapters as Orlov is able to find similar axial concepts in a range of literatures, including direct biblical accounts, Enochic material, Islamic tradition, Rabbinic speculation, and later Jewish mysticism, including the Zohar. Some directly relate to Leviathan, whilst others reference similar antediluvian figures, such as Behemoth, the Watchers (who in the Book of the Watchers are punished by becoming pillars of cosmic stability), and Satan (who in the Slavonic apocryphal text About All Creation, is tied to a cosmological pillar made of adamantine). Orlov expands this theme into a broader consideration of Leviathan’s cosmological and topographical role, documenting the multitude of textual examples in which this is discussed, including, albeit briefly, instances in which the tellurian waterways associated with the dragon are envisioned as avenues for the transmission of energies from the Sitra Achra.

In chapter three, Orlov turns to a different section of the Apocalypse of Abraham to consider the relationship between Leviathan and Yahoel, an angelic protagonist who defines his raison d’être as being to “rule over the Leviathans, since the attack and the threat of every reptile are subjugated to me.” Before getting directly to Yahoel, Orlov uses this quote to reiterate the idea of multiple Leviathans, or instances in which Leviathan is twinned with some other creature such as Behemoth; some in contrasting gender designations as apocalyptic-incepting mates, but others not. As a theme that was touched on earlier in the general discussion of Leviathan’s theophany, this can feel, depending on degrees of severity, either slightly familiar or very repetitive, especially as many of the previous sources are requoted again in their entirety. Orlov compares Yahoel’s function in opposing Leviathan to similar antagonistic pairings in West Asian mythology (Marduk and Tiamat, Baal and Yamm), before drawing comparisons with his angelic brethren Raphael and Gabriel. The final and most complete comparison is with God himself, as Yahoel’s victorious function mirrors that found in the words of the Psalmist, where Yahweh is depicted complete in his victory over Leviathan or its analogues such as Rahab. This is made all the more striking by Yahoel appearing to effectively be a hypostasis of Yahweh, identifying themselves explicitly as “a power in the midst of the Ineffable who put together his names in me;” something which can be seen in the name’s combination of two theophoric elements, yah- and –el.

For his fourth chapter, Leviathan and the Temple, Orlov returns to the theme briefly touched upon in his book Demons of Change: the symbolism of the macrocosmic Leviathan hidden in the architecture and costumes of the microcosmic sacerdotal. As one can imagine, this consideration is pretty light on explicit corroborative examples, so instead, this chapter spends the bulk of its time returning to ideas of Leviathan’s cosmological function, as well as broader ideas of temple symbolism as emblematic of an intersection betwixt the macrocosmic and the microcosmic, such as the veil that protects the Holy of Holies, or the Foundation Stone upon which the temple was built. Leviathan plays a role here in some interpretations of the Foundation Stone, but can also be found in instances in which the primordial waters and their encompassing of the world are represented in sacramental architecture, such as the outer courtyard of the cosmological temple.

Orlov concludes with his fifth chapter, titled somewhat enigmatically, but intriguingly, Leviathan and the Mysteries of Evil, which shows how Leviathan was not simply a figure of monstrosity and antagonism but a source of knowledge. For darker-inclined occultists, this makes for interesting reading, with Orlov providing a whole raft of examples in which interactions with Leviathan are effectively attempts at acquiring knowledge from the Sitra Achra, often through an abyssal or chthonic descent. As a theophanic figure who mirrors the divine in power and incomprehensible glory, Leviathan acts as an encapsulation of numinous mysteries, be it as a eschatological sacrament (whose flesh is eaten by the righteous in the end times), or as an embodiment of the cosmos, the knowledge of which gives insight into the mysteries of creation. Events such as Jonah’s experience in the belly of the whale, the lifting up of the Nehushtan serpent of bronze by Moses in the Book of Numbers, the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan, and Abraham’s subterranean descent in his eponymous apocalypse, as well as many others, each acts as a piece of this puzzle, one which, when viewed in concert, makes for a convincing case. Most striking is the suggestion that the extensive description of Leviathan’s characteristics and dimension given in the book of Job provided an inversion of Shi’ur Qomah inspired mysticism (in which the measurement of God’s divine body act as a source of meditation), allowing one to use the great dragon in a similar fashion.

This is a book with much to recommend it, especially in its treatment of Leviathan as a source of wisdom. Orlov effortlessly navigates his source texts, always finding prior speculative or textual confirmation for each interpretation. Supernal Serpent runs to 347 pages and is hardbound with a beautiful dustjacket designed by James R. Perales that incorporates a detail of St. Michael from Jan van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych. The stock is a beautiful, slightly cream and pleasant to the touch, with text effortlessly but practically formatted in comfortably leading and tracking for ease of reading.

Published by Oxford University Press

October 5, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Myths of Wewelsburg Castle – Edited by Kirsten John-Stucke and Daniela Siepe

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Categories: esotericism, germanic, music, satanism, Tags: Brill,

In the Landkreis of Paderborn in the northeast of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, stands Wewelsburg, a castle that dates to the seventeenth century and which gained notoriety in the aftermath of the Second World War due to its use by Heinrich Himmler as a base and school for the Schutzstaffel. To ensure its function, the castle was redesigned with décor in line with the aesthetics of the SS. Particularly evocative, and a significant factor in the enduring legacy of the schloß as a symbol of Nazi occultism, was the floor of the Obergruppenführersaal in the castle’s North Tower, into which a twelve-armed Sonnenrad (sun wheel) was set in a dark green marble. In Myths of Wewelsburg Castle, editors Kirsten John-Stucke and Daniela Siepe are joined by three other writers (Frank Huismann, Eva Kingsepp, and Thomas Pfeiffer) in presenting a variety of considerations that, for the most part, are less about the material schloß itself and instead focus on how it and the so-called Black Sun symbol in the Obergruppenführersaal have been represented in popular culture, and in occultism and right-wing conspiracy theories.

Due to the savvy sequencing of articles and a cast of just five contributors, Myths of Wewelsburg feels less like an anthology and more like a single work in which the individual authors tag in and out. There is a coherence here, and very little redundancy, which is no doubt helped by Siepe providing five of the twelve entries, and John-Stucke putting her hand to three.

It is John-Stucke who opens the proceedings with the historical grounding of Himmler’s Plans and Activities in Wewelsburg, setting out the nuts and bolts of the schloß and its renovation during the Third Reich. Siepe follows this introduction with a triad of articles discussing the place of Wewelsburg in various forms of popular culture, beginning with the questioning The “Grail Castle” of the SS? in which she tracks the creation of legends about the schloß in scholarly and popular-science literature. This is a weighty piece, looking at how the theory that Himmler chose Wewelsburg as a grail castle developed over half a century following the Second World War, despite there being little evidence for it. Siepe is very thorough here, analysing each book in the oeuvre, tracking the accretion of ideas and how one author would build upon the other, until an almost unassailable idea emerged of Wewelsburg as a Grail Castle hosting Himmler’s new order of Teutonic Knights, and in some cases, housing the recovered grail itself. What is particularly interesting here is that many of these books are ostensibly historical, not speculative conspiracy fodder, and yet Siepe shows how unverified and often self-replicating speculation just churns through this oeuvre, adding grist to an often uncritical mill.

Siepe continues this vein in the next two chapters, discussing the appearance of Wewelsburg in fantasy literature for the first chapter, and in thriller novels and comics by for the second. What Siepe calls fantasy literature is not perhaps how the authors of such books would describe their work, as what is discussed here is the genre of National Socialist occult history, which is often presented as true, albeit hidden. There’s Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s Le Matin des magiciens, Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny, and heirs like Howard Buechner (who Siepe delightfully describes as being seemingly “motivated by the pure pleasure of fabrication”). When turning to novels and comics, Siepe notes how in so many of these types of fiction, Wewelsburg and its inhabitants take on an 18^th century Gothic quality, with the schloß being depicted like a looming and intimidating source of terror or intrigue, worthy of Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley. As befitting such a locus of dread atmosphere, protagonists often arrive at Wewelsburg during the night or in bad weather, with the castle exuding some unspeakable menace. This is despite Wewelsburg’s Weser Renaissance architectural style, with its ornately decorated gables, being more aristocratic than eerie, more fairy tale than fear-y tale. To match the vibe in such works, the inhabitants of the schloß invariably take on gothic roles, Himmler as a dark lord, part magician part mad scientist, with the soldiers of the SS as soulless dark knights meeting in crypts, performing rituals.

