Categotry Archives: esotericism

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The Witching-Other: Explorations & Meditations on the Existential Witch – Peter Hamilton-Giles

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Categories: esotericism, sabbatic craft, witchcraft, Tags:

The Witching-Other coverPeter Hamilton-Giles may be best known for his previous books published by Three Hands Press, The Afflicted Mirror and The Baron Citadel. He is also the instigator and co-founder, so the bio goes, of the Dragon’s Column, the body of initiates whose material is featured, albeit in edited form, in Andrew Chumbleys’ Dragon Book of Essex. With The Witching-Other: Explorations & Meditations on the Existential Witch, Hamilton-Giles and his wife Carolyn, who, fun fact, also comprise the doom metal duo Pombagira, have inaugurated their own imprint, Atramentous Press, marking this birth with a statement of intent in both writing style and aesthetics. In matters aesthetical, Atramentous come out of the gates with a very clear look, presenting this book, its sequel, and another title about Welsh witches, in a distinct, ornamented style, all filigree and not so much shadow.

Meanwhile, in matters of writing, as the title suggests, The Witching-Other: Explorations & Meditations on the Existential Witch has lofty ambitions and attempts to address the figure of the witch from a theory-heavy, methodology-driven academic perspective. What that means is that various aspects of the witch, and as an embodiment of alterity in particular, are considered in dense, somewhat tortuous language that is as vermicular as the book’s ornamented cover design.

Hamilton-Giles appears to write with a thesaurus in hand, never using a simple word or phrasing when a more cumbersome one can be found. One almost begins to think it’s intended as a parody of academic writing, a social experiment to see if anyone is willing to risk looking stupid by saying they can’t follow the incomprehensible; a wager worth making in the image-conscious world of occultism where no one wants to look either uninitiated or unintelligent. It’s not just that there is an abundance of words from the academic lexicon, it’s that their meaning is sometimes lost through their very concatenation, where the in-between-words stringing them together can be overwhelmed by their grandiloquent companions. Structure can be awkward as words large and small jostle to get meaning across, while sentences can be so elongated and circumlocutory that the initial tense is changed or the preposition altered by the time you get to the end of it. Then there are words that don’t seem to mean what they’re thought to mean. Can anything (although in this case we’re talking about “the meeting of the physical and the metaphysical”) imbibe “the perceptual horizon with the continuity concept.”? How does one imbibe a perceptual horizon, let alone with the continuity concept?

The Witching Other dustjacket

Interestingly enough, given Hamilton-Giles’ background in grindcore (he was a member of early Earache Records band Unseen Terror), if the phrasing reminds of anything it’s the medical textbook song titles and lyrics of the band Carcass, in which obscure and technical words were admirably combined, but not always in the most natural way: descanting the insalubrious, or lavaging expectorate of lysergide composition, for example.

The Witching-Other is not perpetually impenetrable, and one finds oneself stumbling into areas where lucidity momentarily reigns, in which the words are still big, but the narrative is clearer and more consistent. This is particularly noticeable where the dizzying first chapter, which shares its title with the book as a whole, gives way to the second, the relatively more digestible Esoteric Hermeneutics and the Witching-Other. The difference between the two chapters is marked, with the periphrastic quality dropping right away, and yet, perversely, the previously applied rules of thumb for punctuation changing to a less rigorous application. Similarly, the tone palpably shifts from the disquisitional voice of the first chapter to a more conversational one in which Hamilton-Giles suddenly starts engaging the reader with hypophoras, asking them theoretical questions.

The Witching-Other is a book you want to like. Who, to use my very own hypophora, doesn’t like a bit of heavy theory with their witchcraft? Not me, that’s who. At the same time, though, who has time for wilfully obtuse writing if there is a point to be made? Especially if that obtuseness runs the risk of descending into incomprehensibility if the unwieldy words get crazy and go into people’s houses at night and wreck up the place. Perhaps, the intent was to follow Gilles Deleuze’s advice in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and “Bring something incomprehensible into the world!” It’s an interesting indication of what reading The Witching-Other is like that the thought of then turning to some Deleuze, Judith Butler or Jacques Derrida promises to be a soothing, effortlessly light read.

