Categotry Archives: esotericism

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

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

Myths of Wewelsburg Castle coverIn 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.

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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.

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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 18th 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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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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:

Philosophising the Occult coverPresented as the 35th 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Aleister Crowley in England – Tobias Churton

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Categories: esotericism, thelema, Tags:

Aleister Crowley in England coverWith its blockbuster subtitle declaring The Return of the Great Beast, this sequel from Tobias Churton picks up where his previous work, Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin, left off; a title that was in itself a sequel to his other books documenting Crowley’s time in America and India respectively. Given the chronology surveyed in the previous titles, we are safe in assuming that the ‘in England’ here does not refer to Crowley’s time spent in England for the majority of his life but rather his return there for his final fifteen years from 1932 to 1947. In doing so, Churton is able to conclude his multiple volume biography of Crowley and focus on a period that is relatively little explored, but which shows that the near penniless Great Beast still got a lot done, even if it was only cooking a lot of curries, and being on the perpetual scrounge in both the actual and the astral.

Churton has a brisk style of writing that combined with the type’s large point size, and the surfeit of images, propels the reader forward at quite a pace. Enabling this still further is that some of what is presented here are fleshed out diary entries, or details from letters, with little room for editorialising or much in the way of elaboration: Crowley had lunch with someone, he moved lodgings, he wrote a letter to such and such, he did a sex magic operation for money, and he carped about the Agape Lodge in California (despite them doing a damn sight more for Thelema than he was). This brevity isn’t necessarily a criticism, merely a comment on how the narrative contains much that is minutiae, with little padding added beyond what has been left by Crowley’s own hand. This ably conveys the intricacies, and frequent mundanities, of Crowley’s everyday life, even if said moments are not necessarily all that detailed, and with each entry moving us rapidly through the months.

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With that said, there are moments where the piecemeal nature of some of the sections may have gotten the better of either the narrative, such as it is, or the editor and layout designer, with abrupt sentences descending into a unintelligible mess of uncertain intent. Sometimes a sentence needs to be read several times before its intent is clear, not because of any complexity but rather due to its economy, with so little to be gleaned from a minor concatenation of words. There are other strange moments, such as a section from pages 28-30 describing the content of three letters, which begins abruptly with two non sequitur, single-sentence paragraphs, one from October 1993 and the other from the more recent “some years ago.” The more recent event is the sale by Weiser Antiquarian of the letters decades after they were written, but by leading with the description of the letters’ sale, rather than the context in which they were written, the reader becomes discombobulated by this jumping forward in time. In a similar manner, the narrative of Crowley’s day to day and current events is temporally upended on page 80 when a one-sentence paragraph noting that the Buchenwald concentration camp was opened in 1937 is followed by one that begins by describing how the LAShTAL Aleister Crowley Society website reported in 2011 of the sale of a letter written by Crowley on Piccadilly Hotel stationery, momentarily making it feel like the two events were relatively concurrent. It’s all very confusing, as if notes and scraps have been cut and pasted and never fully massaged into tense-correct shape.

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Whilst we’re being critical, there are other little quirks that tend to grate, most notably where it appears that having to constantly refer to Crowley by name got tiresome, and as a result, sometimes, out of nowhere, he can be variously referred to as 666, Therion, and most startling in its incongruity, Baphomet. While most readers will be aware of Crowley’s proclivity for pseudonyms and titles, it’s not clear why it stops there. Why not call him Perdurabo, Ankh-f-n-khonsu, Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji  or a little sunshine as well?

Inevitably, comparisons must be made to other books that cover the same period of Crowley’s life, with the obvious one being Richard Kaczynski’s definitive Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley. Kaczynski has a greater narrative sense, an authorial overview that makes for easier reading, and as a result, there’s a lot less of the jarring little events and piecemeal nature seen here. What Churton’s work does have going for it is the sense of immediacy, with the diary-like quality creating a somewhat intimate insight into Crowley’s day to day life and allowing the reader to see what an unpleasant, arrogant, irascible and ultimately exhausting scoundrel he must have been to interact with personally. Also, it must be said that Crowley’s constant attempts to get the war-time British government to employ him as an adviser or expert come across as sad, especially with the way in which his consternation was palpable after each time a long-suffering bureaucrat declined his offer.

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Despite this emphasis of the smaller aspects of Crowley’s life, this period did include some significant magickal outputs, and Churton spends a great amount of time documenting the creation of the Thoth tarot deck in collaboration with Lady Frieda Harris. All events in the process, from Crowley’s first introduction to Harris up to the tarot’s completion and publication, are covered, taking the reader on a comparable journey to its creators. It’s moments like this that show the worth of Aleister Crowley in England, with its fairly well illustrated survey of the tarot and its evolution, indicative of one of the benefits of this title as something one can dip into for the details, without having to read a longer narrative.