Matters now move into areas more esoteric and occult, beginning with another essay from Siepe, this time tracing the use of the so-called Black Sun floor design in the Obergruppenführer Hall; a designation that doesn’t seem to predate the end of the Second World War. Given the role of the sol niger in alchemy, and just how cool an inverted sun seems, this is an attractive association in esoteric circles, where the idea particularly flourished in the intersection betwixt speculative fiction, conspiracy theories and National Socialist remnants. Siepe gives a history of the symbol of the Black Sun as an overall concept in esoteric Hitlerism unattached to Wewelsburg, beginning with the Landig Gruppe formed in the 1950 by former Austrian Waffen-SS members Wilhelm Landig and Rudolf Mund. Incorporating ariosophical ideas from pre-Nazi völkisch movement such as Atlantis and the World Ice Theory, the Landig Gruppe developed the myth of polar Nazi survival in which the Black Sun was a mystical source of energy capable of regenerating the Aryan race. These ideas were promulgated by Landig between the 1970s and 1990s with a trilogy of Thule novels, which were then expanded upon by the pseudonymous Russell McCloud in the 1991 novel Die Schwarze Sonne von Tashi Lhunpo, in which the identification of the Black Sun with the design in the Obergruppenführer Hall was made explicit. 1991 also saw the Wewelsburg design being referred to as a Black Sun by Gerhard Petak (AKA Kadmon) of the industrial project Allerseelen in his Aorta series of esoteric chapbooks, in which he presumed its presence in the schloß could be traced to the influence of Karl Maria Wiligut. Petak was already familiar with the broader symbolism of the Black Sun from alchemy and from Coil’s 1984 album Scatology, the mention of which here does lead to the inclusion of this amusing non sequitur “The subsequent CD release of Scatology showed not only the Coil star but also a naked buttocks.” Love that indefinite article.

Thomas Pfeiffer continues this exploration of the Obergruppenführer design in The Realm of the Black Sun, here focussing on its use as a proxy identifier by contemporary Right-Wing movements in Germany (where it is not legally prohibited in the way that more direct Nazi emblems are). In tracing the use of the Black Sun in Right Wing extremism, Pfeiffer does cover some of the same territory as Siepe, particularly in regards to the Nazi Occult speculative fiction of Landig and McCloud, but most of what is discussed here are examples of its appearance amongst right wing groups and also, briefly, in neofolk and other goth-adjacent subcultures. Landig also warrants a mention in Frank Huismann’s essay Of Flying Disks and Secret Societies: Wewelsburg and the “Black Sun” in Esoteric Writings of Conspiracy Theory, as do Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, of course, and other writers such as Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl of the Tempelhofgesellschaft, and Chilean esoteric Hitlerist and diplomat, Miguel Serrano.

Matters of particular interest to readers of Scriptus Recensera can be found in Siepe’s Esoteric Perspectives on Wewelsburg Castle: Reception in “Satanist” Circles, where she exhaustively documents the importance given to the schloß by occultists, in particular, Michael Aquino of the Temple of Set, and Nikolas and Zeena Schreck of, well, lots of different groups at different times. Aquino was a bit of a pioneer in this regard, having written the article That Other Black Order in The Cloven Hoof whilst still a member of the Church of Satan in 1972. A decade later he visited the castle and undertook what he would call the Wewelsburg Working in the crypt, a ritual in which he called upon the powers of darkness and founded the Order of the Trapezoid, a suborder of the Temple of Set. Siepe includes a photo of Aquino standing in the crypt, something which is then echoed pages later with an image of Zeena LaVey in the same spot from 1998, taken when she, Nikolas Schreck and other then-Setians also performed a ritual in the crypt. Throughout this essay, Siepe is thorough and generous in discussing the intent of the Setians in visiting Wewelsburg, drawing on many references for a comprehensive overview where it would be so easy to simplify and scandalise. What is also of interest in this essay are briefer discussion of two lesser-known occult groups who attach some significance to Wewelsburg, both of which emerged from a German grotto of the Church of Satan: the Ruhr-based Circle of Hagalaz, and the Swiss Ariosophical-indebted Schwarzer Orden von Luzifer (founded in 1999 by Satorius of the metal bands Amon, and Helvete/Mountain King).

Eva Kingsepp follows with two essays concerned with film, the first of which, Wewelsburg Castle, Nazi-Inspired Occulture, and the Commodification of Evil, considers the spectre of returning Nazis. The two variations of this trope add a little twist to the act of Nazi recrudescence, not merely reappearing but taking on new enhanced forms: Space Nazis and Zombie Nazis; as seen in the movies Iron Sky and Outpost respectively. In her second essay, Factual Nazisploitation: Nazi Occult Documentary Films, Kingsepp gives a brief survey of the stylings of exploitative documentary films about Nazi occultism, in which she lays out common structural elements, often of the lazy and gauche type. She gives a few examples, however it’s all over too quickly, as if she’s just getting started but was called away.

Symbolic Bridges Across Countries and Continents: The “Black Sun” and Wewelsburg Castle in International Right-Wing Extremism by Thomas Pfeiffer is the final full essay here and returns to his concerns with right-wing movements. He traces the appearances of the Black Sun, noting in particular examples of violence (such as the 2019 mosque attacks in Christchurch, the attack in Halle an der Saale in the same year, and the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville), as well as its use by groups such as Chrysi Avgi in Greece, Atomwaffen Division, and the Azov Regiment in Ukraines.

In lieu of a conclusion, Myths of Wewelsburg ends with Current Tendencies Concerning the Myths of Wewelsburg Castle by Kirsten John-Stucke, which with its couple of pages mentions a few bits not covered elsewhere in what is a thorough work with something to appeal to almost everyone, whether you come to the subject from an esoteric, political, historical or conspiratorial place. Myths of Wewelsburg is a substantial volume, coming in at a little over 300 pages of quality paper stock and bound in a sturdy hardcover with a handy cloth bookmark. It is illustrated thoroughly throughout, with many of the in-body images, particular exemplars from pop culture, in full colour, making it admirably comprehensive.

Published by Brill

September 28, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Seiðr Magic: The Norse Tradition of Divination and Trance – Dean Kirkland

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Categories: germanic, runes, Tags: Destiny Books,

Bearing an unremarkable title that makes it somewhat merge with other seiðr-denominated books, Seiðr Magic is a how-to guide to reconstructionist Norse-inspired divination and trance. Putting aside the seiðr aspect, it follows the formula of many other popular occultism books, particularly of the Norse variety. There’s a basic outline of the history of the magical forms, a section on nomenclature and terms, another on tools, and the de rigueur detailing of the nine worlds of Norse cosmology, all set out in ten chapters, one building ‘pon ‘tother. The only thing missing, mercifully, is a chapter on the runes with the usual guaranteed page-count-inflator of interpretations and meanings.

Dean Kirkland opens with an introduction, setting out what seiðr is, how it might be compared to shamanism, and what it is not. There’s a giddy enthusiasm here, one that defines seiðr by what it is not almost as much as what it is. To do this, Kirkland evokes the spectre of contemporary “Norse witches” (his persistent sneer quotes, take that!) who get it all so wrong, what with their historical inaccuracies. He goes so far as to imagine a four line rebuttal that such a strawmanwitch might respond with when challenged on their use of ahistorical things like casting magic circles and calling the elements. But he does them dirty by assuming they’d just say what amounts to “OK, how you know?” According to Kirkland, these “Norse witches” believe that tarot was being used by their ancient antecedents, which if they really think that, and weren’t simply fulfilling their fictional role in this fallacious scenario, is a belief so laughable as to not warrant a snarky mention in the introduction of your book. It’s almost as if the reconstructed nature of the seiðr presented here needs to pre-empt any criticisms by mentioning a much worse reconstruction. “Yeah, I might have made this up, but at least I didn’t include tarot like those fakers.”