Image by Carolyn Hamilton-Giles

As the first book published by Atramentous Press there are a few layout wrinkles that seem to have been ironed out in a subsequent book, but not in the sequel to this volume where the styling has been reprised. The most obvious and jarring is the, how you say, reverse indents, where whole paragraphs are indented, except for the first line. This creates a disconcerting sensation and does negatively affect readability, with one’s eyes wandering across the page devoid of the anchors provided by the conventions of layout. On top of that, paragraphs are fully justified and so hyphenation is naturally turned on to avoid text rivers. But the settings applied here are rather conservative and words are hyphenated at as little as two letters, resulting in ladders of hyphens throughout paragraphs, engendering a stuttering, segmented experience for the reader. Both choices are particularly problematic given the sesquipedalian nature of Hamilton-Giles’ writing, where formatting should be assisting comprehension, not compounding any amphibolousness. All of these design choices are strange as there is otherwise a nice, sophisticated feel to the rest of the typography from Joseph Uccello. If the goal was, though, to disorientate through typography as much as through language, then mission accomplished, consider me discombobulated.

Spread of pages

The Witching-Other was released in a standard edition of 891 copies and a deluxe limited edition of 15. The standard edition features 160 100 gram Munken Print Cream pages with Napura endpapers, a ribbon, and is bound in a dark green cloth with the Atramentous logo debossed on the cover. It is wrapped in an evergreen colourset dust jacket, with designs in red and gold foil, though some of the gold is already flaking or was never completely applied on the rear of this copy. The sold out deluxe edition was hand bound with burgundy calf, with the designs from the standard edition’s dust jacket blocked in gold on the front, back and spine. With marble edging on the pagers and marbled endpapers, it is contained within a solander box with the Atramentous logo blocked in gold foil on the front. In addition, the deluxe edition came with a limited print of Carolyn Hamilton-Giles’ illustration, signed by the artist and printed on good quality card.

Published by Atramentous Press.

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The Edda as Key to the Coming Age – Peryt Shou, translated by Stephen E. Flowers

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Categories: esotericism, germanic, runes, Tags:

The Edda as Key to the Coming Age coverOriginally published in 1920 and presented here in a 2004 translation from Rûna Raven Press, The Edda as Key to the Coming Age by Peryt Shou is something of a classic of early 20th century German rune magic. As Flower’s notes in his introduction, Shou’s book provides context to some of his own work as presented in Rune Might: Secret Practices of the German Rune Magicians published by Llewellyn in 1989. In this, he provided a survey of the various strains of last century German runo-mysticism, including that of Shou as well as the contributions of Guido von List, Friedrich Marby, and of course Karl Maria Wiligut. In Rune Might, the influence of Shou on Flowers was clear, and the publication of this source text puts flesh on those bones.

Shou’s cosmology as presented here represents a syncretism of rune mysticism with esoteric Christianity, seeing the cosmic Christ as an analogue of Wuotan, who he describes as the prehistoric Christ of the German folk. Shou is certainly not unique in this concept, as evidenced by far older precedents like the runestone from Jelling, Denmark, in which Christ appears not crucified but hung, entwined with foliage on a tree, in an echo of Odin’s hanging from the World Tree. Indeed, Shou takes this idea of a Germanification of Christianity as mythically central to his system, describing a stark break between the Christianity of Roman Catholicism and a vigorous Germanic Christianity; a break that occurred at the very point of the crucifixion. For him, Christ’s death marked the end of Catholic Christianity as a valid system, at which point Germanic Christianity began and Christ awoke on the World Tree, descending alive as Wuotan.

Central to this cosmology is the idea of Need, which seems to occupy positions both negative, comparable to desire in Buddhism and therefore the cause of suffering, and positive, as a force of will that provides the operations and indeed the whole system, with its impetus and energy. This concept of Need naturally relates to the rune Nauthiz, but Shou takes this further, seeing it encoded within the ‘N’ in the INRI acronym placed above the crucified Christ, and therefore a key to understanding that moment where Christ proper transformed into Christ-Wuotan. Shou associates this moment with Odin’s hanging on the World Tree as recorded in Hávamál, drawing attention to the idea that on the ninth night, screaming, he grasped the runes with Need.

