Categotry Archives: hermeticism

by

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

No comments yet

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.

Philosophising the Occult spread

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.

Philosophising the Occult spread

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.

Philosophising the Occult spread

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

by

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

No comments yet

Categories: alchemy, hermeticism, Tags:

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

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

Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England spread

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

Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England spread

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

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

Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England spread

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

Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England spread

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

Published by D.S. Brewer

by

The Light of Hermes Trismegistus – Charles Stein

No comments yet

Categories: alchemy, classical, hellenic, hermeticism, Tags:

The Light of Hermes Trismegistus coverCharles Stein’s The Light of Hermes Trismegistus is one of those releases from Inner Traditions that feels a little different from their usual fare, appearing as something for shelving in the reference section, rather than the personal growth or practical magic ones. Stein has a Ph.D. in literature and a bachelor’s degree in ancient Greek, and in the past he has principally published works of poetry, as well as a Persephone-focussed study of the Eleusian Mysteries. With this new book he provides translations of what are categorised here as seven essential Hermetic texts, each drawn from the earliest written source, and with context and further insights provided by Stein’s preamble and voluminous commentaries.

Despite a subtitle promising “seven Hermetic texts,” the works included here come from a period that spans several centuries, beginning in the seventh century BCE and ending in the fourth century CE, with only one of them, Poimandres, having provenance within that great canon of Hermetic thought, the Corpus Hermeticum. Thus, instead of being texts that could be specifically defined, in a purely technical sense, as Hermetica, these are works that pull on threads various, drawing from Greek myth, the Homeric Hymns, Neoplatonism, archaic alchemy, and (in the case of Apuleius’ The Metamorphoses) picaresque novels from ancient Rome. The one occasional through-line amongst these temporally and culturally diverse texts is Hermes, whether he appears as the divine messenger of Greek myth, as seen in Hesiod’s Theogony, or as the later Hellenistic syncretic form of the fabled Hermes Trismegistus; with Stein regarding the mythic and the legendary incarnations as largely one and the same.

The Light of Hermes Trismegistus spread

Stein opens with a substantial introduction, outlining his focus on Hermes in a rather personal and devotional manner, describing him as the very principle of the mind in all its possibilities. Here, Stein makes clear his intent, defining this work as an exercise in what he calls configurative theology, with an attendant configurative theophany, emphasising the concept of hermeneutics, in which the translation and interpretations of a text perpetuate it in new, ever evolving ways.

Hesiod’s Theogony is the first work featured here, with Stein translating from the original Greek as recorded in Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s 1977 collection of the Homeric Hymns and works by Hesiod. As a poem dated to the eighth or seventh century BCE, this is the piece furthest from the traditional corpus of Hermetica, retelling the creation of the world. In his commentary, Stein ties this act of cosmic creation to Hesiod’s text itself, saying that Theogony does not simply describe the act but rather, through the reading thereof, initiates it. This is emblematic of Stein’s hermeneutic approach to this material, using etymology, historical precedent and philosophy to present it as not only profound, but inherently magical.

The Light of Hermes Trismegistus spread

Rather than providing a line-by-line analysis of each text, Stein’s commentary is often focussed little on the specific textual content itself, and instead uses the works as starting off points for broader discussions of each core theme. Sometimes this extends far beyond the source texts, such as in the translation of a text by Zosimos of Panopolis, which is followed by an extensive overview of alchemy that stretches centuries, even millennia beyond the fourth century origins of the source; embracing everything from the Greek Magical Papyri to seventeen and eighteenth century alchemists, but without too much reference to the text itself.

This book’s Hermes-focussed brief finds a good fit in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, for which Stein provides a nimble translation followed by commentary focussed on the themes of magical voice and conscious listening. This is the abruptly book ended by an assemblage of somewhat contextless and usually brief additional comments on various matters from within the hymn, some as little as a sentence long, each divided by a short row of bullet points as if they were research notes that have been formatted into the chapter by mistake (not that they were).

In the next section, The Poem of Parmenides, Stein translates the fragments of Parmenides’ sole surviving work, usually retroactively referred to, though not here, as On Nature. Here the following commentary is less an exegesis on matters metaphysical and is, for the most part, purely textual in its focus, with a selection of notes about the translation.

The Light of Hermes Trismegistus spread

Stein’s translations are often functional with a literal approach that predicates economy over poeticism. His translation of The Poimandres, for example is almost staccato in its brevity, with none of the free verse flourish and beauty of G.R.S. Mead’s version. The same is true of the Chaldean Oracles, though this is largely due to the fragmentary nature of the very source material. For the version here, Stein has used only 87 of the 260 extant fragments, and, diverging from the ordering template established in 1894 by Wilhelm Kroll, has rearranged them as if they make up a single poem.

After a free verse reinterpretation of the vision of Isis sequence from Apuleius’ prose The Metamorphoses, Stein concludes with a translation of a foundational but innominate alchemical text by Zosimos of Panopolis, in which the 4th century Greco-Egyptian alchemist related a series of visionary dream journeys. This translation dates from 1964, using a text found in the Columbia University Library (though Stein notes that the exact source document is unknown as he no longer has the reference), and it was first published the same in his own single issue journal of the occult and the phenomenology, Aion: A Journal of Traditionary Science. For his translation, Stein uses the title On Divine Virtue and follows it with a commentary that is significantly longer than the mere five pages of entries from Zosimos’ dream journal.

The Light of Hermes Trismegistus spread

Priscilla Harris Baker provides the text design and layout for The Light of Hermes Trismegistus, using Garamond for body copy and Trajan, Optima and Gill Sans as display faces. The translations themselves are formatted in Friz Quadrata, a pleasant enough modern serif, but one that feels a little incongruous for content from the Hellenistic and Roman eras. With its heavier than usual typographic weight, it is a face that seems more suited for display purposes, and at this point size, the tiny serifs almost disappear, giving the impression of a bulky san serif whose readability is not ideal for often poetically-formatted text. Like another Hermetic-themed work recently published by Inner Traditions, Marlene Seven Bremner’s Hermetic Philosophy and Creative Alchemy, this book has been granted a little more finesse than their usual trade paperbacks. It is presented as a sturdy hardback wrapped in a fetching blue-hued dustjacket, with foiled gold text on both jacket and spine; though it must be said that the gold of the title makes it hard to read against the blue background of the dustjacket.