In the ten chapters of Seiðr Magic, Kirkland breezes along at a fair clip, presenting his version of seiðr in a very palatable, modern-pop-occultism manner that is generally correct but low on citation, with Neil Price’s The Viking Way being the only Norse academic text to get a mention. As a result, everything can end up feeling just a little untethered and ‘trust me, bro’. Things are consistently compared to shamanism, and while Kirkland does give some specific examples, too often the language used refers simply to “shamans all around the world” or “most shamanic cultures” and the like, flattening diverse and geographically distant cultures into one amorphous analogical device. The list of cited works bears these impressions out, with a short crop that, other than primary Norse sources, is limited to Price’s The Viking Way, Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism, Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman (unsurprisingly), The Norse Shaman by Harner student Evelyn C. Rysdyk, an article from the shamanism magazine Sacred Hoop, two books by Edred Thorsson, and, somewhat disproportionately, three folklore books by Claude Lecouteux. No academics were harmed (or encountered) in the writing of this book; with apologies to Professor Price. In all, what is presented here is largely inoffensive, just very smoothed over, occasionally vague and awash in the type of framing one might expect from a New Age-adjacent imprint like Destiny Books.

In chapter seven, Kirkland strays specifically from seiðr, something which he acknowledges in the preamble, and looks at hearth and land spirits. Strangely, while this includes a discussion of Landvættir (the Norse spirits of the land), a larger section is on the Cofgodas, whose Anglo-Saxon derivation makes for quite the startling etymological aberration amongst all this Old Norse. This is made all the stranger since the historical use of cofgodas to refer to household gods is so slight as to be practically non-existent, with the word only occurring in Old English texts as a gloss for the Latin penates (the dii familiares or household deities of ancient Rome). Other than acting as a post-Christian gloss for a Roman concept, and one which was probably invented solely for that editorial role, there’s no evidence of the cofgodas in Anglo-Saxon paganism. It was Claude Lecouteux who really took the name and ran with this idea of cofgodas as household spirits, arguing that they were akin to the kobolds of medieval German legend (who, it must be pointed out, are mischievous sprites rather than minor gods), and making much from so little. The self-replicating, fact-checking-averse nature of the interwebs has then further uncritically perpetuated this idea. Unsurprisingly, Lecouteux’s 2013 The Tradition of Household Spirits is cited here by Kirkland and seems to be the sole source of the information.

Kirkland is described in his biography as a goði of the Three Castles Kindred, and a part of the “ritual-specialist team,” whatever that means, for Asatrú UK. He has a Ph.D in ecology (or entomology according to his LinkedIn profile) and also mentions undertaking a shamanic apprenticeship with the Dorset-based Sacred Trust. The latter immediately sets off alarm bells as Sacred Trust is the organisation of fantasist and fabulist bee-botherer Simon Buxton, whose plagiarised book The Shamanic Way of the Bee has been previously (and scathingly) reviewed on this site. Such deceit makes suspect anything else associated with a serial maker-of-things-up such as Buxton.

Speaking of making things up, in his introduction, Kirkland references the use of Unverified Personal Gnosis (UPG) in his practice and says that any examples will be identified as such in the book whenever possible. The ‘whenever possible’ caveat seems warranted as it was apparently not always possible to do so. While Kirkland often backs up what he’s saying with recourse to primary textual sources, at other times he’ll just throw something out there as if it is uncontested or accepted, filling in little lore gaps without identifying them as the mytho-polyfilla that they are. In discussing the nine worlds, for example, he associates each realm with a guardian, and makes the interesting claim, one that doesn’t exist even remotely in lore, that the guardian of Niflheimr, what with its icy associations and all, is the king of the rime thurses, adding the caveat that the specific holder of this title can sometimes change. He makes a similar claim for Svartálfaheimr, and this time the guardian is the current king of the dwarves, a position that apparently “due to internal politics” can change from time to time. Cool story, bro.

There are also a few bits of odd and errant etymology, which is strange as most of what is here otherwise hews to the standard. When listing the names given to various types of magical practitioners, he dissects the title Galdrakona to mean ‘woman that crows’ rather than the obvious ‘spell woman.’ Injudiciously extrapolating on a single line from Edred Thorsson’s 1993 Rune-Song: A Guide to Galdor (in which he traces galdr back to galla), Kirkland claims that galdr is “literally translated” as the “cawing of crows” or “crowing of cockerels,” seemingly mistaking galdr (‘magical chanting’) for galla (to ‘sing,’ ‘chant,’ and yes, to ‘crow’). Whilst related, galdr is not galla (having distinct Proto-Germanic roots: galdraz and galan? respectively) and, as it is, both are words that still prioritise the idea of galdr as an empowered vocalisation, with any avian crowing associations being at best tertiary. That galla can be used for the voice of birds means nothing when it’s also applied to the voice of anything else (wolves, Loki, your mum). Also, getting crow (kráka) the bird from crow (galla) the action in order to extrapolate galdr into the ‘literal’ “cawing of crows” is quite a linguistic leap and one that seems to rely on the homophonous nature of only the English version of the words. Taking this idea to its ‘literal’ conclusion, the use of galdr as a general term for all types of Norse magic must have meant that anytime someone was alleged to have performed magic, they were really being accused of talking like a chicken? Was a galdramaðr a chicken-talking man? Was their galdrabók a chicken-talk-book? A squawkbook?

The text and layout for Seiðr Magic has been handled, as is tradition, by Debbie Glogover, with body set in old favourite Garamond, whilst Gill Sans, Mrs Eaves, and Swear Display are used as display faces. The formatting is light and breezy, with a generous leading between lines that near doubles the page count, pushing it a little past 200. Illustrations are limited to a diagram of the nine worlds (a schema formulated in the style of Stephen Flowers), and two small and murky photographs of Kirkland’s seiðstafr which really weren’t worth the effort.

Published by Destiny Books

September 5, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Thinking Queerly: Medievalism, Wizardry, and Neurodiversity in Young Adult Texts – Jes Battis

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Categories: magick, middle ages, queer, Tags: De Gruyter

Jes Battis teaches literature and creative writing University of Regina, Canada, and has written a number of contemporary fantasy books, including two series with Penguin imprint Ace: Occult Special Investigator (Tess Corday is a paranormal detective working in Vancouver and the Fraser Valley) and, as Bailey Cunningham, Parallel Parks (a group of graduate students discover a parallel dimension at the heart of the city of Regina). The genesis of Thinking Queerly came during a semester which saw Battis teaching Chaucer during the day in one session and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in another at night, with the themes of youth and medievalism being productively blurred. As Battis notes, this is emblematic of Carolyn Dinshaw’s idea of medievalism’s asynchrony in which different timeframes and temporal systems collide in the now, in the queer middle. Battis found a link between these medieval temporal worlds through a third class they were teaching that focussed explicitly on teen fiction, with the teen wizard and his vampire boyfriend of Rainbow Rowell’s novel Carry On bridging the medieval and the medievalist. For Battis, medievalist young adult fiction locates the intermediacy of adolescence in what Jeffrey J. Cohen and Eileen Joy have defined as the medieval middle, the liminal space within which definitions merge and break down, where monsters, and wizards, lurk.

Battis argues that the wizard, with their exceptional abilities and a sense of otherness, can serve as a metaphor for neurodivergent experiences and highlights the similarities of queerness and neurodiversity in which viewing the world differently and fitting into societal expectations can be challenging. To this end, they bookend Thinking Queerly with paeans to two specific wizards: opening first with a chapter on Merlin, and then ending with an epilogue about Gandalf. Both wizards are cut from the same wizard cloth, being perpetual outsiders who are hard to pin down. They are both gifted with a hyperawareness that is twinned with a hypersensitivity that necessitates their occasional self-imposed exile from public life.

In their second chapter, Battis turns to what they identify as modern medievalist heirs to Morgan le Fay, prefacing this exploration with a thorough survey of her appearance in early texts the Vita Merlini and the Vulgate, as well as the later Les Prophéties de Merlin and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Informed by Carolyne Larrington’s essential study of Morgan and her sisters, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, Battis depicts her as a rebel against the magical establishment, an independent and ambiguous figure who defies classification. The witches identified by Battis as Morgan’s modern heirs are only designated as such by their status as witches and outsiders, rather than as villains. This is a shame and something of a disappointment as Le Fay’s particular strain of turpitude is such a core part of her appeal but is conspicuously absent in these scions. The two heirs do make for an odd assortment too, being Terry Pratchett’s imperturbable witch in training, Tiffany Aching, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch from Archie Comics (though viewed principally through the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and, with some personal regret, not the 1990s sitcom starring Melissa Joan Hart). It is Sabrina that receives the lion’s share here, with the infinitely more interesting Tiffany sadly being deduced to a mere handful of pages.