This intersection between the crucifixion of Christ and the hanging of Odin forms the basis of the main ritual Shou presents in this work, the Ritual of the Ninth Night. This ritual is a combination of special postures, visualisations and voice work that is redolent of the rune vibration and runic yoga of Shou’s contemporaries, and the core principles will be fairly familiar to anyone that has encountered occultism within the last century. In a series of procedures over several days or weeks, depending on one’s sense of progress, the practitioner gradually builds connections with cosmic energies, building an aethyric form that replicates the body of Christ-Wuotan. As the Tabernaculum Hermetis, this Adam Kadmon-like figure contains within it all the runes as vibratory symbols.

Tabernaculum Hermetis

The nomenclature Shou uses to describe his system has an endearing retro-futurist technological quality to it, making it, in retrospect, feel slightly cyberpunk or evocative of the technomages of Babylon Five. In the Ninth Night ritual, the practitioner imagines themselves as a cosmic antenna, drawing on radio waves from the divine, and even entreating these forces to awaken the network within; drawing an explicit analogy between this mystical proto-internet and the instruction made by Jesus to his disciples to cast their nets. In concert with this surprisingly contemporary terminology is a lexicon that feels much more of its Theosophy-inspired time, filled with ideas of planetary energies and ascended masters, such as the Hermes-Brotherhood who appear to literally live on the planet Mercury. In a particularly intriguing moment, Shou refers to another priesthood on Mercury called the Wolves of the Sun who are hostile to Wuotan, and who obviously provide the template for the idea of the predatory wolves Fenrir, Hati and Skoll. Combined, these two strains of language and paradigms make for an appealing modality, a little old fashioned, a little futuristic, a little pagan and a little Christian.

Ninth Night

One of the most interesting aspects of reading The Edda as Key to the Coming Age is considering its status as a historical and prophetic document, aided and abetted by the hindsight of nearly 100 years. With the book being written in the aftermath of the First World War and long before the rise of National Socialism (although part of the nationalist rebirth, and its sometimes problematic racism, from which it would draw), it is hard not to identify that most tumultuous period two decades then hence as the coming age Shou speaks of. This is certainly true when he says that the Germanic people are destined for destruction, something he ties to what he defines as an outdated definition of race, albeit to be reborn for the greater global good. Alternatively, it must be asked, is this still an age that is yet to come.

The Edda as Key to the Coming Age is a slim volume at only 57 pages. Shou, as translated by Flowers, writes with enthusiasm but also with the unchecked anthropology of yesteryear, where the etymology is often wishful and there’s very little citing of academic sources with an often inescapable feeling that some things could be several steps removed from the original material. There’s also a certain degree of repetition, despite the low page count, with the basic premise of Christ-Odin/crucified-hung repeated in several variations as Shou attempts to make his point in a largely poetic way. As an archival document, this is an important resource, and despite the repetition, a genuine joy to read; something abetted by that little bit of crazy that are the cosmic, early 20th century occultism elements.

Published by Rûna Raven Press and since reprinted by Lodestar.

Review Soundtrack: Peryt Shou by Inade and Turbund Sturmwerk.

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Distillatio – Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule

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Categories: alchemy, art, classical, esotericism, hermeticism, magick, tantra, Tags:

Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule has already had one review this year here at Scriptus Recensera with Time, Fate and Spider Magic from Avalonia. While that work was largely a written one with elements of Orryelle’s art featured throughout, Distillatio is very much a complete showcase of their visual output in various mediums. As its name suggests, Distillatio represents said alchemical stage, and acts as a companion to the other parts of the process documented in Orryelle’s Tela Quadrivum series: Cojunctio, Coagula and Solve. The status of Distillatio as the final volume in this series and the culmination of the alchemical process is reflected in the design, with the book bound in a pure white cloth and wrapped in a weighty white dust jacket with the Cauda Pavonis or Peacock’s Tail in iridescent foil on the front and a similarly rendered fingerprint design on the back.

While the previous entries in the Tela Quadrivum series worked predominantly in black and white, with flecks of gold and silver, Distillatio takes the opportunity provided by the iridescence associated with its alchemical stage and runs with it. Colours, and in particular striking Melek Tausian-blues and a rich ruddy brown, dominate, with the book showcasing Orryelle’s ability as a painter in oils. Orryelle’s characteristic fleshy forms are given an added layer of depth and voluptuousness with the addition of oils, bringing with it a different sense of energy.