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Aleister Crowley in England is presented as a hardback edition, bound in blue beneath a dustjacket with a rather fetching photographic montage design by Aaron Davis, with Union Jack and all, just so you know it takes place in England. Typesetting by Debbie Glogover uses Garamond for body copy with titles in Gotham Condensed, and other display text in a combination of the stoic sans serifs Gill Sans, and Legacy Sans. Photographs are used profusely throughout, though their presence can seem disproportionate and arbitrary, such as when someone who receives only a single passing mention is rewarded with a portrait, while more significant figures have none.

Published by Inner Traditions

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The Antichrist: A New Biography – Philip C. Almond

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Categories: esotericism, middle ages, religion, Tags:

The Antichrist: A New Biography coverPhilip C. Almond is all about new biographies, having previously used that titular conceit for explorations of both God and the Devil. This latest biography acts as a companion to one of those, his 2014 work on the Devil, and like its predecessor, it is imminently readable with its body copy set in a larger-than-usual point size on smaller-than-usual digest-size pages (averaging ten words a line), all aided by Almond’s easy manner and authorial voice.

Any consideration of the Antichrist inevitably brings to mind Bernard McGinn’s masterful exploration of the topic, 1994’s Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. Almond acknowledges a debt to McGinn for that work and his other many titles, mentioning the quote from Denis the Carthusian with which McGinn closed his own study, “Have we not worn ourselves out with that accursed Antichrist.” With the completion of this biography, Almond wryly notes that he now includes himself amongst the company of Denis and McGinn as a sufferer of this Antichrist-fatigue.

Almond opens by describing the Antichrist as a fluid and unstable idea from its inception, and noting how from this flux emerged two primary characterisations: the tyrannical Antichrist who opposes and persecutes the Christian church, followed by the later concept of a hypocritical papal Antichrist who deceives from within the very church. The former idea, which dominated the first millennium of the Common Era, was consolidated in its last century by Adso, a Benedictine monk from Montier-en-Der in north-eastern France. For his first chapter, Almond summarises Adso’s highly detailed biography of the Antichrist as a Jew born of the tribe of Dan, into whose mother the Devil would enter at the moment of conception so that the child, though conceived by human parents, would be “totally wicked, totally evil, totally lost.” Born in Babylon and raised in the unrepentant Galilean cities of Beth-saida and Corozain, the Antichrist would travel to Jerusalem where he would circumcise himself, upon which the Jews would flock to him as the Messiah. He would then terrorise Christians, and kill the returning Old Testament figures of Enoch and Elijah (sent by God to convert the Jews to Christianity), until after a three and a half year period of tribulations he would be defeated by either Jesus or the archangel Michael. With this narrative established by Adso, Almond, in a rather pleasing device, then takes a historical step backwards and shows how a millennium’s worth of influences and eschatological speculation culminated in its creation.

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This analysis begins by exploring the considerably slight appearances of the Antichrist in the biblical record, the first of which is the plurality of lowercase antichrists that are mentioned in some of John’s epistles, where the term is used as a pejorative directed against fellow but estranged Christians who, contrary to orthodox interpretation, denied the divinity of Jesus. Almond then highlights less specific elements from both the Old and New testaments that would be incorporated into the vision of the singular Antichrist, beginning with the analogous false prophets and false messiahs which Jesus warns of in Mark’s gospel when discussing the end times. In the same gospel, Jesus also talks about the abomination of desolation or desolating sacrilege, an idea drawn from the Old Testament book of Daniel and the first book of the deuterocanonical Maccabees, where the term refers to the profanation of the temple in Jerusalem by a foreign tyrant (for Daniel, the second century BCE Greek king Antiochus IV). In later Antichrist traditions, the abomination of desolation became not an act (usually assumed to be Antiochus’ sacrifice to Zeus of a pig on the temple’s altar) but was personalised as the Antichrist, thereby aligning with Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians in which he talks of another Antichrist analogue referred to as ‘the man of sin, the son of perdition’ who not only takes his seat in the temple of God but declares himself to be God. Irenaeus in the second century of the Common Era was the first to consolidate these various strands, along with the little horn of the book of Daniel and the beast of Revelation, into a single figure identified as the Antichrist, and over the centuries, as Almond documents, more details would be added.

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It is this approach that marks a welcomed difference between this work and McGinn’s denser and more obviously chronological Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. By beginning with the end, and then effectively having Christendom ‘show its work’ to explain how its vision of the Antichrist was arrived at, Almond underscores how the picture of the Antichrist developed over the first millennia from the smallest of scriptural crumbs and how by the time Adso composed his definitive biography, the monk was able to confidently narrate a story with a considerable amount of details not explicitly found in scripture. Key to this was the way in which speculation over the tiniest scriptural phrase or allusion, not to mention gematria and theological and eschatological mathematics, led to an accretion of popular and unquestioned key points, such as the idea that the Antichrist would be from the tribe of Dan. This was something first expounded by Irenaeus based on a decidedly creative reading of a verse from Jeremiah 8.16 (in which the city of Dan is meant, not the tribe, and where it is a victim of an invasion, not the source of a tyrant), and because the author of Revelation did not include Dan amongst the twelve tribes of Israel whose members would make up the 144,000 souls marked for salvation by God; a list from which the tribe of Ephraim is also missing, so who knows what they did wrong.