Battis turns to that mainstay of young adult fantasy, the magical school, for their third chapter. Blessedly, little time is wasted on mouldy old Hogwarts, which is usually merely mentioned only in passing, and instead the case studies are drawn from Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and its sequels, and Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On (not to be confused, as I initially was, with the bawdy English series of cinematic farces, but rather a fan-fiction inspired remix of the tropes of Harry Potter). Sadly, Le Guin’s wizard school on the island of Roke doesn’t get much coverage here and the focus is on the two more recent examples from Grossman and Rowell, with Battis providing thorough analysis of these stories. Perhaps the most valuable device that Battis employs here is comparing these fictional schools to modern academia, drawing comparisons between the experiences of the characters and those of contemporary students in medieval studies. Indeed, throughout Thinking Queerly, it is often when Battis provides anecdotes from the classes they have taught that the central premise really shines, seeing how these tales both ancient and modern can be made to relate to contemporary queer and/or neurodivergent students.

Battis is well equipped for the final chapter discussing Sir Gawain as a young adult fiction protagonist, having written a 2023 urban fantasy Arthurian novel, The Winter Knight, in which the lead character is a reincarnation of Gawain. This isn’t merely focussed on recent treatments of the character, but goes all the way back to the anonymous late 14th-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with Battis highlighting the hero’s youthful and innocent qualities as the youngest of King Arthur’s knights. Gawain is as metaphorically green as Sir Bertilak, the Green Knight, is literally so-hued, with his youth being one of his most defining characteristics; someone who has “always been a YA figure” as Battis says. Like a modern Young Adult hero, Gawain is in the midst of becoming himself, discovering his wants and values, and how to find a space between his own desire for independence and the rules of the society within which he exists.

Moving past the aforementioned Gandalf epilogue, Battis concludes with a substantial appendix of texts and media, fifteen pages in all, listing not just medieval sources, each with a paragraph long blurb, but with a section on Young Adult novels, and another on media such as films and television series. The latter category is pretty broad and welcoming, featuring things one might expect, Labyrinth, Willow, and Buffy, but also outliers such as Young Sheldon, Community, and Hannah Gadsby’s comedy special Douglas.

While this may reflect the biases of the reviewer, Thinking Queerly is most interesting when it is considering the medieval rather than the medievalist. The link between the blueprints and their successors may be worthy of consideration, but it often emphasises the strength and depth of the originals, with modern medievalist interpretations being poor facsimiles. The theme of finding neurodivergent kin amongst literature’s magical cast of characters is an interesting one that offers a particularly unique selling point, even if it sometimes feels like the characteristics of almost anyone mentioned can be interpreted as examples of neurodiversity. Sans appendix, index and bibliography, Thinking Queerly runs to 202 pages of body copy, and is presented in De Gruyter’s usual house style and bound in a fetching magenta hardback.

Published by de Gruyter

August 20, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Afterlives of Endor – Laura Levine

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Categories: witchcraft, Tags: Cornell University Press,

Laura Levine is an Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at New York’s Tisch School of the Arts and so brings an intriguing perspective to witchcraft literature from the early modern period. Subtitled, Witchcraft, Theatricality, and Uncertainty from the “Malleus Maleficarum” to Shakespeare, Levine considers how that period’s anxiety about witchcraft and theatricality impacted on the understanding of witchcraft, and further, how this was conveyed in the works of three pivotal writers, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlow.

Was witchcraft a real and imminent threat, or was it delusion and deception? This dichotomy is embodied in the biblical witch of Endor referenced in the book’s title, and the ways in which she was perceived on the one hand by the rationalist Reginald Scot (author of The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584), and on ‘tother by the contradistinctively zealous King James VI/I (who penned the tract Daemonologie in 1597). For Scot, most accusations of witchcraft were a scapegoating campaign against poor menopausal women, and the imagery of malfeasance and malefica were entirely in the minds of the accusers. King James, however, believed explicitly in the reality of witches and witchcraft, making both practice and practitioner worthy of extermination. Both men understood that the Endor witch visited by King Saul in the biblical book of 1 Samuel could not have raised the shade of the prophet Samuel to physical appearance, but each offered a different explanation. Scot took the most obviously rational approach and argued that the witch was simply a charlatan, using stage tricks to effect the appearance of Samuel. King James also perceived a deception, but rather than coming from the hand of the witch, it was the devil himself who was given his due, with Satan employing a demonic theatricality to assume the shape of the dead prophet.

Levine divides her book into two parts, with the first five chapters devoted to the witchcraft treatises of Heinrich Kramer, Reginald Scot, Jean Bodin and King James, and the rest on the literature of Spenser, Marlow, and Shakespeare with a chapter given to each writer; and an epilogue in the case of the bard.

There’s a common though largely unspoken sense of duplicity that weaves its way through the texts of Kramer, Bodin, Scot and King James, with Levine highlighting moments that make the writers seem conflicted and possessed of double standards. In the Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer and Sprenger provide elaborate instructions for trials of witches, creating scripts and judicial procedures that seem to instil order but are then undone with a theatrical flourish at the end of the trial in which a witch’s accuser are revealed to her, thereby confirming her guilt. This is just one example in the Malleus Maleficarum where examiners are advised to use deception to reveal deception, the judicial theatricality acting as a counter-performance to the innate performative nature of witchcraft itself. Jean Bodin in his meisterwerk De la démonomanie des sorciers makes an impassioned case against theatricality in witchcraft trials, distaining any spectacles, especially instances that replicate the witchcraft he is examining (something which he singles out German judges as being guilty of, take that Kramer and Sprenger). Yet there is much in Bodin’s judicial approach that suggests the magic of performance, and despite believing that words ‘describe’ rather than ‘create,’ the act of verbally giving evidence has a constitutive power, one that as a prosecutor he is reliant upon. In this and other examples, cognitive dissonance abounds and as Levine notes, this is something that extends to both a rationalist like Scot and to the believers like James, with the worldviews of both sceptic and witch-monger often coming close.

The grounding in history that Levine provides in the first part of the book is so successfully done that when it comes to consider the fictional heirs of Kramer, Bodin, Scot and James, the parallels betwixt fact and fiction are immediately obvious, even before she makes each case. Of these, the most interesting examples are drawn from the works of Edward Spenser and William Shakespeare. In the eighth canto of the first book of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Una strips the witch Duessa of her clothes to reveal to Red Cross Knight who he has been consorting with and demonstrate what she actually is. This obviously recalls the procedures found in both Malleus Maleficarum and Newes from Scotland in which suspected witches were stripped and their bodies searched in order to find the devil’s mark and elevate that suspicion to categorical fact. What is a particular delight in this section is how Levine highlights the way in which Spenser undoes the inquisitor’s gaze, never allowing Duessa to be truly laid bare. He couches his description with ostensive modesty, employing acts of narrative preterition that he credits to his chaste muse who prevents him from describing Duessa’s innermost muliebral monstrosity. Despite tantalising the reader with description of her broader theriomorphic and colubrine attributes, the private site that would confirm her designation as female and witch remains invisible, her secret filth “good manners biddeth not be told.” Levine draws a comparison to the unveiling of Duessa (“loathly, wrinckled hag, ill fauoured, old”) to the trial of Agnes Sampson (“eldest witch of them al”) in Newes from Scotland. The account details how Sampson seemed to resist corporeal definition by her interrogators and had to be stripped and fully shaved before the devil’s mark could be finally found on her ‘privities.’

When turning to the works of Shakespeare, Levine considers first The Winter’s Tale. This sharpens the focus once again on the differing interpretations of Saul and the witch of Endor by Scot and Shakespeare’s patron, King James. Here the divergent interpretations are credited to the characters Paulina and King Leontes, with the latter calling the former a ‘mankind witch’ and threatening to have her burnt. In turn, Paulina, channelling the pragmatic Scot, replies that “It is an heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in’t,” effectively arguing that the crime is in the tyrannous mind of the beholder who makes the accusation and kindles the flame, not the immolatee. The Tempest with its play within a play provides an even clearer exploration of the themes of magic and artifice, given the clear analogy that it makes between Prospero’s sorceress arts and the contrived magic of the theatre, with Prospero giving up the practice of the artes magical like an actor retiring from treading the boards.

Afterlives of Endor runs to a brisk 129 pages of body copy, followed by a substantial section of extensive endnotes (many running to over a page in length), as well as references and an index, making for 178 pages in total. Levine has an engaging but dense writing style that rewards close attention, but does assume some familiarity with its subject matter, both in terms of witchcraft trials and the works of fiction, both of which she refers to exhaustively.