Like many of the line-drawn figures in occult art, Orryelle’s phantasmagorical forms usually have an ephemeral and chimerical feel, adrift in a timeless netherworld, but with the addition of oils, they become a lot more present, the line made flesh as it were. With this physicality comes two things, energy and permanence. In The Wild Hunt, participants in the Heljagd pour forth from the centre of the image, reaching across a tumultuous heaven in a furious motion that is mirrored below by the reaching branches of the World Tree. Their source at the centre, which in this case is the gutter of the two page spread, is a zoomorphic figure of Odin and Sleipnir interfused, disappearing into the liminal space created by the formatting of the book. Naturally evocative of Peter Nicolai Arbo’s Asgårdsreien painting from 1872, The Wild Hunt replaces Arbo’s classical forms with more tangible yet still fleetingly elven figures, whose ferocious, otherworldly speed is implicit within the flurry of brush strokes.

Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule: The Wild Hunt

The World Tree of the The Wild Hunt is a frequent motif within Distillatio, often assuming the same compositionally-central role, with its branches and roots emanating outwards, bringing with it various forms of life. In one, alchemical birds appear in its branches and surrounds: a bloody-breasted pelican feeding its young, a resplendent white eagle that forms the tree’s crown and is mirrored by the shadow of a black eagle in its root, while a peacock claims a branch as its own. Similarly in Cycle of Life, the tree sits at the centre of the only partially coloured and inked image, some of its limb anthropomorphised into grasping hands, while various animals and humanoid creatures emanate from it and circle around the frame as embodiments of Nature, red in tooth and claw.

Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule: Alchymic Birds on the World Tree

In more static images, Orryelle’s oil paint gives gravity and a luminous power to its subjects, such as the looming figure of Isis in Osiris Embalmed, or the apple-clasping Melek Taus adrift in a sea of peacock feathers and interstellar clouds in Melek Taus and the Path of Venus. Meanwhile, in With the Milk of a Gazelle, Hathor heals Hoor’s Eyes, an asomatous Egyptian landscape hosts Hathor, crowned effulgent, who heals the eyes of a contorted Horus that lies before her, his arms and legs twisted into uncomfortable reversal.

Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule: With the Milk of a Gazelle, Hathor heals Hoor’s Eyes

As evidenced by the variety of deities featured throughout the works, Distillatio is indicative of Orryelle’s eclectic mythological tastes, with the various divine stars being familiar to anyone who has encountered hir work before. This syncretic quality draws principally on Egyptian, Hindu and Germanic myth, with bits of Greek and Celtic thrown in, sometimes in the same image.

It isn’t only oil paintings that feature in Distillatio and Orryelle also includes a selection of his digital montages. Some of these incorporate elements of his paintings, such as St Michael And/As The Beast which blends the background of a painting with repeating photographic images of Orryelle as the titular and winged saint. There is something a little incongruous about the presence of these montages, and the incredible skill evident in the paintings is not necessarily always matched in their digital siblings. It feels like the book would have been no poorer had they been left out, allowing for the paintings alone to be a more solid and consistent body of work.

Explanations for the images are spread periodically throughout the book, appearing in explanatory blocks before or after several blocks of spreads. It’s not the most satisfactory way of presenting this information, requiring a lot of flicking backwards or forwards, but there’s not many other ways to do it. These legends to the legends are fairly pithy and provide an invaluable aid to understanding Orryelle’s multi-layered images. It is a shame the typography used here does not mirror the beauty of the images, with it all feeling very defaulty due to the body being set in generic Times, save for Orryelle’s typographically-inadvisable tendency to use a goody bag of other typefaces to highlight certain words. Subheadings are also subject to this, centered atop each section and appearing variously in Harrington, Stonehenge and the face that shall not be named; well, OK, suffice to say, I was not best pleased to see the Egyptian-related subtitles being in dreaded, stroke-bolded Papyrus.

Distillatio was made available in standard and deluxe editions, with the standard being 640 hand-numbered copies in white cloth with a white dust-jacket. The deluxe edition of 64 hand-numbered copies signed by the artist came in crushed white quarter morocco, stamped in black with top edge silver in a dust-jacket and slipcase.