Due to this speculative accretion, a fairly complete idea of the Antichrist was in place by the end of the century, with the work of Irenaeus being joined by contributions from other including Hippolytus of Rome, Tertulian, Commodian, and the anonymous author of the Sibylline Oracles, with each bringing their own, though not always complimentary, additions to the lore. One of these is the quite delightful idea that the Antichrist was Nero, but not the living Nero as he was during his reign as Roman emperor but rather a future incarnation, who had either escaped death to wait in hiding, or who had returned from the dead in a sublime perversion of the resurrection of Christ. Five hundred years later, Adso’s influential vision of the Antichrist was still current, and can be seen in Luca Signorelli’s fresco The Preaching of the Antichrist, which, with its cast of apocalyptic characters and events, shows, as Almond puts it, Adso’s life of the Antichrist in pictorial form.

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When it comes to the alternative idea of a papal Antichrist, Almond does not quite have the equivalent of Adso’s perfect summary, nothing that necessarily combined all the interpretation’s main elements. So rather than working backwards, Almond instead provides a further history of the conception of the Antichrist throughout the centuries, marking a trail of ideas, rather than explicit themes, which culminated in a then novel interpretation by the Cistercian monk Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202). Almond shows how concerns about the Antichrist gradually evolved three hundred years into the Common Era and how, following the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312CE, Christianity was no longer the sole province of a persecuted faithful minority but was instead the dominant religion. With it now being hard to imagine an external tyrant persecuting a powerful Christian empire, a once imminent Armageddon was, for many, put on hold. Other than the exception of military leaders briefly figured as the Antichrist, such as the Vandal king Gaiseric or later the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, accusative fingers were now often pointed inwards. However, in these initial stages, there was no single Antichrist identified within the church, and instead a plurality of lowercase antichrists, the faithless hidden amongst the faithful, were excoriated for their hypocrisy, disbelief or heretical thoughts by luminaries such as Augustine, Tyconius, and Pope Gregory the Great. This intramural suspicion of other members thus imagined the body of the Antichrist as something active, like a virus, within the very body Christ that was the church. In 1190, Joachim of Fiore brought such ideas to their logical, singular conclusion when he told King Richard I of England, that the Antichrist was not only alive but had been born in Rome and would be elevated to the Apostolic See. While King Richard’s response, as recorded by Roger de Hoveden in his annals, was surprise, this idea would grow in popularity, with Joachim’s vision of a papal Antichrist equalling in spread and influence the older Adsonian tradition, particularly amongst Franciscans.

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Almond continues his biography of the Antichrist down through the centuries, noting how both the Adsonian and Joachite traditions perpetuated and mutated, with expectations changing as events occurred and conditions for the arrival of the Antichrist evolved. One notable change was the addition of a multitude of other characters to the apocalyptic tableaux, including the heroic Last World Emperor, a restorative Angelic Pope, and sometimes even dual Antichrists: a mystical one and a martial one; while in the case of Ubertino of Casale, who seemingly couldn’t get enough of Antichrists, there would be two Mystical Antichrists (Boniface VIII and Benedict XI) as well as the final boss, the Great Antichrist.

Almond concludes in the modern era in which the decline of prophetic history from the middle of the nineteenth century lead to the idea of the Antichrist as a floating signifier, less associated with the apocalyptic and more a general critique of perceived evil in the world. Thus anyone, or anything, could be accused of being the Antichrist, be it a royal, a politician, or even entire religions or progressive social movements. Here Almond also turns his focus on literary and cinematic representations of the Antichrist, briefly summarising Rosemary’s Baby, the Omen trilogy, the Left Behind series, and in considerably greater detail, Vladimir Solovyov’s A Short Story of the Antichrist; but sadly, no Good Omens.

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In all, this is an enjoyable read in which Almond’s pleasant narrative style belies a depth and thoroughness, acting as a testament to his familiarity with his subject. The Antichrist: A New Biography is presented as a hardcover edition bound in orange cloth, with title and author debossed in black on the spine, all wrapped up in a full colour dustjacket featuring William Blake’s rather fetching watercolour The Number of the Beast is 666 from 1805; continuing a Blakean pattern seen in Almond’s previous biographies. More colour is found in a section of colour plates towards the book’s centre, thirty images in all drawn from a variety of sources ranging from mid-eleventh century France to modern cinema. While each image has a caption describing it, there’s no specific title, credit, source or date included with it and the reader has to thumb back to an index of plates in the preamble for rather minimal information that could just as easily have annotated each image.