Published by Cornell University Press

July 20, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

The Rephaim: Sons of the Gods – Jonathan Yogev

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Categories: mesopotamian, Tags: Brill,

Marking the 121^st volume in Brill’s Culture and History of the Ancient Near East series since its founding in 1982, Jonathan Yogev’s The Rephaim: Sons of the Gods has a very specific focus and offers a new interpretation of the Rephaim. Best known for their enigmatic appearance in Biblical texts, where they appear as either a Nephilim-like race of giants or the spirits of the dead, references to the Rephaim are found in other ancient Near Eastern literature, from the ancient port city of Ugrat in northern Syria and Phoenician sites in North Africa. These three loci facilitate the chapter divisions for The Rephaim with Yogev giving thorough epigraphic analysis of each respective source text, concluding, where needed, with summaries and additional philological notes.

Discovered relatively recently in 1928, texts from Ugarit provide the oldest references to the Rp’um (Rephaim), all immortalised on cuneiform clay tablets in various states of completeness and legibility: The Rp’um from KTU 1.20–1.22, the Legend of Aqhatu, the Ba’alu Cycle, the story of King Kirta, a Memorial Service for Niqmaddu, a song for a New King from KTU 1.108, an Incantation from KTU 1.82, and a fragmentary text from KTU 1.166. For his translations, Yogev uses high resolution images from the University of Southern California’s Inscriptifact Project database, whilst others were obtained from private collections, or sent to him by the Louvre Museum. Transcripts were created directly from the images, comparing them to other works in order to assure as much precision as possible, referring to various opinions in cases of epigraphic and philological issues, and in instances of great uncertainty, leaving some words untranslated.

As Yogev notes later in the book, scholars first encountered the Rephaim in scripture and so the 2000 year lead-in provided by the Bible’s depictions informed subsequent interpretation of the chronologically older but only relatively recently studied Ugarit and Phoenician texts. The most obvious example of this is how the Rephaim are almost universally depicted antagonistically in the Old Testament and cast as villains of great stature. Another is the often vaunted identification with the dead. Yogev is at pains to undo these assumptions in his analysis of the Ugaritic texts wherein the Rp’um appears as mortal and material heroes and kings who ride chariots and gather together for feasts and celebration. These Rephaim may have been considered divine or semi-divine because they are referred to as ilm (‘gods’), ‘ilnym (‘divine ones’), whilst one of the named Rp’um, Kirta, is addressed as ‘son’ and ‘family’ of the ‘Ilu (the Ugaritic equivalent of El, the name for the supreme deity found across Semitic languages). At the same time, though, the Rp’um are neither immortal nor endowed with supernatural powers, instead appearing, as the Bible would phrase it, as “mighty men of old, men of renown.”

The Phoenician body of evidence is the smallest assembled here, with only two specific full length texts being considered: Tabnit and Eshmunazar Inscriptions (KAI 13 and KAI 14) and a Latin/Neo-Punic Bilingual Inscription from El-Amruni (KAI 117). Both are sarcophagus inscriptions that emphasise the association of the Rephaim with dead, and in both instances act as warnings against disturbing the occupants, lest the perpetrator be cursed in their own death and not buried with the Rp’um, This seems to affirm the idea of the Rp’um as sanctified and venerated heroes who have received an honoured place in the afterlife. One fragmentary text is also covered here, a eulogy found on a fragment of limestone from debris in the Mausoleum in El-Amruni, north of Remada, Tunisia. Written with five lines in Neo-Punic and eight in Latin, indicating its origins in the Roman empire between 1 and 3 CE, it commemorates a Romanised local farmer called Q. Apuleius Maximus Rideus. In the opening line reference is made to l’l[xx]’r’p’m which has been connected with the Rp’um due to a corresponding line in Latin that often appears on tombs as an address to the Manes, chthonic spirits of the deceased.

In the third chapter’s consideration of the evidence from scripture, Yogev makes a suitably eschatological division between the living and the dead, considering depictions of the Rephaim as the Dead (drawn from Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs, Job and Ezekiel) as well as two distinct traditions of the Rephaim as living beings (found in Genesis and Deuteronomy for the first, and in Genesis, 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles for the latter). Given the enigmatic and equivocal nature with which these references have engendered the Rephaim, there’s unsurprisingly very little that is conclusive in the passing mentions here. But the additional information provided by the Ugaritic and Phoenician sources provides valuable context and situates the Rephaim more clearly within the cultural milieu of the ancient Levant. Yogev highlights that whenever the Rephaim are encountered in scripture, they are either dead or in the process of being killed, recipients of a distain and hatred that can be attributed to the affront they represented to Yahwist monotheism. As the demigod descendants of a plurality of rival gods, the Rephaim were an aberration to the status of Yahweh as the only god, as was the idea that kings of other lands might claim a divine mandate due to their descent from these sons of gods. The Rephaim, then, are treated in the same way as other supernatural opponents of Yahweh, such as the monstrous Leviathan and Behemoth, defeated and consigned in their abnormity to the underworld.

One of the most interesting examples to come from scripture, and which is at odds with the prevailing Yahwist attitude towards the Rephaim, is a reference in Ezekiel to a situation in which God could send four plagues against a sinful nation, destroying all but three righteous men should they be found there: Noah, Job and Daniel. Later in an imprecation against the King of Tyre, Ezekiel mentions Daniel again and describes him as wise. Without much evidence to the contrary, it was long assumed that the Daniel referenced here was the biblical hero of the same name. Such identification ignored the temporal issue it creates for scriptural chronology, as that Daniel would have been very young at the time of Ezekiel’s prophecy with none of the fame or familiarity that his later legend would engender; making for a meaningless reference for Ezekiel’s audience and for the King of Tyre. Following the discovery of the Ugaritic texts, a different claimant to the identity of this wise Daniel was found, with the Legend of Aqhatu referring to the hero and wise judge Dan’ilu Rp’u, one of the Rephaim. Yogev argues that Dan’ilu was a heroic figure originally present in Ugaritic, Phoenician and Israelite myth, but whom, like the rest of the Rephaim, was abandoned by the Israelites as they progressed to Yahwist monotheism. Much of the details of Dan’ilu vanished, but the strength of his association with wisdom remained enough for Ezekiel to reference him as a paragon of such.

Yogev makes a fine case when presenting his argument. The Ugaritic and Phoenician exemplars are meticulously documented and the summary of the evidence is so complete, that when instances from scripture are mentioned, the broader context is clear despite the Yahwist reading. The Rephaim: Sons of the Gods runs to 180 pages for the main body, followed by an extensive bibliography, an index of subjects, and a multipage index of all the Ugaritic, Phoenician and scriptural primary texts and their catalogue numbers. Set in an eminently readable modern serif, The Rephaim is presented in a matte red hardback with a simple text and icon cover.

Published by Brill

June 20, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Russian Black Magic – Natasha Helvin

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Categories: folk, satanism, Tags: Destiny Books,

Picking up where her previous book Slavic Witchcraft left off, Natasha Hevin’s Russian Black Magic turns a dark corner into regions unequivocally black. While its predecessor considered fairly generic folk magic, with, as the review attested, some psychologically-questionable attitudes towards consent and mental wellbeing, the negativity here is of a more glamourous kind, with a book whose explicit diabolism might seem at odds with something as New Age-adjacent as the Destiny Books imprint of Inner Traditions.

Helvin divides her book into two halves, the first and shorter being a history and theory lesson, whilst the second is a practical spellbook, a Black Magic Spellbook, as it plainly says on the tin. As an indicator of the grimdark vibe, if this wasn’t enough, Russian Black Magic is preceded by the de rigueur cautionary note warning that anyone who performs these spells does so at their own risk, and Helvin and the publishers accept no liability. Neat.

Helvin writes in a forceful almost proselytory manner with a sometimes unwarranted confidence, dispensing categorical statements sans examples and evidence when something more circumspect or empirical would be warranted. This is on display in the first chapter where she gives a basic outline of magical principles before describing the mages that practiced it prior to, and following, the Christian conversion of Russia. Despite apparently being heirs to a system that had been honed and systematised for centuries, these ill-defined mages exist in a temporally-unspecified murk of history. There’s no names given, no references to historical records, barely any specific locations, just this vaguely-defined idea that these mages have been out there, doing their mage thing for many mage years. There’s not even an appeal to authority via some mysterious claim to a magical lineage, just categorical statements about something that can’t really be fact-checked on account of the dearth of facts to check.