Published by Fulgur

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Liber Coronzom: An Enochian Grimoire – A.D. Mercer

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Categories: enochian, esotericism, grimoire, Tags:

Liber Coronzom coverReleased by Aeon Sophia Press, A.D. Mercer’s Liber Coronzom represents the first foray into matters Enochian for the Dutch publishing house. Its raison d’être is suggested in its very name, with Mercer intending to provide an authentic system of magic based on Dr John Dee’s records, rather than the adaptations made by the Golden Dawn and subsequently Aleister Crowley. Core to this authenticity is the name Coronzom, as it appears in Dee’s original hand, rather than the more familiar ‘Coronzon’ of Méric Causabon’s A True and Faithful Relation… or Crowley’s h-enhanced ‘Choronzon.’ Mercer spends some time documenting the instances where this name and its variants appear in the original documents, concluding with ‘Coronzom’ as the most accurate form. This is important as Mercer bases much of his system around the idea of Coronzom, calling it the Coronzomic Craft (and presumably not Cozonomic as it is also rendered in at least one instance).

After this preambulatory discussion of Coronzom, in which Mercer identifies him with Samael, the rest of Liber Coronzom follows and is divided into three books: Liber Hermetica, Liber Enochia and Liber Aethyrica. The first of these libers presents basic ritual techniques, variations of which will be familiar to anyone versed in western ceremonial magic: breathing exercises, white light visualisations, and a Golden Dawn pentagram-style ritual including the Kabbalistic Cross; as well as references to two specific, non-Enochian procedures: the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and the Bornless Ritual. At the same time, Mercer says the link ‘of’ (by which, one assumes, ‘between’ is meant) Enochian and Kabbalistic magic must be severed for the Coronzomic workings to be successful; which makes one wonder, why have any of those elements in the first place.

In Liber Enochia the focus naturally turns to more Enochian matters and Mercer provides a discussion of the Enochian language, and a variety of procedures including the banishing of Enochian entities, the opening of the four watchtowers, and the summoning of the Governors. This largely creates the toolkit for the system presented here, with watchtower openings and brief little intoned Enochian invokations being the order of the day.

Mercer incorporates his own innovations to Dee and Kelley’s template, making ritual use of a three-sided blade (which in his case is the somewhat incongruous Tibetan phurpa), and introducing what is described as a heretofore unknown shortcut through Enochian magic’s system of aethyrs. While on the surface this makes you think of some hidden formula being decoded from amongst the Enochian elemental tablets or one of Kelley’s transmissions, it appears to be simply that, a shortcut, wherein the way to get to the final ten aethyrs is to skip the other twenty. Genius. The vehicle for this shortcut is provided by the angels of the tenth aethyr, Zax: Lexarph, Comanan, and Tabitom. As the names of these angels are found within the Black Cross that quadfurcates the Great Table, the arguments goes, you can open all four of the table’s watchtowers, invoke those angels, go directly to Zax, do not pass Zip, do not collect 200 pennies. As Zax is the aethyr in which Coronzom resides, having done this you now have instant access to the mighty devil of dispersion and with that, the experience of the Abyss. Coronzom himself turns out to be a bit of a pushover and after a brief invocation, he is overcome and it is revealed that… *spoilers*… wait for it… they were you all along – and they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling ceremonial magicians.

Once you have nimbly bypassed Coronzom, Liber Aethyrica follows and the final ten aethyrs from Zip to Lil are yours to explore… quickly. In fact, ‘explore’ might be too grand a word. Forget Crowley’s description of the aethyrs with all their fantastic landscapes and chimeric entities, these aethyrs are presented as briefly encountered, largely interchangeable zones that are passed through in brief, single-paragraph descriptions, always with a citadel in Lil in sight as a goal.

As suggested by the shock reveal of Coronzom as your bad self (get down with them), there is much in Liber Coronzom that is framed within a psychoanalytical paradigm, particularly the Jungian variant. Other reviews here at Scriptus Recensera attest to how your mileage may vary when it comes to this approach, and it comes off a little dated, recalling the heady days of the 1990s when magic as science was all the attempt-at-credibility rage.