Published by Cambridge University Press

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Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic – Edited by Claire Fanger

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Categories: esotericism, goetia, grimoire, magick, middle ages, Tags:

Conjuring Spirits coverPart of the expansive Magic in History series from Pennsylvania State University Press, Conjuring Spirits is an academic work that calls to mind Scarlet Imprint’s more experientially-orientated compendiums Howlings and Diabolical, in that it brings together essays on various magical texts and manuscripts, albeit from an entirely scholarly perspective. The contributions in Conjuring Spirits are divided into two sections, Context, Genres, Images and Angelic Knowledge, with the latter focussing on just two texts, the Sworn Book of Honorius, and John the Monk’s Book of Visions. Presenting both general surveys and more specific analyses are Michael Camille on two examples of the Ars Notoria, Robert Mathiesen on the Sworn Book of Honorius (also discussed alongside the Liber Visionum by Richard Kieckhefer in a separate entry), John B. Friedman on the Secretum Philosophorum, Elizabeth Wade on Lullian divination, while Nicholas Watson and editor Claire Fanger each separately discuss John the Monk’s Book of Visions of the Blessed and Undefiled Virgin Mary, Mother of God. Finally, this book also includes Juris Lidaka’s edition of the Osbern Bokenham-attributed Liber de Angelis, and an overview by Frank Klaassen of late medieval English ritual manuscripts.

It is Klaassen’s survey of late medieval English manuscripts with which the proceedings open, being an appropriately broad grounding in the genre, even if not all of the works discussed in this book come under that category. Lidaka’s translation of Liber de Angelis follows, being introduced with a brief essay in which he gives a history of this manuscript, establishing early on that the attribution to the Augustinian friar and poet Osbern Bokenham is incorrect, and that the Bokenhan to whom authorship is credited may actually have been one William Bokenham. Liber de Angelis is not a single liber and instead consists of extracts from at least three texts, as evidenced by the demarcation into sections on making rings for each of the planets (ordered from Sun to Saturn), followed by Liber de ymaginibus planetarum, in which instructions are given for creating images of the planets but with the spheres in a different order to the rings, and ending with Secreta  astronomie de sigillis planetarum & eorum figuris in which the planets are ordered differently once again in a guide to creating planetary magic square. Given some of the errors in the original text of Liber de Angelis, such as the numbers in some of the magic squares not calculating correctly and the names of planetary angels differing from other sources, Lidaka argues that the texts were transcribed by an enthusiastic amateur, someone with a general interest in magic though less concerned with slavishly getting everything right.

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John B. Friedman’s consideration of the Secretum Philosophorum is a rather dry and technical history of the text, feeling a little out of place given its focus not on ritual magic but on tricks and experiments demonstrating various aspects of the seven liberal arts. Friedman does argue that the text is an example of ‘safe magic,’ using the appearance of sorcery, with its diagrams and occasional acknowledgement of hermetic authority, to give a theoretical matrix to technology and convey ideas of power and learning. Elizabeth Wade also makes a diversion away from grimoires to discuss a fifteenth century German divination device found in a large paper codex catalogued as Cod. Guelf. 75. 10 Aug. 2°. Said fragmentary device is not necessarily the entire focus here and Wade uses it as a starting point for a broader primer on Lullian and pseudo-Lullian forms of mechanical divination, as well as their medieval analogues.

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Robert Mathiesen’s essay on the Sworn Book of Honorius focuses not on its use as a Solomonic grimoire for ceremonial magic, and instead on one of only two magical operations to survive in its six known, and presumably partial, manuscripts. While the second (and according to Mathiesen, less interesting), of the operations is for the summoning to appearance of an angel, spirit or demon, the first is a byzantine ritual for attaining the beatific vision, effectively creating a shortcut to the eschatological goal of Christianity. Mathiesen begins with a preamble giving the history of the sworn book, and then a summary of the rite itself, which still runs to several pages despite not being presented in its entirety. There’s little analysis of individual components of the rite and Mathiesen concludes with a discussion on the efficacy of such complicated ritual formulae (he seems pretty assured that it would get some kind of result), and thereby suggests that the rite’s potential to undercut the religious foundation of the medieval world would account for William of Auvergne’s description of the Sworn Book of Honorius as the very worst book of magic in circulation.