Published by Inner Traditions

by

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult: An Anthology

No comments yet

Categories: egyptian, hellenic, hermeticism, magick, music, shamanism, witchcraft, Tags:

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult: An Anthology coverPublished by Aeon Sophia Press, Music in Witchcraft and the Occult concerns itself with exactly what it says on the tin, but it approaches this theme from a practical and experiential perspective, with a variety of musician writing about the ways in which music and the occult interact within their work. But first, a little caveat, as this anthology includes an essay from this reviewer, discussing her creation of devotional music for Hela under the name Gydja. Suffice to say, we will be neither critiquing nor lauding that particular contribution, but even without that, there’s plenty more to explore.

We usually leave matters of aesthetics to the conclusion of reviews, but the appearance of Music in Witchcraft and the Occult impacts on reading to such an extent that it informs what follows. There is unfortunately a haphazard quality to the layout, with no consistent style and with each entry apparently retaining its contributor’s source formatting. As a result, the inherited styling of subtitles, footnotes, footnote numbering, indents, captions, page beaks, line spacing and paragraph returns are all inconsistent; though mercifully, the same serif face is used throughout for the main body. This inevitably makes the book feel rushed, lacking in cohesion and genuinely hard to read in some places; such as the first entry in which the text is interrupted by strange, abrupt digits as the footnote numbering has been formatted at full scale instead of superscript. Most jarring of all are the main titles which have been left however the author minimally formatted them in their submission, resulting in barely any typographic hierarchy. Similarly, if an author didn’t include their name at the start of their original submission document, then it hasn’t been added here for publication, meaning that without recourse to the contents page you can dive into some entries with little context, hoping that the author’s name is mentioned latter on.

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult spread

There are some interesting contributions in Music in Witchcraft and the Occult which makes it all the more frustrating that it doesn’t look better, especially when only a little tightening of the layout and the addition of hierarchy and consistency would have done wonders. After something of a broad introduction with a few personal specifics from Aaron Piccirillo of Synesect, the first entry comes from Kakophonix of self-described Black Ritual Chamber Musick project Hvile I Kaos. This is a comprehensive consideration of the music of Hvile I Kaos, with a guide to their performances as live rituals, an analysis of the theory behind some indicative pieces and albums, accompanied by notation of particular motifs, including a setting of the Agios O Baphomet sinister chant. It’s all rather interesting, though the lack of formatting makes it feel rather desultory, with huge half-page spaces left between sections and little in the way of typographic hierarchy.

Zemaemidjehuty, author of The Book of Flesh and Feather, published by Theion Publishing, lays his Kemetic cards on the table with his contribution, which focuses not on any music they themselves make, but on a ritual that takes the form of a conversation between Djehuty and Barbelo/Sophia. The dialogue is spread across an exhausting sixteen pages at a fairly large point size and with a lot of leading between the lines, with the words spoken by Sophia being differentiated with some hideous underlining as if we’re still living in a world of manual typewriters instead of one in which any variation of formatting could have been chosen.

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult spread

Moving swiftly along, another author, Jack Grayle, whose book on Hekate, The Hekatæon, was published by Ixaxaar, provides a dose of erudition with Gravesong. Once again, though, this piece feels a little divorced from the overall theme of this anthology, though it is tangential, with Grayle focusing on funeral songs, particularly in the intersection of Aeschylus’ trilogy of plays The Oresteia and the Greek Magical Papyri. Again, and through no fault of Grayle, the formatting here leaves a lot to be desired, with subtitles capitalised but otherwise unformatted (and in one instance, widowed at the bottom of a page), and with the endnotes kept in Microsoft Word’s deplorable default Calibri styling.

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult spread

Ilya Affectvs mirrors the entry from Hvile I Kaos with a thorough, fifteen page, multi-section overview of his ritual ambient project Corona Barathri. It begins with a general biography and statement of intent, followed by Oratio Sacra, a part-manifesto sermon that is exemplary of Corona Barathri’s diabolist themes and lyrics, finally ending with the lyrics of two songs, Hymn of Nahemoth from the album Womb Ov Sheol and the title track from Speculum Diaboli.

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult spread In Baron Samhedi, Edgar Kerval gives a broad outline of his project Emme Ya before turning to the baron of the title. Ostensibly this is done to illustrate how Kerval has worked profoundly with Baron Samhedi since 2009 and how the attendant methods of invocation include sonically-induced trance states. In practice, though, this is more of a six page general biography of Samhedi with a concluding ritual, and one that could have benefited from proofing and editing to corral Kerval’s otherwise enthusiastic prose.

A different style of writing is provided by Keeley Swete and Jessica Rose of Portland’s She Scotia with their Music as Ritual, which invites the reader to reject the commodification of music in favour of something with a more sacralised intent. This is a considered and eloquent piece with a voice that blends a New Age style of metaphysical speculation with a witchy underpinning, a little self-help, a little inspi- and aspi- rational. Jon Vermillion’s The Souls (sic) Expression Through the Universal Vibration of Sound follows and feels somewhat cut from the same cloth, with a focus on frequencies and sound waves, and visualising a violet sphere of light. There’s an obvious debt to Robert Monroe’s idea of altered conscious using audio techniques to achieve hemispherical synchronization, and quite a bit of the New Age with talk of Kryst Consciousness, meditation and etheric bodies. Sitting within the same pages as Emme Ya’s Baron Samhedi and Corona Barathri’s diabolism, this makes for some incongruent company.