It’s not just the lack of specific history that makes for an infuriating read but also statements so sure of themselves that the self-belief is staggering, such as when Helvin casually refers to Western ceremonial magic as the opposite of Catholicism because of its, would you believe, black mass. She also identifies Russian black magic as dual faith and claims with admirable audacity that dual faith is an “exclusively Russian phenomenon; it has no equivalent in other cultures.” This is particularly amusing given that one of the one of the favourite comparisons that Helvin makes for her Russian Black Magic is Vodou whose fundamental syncretism is the very definition of a dual faith.

In her second chapter, Helvin introduces another form of magic workers, distinct from mages from which they sprung, the Veretnics or heretics. At last, an actual name, one might foolishly say, but Google return results almost exclusively related to this book, and nothing independent; though presumably the name is meant to be related to the Russian erétik (‘heretic’). But if you want made up names, have we got you sorted, because in her third chapter we meet the demonic pantheon of this system. Satan’s there, all good (although he is only designated as a prince, which feels like short changing oneself when you make a big deal about wanting to reign in Hell), but then his companions are all unfamiliar and largely un-Googleable etymologically-diverse faces. There’s Prince Veligor, Prince Versaul, Prince Enarh, Princess Death, Prince Indik, and Prince Mafawa. One of these demonic princes does have a familiar name, Enoch, but this isn’t the antediluvian patriarch of the Bible but a demon of lust and debauchery (and presumably identity theft). Another one, Prince Aspid (Satan’s nephew, according to Helvin, but really just the Russian word for ‘asp,’ is a little-known dragon from Slavic folklore, rather than a demon of greed and envy as he is here, and is the closest Helvin gets to anything authentically mythic. Helvin gives multiple paragraph descriptions of each of these demons, explaining their responsibilities and what role they played in the rebellion in heaven, which is just silly as it’s all patently made by her out of whole cloth. One could easily create an interesting pantheon that had some Slavic connection to either folklore or pre-Christian mythology to give it an air of authenticity, while still adding glamour with some demonic sheen. But to spend so much time on your war in heaven fanfiction without making it even remotely fit the brief seems like a consummate waste. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with making up your own cosmology and pantheon, cultures have been doing it for millennia, but to weakly try and pass it off as some ancient Russian tradition serves no purpose.

Helvin follows her demonic pantheon with chapter on cosmology that segues into a discussion about the definitions of Satanism and paganism, There’s a retelling of the story of creation and the war in heaven, filled with lots of other embellished details delivered with undeserved confidence and in one instance, an appeal to authority referencing a legend (from an unspecified time, place and culture) that hasn’t previously existed. When it comes to define Satanism and what it is and is not, there’s a lot of ponderous waffling, the kind of near incoherent but strangely didactic tone and structure one would expect in a self-published guide to the dark arts, where the writer is so sure they’ve got this intellectual stuff down and it’s all going so well… “look at me ma, I’m writing, I’m really writing.” Helvin’s definitions, be they of Satanism or paganism, always feel a little off, divorced from reality and experience; an ambiguous sensation that is then compounded, not assuaged, by her unwarranted certainty. The rituals and ceremonies that pagans perform are, apparently, “quite pleasant for their participants” with music, dancing, alcoholic beverages and, gosh, “interaction with the opposite sex” phwoah. We could pick out other moments to critique but it’s not worth the effort, suffice to say, it goes on and on, page after page, periodically devolving into convoluted literary miasma and making it apparent that there was never an editor going “maybe you should reign it in and tighten this up.”

With it now being time for the Black Magic Spellbook section, let’s rub those hands together and get busy. Well, busy after some ponderous theorising about the principles of magic, sprinkled with some faulty etymology, poorly cited folklore, mixed mythologies, interminable fluff and the ever present insufferable pontificating. When it does get to the magic, after all this talk about century-long mages, it’s a little disappointing because it’s pretty much just the same kind of old folk magic from Helvin’s previous ill-considered book, but this time, you do it in a cemetery because it’s darque. Lots of love spells (in the cemetery), divorce spells (in the cemetery), death and harm spells (in the cemetery), followed by another chapter of similar sortilege but in a church. It all concludes with a chapter of more of the same but these ones are under the glamorous title of The Thirteen Veretnic Spells of Evil which at least live up to the hype with their cartoonish diabolism, destroying icons and images of the trinity, trampling a crucifix under foot, all the hits. Fun times.

In all, this makes for a very odd book, particularly, as noted, with it being released by a conventional metaphysical publisher like Inner Tradition’s Destiny Books imprint. Helvin’s unwarranted confidence grates, and this is especially compounded by the sloppy writing and editing, not to mention the comical enthusiasm for grimdark diabolism. It’s hard to tell who the audience for a title like this was, with its lack of genuinely Russian elements doing a disservice to anyone who comes to it looking for that, while its publication by a New Age publisher may restrict its appeal to any angsty teen starting out on an antisocial path of antichristian occult mastery.

Published by Destiny Books

May 30, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Demons of Change: Antagonism and Apotheosis in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism – Andrei A. Orlov

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Categories: luciferian, mesopotamian, Tags: SUNY Press,

Andrei Orlov is Professor of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and has previously published several titles through SUNY Press. With his past considerations of heavenly doppelgangers, divine scapegoats, and the place of Azazel and Satanael in early Jewish demonology, Orlov often has a focus on the demonic and this is the case here as well. In this instance, it is the idea of an adept’s combat with demonic forces being a prerequisite for their apotheosis, a combative tempering within the forge of diabolical antagonism. Such combat does not simply represent a standard hero’s journey in which the protagonist defeats a monster on their way to maturity, be it Marduk and Tiamat, Sigurd and Fafnir, or Luke Skywalker and the Rancor. Rather, this process of deification is one in which the antagonist not only loses the battle but also their status, with the hero being apotheosised at their expense, taking their place (and in some instances, their clothes) and assuming their role.

Orlov has a somewhat verbose academic style, particularly in the introduction where he establishes the core thesis and maps out a general framework. It’s all perfectly legible, but it does feel almost poetic in its grandiloquence, with a noticeable preference for certain field-specific key words that get quite the workout. And wonderful words they are too, can’t fault him there as some of them are personal favourites as well, with a surfeit of ‘eschatologicals,’ ‘protologicals’ ‘metamorphoses,’ soteriological,’ ‘sacerdotal’ (five times in one paragraph), and the delightful double barrel of ‘psychodemonic anthropologies;’ a collocation that really should be slotted into more everyday conversations.

Demons of Change is divided into four chapters, each dedicated to a particular variation of these antagonistic interactions, beginning with, well, the beginning, in which the battle is betwixt God and Satan, with the primordial Adam as the protagonist who is destined to usurp the mantle of his antagonist. Key to this theme of angelic opposition is what Orlov describes as an induction ritual, in which the protagonist is presented before the angels as tselem or image of the divine, one whose arrival threatens their privileged existence, and is then either venerated or opposed by them. In apocryphal versions of the creation myth, such as those found in the Primary Adam Books, Satan’s refusal to venerate Adam is what leads to his fall from grace, abandoning the vestments of heaven to the protoplastic Adam and assuming a dark mantle. Orlov shows how this Adamic template was applied to other significant figures, beginning with the antediluvian patriarch Enoch who was caught up to heaven upon his death and, in an act of apotheosis, was presented as an Imago Dei to the angels (who, seemingly aware of the Satan-Adam precedent, knew not to make a fuss this time). Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at Bethel and the vision of the ladder stretching between heaven and earth also aligns with this theme, as does an excerpt from the Exag?g? of Ezekiel the Tragedian in which Moses describes a vision of being enthroned in heaven and having stars process in front of him in obeisance.

The full circle of this motif then occurs in the New Testament, where Jesus, the very literal iqonin or image of God, is tempted by Satan in the desert. Satan attempts to reverse his interaction in heaven with the prelapsarian Adam, compelling this New Adam to bow before him, offering him all the kingdoms of the world if he does so. When Christ refuses this genuflexion rematch, Satan departs and the gospels of both Matthew and Mark refer to angels then ministering to Jesus, drawing an inevitable parallel to the angelic attention paid in the climax of the induction rituals of other incarnations of the Imago Dei. Orlov studiously documents the evolution of these ideas and how such parallels have been drawn before in both Talmudic and Christian commentary.