Two essays from Nicholas Watson and editor Claire Fanger are unique in that a hitherto unknown manuscript version of their subject, John the Monk’s Liber Visionum, had, at the time of writing in 1998, been recently discovered at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada; while several other full and partial manuscripts have since been found in various European archives. It is worth mentioning that Flanger has subsequently shown that, as per John the Monk himself, the work should be more accurately called Liber florum celestis doctrine, with only its first, autobiographical section being called the Liber visionum, but for the sake of consistency and the convention established by this volume, we’ll keep the archaic naming in this review. With the McMaster version of the Liber visionum being uncovered by Watson and then translated and thoroughly documented by Fanger, there’s a personal feel to the considerations here. Watson discusses the relationship between the McMaster manuscript and another one discovered in Munich, as well as contextualising the work in terms of the broader devotional and mystical tradition upon which it draws. Watson is exhaustive in his analysis, resulting in the longest entry in Conjuring Spirits, running to 52 pages, aided and abetted by extensive endnotes and several appendices: structural analyses of the McMaster and Munich manuscript, as well as individual summaries of both versions. After that, Fanger shows that there’s still more to be said about John the Monk’s text with her own essay in which she considers its relations to the Ars Notoria on which it is modelled. For her own appendix, Fanger provides a synopsis of a prologue from a version of the Liber visionum from the University of Graz library.

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John the Monk makes another appearance in Michael Camille’s consideration of examples of ars notoria imagery from various manuscripts, which opens with a vituperative quote from the Grandes Chroniques de France in which the monk of Morigny is pilloried for his wish, through his curiosity and pride, to renew the heretical and sorcerous notary art under another name. John the Monk’s own Marian 0figures are not the focus here, though, and Camille considers the notae from the thirteenth century Turin manuscript (MS E. V.13) and the fourteenth century Paris BN lat. 9336. The images are recipients of detailed discussion, with Camille bringing to them an art historian’s focus by tracing provenance and making comparisons with other examples of medieval pictorial and diagrammatic content. Photographic examples of the notae, as well as their analogues, are included, many at full size, though the quality of reproduction is not the greatest, with a blurry murk and a lack of contrast.

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Conjuring Spirits concludes with Richard Kieckhefer’s The Devil’s Contemplatives, in which he considers the two titles already exhaustively discussed within this volume: the Liber Iuratus Honorii (aka the Sworn Book of Honorius) and once again, John the Monk’s Liber Visionum. Kieckhefer’s point of difference, though, is analysing how both texts are evidence of the Christian appropriation of various elements from Jewish occultism. He emphasises the way in which both the Liber Iuratus and the Liber Visionum focus less on the typical goetic summoning of demons and rather on a form of devotional mysticism; an approach, he argues, that has little precedent in Western occultism and is instead drawn from Kabbalah, particularly the vision-rich Merkabah tradition. The previously-discussed ritual for attaining the beatific vision from the Liber Iuratus is an obvious example of this, as is John the Monks devotional reverence towards the Virgin Mary. While the attitude of these Western and Kabbalistic systems is circumstantially similar, Kieckhefer has no smoking gun, with the closest being a version of the Liber Iuratus that includes the Shem HaMephorash, Kabbalah’s secret name of God, in the design of a seal used for acquiring a dream vision.

Despite this book’s title, there’s relatively little that concerns itself with the conjuring of spirits here, with far greater focus on the devotional and reflective elements seen in works such as the Sworn Book of Honorius and Liber Visionum, and even in considerations of the mental self-improvement and memory aides showcased in the Ars Nortoria and the Secretum Philosophorum. With John the Monk looming over many of the contributions here, Conjuring Spirits is a valuable resource on the Liber Visionum, being the largest consideration of the text at the time of publication; though now rivalled by Fanger’s 2015 book, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk, also published by Pennsylvania State University Press.

Conjuring Spirits, like other titles in the Magic in History series, appears to be available in two editions. One of them features the classic, sombre and refined Penn State Press Magic in History cover template, whilst the other, reviewed here, has a cover design that is slightly more in keeping with an Inner Traditions or Weiser mass market title, all green gradient, low opacity goetic sigil and large drop-shadowed type. In at least this copy, apparently printed-on-demand by Ingram, there is a printing error, where the cover has skewed a couple of degrees off base, meaning that the spine print is noticeably misaligned, with a crooked sliver of the cover’s green gradient creeping into the spine, and a corresponding slice of black spine sneaking round onto the back matter. This same on-demand printing may account for the poor quality reproduction of images.

Published by the Pennsylvania State University Press

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Occult Roots of Religious Studies – Edited by Yves Mühlematter and Helmut Zander

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Categories: esotericism, tantra, Tags:

Occult Roots of Religious Studies coverGrandly subtitled On the Influence of Non-Hegemonic Currents on Academia Around 1900, this anthology focuses on the interconnections between religious studies and occultism, advancing the thesis that the academic discipline of religious studies has hitherto unexplored, and literally and purposefully occulted, roots in esoteric traditions and the occult. As such, occultism and esotericism provided a fertile ground for the development of academic interests in comparative religion, with several scholars of the occult being directly and indirectly involved in the emerging field. The exploration of this scholarly evolution takes the form of case studies of figures such as Paul Masson-Oursel, John Woodroffe, Nees von Esenbeck, Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, Walter Andrae and others. In addition, this volume concludes with what are described as ‘short biographies’ of various contributors to religious studies whose interest in both occultism and science have been little explored, revealing how esotericism, despite its othered status, can be an intrinsic part of the hegemonic culture to which it otherwise appears to be a contrary counterpart.