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult spread

Iceland’s enigmatic NYIÞ offer one of the most interesting contributions here, situating their work within the folklore and magick of their homeland, beginning with a broad overview of such. They then pull back the curtain, explaining the symbolism behind various choices of instruments (the organ being linked to death, skin drums with shamanism, etc) and then showing how these elements can be combined with more conventional instruments and intent to create their intersection between music and magick.

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult spread

Finally, zenKOAL of the ritual noise duo Brujentropy wields the longest-titled entry here, offering Strange Spells Spontaneously Evolving into Art: Avant Punk, Spoken Wyrd, Ritual Noise and Deathdream Electronics Unveiled no less. It’s also a pretty long piece in general, with zenKOAL writing dense paragraphs in a lyrical and effusive manner that, given the abrupt and indecisive formatting elsewhere in this volume, is quite welcome and even comforting. Like a lot of the entries here, this feels like a manifesto, with zenKOAL describing her practice, both magical and musical, as one in which creative works are birthed as sentient entities that gradually form over time, and eventually perpetuating themselves independent of their creator.

Music in Witchcraft and the Occult spread

In all, Music in Witchcraft and the Occult has promise but is let down by the presentation and lack of attention to detail. It is presented in an edition of 200 hand-numbered exemplars, bound in cloth with a metallic foiling of the title and a stylised flame on both the cover and the spine. There are multiple images used throughout, both graphic and photographic, with some at full page or as spreads, while others are awkwardly marooned on their own and not integrated into the text, as if they’ve retained the practical formatting of their original submission document. Accompanying the book is a CD that compiles music pieces from the various contributors: Gydja, Khtunae, She Scotia, NYIÞ, Hvile I Kaos, Brujentropy, Corona Barathri, Emme Ya and Synesect.

Published by Aeon Sophia Press

by

The Magian Tarok: The Origins of the Tarot in the Mithraic and Hermetic Traditions – Stephen E. Flowers

No comments yet

Categories: hellenic, hermeticism, mesopotamian, tarot, Tags:

The Magian Tarok coverInner Traditions and Stephen Flowers seem to have a lucrative and fulfilling relationship, reissuing many of his works from over the years, usually in revised, expanded and more substantial versions than their humble first pressings on Flowers’ own Rûna Raven Press. This is one such title, originally released in a preliminary edition following its effective completion in 1992, then more widely by Rûna Raven Press in 2006 and finally again in 2015 by Lodestar Books. Suffice to say, with a cover design by Aaron Davis and layout by Debbie Glogover, this incarnation has all the effortless class one would expect from an Inner Traditions title.

The Magian Tarok follows a slightly atypical trajectory, placing, as its subtitle makes clear, the origins of the tarot in Mithraic and Hermetic traditions, rather than any of the more usual suspects, credible or not; an idea touched on briefly by Flowers in his book Hermetic Magic. In his introduction, Flowers details how the inspiration for this book long preceded its 1992 completion, having its inception in 1981 whilst he was researching in Germany. Here, the idea had an unlikely source, being found in the academic works of the Swedish poet and philologist, and promoter of the Uthark theory of the runes, Sigurd Agrell.

Flowers begins by talking tangentially, and in somewhat surprisingly glowing terms, about postmodern theory, but, of course, one as perpetually gruff and traditionalist as he isn’t referring to *that* postmodernism, oh no, heaven for fend. Instead, he is talking about, you know, the real one; the one that probably chops wood with an axe, smokes cigars, drinks whiskey, and has a moustache, rahhhh. Needless to say, Flowers can’t resist shaking his fist at those “Marxists and crypto-Marxists” on his lawn, hijacking postmodernism and storming poor, defenceless academia, saints preserve us. This is a peculiar little spittle of invective that once again highlights the incongruity of the relationship betwixt Flowers and Inner Traditions; a company one can’t imagine spends a lot of time railing against the modern world, not when there are books to be sold about vibrational nutrition, healing crystals and tuning the human biofield. This is particularly so as Inner Traditions are the kind of publisher that comes to mind in Flower’s preface when, in the very first paragraph, he laments that the modernisation and desacralisation of the tarot “has gone so far that one can even now buy “Teen Tarot” packages;” as if this apparently inconceivable proposition was one of the veritable signs of the apocalypse, right up there with human sacrifice and cats and dogs living together. Lawks, save us all from the twin evils of teenage girls and post-structuralist academics, they assail us from all sides.

The Magian Tarok spread

To ground the book’s central hypothesis, Flowers spends a considerable time, 52 pages in all, summarising Mithraism, along with its antecedents and contemporaries: Zoroastrianism, Magianism and briefly, Stoicism. This immediately provides a perfect encapsulation of some of the problems with the writing found in The Magian Tarok; something that comes as a surprise given Flowers’ experience and mileage as an author. Despite its 52 pages, this one chapter contains only five cited references, all from Franz Cumont’s seminal if not unassailable The Mysteries of Mithras, with all other secondary sources uncited, thereby leaving the reader to entirely trust Flowers’ description of these religious systems or to guess the source from amongst the three page bibliography at the back. Two of these citations relate awkwardly to a summary of Cumont’s highly speculative recreation of the story behind the tauroctony (the familiar if enigmatic slaying of the bull by the Roman form of Mithras), which, given the text’s block quote formatting makes it appear to be a direct quote from The Mysteries of Mithras, which it isn’t. This lack of sources other than Cumont is problematic given that so much of the writing is riddled with weasel words and false appeals to authority. There’s an abundant use of qualifiers like ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps,’ but even more egregious are those appeals to false authority with phrases such as “it has been said,” “some say” and “some believe,” as well as references to some unspecified “most early scholars” and their descendants, the equally anonymous “some recent scholars.”