In his second chapter, Orlov turns his attention to stories of fiery ordeals, in particular an apocryphal tale in which a tyrant (sometimes identified as Nimord) tried to burn a young Abraham for refusing to worship fire. The story is found in the midrashic Genesis Rabbah, but the focus here is on a version from the Slavonic recension of The Apocalypse of Abraham, a pseudepigrapha, that includes details not found elsewhere and is cited with some frequency across Orlov’s work. Thought to have been written sometime in the first or second century CE, the most obvious parallel to The Apocalypse of Abraham is the chronologically older but textually younger biblical tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace from the book of Daniel, with both including elements of oppressive leaders and angelic intervention. On the surface, this theme could feel somewhat divergent from the angelic and demonic antagonisms documented in the first chapter, but by drawing parallels with the fiery martyrdom of Christian saints, such as Pionius and Polycarp, Orlov shows how it relates to this book’s other theme of apotheosis. Orlov gets into the weeds here, drawing little details from various variations of the theme of fiery martyrdom to flesh out an interpretation of the apocalypse as one concerned with a ritualised apotheosis, including ideas of Abraham as a bound sacrifice whose igneous ordeal elevates him to heaven. Sometimes the recourse to chronologically and culturally diverse, but circumstantially similar, sources feels like a stretch, with the tiniest of minutiae being mentioned if it helps the speculative narrative.

This second chapter is significant because much of this book’s remainder flows from The Apocalypse of Abraham and its characters and antagonists. While there are human antagonists in the various accounts of fiery martyrdom, with the various tyrannical rulers (Nimord, Nebuchadnezzar, Marcus Aurelius) seemingly acting as avatars of demonic malice, the second section of the apocalypse features an actual demonic adversary, Azazel, who assumes the form of an unclean bird and attempts to interfere with a sacrifice Abraham performs on the summit of Mt. Horeb. The angel Yahoel assists Abraham by fighting off Azazel, and rewards the patriarch with celestial garments that had been originally set aside for the fallen angel. This allows Orlov to return to one of his favourite themes, the gifting of ritual clothing, and to use that most favoured of his phrases, sacerdotal garments. Matters sacerdotal and sartorial continue in the third chapter with a brief, and on the surface, diverting, discussion of the cosmological symbolism of the sash worn by the Hebrew high priest. The snake-like appearance of the sash’s material has long drawn comparisons with the primordial serpent Leviathan and Orlov details how the symbolism of the outer waters and its monstrous inhabitant in Jewish cosmogony had a liturgical application, particularly in the macrocosmic design of the temple in Jerusalem as a vision of the earth. As such, the High Priest could be interpreted as an eschatological Adam, an Adam Kadmon whose very form represents creation as a dynamic process of divine exile-rectification hitlabshut (‘enclothement’). Orlov affirms this interpretation by mentioning a tradition found in some Jewish traditions (as recorded in the Aramaic Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and the midrash Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer) that when Adam and Eve were clothed by God, he did so with garments made from the sloughed off skin of the Edenic serpent; repeating, once again, the motif of the clothing of a demoted antagonist being given to their replacement.

For here on out it is pretty much Everybody Loves Azazel for almost the rest of Demons of Change, with the scapegoat returning in the fourth and shortest chapter with a little comparison between the demons ritualised sacrifice (as documented in Leviticus and elaborated on by Mishnah Yoma as well as a variety of apocalypses), and the description of Great Beast’s descent from heaven and subsequent binding from the Book of Revelation. Orlov breaks down the motifs of the scapegoat ritual (banishment to the wilderness, a binding and descent from a cliff, being sealed away in an abyss, a temporary healing of the earth, and a momentary release before a final demise) and compares them to key points in the descent of the beast. They make for a neat, but by no means conclusive, simulacrum, although once again, the comparisons can feel a tiny bit circumstantial and finessed. Given the brevity of this chapter, there’s obviously not much more than can be pulled from this comparison, but it’s an attractive interpretation nonetheless.

In the penultimate chapter, Orlov broadly considers the will of Azazel and other demonic forces (such as Matema) but also uses this section as a demonological survey of how the nature of demons and spirits were understood in a variety of apocalypses and pseudepigrapha. Finally, and straying from Azazel, the concluding chapter deals with the use of fear as a component in divine encounters, with a particular focus on 2 Enoch, where this emotion often precedes their apotheosis.

Demons of Change runs to 262 pages, but with its six chapters it is something of a short book with 100 of those pages being taken up by a bibliography, an index, and rather extensive endnotes. For those who have read any of Orlov’s previous works, there is a certain atmosphere of familiarity, given the outsize role the Apocalypse of Abraham plays here and in his entire oeuvre. With that said, it is a text that warrants Orlov’s repeat visits, as he brings a different focus in this investigation and clearly knows his source material. The first chapter remains the highlight and a supreme statement of thesis, but the resulting ones have much to offer in fleshing out some of these themes.

Published by SUNY Press

May 4, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Philosophising the Occult: Avicennan Psychology and ‘The Hidden Secret’ of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi – Michael-Sebastian Noble

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Categories: esotericism, hermeticism, mesopotamian, Tags: De Gruyter

Presented as the 35^th volume in De Gruyter’s series Studies in the History and Culture of the Middle East, Michael-Sebastian Noble’s Philosophising the Occult is a development of his 2017 doctoral thesis, pursued over four years at the University of London’s Warburg Institute. His focus here is on Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. Known as the Sultan of the Theologians, al-Razi was one of the most influential Islamic scholars of the twelfth century, writing various works on astronomy, chemistry, cosmology, history, jurisprudence, literature, medicine, ontology, philosophy, physics and theology. But he also covered matters considerably more magical and in one of his earliest works, Al-Sirr Al-Maktum Fiasrar Al-Nujcm (‘The Hidden Secret in the Secrets of the Stars’), he presented a study of the ‘craft’ of astral magic which drew upon spiritual discipline and natural philosophy to establish noetic connection with celestial souls in order to work wonders on earth. In this, the first ever full-length study of al-Sirr al-Maktum, Noble seeks to understand al-Razi’s intent in writing the work, and argues that it represents a synthesis of two sources: the perfect nature doctrine conceived by the twelfth century philosopher Abu’l-Barakat al-Baghdad?, and the naturalistic account of prophethood constructed by the eleventh century Persian polymath Ibn Sina (commonly known in the West as Avicenna).

Avicenna believed that the human soul was composed of two parts: the rational soul (responsible for intellectual thought), and the animal soul (responsible for sensation and movement). Noble argues that al-Razi’’s theory of astral magic was based on his understanding of Avicenna’s concept of bifurcated souls, with the talismanic power of the celestial spheres being mediated by the human soul. Most notably, it was the rational soul that could be used to establish a noetic connection with the celestial spheres, and it was this connection that drew down their power into a talisman.

Noble frames his exploration within three primary themes: cognition, prophethood, and soteriology, and shows how these were developed and systemised in al-Razi’s work. While this may summarise the core argument of Philosophising the Occult, Noble is nothing if not thorough in his journey getting there, providing considered diversions into various relevant areas that establish vital context. As a result, this is a book whose value extends beyond the central premise, with much that is rewarding for those with a broad interested in Arabic mysticism and its intersection with pseudo-Aristotelian and Neoplatonic cosmologies.

Central to Al-Sirr Al-Maktum F?asrar Al-Nujcm is al-Razi’s representation of the Sabians, an enigmatic ‘people of the book’ mentioned three times in the Quaran whose identity has never been firmly established. Al-Razi was little concerned about the historicity of the Sabians, and used the term to broadly describe various forms of learned astrolatrous paganism, be it Egyptian, Indian, or that of any pre-Islamic Mesopotamian people, in particular the Chaldeans. As these types of non-Islamic sources could be condemned as heretical by pious Muslims, al-Razi took a hermeneutic approach, arguing that since God’s wisdom encompasses all things, no knowledge could be considered damnable, and nothing could be said to have been created in vain. Al-Razi’s conceptualisation of the Sabians was a syncretic one, drawing specifically on Hindu and Chaldean ideas, and then run through an Avicennan filter, with recourse in some instances to al-Baghdadi as well.