The case studies in Occult Roots of Religious Studies compile papers presented at the 2018 conference The Birth of the Science of Religion: Out of the Spirit of Occultism, hosted by the Université de Fribourg, and featuring Marco Frenschkowski, Daniel Cyranka, Boaz Huss, Julian Strube, Jens Schlieter, Léo Bernard, Sabine Böhme, and Dilek Sarmis. Editors Yves Mühlematter and Helmut Zander open the proceedings here with a joint introduction that presents the central thesis. Zander follows this with a contribution of his own, less of a case study and rather a setting out of terms in answer to the titular trinity of questions: what is esotericism? Does it exist? How can it be understood? As an academic setting of terms and definitions, this is all fine and de rigueur, but one finds oneself itching to skip the grounding and get to the case studies. Also offering something of an overview is Marco Frenschkowski’s The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain (1870–1914), in which he documents how the emerging field of religious studies in late 19th century Britain both influenced and competed with occult and esoteric groups who were pursuing similar but one might say, more invested, avenues of investigations. Despite being an abridged version of a longer study, Frenschkowski’s contribution feels relatively exhaustive, providing a context that extends beyond the geographical boundaries of the Great Britain of the title.

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The first case study of an individual is Daniel Cyranka’s Magnetism, Spiritualism, and the Academy in which he considers perhaps the oldest figure to be profiled here: the German botanist Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck, president of the famed German Academy of the Natural Sciences Leopoldina from 1818 to 1858. As the title suggests, Cyranka is not concerned here with just Nees’ involvement in matters of the academy but with his interest in the then emergent trends of magnetism/vitalism and spiritualism, two fringe belief systems that, to varying degrees, embraced a scientific veneer. Cyranka’s archly disagrees with Johanna Bohley’s 2003 biography of Nees, in which she interprets his involvement with spiritualism as ’senile mysticism,’ painting him as someone for whom ‘infirmity’ and decrepitude made him descend into the comforting murk of pseudo-science. Cyranka contradicts this image, showing how there was a continuum between his academic works and later interests, and that his attempts to align the otherworldly with the scientific were hardly unique, being indicative of similar conversations occurring at the time.

In Academic Study of Kabbalah and Occultist Kabbalah, Boaz Huss profiles several 19th and 20th century scholars of Kabbalah including Gershom Scholem, Adolphe Franck, Moses Gaster, Joshua Abelson, and Ernst Müller. Although such scholars of Kabbalah, and Scholem in particular, were dismissive of occult Kabbalah because of its practitioners’ lack of academic expertise, and its independence from a specifically Jewish framework, Huss argues that the relationship betwixt the two fields was more nuanced than one might expect. He notes that Kabbalah scholarship and experiential Kabbalah have common genealogies, with significant connections, shared ideas, and nomenclature, and with the scholarly side of the aisle going so far as to identify Kabbalah as a form of theosophy (with the lowercase ‘t’). Scholem was even appreciative of Arthur E. Waite and Joseph Franz Molitor (both Christian kabbalists rather than occult ones) and the insights they provided, commending Waite for his appreciation of kabbalah’s sexual symbolism.

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This volume’s sole illustrated essay is Sabine Böhme’s The Ancient Processional Street of Babylon at the Pergamonmuseum Berlin, with its focus on the Anthroposophical background to Walter Andrae’s reconstruction in Berlin’s Pergamon Musuem of the Ishtar Gate and other archaeological objects from the same region, creating what is known as the museum’s Processional Way of Babylon exhibition. Böhme emphasises Andrae’s membership of Die Christengemeinschaft (The Christian Community), an esoteric denomination influenced by the works of Rudolf Steiner, though not directly affiliated with him, arguing that the community provided Andrae with an understanding of Steiner’s system of Anthroposophy and that this influenced the design of his museal concept. Assigning ancient intent to an apparently theoretical master architect called Zaratos or Nazarthos, Andrae conceived of the processional way as a device to purify those who walked down it as they headed into the Holy City of Bab-ilu, with the various stelae of lions, bulls and the chimerical mushhushshu dragons that lined the way creating a metaphysical experience for them. In such animal figures, and in the sphinxes he imagined standing guard at the beginning of the journey (going so far as to include two sphinxes from a different area and time period at the start of the museum’s processional way, one a restoration and the other a replica of it), Andrae saw a depiction of Steiner’s idea of humans being comprised of four parts: a physical body, a life body or etheric body, an astral body bearing sentience or consciousness, and the ego. Böhme’s illustration of how Anthroposophical ideas informed Andrae’s thinking is convincing, drawing principally from his own writings, while said thinking is rather less so, coming across as supremely speculative and prejudicial, with preconceptions colouring the archaeological interpretations.