In addition to issues with referencing are some sloppy editing moments where whole sections of information are repeated redundantly, almost as if a few notes have been fleshed out one way and incorporated into the text, only for the author to rewrite the same information and insert it into the body a few pages later, appearing to forget doing it the first time. On page 15, for example, Flowers introduces Zarathustra and relates how this Iranian priest identified the embodiment of absolute divinity as Ahura Mazda (Lord-Wisdom), with all other gods and goddesses as abstract principles created by them. A brief five pages later, with the details still fresh in the memory of the reader, if not his own, Flowers disorientatingly introduces Zarathustra again and tells how he identified the embodiment of absolute divinity as Ahura Mazda (Lord-Wisdom) with all other gods and goddesses as abstract principles created by him. In other instances, concepts are discussed before they are defined, with, for example, Zurvanism being mentioned several times, albeit only by name, before a full explanation comes pages later, finally introducing Zurvan as if they hadn’t been mentioned in passing prior.

The Magian Tarok spread

After this lengthy grounding, Flowers moves on to a consideration of stoiechia, by which is meant the letters of the Greek alphabet, thus providing the book’s first hint of a pathway between Mithraism and the tarot. Flowers presents an esoteric, Mithraic interpretation of each letter, seemingly based entirely on the work of Agrell as no other sources, ancient or modern, are mentioned. Thus, the bull symbolism of alpha (or at least its Phoenician antecedent aleph) relates to the tauroctony; beta, as the second letter, is the lesser god and second principle of life in Zoroastrianism, the malevolent Ahriman; whereas the third letter, gamma, refers to Mithras who in Greek texts, according to Flowers, was “often called” triplasios (‘three-times-as-much’) and which he takes to imply the idea of a Mithraic trinity. It is worth noting that the names of these many Greek texts are not cited and the primary, if not only, use in Greek of the triplasios term for Mithras is by the 5th-6th century Christian theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, where he employs it in the sense of thrice-great, rather than a trinitarian threefold.

This is all very speculative and it often feels like an association is made using the barest of symbolic simulacra, which is fine when one is doing an esoteric investigation for oneself, but less so when these correspondences are ostensibly being presented as an ancient belief system with a lineage that also stretches forward at least two millennia into the modern age. As the Greek letters do not have the rich symbolic associations of Hebrew or the runes, a meaning often has to be drawn, with some effort, from their numeric value using a simple Mispar Hechrachi-style number-for-letter formula. As a result, things get reachier the further into the alphabet one goes, with one of the reachiest being the eleventh letter, lambda, which is said to be associated with growth and vegetative virility. To get to this, Agrell noted that an excerpt from the Zoroastrian scripture Bundahishn tells how from five parts of the slain cosmic bull sprung 55 types of grain and twelve kinds of healing herbs. Discounting the twelve herbs, Agrell introduced the number 11 and tortuously argued that since 5 times 11 equals 55, then 11 must be the number that signifies growth and vegetative virility; not the referenced 5, nor 55, and certainly not 12. Like we said, so reachy, and that’s not even taking into account that the Bundahishn excerpt in question has Ahriman and his evil forces as the killers of the bull, not Mithra, who in his Iranian form is never associated with that act.

Undaunted with the sketchiness of this assignment to the Greek alphabet of myriad Zoroastrian and prochronistic Roman Mithraist elements, the next chapter moves forward in time with an assumption that said esoteric attributes were transferred from the Greek letters to their Latin equivalent. Little time is spent on this evolution and instead Flowers takes it as read and moves swiftly on to Agrell’s interpretation of the tarot, admitting for the first time that it would be untenable to suggest that the tarot trumps existed at this period in their later card form, but rather that their symbolism was then extant and conveyed in the esoteric import given to symbols, such as the Greek and Roman letters. Only later, the theory goes, were these arbitrary (and seemingly reverse-engineered) associations given pictorial form in the cards of the tarot; assuming an uninterrupted lineage of centuries.

The Magian Tarok spread

Flowers goes through each of the trumps, giving Agrell’s interpretation and fleshing out the information with additional details. There’s a lot of wrangling of imagery drawn not just from Mithraism’s limited symbolism but also ancient Egypt, Greece and more broadly, Hermeticism, all of which has to then be inelegantly tied back to Mithraism in order to fit the brief; although sometimes the stretch was apparently too great to bother with. Thus, the wand-wielding Magician is linked to a was-sceptre-holding Set, but then Flowers has to make this relevant to Agrell’s hypothesis with a hand-waving claim that “it is also likely” that during the Persian rule of Egypt, their Mithra was identified with the native Set. Similarly, The High Priestess is just, well, any queen-like goddess figure, so yeah, let’s say Isis, and well, maybe Cybele, and then let’s see if we can tie this in to Mithras based merely on the proximity of their respective cults, Yeah, that’ll do. Next! What, another goddess figure for The Empress? Ahh, that must have been Diana for, um, reasons. These Mithraists weren’t exactly bothered about encoding many figures unique to their ill-defined cosmology into these cards, any old god will do, almost as if these magi had the benefit of four millennia of mythological hindsight at their disposal.

Throughout this analysis, any coincidence is looked upon as proof and any inconsistency is acknowledged as something that must have changed, albeit for unspecified, mysterious reasons. Thus, The Fool is an image of the tauroctony, but the bull has been turned, naturally, I guess, into the jester figure, with his cap and bells read, for the first time by anyone ever, as bull’s ears. Mithras himself is completely absent, but lo, a dog seen in the tauroctony is there in the trump; although let’s ignore the fact that the dog is parasitically licking the bull’s blood in the former, while trying to warn the Fool of imminent danger in the latter. Not to mention that the dog first appears in the Marseilles deck, and not in any of its 15th century predecessors.