In his third chapter Noble analyses the eight Sabian doctrines, as understood by al-Razi, and gets to the meat of his hypothesis, breaking down al-Razi’s analysis of these cosmological concepts and seeking to show how he was influenced by arguments of Avicenna and Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi. No space is spared here, with each doctrine and its interpretations explained in sometimes excruciating detail, examining how al-Razi interpreted it, and how this aligned with the cosmovisions of Avicenna and Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi specifically, and with the worldview of Islam in general. It is the Sabian concept of the cosmos that facilitates the use of talismans, imagining a Neoplatonic scheme of emanations in which seven concentric celestial spheres encompassed the earth, each endowed with intelligences. These rational souls, it was argued, had perfect knowledge of the universal and were the causes of all sublunary change. As such, these intelligences could be petitioned through the sympathetic magic of talismans to affect change on earth. That’s the simplest explanation, but Nobel details all the justifications and science from al-Razi, Avicenna and Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi. And by science, we don’t really mean anything empirical or heuristic, just theoretical and often specious speculation and thought experiments, as was the style of the times. Ah, the wisdom of the ancients.

Noble’s fourth and fifth chapters turns to the talismans themselves, first explaining, as the chapter title puts it, the general physics or talismans, and then detailing their creation through a process called tamz?j (‘blending’), in which the active celestial influences were combined with receptive terrestrial forces. There endeth the consideration of talismanic magic, and in the remaining chapters, the discussion moves to matters augural and soteriological. Nobel concludes with an appendix, providing, as a valuable service, an English translation of the Ritual of Planetary Ascent (Al-Sirr al-maktum 4:2)

Philosophising the Occult runs to almost 300 total pages and is formatted in the standard De Gruyter house style of flat colour covers, headings both supra and sub in a bold sans serif and body text in the standard slightly slab-serif face that kinda scans as a sans-serif and feels, as a result, just a little unpropitious for reading. With the book’s overly-detailed accounting of all the Neoplatonic and Avicennan speculative theorising, it can be a little hard going in places, and it does feel like a reigning in of some of Nobel’s exhaustive treatment of his subject could have been beneficial. Nevertheless, Noble succeeds is showing that al-Sirr was not an aberrant minor composition in al-Razi’s oeuvre but rather an important text that embraced an original approach to matters philosophical and scientific in cosmology.

Published by De Gruyter

April 4, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England – Eoin Bentick

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Categories: alchemy, hermeticism, Tags: DS Brewer

Like Bruce Janacek’s recently reviewed Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Religious Culture of Early Modern England, this book is concerned with how alchemy was perceived in Early Modern England, with the focus here being on literary works. Rather than simply providing a survey of specifically alchemical literature from alchemists and their advocates, Eoin Bentick casts a wider net to provide more fluid understandings of the art in that period, exploring how it was conceptualised by adept and sceptic alike, and how its obfuscated language was interpreted by those who didn’t know their alembic from their athanor. In so doing, Bentick endeavours to answer the question as to why the difficult writing and language of alchemy held appeal for so many.

Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England has its content divided into two sections, the first considering how alchemical obtuseness was dealt with in medieval poetry and academia, as well as the wider culture. The second turns to the language of alchemy itself and narrows the view in particular to how it was read and understood by those novitiates beginning their alchemical journey. Bentick opens with an introduction, but this is no mere formality and instead gives a thorough history of alchemy, beginning in Egypt with Zosimos of Panopolis, marking its growth in the Arab world, and then its expansion into Europe where it was assimilated into the canon of Latin scientific literature and even incorporated into Christian cosmology. Concise yet detailed, this makes for a valuable primer, even for those who might be familiar with alchemical history, allowing the background of alchemy and its procedures to be covered off before getting to the grist of this book: writings about the thing, not the thing itself..

The first chapter bears the intriguing title Ignotum Per Ignocius: Literatures of Alchemical Impotence, the choice of which becomes clear when the topic is depictions of alchemists as fools or dupes. Satirisation was the name of the game in the medieval and early modern periods, with alchemists represented in literature as either tricksters or the tricked. Bentick gives a variety of examples from Ben Johnson, Dante and Petrarch, but the largest analysis is of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which the yeoman tells two stories, each about a different canon, both of whom are deceitful alchemists. The canon whom the yeoman is indentured to appears to be inept, despite his claims of great skill, while the second canon is a charlatan who tricks a priest into buying a recipe with the claim that it can turn things into silver. As S. Foster Damon argued 100 years ago in his article Chaucer and Alchemy, Chaucer may have attacked charlatan alchemists because they were becoming a public menace, but he appears to have also surreptitiously included information so that genuine alchemists would recognise him as one of their own; which they did. Indeed, Chaucer provides something of a through line within this book, being a friend of John Gower who is discussed in the second chapter, while a century later, the poet and alchemist Thomas Norton satirised the alchemical bona fides that Chaucer had been given.

Questions of morality and character arise again in the second chapter, Alchemical Theories of Social Reform, in which Bentick surveys the use of alchemy as a metaphor or analogy of the reinvigoration of a fallen present. The obvious exemplar of this is what Bentick refers to as the Holistic Alchemy of Roger Bacon, with the Doctor Mirabilis seeing alchemy as a force for social evolution, though perhaps not in the most altruistic of manners. Based on a unique misreading of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum (a work that presents itself as messages given by Aristotle to Alexander during the conquest of Achaemenid Persia), Bacon believed that it was through the alchemical principles taught by Aristotle that Alexander was able to conquer the known world. For Bacon, people could be changed by the manipulation of the elements, making it possible for a skilled alchemist to transmute an entire population on the macrocosmic level just as they would the microcosmic elements in a laboratory. As unethical as this sounds, Bentick notes that this core idea would influence others who saw alchemy as capable of social improvement, such as the 14^th century poet John Gower and the 15^th century poet and alchemist, Thomas Norton. While Gower followed Bacon’s model of a moral universal improvement, Norton focussed on the idea of a redemptive Alchemical King whose changes would be more overtly political, one who would Antiquos mores mutabit in meliores (‘change old ways into better.’).

For his third chapter, British Library, MS Harley 2407, Bentick turns to the manuscript of the title and considers its compilation of alchemy-related poems. The MS consists of six booklets, mostly written by two fifteenth-century scribes, with over twenty people contributing to an accretion of notes in the margins and spaces from the fifteenth to eighteenth century; including the recognisable hands of John Dee and Elias Ashmole. There are nine Middle English poems in the manuscript, making it indicative of the veritable boom in English alchemical verse in the fifteenth century and onwards; contrasting with previous centuries in which Latin prose had dominated as the lingua alchemica, and with only a fraction of that being presented in verse. The clutch from this manuscript are categorised by Bentick as recipe poems, gnomic poems, theoretical poems, and conceit poems, and he provides an analysis of each one under those groupings.

Bentick’s fourth and final chapter, Alchemical Hermeneutics, opens with a discussion on how alchemists, with their reverence for the inerrancy of the past, reacted when coming across alchemical information that was contrary to either their training or experience. The assimilation of such potentially false knowledge required interpretation, rather than dismissal, using an Augustinian system of hermeneutics, in which everything, be it text or the physical universe, was to be interpreted in order to discovered the divine truth buried within it. This speaks to Bentick’s core theme here, that the literature of alchemy, be it by novices, sceptics or adepts, helped to perpetuate the allure of alchemy. Even when someone like Chaucer uses the Canon’s Yeoman Canon as a vehicle to depict alchemists as fools or mountebanks, such presentations encouraged readers to seek out the truths that must surely lie behind the façade. Furthermore, the rich symbolism of alchemy ensured its own perpetuity, with its lexicon gifting writers such as Shakespeare and Sidney with ready images of amelioration and mystery. These writers, then, maintained the allure of the arte, adding to its inherent sense of wonder with their alchemical use of language to create even more wonder.

Despite its four chapter length, Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England feels like it crams a lot into its sub-200 pages. Bentick writes with an assured style, the general thesis being threaded throughout with no sense of wandering off into tangents or becoming mired in irrelevancies. The book is presented by D.S. Brewer as a hardback with a cover design by Hannah Gaskamp that incorporates an alchemical petegrue from MS Harley 2407. In at least this review copy, the pages are printed on an unpleasant acid-free paper by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, leaving a distracting film on one’s fingers with every page turn. In addition, the cover image is sloppily misaligned, drifting off centre so that the petegrue image touches the right edge of the book resulting in a vast empty space being left on the cover’s opposite edge; with the title and printer’s mark on the spine being similarly misaligned. It is not clear whether this slipshod production is true for all copies, or if we just got unlucky.

Published by D.S. Brewer