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Three of the entries here concern themselves with the intersection of the West with Indian and Buddhist ideas, beginning with Julian Strube’s Tantra as Experimental Science in the Works of John Woodroffe. This provides a welcomed profile on the English author, perhaps better known by his pseudonym Arthur Avalon, whose comprehensive works on Tantra and Yoga first introduced those ideas to many in the West. Strube shows how Woodroffe’s advocacy for Tantra as an empirical, rational and ultimately scientific form of mysticism had an enduring and substantial influence on figures such as Mircea Eliade and Carl Gustav Jung, amongst others, with the system being considered analogous to the emerging Western fields of spiritualism and occultism.

A broadly similar vein is mined in Jen Schlieter’s A Common Core of Theosophy in Celtic Myth, Yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism, but with the focus on the American Theosophist Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, who, like Woodroffe with whom he communicated, was a Westerner who directly engaged with indigenous experts and intellectuals; including the Indo-Tibetan scholar and translator, Lama Kazi-Dawa Samdup with whom he collaborated on three titles, the most famous of which is the first English translation of the Bardo Thodol. Schlieter does not solely focus on Evans-Wentz’s relationship with Tibetan Buddhism, rather contextualising it within a Theosophy-inspired embrace of all religions and spiritualties that saw him study Celtic mythology, search for Egyptian wisdom, and only later explore Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. Highlighting the book’s concern with comparative religion, Evans-Wentz saw themes of animism and reincarnation in all of these religions, as well as in the beliefs of certain Alexandrian Christians and Gnostic sects, arguing that they were fundamental principles of a perennial spirituality.

As the final part of this similarly-themed trio, Léo Bernard’s profile of the orientalist and philosopher, Paul Masson-Oursel, subtitled Inside and Outside the Academy, charts his oscillation between hegemonic and non-hegemonic poles, as exemplified by René Guénon’s scathing assessment of him as exhibiting a tendency towards appeasing everyone, “a result, no doubt, of his quite indecisive character.” Understandably, Bernard is nowhere near as a vituperative in his consideration of Masson-Oursel, highlighting his role in developing an academic approach to comparative religion in which the idea of philosophia perrenis played a central role, as well as showing his links to the growth of Neo-Vedanta/Neo-Hinduism in which Hindu thinkers and reformers such as Vivek?nanda and G?ndh? redefined Hindu dharma as an essentially universal, ethical religion.

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The short biographies with which this volume concludes makes for a significant contribution of twenty-seven pages despite their individual brevity. Each on average runs to a page and a third with usually a biographical paragraph as a contextual grounding, followed by one or two on their scholastic endeavours as they pertain to this title’s central thesis. Profiled here are Mehmet Ali Ayni, Hermann Beckh, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Baron Omar Rolf von Ehrenfels, Antoine Faivre, Charles Johnston, Anna Kamensky, George Robert Stow Mead, Georges Méautis, Erwin Rousselle, Friedrich Otto Schrader, Karl Bernhard Seidenstücker, Daisetsu Teitar? Suzuki, and Mari Albert Johan van Manen.

Occult Roots of Religious Studies runs to 283 pages of main content, bound as a sturdy hardback. The text in is presented in the De Gruyter house style, with the body set in a mild slab serif that almost scans as a sans serif, giving a distinctly modern look that, as has been mentioned in other reviews, is ever-so-slightly unconducive to reading. Images in Böhme’s consideration of Walter Andrae are reproduced at a small size and with their captions are somewhat awkwardly formatted.

Published by De Gruyter

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Magic in the Landscape – Nigel Pennick

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Categories: esotericism, folk, Tags:

Magic in the Landscape coverLike other recent reviewed titles from Nigel Pennick, his Magic in the Landscape is a book previously published in the first half of the 2010s by Lear Books, but which is now seeing a wider release with this new Destiny Books edition. Here subtitled Earth Mysteries & Geomancy, one might imagine that it would follow in the footsteps of people like John Michell and Paul Devereux, exploring fairly well worn paths across a magical and energetic landscape. This isn’t necessarily so, though, and instead Pennick takes a more philosophical approach, couching the discussion of real world examples with considerably more musings on the methodology behind this geological magic and a healthy dose of pragmatism.