Ultimately, none of the interpretations of the cards are very convincing and the entire premise fails to move beyond confusing correlation for causation. Rather than showing that there was some ancient template for the 15th century tarot deck, inconceivably carried through time for over 1500 years by a secret magian brotherhood straight out of Dan Brown’s tawdry fiction, the swish of Occam’s Razor would argue that the 15th century designs, like any other creative output, drew their imagery from a vast array of extant sources and influences, both esoteric and mundane. Once again, if it was simply a matter of retroactively applying a Greek, Hermetic and tiny sliver of Mithraism to the symbolism of the tarot, in a manner done, for example, by anyone designing a new tarot with a specific cultural variation, then that would be fine; even if the links are, as mentioned, often tenuous. The issue though is with the implausible central hypothesis that all this happened the other way round, all managed by magian adepts with a knowledge of Hermeticism, two versions of Mithras (both Persian and Roman), who were also cognisant of a future where mere playing cards could become a system of divination (and then desacralized by those damn teenagers). This sloppy scholarship is exacerbated by the attempts to give names to these non-existent Roman trumps, as if that’s what they would really have been called, claiming for example that the original Roman name for Strength “was probably Magnitudo,” that for The Hanged Man “the evocative interpretation was probably Noxa,” that the Roman name for Temperance “was likely Pluvia, “rain (water),”” and that The Devil “would have carried the name Quirinus.” Even with those weasel word caveats, these are pretty bold claims to pull out of the aether and I could just as easily say, with comparable certainty, that The Tower was originally almost certainly most definitely called Geminae Turris (and the other tower was removed from the card’s imagery at some point because, you know, reasons).

The Magian Tarok spread

As an argument for a theory best left in the 1930s, the content of The Magian Tarok has little to recommend it, stretching symbolism, time, logic and the reader’s credulity. At best, one could say the book is merely a prima facie presentation of Agrell’s theory and is not intended as either critique or advocacy, But beyond the tarot theory itself, as a history of Mithraism it is also lacking, rife as it is with its lack of reference to both primary and secondary sources, and with its preponderance of weasel words, setting the discerning reader adrift in a sea of uncertain provenances and fruitless speculation. Given the relative obscurity of Mithraism, a clearer, more referenced consideration of the topic would be recommended, with less reliance solely on Cumont, as some of his once popular theories have attracted criticism over the years, beginning in 1971 with John Hinnells and R.L. Gordon at the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies.

The layout of The Magian Tarok comes, as ever, by way of the expert hand of the aforementioned Debbie Glogover, who sets the body in Garamond, with Brioso, Goudy Oldstyle and Gill Sans as display faces. Images are dotted throughout the book and the tarot trumps are represented four-fold in each example, with a row of three cards drawn variously from the Visconti-Sforza, Marseilles, Grigonneur, Rosenwald and Mantegna decks, topped each time by a larger featured image from the photographic tarot of Amber Rae Broderick.

Published by Inner Traditions

by

Entering the Desert – Craig Williams

1 comment

Categories: alchemy, hermeticism, magick, Tags:

Entering the Desert cover, standard hardback editionAnathema Publishing has released several works by Craig Williams, but this was the first, a relatively slight text based on the idea of the working with the theme of the desert and the solitude of monasticism. As with some other reviews of Anathema titles, this one requires a slight caveat as your humble reviewer has an editing credit here, though in my defence, time marches so inexorably forward that I often don’t immediately recall the text ‘pon reading it.

What becomes immediately apparent in reading Entering the Desert is a decisive placement of its contents in opposition, setting it, as the saying goes, against the modern world. Williams lets little time pass between moments of decrying something wrong with modernity, be it the world in general or occultism in particular. This degree of vituperative invective gets a little tiresome rather quickly, and its earnestness grates in its self-congratulatory repetition, getting in the way of good narrative as there’s almost an unspoken expectation that the reader will be hooting and hollering at each sick burn. It’s like when someone first discovers that Christianity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, or that popular culture isn’t as cool as Hot Topic culture, or when Krusty the Clown became a tell-it-like-it-is stand-up comedian, except here the shibboleth is that nasty nasty modernity, boo, hiss.

Spread with a painting by David S. Herrerias

It is, though, this opposition to the modern that acts as the primary motivation for what is presented here, with the entering of the desert being a chance to literally get away from it all. The desert is idealised as a place of isolation from the modern world, the journey to which is, as the book’s subtitle renders it, a pilgrimage into the hinterlands of the soul. Conversely, though, this is but one of what Williams identifies as two deserts, with the individual’s internal Desert of the Soul contrasting with an outer desert of the collective environment and dreaded modernity. Williams is at pains to point out that using this iconography is not an escapist fantasy or just a simple visualisation (which would, no doubt, be oh so modern), but rather a less tangible mode of being, more of a telling-it-like-it-is in which “one ruthlessly examines and accepts all the ‘aspects of life.’”

Spread with graphics by David S. Herrerias

There is a practical side to all this detached examination, and in chapter two, The Cell, Williams expounds on the use of another location within this eremophilous topography. This cell is treated less as a theoretical locus than the wilderness itself, and Williams provides a broad guide to what you’re going to get up to on your lonesome.

Inevitably, what emerges here is clearly indebted to the desert fathers and mothers of the early church, at least in an aesthetic and general approach, even if the overlay is an antinomian, anti-modern, hyper-individualist one. Like those hermetic forebears, the practitioner seeks isolation from the greater world, but Williams hastens to add that there is none of the asceticism of the latter, in which the body and flesh is abhorred and mortified. Despite the preponderance of the world ‘gnostic’ there’s also none of classic Gnosticism’s distain for matter, incarnation and existence. Instead, the cell acts as a space within which to alchemically sacralise the flesh, awakening daemonic voices from within both the mind and the body. To do this, the gnostic hermit enters a unique time stream within the cell, and performs simple exercises of breathing, mediation, reading and dreamless sleep. This awakened Sacramental Vision then allows the devotee to view the desert of the world as a source of nourishment and empowerment, a reflection of the inner landscape of the Soul, and not as an existential threat.