Throughout Liber Coronzom, Mercer writes somewhat informally with a degree of confidence if not fluidity, with, for example, the initial discussion of Choronzon vs. Coronzom having a conversational tone as he explores the issue hand in hand with the reader. There are, though, little things that begin to irritate as the book progresses, making for an ultimately frustrating read. There is a preponderance of filler words, the first use of ‘at the end of the day’ that I’ve seen in a book in a long time, and a considerable number of sentences that begin with ‘And.’ There are also little words and phrases used inappropriately: ‘gambit’ is used where ‘ambit’ must surely be intended, ‘thou’ pops its archaic head up in one sentence, only to be followed by ‘you’ in the very same sentence, and there are repeated conflations of ‘affect’ with ‘effect.’ Commas are used inconsistently: in one instance creating a Shatner-esque staccato with their frequency, but are then almost entirely absent in other places; or in completely the wrong place in still others. Elsewhere, stray words are left in the middle of sentences, while instructions that begin by detailing what an anonymous adherent should do, abruptly get personal and start speaking directly to the ‘you’ that is the reader. This is without mentioning other misspellings, punctuation errors and the use of incorrect homophones that riddle the book, making for a mistake on almost every two pages. This is all symptomatic of a complete lack of proofing, and makes it feel like you’re reading a first draft. It would have been beneficial to have an editor act as a brutal gardener to cut some of the redundancies, solecisms and erratum. Maybe they would have caught things like the titles that in two instances refer to things being ‘Enochain.’

There are multiple editions of Liber Coronzom including one as a high quality hardcover with a full colour cover, wrapped to front and back, featuring Henry Gillard Glidoni’s painting John Dee Performing an Experiment before Elizabeth I. The deluxe edition features black end paper, gold foil lettering to front cover and spine on a full black leather bound hardcover. A further devotee edition is limited to thirteen exemplars and has black end papers, a quarter grey goatskin leather bound over hand-marbled paper, and 23 kr gold decorations to the back and front cover and the spine. It is housed in a solander box, bound in full Italian grey cloth. And then there’s the X-Series edition limited to 50 exemplars and bound in blue cloth but with the cover featuring the same gold foiled title and design as the deluxe edition.

The version reviewed here, though, is none of these and is, it would appear, an iteration of the standard cloth-bound edition, with a blue cloth blinding and a foiled decagram on the cover, limited to 200 exemplars. I add the caveat of ‘it would appear’ as the current standard edition available from the Aeon Sophia Press website, also with only 200 exemplars, is now a black cloth version, with no decagram on the front and just the title rendered in a foiled blackletter Killigrew face.

Published by Aeon Sophia Press

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Pillars: The Scalding of Sapientia – Edited, compiled and curated by G. McCaughry

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Categories: esotericism, hermeticism, luciferian, magick, robert cochrane, witchcraft, Tags:

The Scalding of Sapientia is something of special issue of Anathema Publishing’s Pillars journal, which at time of writing has had three soft-cover issues in its first volume; all of which have since been compiled into a single, hardbound Perichoresis Edition. The Scalding of Sapientia sits outside this issue structure and goes straight for the hardcover, with a standalone clothbound volume wrapped in a 3/4 dusk jacket. This special edition finds its purpose in its theme, Lucifer as an exemplar of magickal consuetude, making it, along with previously reviewed books from Three Hands Press and Black Moon Publishing, part of a vigorous renaissance for the light bringer. It is Lucifer’s role as this light bringer that The Scalding of Sapientia concerns itself, casting its net wider than just a consideration of him as a mythic figure, and also exploring various themes of Luciferian wisdom, sacrifice and praxis, as well as other personifications of wisdom such as the Gnostic goddess Sophia.

The contributors to The Scalding of Sapientia are a varied bunch and amongst the fourteen writers there are only a few names that immediately leap out as recognisable: Shani Oates, Craig Williams, Carl Abrahamson, Johannes Nefastos and Anathema owner Gabriel McCaughry. Things do start off slowly too, beginning with Kogishsaga, a long poem by Nukshean of the Alaskan black metal band Skaltros. Preceded by a preamble itself several pages long, the poem, which provides the lyrics to a Skaltros album of the same name, runs to eleven pages. It is presented as somewhat intimidating blocks of text, bisected only by the individual song titles, rather than more easily digestible verses. As such, it’s one of those things where you go “Well, this is nice enough and all, but I’ll come back and finish this later after I’ve read the rest of the book.” Once one realises that these are black metal lyrics, the phrasing and intonation makes more sense, and if you like, you can try and follow along while listening to the album and its corvid vocal stylings; this reviewer lost track pretty quickly.