Pennick begins, a little unexpectedly, with an introduction that acts as a rambling meditation on a range of ideas under the title A Vanishing World in Need of Rescue. This concerns itself not, as the title might suggest, with matters of imperilled environment or encroachments on the ruins of heritage, but rather with temporality, of the pitfalls of nationalist interpretations of the past, and of the permeability and often contrived or manufactured nature of tradition; a pragmatism that, given his career-long focus on various folk and magical traditions, is both interesting and surprising to hear. A similar voice leads into the book’s first chapter, where Pennick gives a brief history of Britain’s rural landscape, mapping out a process of alienation from the land and progressive urbanisation that began with the removal of common land by Parliament at the behest of the wealthy (a process that between 1604 and 1914 saw over 5,200 such Inclosure Acts, affecting 6.8 million acres of land). These acts literally imprisoned and reshaped the land, with new owners maximising its agricultural use by destroying ancient walkways, trees and standing stones, while the peasantry were no longer able to freely work the land as they once had. Pennick notes how the Inclosure Acts later assisted the construction of railways which added still more barriers across the landscape, and incentivised entrepreneurs to build factories and mills in close proximity for ease of transformation, hastening an increasing industrialisation of the land. One might expect this narrative to read like the very worst of Luddism, flailing ineffectively against the modern world,™ but somehow it doesn’t, with Pennick being largely dispassionate, despite his obvious allegiances, and not as, how you say, frothy as others might be.

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With this thorough grounding in the mistreatment of the land, it is only in the third chapter that Pennick begins to talk about treating it right and turns specifically to geomancy, opening with a discussion of the quaternary division of the land. This begins with the Etruscan’s method of laying out towns and temples centred around an omphalos, following a cosmological principle that Pennick also sees present in the designs of traditional British towns such as Oxford, Dunstable and Chichester.

Pennick quickly moves on to other elements within this magical landscape, shifting abruptly upwards into the heavens with a consideration of the seven stars of the plough Ursa Major, another on direction, and another on the eight winds. This marks something of an abrupt change of style, with the more philosophical and pleasant meander of the first chapters giving way to one in which info dumps are more common. This is particularly so in the chapter on the seven stars, where sentences of abrupt information concatenate together with no elucidatory sinew connecting them. Here, the staccato delivery of single sentence blocks of information create an aberration that contrasts with the more considered and massaged chapters of the book; almost as if someone forgot to turn the cliff notes into a proper chapter. This, mercifully, is a rare case and otherwise Pennick writes with a well-composed tone, displaying a clear editorial voice and calling upon a range of interesting and wide-ranging polymathic gems.

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Including a glossary, a bibliography and an index of several pages, Magic in the Landscape runs to a somewhat slight 169 pages, making it feel like a brief read. This is compounded by type that is set in a generous point size, with equally munificent leading betwixt lines, and chapters that are often brief and comprehensively illustrated. Pennick uses these brief chapters to create a brisk pace, moving with each from one subject to another, providing a range of examples in each that are frequently, though not rigorously, cited in text. The primary themes here are ones of boundaries, centres and spaces, with Pennick eschewing much of the more mystical modern interpretations and instead letting the examples and the explicit beliefs attached to them speak for themselves. This is particularly evident in a discussion of the quintessentially ‘earth mysteries’ idea of leys as unseen straight lines that run across the ancient landscape. Building on his 1989 book Lines on the Landscape, co-authored with Paul Devereux, Pennick takes an unyieldingly rational approach, lightly seasoned with a sprinkle of scathing tone, noting that Alfred Watkin’s ill-conceived but appealing 1920s idea of these straight lines connecting archaeological sites was later given a mystical interpretation, one that Watkins himself had never made, when interest in the theory was reinvigorated by 1960s counterculture. John Michell led this charge, particularly in his seminal book The View Over Atlantis, combining Watkin’s premise with ideas inspired by Chinese Feng shui in which paths of energy pass unseen within the land. Suffice to say, Pennick has no time for such shenanigans.

Given the centrality of ley lines in the Earth Mysteries movement and the whole attendant idea of unspecified but mysterious energies flowing beneath the ground, the presence of the ‘earth mysteries’ phrase in this book’s new subtitle seems a little incongruous. With that said, it is interesting that the word ‘ley’ is significantly more appropriate to Pennick’s considerations of space and genii locorum, rather than the idea of ancient energy lines, given that it is an Anglo-Saxon word denoting not a line but a cleared space (from l?ah/l?a?e ‘a clearing in the woods’, and as seen in l?ge meaning ‘fallow’), and Watkin’s problematic choice of the word came solely from its presence as a suffix in the names of several sites along his old straight track.

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The rejection of energetic ley lines does not mean that there is no spirituality or mysticism here because there is, one that is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, more grounded; and yet also more intangible. Rather than literal but scientifically debunkable energies pulsing through the land, this magic in the landscape is more concerned with alignments and intent, with a simpatico betwixt people and space, where occupancy cultivates a spirit of place. It is this that provides the merit to this book, not chasing saints and dragons across imagined lines of power but rather meditating on the land and how orientating oneself within it provides a way of connecting with the great universe.

Magic in the Landscape is illustrated throughout with photographs of various locations, objects and texts. Text design and layout is by Priscilla Baker, using Garamond for the body and Kiona, Gill Sans and Snell Roundhand as display faces.

Published by Destiny Books

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