Image that appears blind debossed on the cover of the standard hardback edition

The broad outline of the preceding chapters gets more specific in a section called The Desert Grimoire, which provides exactly that, a grimoire of rituals and verse that is described as a transmission from the deeper regions of the wilderness of the soul. The first item of note is an introduction to a heretofore unmentioned aspect of Williams’ system, a group of primordial and supra-spacetime intelligences called the Priests of Night, whose egress within the cell can be initiated through the cultivation of its atmosphere. Other rituals follow, including a multi-day vigil, an invocation, and a lovely desert liturgy. The Desert Grimoire concludes with a section of verses, two to a page, each accompanied by a sigil and all wrapped within an ornate border. These provide a reification of what has been presented elsewhere in the book, but simplified into, or veiled by, poetic language.

Sigils and texts from the Desert Grimoire

The typography in Entering the Desert is expertly executed in typical Anathema style by Gabriel McCaughry: the body set in a relatively large, fully justified serif face, with headings and quotes in a copper tint for an understated touch of visual interest. David S. Herrerias provides extensive illustrations throughout, with both paintings and pen and ink illustrations, including one painted image of the desert that acts as both the front and rear endpapers, spreading across verso and recto. The internal paintings largely follow the style of this endpapers landscape, with a sedate tableaux of muted yellow and brown tones, including a Sparesian portrait of Williams himself. The pen and ink images follow the style seen previously from Herrerias, including his previously-reviewed Book of Q’Ab-Itz, with amalgams of Andrew Chumbley-like facetted plains and jagged geometry, and spindly things breaking into space. His desolate aesthetic makes for a fitting companion to Williams’ theme, conveying the sense of an eremitic and uncanny touching of the beyond.

In all, Entering the Desert is a pleasing little tome that brings its theme together rather well in terms of written and graphic elements. At its core, it contains some rather simple or fundamental concepts, as one would expect when the matter is one of sitting alone in the desert with nothing but wraiths and strays for company, But Williams presents these in a considered, perhaps too considered, manner that patiently reiterates each theme or technique in what becomes almost its own devotional or meditative act.

Spread with a painting by David S. Herrerias

Entering the Desert was released in four editions: a paperback, along with hardback editions of standard, collector and artisanal; all three of which are now sold out. The paperback runs to 176 pages of Rolland Opaque Natural 140M quality paper, bound in a scuff-free velvet matte with a selective spot varnish on the cover. The standard hardback edition of 400 copies featured 160 pages on Royal Sundance paper, hardbound in Sierra Tan bookcloth, with the title foiled in metallic black foil stamp on the spine and slightly hard to parse phantasmagorical figures blind-debossed to both the front and rear covers.

The collector’s edition of 150 copies binds the pages in a Fiscagomma Agenda dark brown faux leather, with a different symbol to the standard edition stamped in bronze foil on the cover, and metallic bronze foiling to the spine, It comes with a hand-numbered book plate signed by the author. Finally, the artisanal Midnight Sun edition of twelve copies was hand bound in genuine buffalo leather, dyed midnight blue, with a symbol blind debossed and gold foil stamped on the front cover. With custom-made artisanal endpapers and raised nerves and gold foiling on the spine, the Midnight Sun edition was presented in a slipcase bearing handmade custom-dyed marbled paper so that each box looked slightly different to the other.

Each hardcover edition of Entering the Desert also came with a download code for a copy of a musico-mystical contribution from ritual/dark ambient projects Shibalba, Alone in the Hollow Garden and Nam-Khar. These five tracks (or vibrational rituals, as they’re called here), three from Shibalba and two from the collaboration of Alone in the Hollow Garden and Nam-Khar, were channelled specifically as a meditative sound support for Entering the Desert and do have a certain eremophilous quality, casting detailed percussive sounds, throat singing and the occasionally languid Orientalist figure against linear landscapes.

Published by Anathema Publishing

The soundtrack for this release is naturally the pieces created by Shibalba, Alone in the Hollow Garden and Nam-Kar for Entering the Desert. The tracks by  Alone in the Hollow Garden and Nam-Kar can be heard on the Alone in the Garden Bandcamp page.

by

The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death – Edited by James R. Lewis

No comments yet

Categories: alchemy, esotericism, hermeticism

The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death coverPart of Routledge’s New Religions series, this James R. Lewis-edited anthology brings together a variety of academic writers in discussion of the Switzerland and Quebec-based Order of the Solar Temple; along with a selection of Solar Temple documents, and some previously published articles edited anew here. As with the similarly named Solar Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, there’s always something intriguing about the idea of magickal orders gone wrong, and things certainly went wrong for members of the Order of the Solar Temple. Formed in 1984, the Order of the Solar Temple came to the attention of the world ten years later when many of its members in both Europe and North America committed suicide or were murdered, while various order properties were set on fire.

Following an introduction by Lewis, things open with an archival piece by Jean-François Mayer from 1993, detailing the history of the various organisational guises, such as the exoteric Lausanne Club, that were associated with the more esoteric order, thereby placing it within a conventional new age milieu of healthy eating, homeopathy and Age of Aquarius earth changes; rather than the more hermetic and Templar-inspired incarnation the inner temple would later become. Naturally, there’s not much in what Mayer presents that foreshadows what would later occur with the Order of the Solar Temple (save for an unwittingly prescient note that the order, then so unknown, might prove of interest to later researchers), though when he describes members of the Lausanne Club innocently lighting a bonfire and dancing around it for St. John’s Day, one can’t help but think of the deadly role that fire would later play.

Considering its varied cast of contributors, The Order of the Solar Temple reads rather coherently, with each piece flowing into the next, building upon its predecessors by adding further details, but with very little in the way of redundancy; at least at the start. Mayer’s pre-1994 consideration of the order and its satellite clubs and groups is followed by Massimo Introvigne’s Ordeal by Fire: The Tragedy of the Solar Temple, which brings the narrative up to the events of 1994 with the first full recapping of what occurred. But Introvigne also prefaces this with a thorough history of the various Templar-inspired groups that preceded the Order of the Solar Temple, placing this side of the organisation within a stream of neo-Templarism and Freemasonry. With that said, though, the Order of the Solar Temple’s beliefs that do emerge throughout the book feel less like those of Templar-obsessed groups, with the usual combination of hermeticism, alchemy and Rosicrucianism, and rather a much more modern beast. Ascended masters, reincarnation and most dramatically of all, the transit to Sirius with members leaving behind their human bodies to assume new astral ‘solar bodies,’ speaks more to the post-Theosophy milieu of late-twentieth century New Age; just dressed up in white capes with red crosses, aided and abetted by a lot of sword waving.