The allure of America’s Pacific Northwest and its other mountainous and arboraceous regions is something that comes through clearly in Nukshean’s Kogishsaga and the same is true of the following contribution from Paul Waggener of Wolves of Vinland and Operation Werewolf. Both Nukshean’s piece and Waggener’s Sacrifice: Discipline & the Great Work emphasis the virtue of tribulation and time spent alone in the wilderness, with Waggener’s approach being largely an excoriation of those that don’t follow such an approach.

Johnny Decker Miller: Durtro

The first piece here that truly piques the interest is Johnny Decker Miller’s The Dreadful Banquet. Subtitled Sacrifice, Luciferian Gnosis & the Sorcery of the Bone Trumpet, it explores various examples of wind instruments made of bone, in particular the kangling, the human thigh trumpet used in Tibetan Buddhism. Heavily indebted to the work of Andrew Chumbley, Miller relates this instrument, its aesthetics and use to Sabbatic Craft and witchcraft in general, highlighting how an atavistic ritual such as the Tibetan Chöd can have an equivalent in more Western climes.

It is these kind of pieces, merging research with suggestions of contemporary praxis, that are ultimately the most satisfying amongst the content of The Scalding of Sapientia. They stand in contrast to more philosophical musings about the nature of the left hand path, metaphysical cosmologies, or the virtues of living alone in a cabin in the woods; none of which feel anywhere as revolutionary or revelatory as the authors probably hope they do. At this point in contemporary occultism, pretty much everything has been said in those avenues, and given that publications such as these are directed towards the choir, there seems little benefit in expatiating them once again.

There is a strong emphasis within The Scalding of Sapientia on the experiential, of exteriorising the interior, and representing one’s personal approach to the acquisition of wisdom. Sometimes specific examples are given, and other times the practical side may be a little veiled, cloaked in philosophical speak or biographical accounts bordering on the hagiographic. In addition to the personal recollections in the aforementioned contributions from Nukshean and Paul Waggener, Craig Williams provides a succinct introduction to his Cult of Golgotha, while Camelia Elias talks of her relationship with Lucifer and of being a prodigious two year old reciting Mihai Eminescu’s poem Luceafarul. Likewise, Graeme de Villiers intersperses a dual observance mass for Our Lady of the Two Trees with a biography both magical and mundane, and Anathema-stalwart, Shani Oates writes a somewhat peregrinating paean to the entities she works with, beginning her narrative as a child who was often thought to be a changeling left by the Fey.

Spread including artwork by Adrian Baxter

From an aesthetic perspective, The Scalding of Sapientia is a delight. Elsewhere we’ve lauded the look of releases from Anathema and this seems to have reached its apex with this release, making them the producer of some of the most beautiful books in occult publishing. McCaughry has a wonderful typographic eye, working with a suite of faces and techniques that says multiple things: occult, classic, yet paradoxically modern. Along with that, there’s an admirable use of white space and hierarchy that assists in creating that sense of rarefied environs.

Then there’s the artwork featured throughout, which feels very curated, such is the quality, with nary a dud amongst them. Consisting of predominantly black and white images, as well as some muted and murky colour ones and a few photographs, the highlights are those such as Johnny Decker Miller illustrating his own essay, Chris Undirheimer’s eitr-tinged inks (above) and Adrian Baxter’s ikon-like botanicals. All three artists specialise in what you would hope for in contemporary occult illustration: delicately rendered fine lines and beautifully defined forms that are redolent of engravings. And skulls, always skulls. Also worthy of note is Robert W. Cook, who traffics in blackened drips and eldritch rhizomes, hued in a gloaming effulgency.

The Scalding of Sapientia was made available in two editions, a standard edition of 600 copies, and an artisanal Cutis Novis edition of a mere twelve exemplars. The standard edition consists of 208 pages on Cougar Natural 160M archive-quality paper, hardbound in a gorgeous Bamberger Kaliko metallic cranberry red bookcloth, with gold foil stamp on the spine and cover, and the sigil for this volume blind debossed on the back. Inside are Neenah Dark Brown endpapers with a burnished leather and finish, and the entire book is wrapped in the aforementioned 3/4 dusk jacket featuring the artwork Hortus Aureus by Denis Forkas Kostromitin. I’m not totally convinced by this partial dust jacket as it looks a little messy, with Kostromitin’s artwork not integrating with the gold foiled image by Undirheimer on the cloth front, and only the title on the spine bringing the two elements together.