Susan J. Palmer provides another fleshing out of the order’s inner intrigues by way of her Purity and Danger in the Solar Temple, which offers insights into some of the motivations and internal psychology of group members, all viewed through a sociological lens provided by the theories of the British anthropologist Mary Douglas. Douglas, whose work is alluded to in Palmer’s title, argued that the human body mirrors the collective body of a society and that in small and persecuted groups, any actual or perceived threat tends to be dealt with in purity rituals that govern the exits and entrances of the human body, enhancing the collective’s social control over the individual. This is a model that works rather well when applied to the insular and increasingly paranoid order, where control over bodies can be seen in the process of ‘defamilialisation,’ in which members were periodically endowed with new spiritual identities, previous incarnations whose past relationships or antipathies could have an effect on existing partnerships. The order’s affinity for a Gnostic-like asceticism and detachment from the body found its ultimate expression in the events of 1994, when the bodies of members were sloughed off in the final response to perceived external threats, and this attempt at purifying the body of the organisation was then compounded by the repeated use of fire to burn, to varying degrees of success, the corpses and order’s buildings.

John R. Hall and Philip Schuyler add to the discussion of the machinations within the order in The Mystical Apocalypse of the Solar Temple, a reprint of the fifth chapter of Hall’s Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe and Japan from 2000. As in that book, Hall and Schuyler show how the destructive end of a group like the Order of the Solar Temple cannot be simply attributed to the cliché of cult leaders with ulterior motives brainwashing the vulnerable; nor entirely to something inherently violent or destructive in a group’s beliefs. Rather, how society at large responds to this smaller microcosmic society plays a significant role, with the anti-cult hysteria generated by both the media and government departments exacerbating or even initiating conflict. Besides this premise, Hall and Schuyler’s contribution provides perhaps the most thorough recounting yet of the events leading up to 1994, whilst still managing to feel that it doesn’t excessively regurgitate or labour over details covered in previous chapters.

Jean-François Mayer provides another piece, The Dangers of Enlightenment: Apocalyptic Hopes and Anxieties in the Order of the Solar Temple, picking up from where his earlier pre-1994 essay left off, and now, with the benefit of hindsight, offers just that, hindsight, looking at some of the apocalyptic beliefs of the group and asking what signs there were of what later occurred. There’s a certain inevitable overlap of themes in the following Crises of Charismatic Authority and Millenarian Violence: The Case of the Order of the Solar Temple by John Walliss, where unlike Hall and Schuyler, he downplays the validity of any sense of persecution the order may have felt (relatively slight as it was), suggesting instead that the decision to perform the lethal transits was the result of crises of charismatic authority which, after defections and other waverings of order confidence, leaders Luc Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro sought to restore with an act of performative violence. As such, the transits can be seen as a final spectacular ritualistic gesture to the world, through which the order’s leaders tried to “reassert their authority over their followers and create some kind of legend for the order.”

Order of the Solar Temple ritual chamber

Henrik Bogdan, perhaps the only familiar name here from esoteric academia, explores a suitably occult theme in Death as Initiation: The Order of the Solar Temple and Rituals of Initiation, where he turns specifically to the initiatory rituals of Freemasonry. Bogdan gives a relatively thorough account of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, including basic rituals of the former, before ultimately bringing the discussion back to what he’s here for: how death is perceived in an initiatory manner within these types of groups, with specific reference to the Masonic legend of the murder of the master mason Hiram. This, in turn, leads to a consideration of some of the masonic-style rituals of the Order of the Solar Temple, each documented meticulously, with particular note being made of one in which the initiate is ominously taught that death is an illusion, a part of life, and one must be able to die in the profane world to be born into the cosmic world. While such language is by no means uncommon amongst metaphysical groups, Bogdan notes that the Order of the Solar Temple took it beyond the metaphorical with the transit becoming the ultimate ritual of initiation as members transformed into disincarnated Masters, creating a link between the worlds of men and the divine.

There’s the same sense of delving into occult roots in Sources of Doctrine in the Solar Temple by George D. Chryssides, though for someone with his credentials there’s a lot of minor and sloppy errors. There’s a belittling reference to Hatshepsut as an ‘Egyptian princess’ rather than as one of Egypt’s most successful pharaohs. Similarly, there’s a misrepresentation of Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled as a book that combines ancient Egyptian ideas with eastern spirituality, when the Egyptian section is but one small part of a wider consideration of various strands of Western occult traditions, alongside a history and critique of Christianity; a rookie mistake, perhaps, given the title, but really? Then there’s a strange reference to the Templar’s suppressing Catharism as their last crusade, which seems unlikely, given that it runs counter to their whole raison d’être as bankers and protectors of pilgrims to the Holy Land; and considering that what one could consider as one of their final campaigns was an unsuccessful one fighting off a Mamluk invasion on the other side of the continent in Armenia; followed by further losses of bases in the eastern Mediterranean. The most head scratching statement of all comes when Chryssides, or his editor, so poorly summarises one conspiracy theory about the Order of the Solar Temple that it inelegantly depicts extra-terrestrials building unexplained subterranean chambers (giving the reader the impression that he’s talking about ritual chambers used by the order in Switzerland, not in Nevada as the original theory has it; sigh, it’s a long story better summarised elsewhere in the book), with Jimmy Carter seemingly described at the time of the transits as the “then president”, who, with the CIA at his command, was responsible for the deaths as part of a cover-up.