The Cutis Novis edition is bound in a mottled, highly textured calfskin leather, with the sigil for The Scalding of Sapientia blind debossed on the front. The spine features raised nerves and the title and Pillars sigil foiled in gold, while the interior includes additional handmade endpapers. Included with each of the deluxe editions was a pine wood seal with the McCaughry-designed Scalding of Sapientia sigil burnt at knife point by Undirheimer and consecrated with the blood of both artists.

Published by Anathema Publishing

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Hermes in the Academy: Ten Years’ Study of Western Esotericism at the University of Amsterdam – Edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaf and Joyce Pijnenburg

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Categories: esotericism, hermeticism

Published in 2009, this volume commemorates the establishment ten years prior of a chair and centre of expertise for the study of Western esotericism at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. While the writing in this anthology touches upon the wide gamut of Western esotericism including alchemy, hermeticism, and kabbalah, the first section is more pragmatic and concerns itself with the creation of the chair for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, as documented by Roelof van den Broek, while Wouter J. Hanegraaff considers the state of esoteric studies in the academia of the late 1990s. The same is also true of some of the book’s other sections, in which the writings about writings have been categorised into sections of Studying Western Esotericism in Amsterdam and Western Esotericism in International Perspective.

The second section, Glimpses of Research, provides just that, with a selection of representative research pieces spanning the neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance to twentieth century Danish esotericism and a few bits in between. It begins with a pure glimpse of research with an essay on the Byzantine philosopher George Gemistos, AKA Plethon (1355/1360-1452), but then, almost inextricably, things drift back to writing about writing about magic. The two following pieces Kocku von Stuckrad’s Astrologia Hermetica: Astrology, Western Culture, and the Academy, and Marco Pasi’s The Modernity of Occultism: Reflections on Some Crucial Aspects, both effectively concern themselves with how their fields have been, perhaps unfairly, perceived in academia. Stuckrad’s Astrologia Hermetica briefly surveys how astrology has in the past been treated with almost embarrassment, where studying its historical uses always had to be qualified with a disavowal in any literal belief in the ‘wretched subject.’ Pasi’s The Modernity of Occultism, on the other hand, addresses the perception of occultism as fundamentally reactionary and authoritarian, an image made glibly real by the stereotype of the elitist magician seeking unlimited power.™ Pasi turns this assumption, made principally by academics in the first half of the last century, on its head, highlighting how the growth in esotericism in the twentieth century undid many of these claims. Focussing in particular on the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn, Pasi shows that in regard to matters relating to gender, body and sexuality, the self, colonialism and religion, those strands of Anglo-American occultism, at least, were progressive and, he argues, anticipating rather than just being representative of broader societal change.

Things turn more personal and reflective in the third section of Hermes in the Academy with Studying Western Esotericism in Amsterdam, in which five writers each briefly reflect on their time in Amsterdam academia. There’s not much to these, each being over in a flash, but they’re charming little pieces, showing how the university attracted would-be hermetic academics from around the world.

And then everything wraps up with part the fourth, Western Esotericism in International Perspective, in which discussion turns once more explicitly to the chair at the University of Amsterdam with paeans from further afield, contextualising it within the greater milieu of occult academia Thus, Antoine Faivre, holder of the chair of History of Estoteric and Mystical Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, speaks of the history of that particular chair dating back to 1964, and of its subsequent collaborations with its Amsterdam equivalent. Meanwhile, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, holder of the chair of Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter, focuses less on the Amsterdam chair with a lens turned instead to the study of Western esotericism in the United Kingdom, framed first within his own journey of study, before expanding on the achievements of the Exeter programme. Dame Frances Yates naturally looms large in this section and elsewhere in the book, with Allison P. Coudert, who studied under her, noting her important role as a legitimising force in the academic place of Hermeticism.

In all, Hermes in the Academy doesn’t entirely feel like it knows what it wants to be. The representative research often feels incongruous, lacking context alongside the reflections on the history of the chair and studying at the University of Amsterdam, and not feeling all that representative. Indeed, the brief little pieces from students in the third section are some of the most engaging contributions, and their mention of their specialist subjects areas are more intriguing than what is included here. As such it is the ‘writing about writing’ that becomes the most enjoyable part of this volume, with the various discussions about esoteric academia being more satisfying than the esotericism itself.

Published by Amsterdam University Press

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