At this point, things feel like they’ve reached Maximum Templar Saturation (a killer band name if ever there was one) and there can’t be much more to say. This certainly turns out to be the case with the final two essays not contributing much that hasn’t already been said. Marc Labelle’s The Ordre du Temple Solaire and the Quest for the Absolute is a muddled read with tense shifting relentlessly in a space riddled with non sequiturs and anacoluthon, reading as if it was translated from another language and not thoroughly proofed. Meanwhile, Sects, Media and the End of the World by Roland J. Campiche has little to say other than ‘media bad,’ an original sentiment to be sure.

The Order of the Solar Temple concludes with its appendix of order documents, beginning with a letter sent to 60 journalists, scholars, and government officials the morning after the fires in 1994. One part esoteric exegesis, one part paranoid invective against the order’s enemies, there’s a certainty in the words, but also a baffled desperation at the tribulations inflicted upon them by various external ne’er-do-wells. The second document here is for the Ritual for the Donning of the Talar and the Cross, referenced extensively in Bogdan’s essay, which provides an interesting insight into the order’s approach to ritual, part masonic fancy dress, part Catholic pomp and liturgy.

Published by Routledge.

by

Left-Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009 – Bruce Russell

No comments yet

Categories: hermeticism, music

Left-Handed Blows coverThe copy of Left-Handed Blows that sits before this reviewer has an interesting provenance, having been withdrawn from the library of a tertiary institution I used to work at. Quite who there would have ordered a book by the Dead C.’s Bruce Russell is hard to fathom, as the music department at this institution, both teaching staff and students, could hardly be said to have adventurous tastes. And the pristine, un-issued state of this book suggests that any optimism of usage by whoever ordered or requested it was severely misplaced, and it held no interest for a demographic for whom Sgt. Pepper’s was probably a bit too weird.

Consisting of material on sound and its role in culture written over sixteen years, Left-Handed Blows compiles essays, liner notes, catalogue contributions, as well as most of the previously published content of the Russell-edited Logopandocy: The Journal of Vain Erudition, published by Ekskubalauron Press. Anyone familiar with Russell’s work will not be surprised to see a collection such as this reviewed amongst our usual selection of occult books, as his work has always had a stream of esotericism, qabalah and Hermeticism running through it, right down to the choice of Corpus Hermeticum as a record label name. And it is musings along these themes that provide the most interesting readings amongst these pages.

Left-Handed Blows title page

Russell begins with a dense and lengthy essay that bears the same title as this book, establishing theory and methodology and drawing on a variety of principally Marxist figures such as Guy Debord and György Lukács to discuss the idea of improvisation and its resulting improvised sound work (AKA noise) as not only a critique of music, but a form that perpetually critiques its own existence by its very method of creation. This theoretical investigation is intended by Russell to provide a prism through which the subsequent writings are viewed, though he warns the reader against expecting any coherent theory, choosing instead to refer to the various bits of content as ‘gilded splinters.’

As is perhaps typical of their origin in Logopandocy, some of the contributions here have a distinctly zine-like feel to them, such as the free noise manifesto What is free? from 1994, a ten point (with multiple subpoints) declaration originally published in the legendary Bananafish and then reprinted in Logopandocy. Another list is found in Contra-Fludd/contra-Kepler, presenting ten theses extolling the disharmony of the spheres, where noise and improvisation is set in opposition to the mechanistic vision of the music of the spheres, freeing humanity to make music no longer celestial but human. Adorably, what are brief, usually one-sentence statements actually run to four pages due to the extensive footnotes that rise towards these ten theses like a threatening tide of small point-size information; providing a thorough background to the references to Pythagoras, Robert Fludd, Johannes Kepler and the like. Finally, another numbered list is found in Russell’s notes towards an epistemology of tape music, Time under the rule of the commodity, which concludes by stating that by foregrounding the medium and its method of operation, tape music makes destruction and human choice central to art.

Left-Handed Blows footnotes

Three of the contributions here take the form of interviews or conversations, allowing for a consideration of many of the themes featured elsewhere in these pages but in an informal and, well, conversational manner. The more conventional of these is an interview by Marco Fusinato for Axe magazine in which Russell describes performance process in practical terms, detailing his different approaches in the Dead C. and A Handful of Dust, as well as providing information about the Lyttelton circle of musicians and his labels Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum. It is the most rock musician-like interview here, and the other two focus more acutely on the theoretical. In a dialogue with Alastair Galbraith, a frequent collaborator with Russel as one half of A Handful of Dust, the two muse on improvisation and its virtues, with Galbraith approaching the metaphysical by describing how randomness opens realms within which the very randomness creates its own melodies, almost as a sentient spirit operating on those who are open to its influence. Improvisation, structure and randomness is also considered in a 1993 conversation with Russell led by Danny Butt, now Associate Director (Research) at Victoria College of the Arts but also a one-time member of Flies Inside The Sun and one half of Tanaka-Nixon Meeting with Michael Morley. Here the conversation turns to Russell’s interest in neo-Platonism, Hermeticism and the philosophia naturalis of Fludd and others, not as a conscious metaphysical justification for, as he describes it, “this kind of din,” but as an unintended intersection betwixt musical praxis and philosophical truths. Russell reveals a love and sympathy for the worldviews professed by these archaic predecessors, ones which fell quickly away with the emergence of the materialistic materialism of Cartesian thought and the various aspects of Newtonianism that inform the modern scientific paradigm. While he doesn’t subscribe to these older ideas in their entirety, he laments the now lost holistic principles and attendant concepts of the macrocosm and microcosm, seeking to develop a dialogue between the worlds of then and now.

In To think is to speculate with images, Russell details another intersection of his praxis with Hermeticism in a discussion of the search for a reformed philosophical language that would replicate the universal and presumably divine language spoken in Eden before the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. For Russell, the way in which Giordano Bruno, and subsequently Fludd, designated post-Babel languages as less capable of “communicating a profound level of intersubjective meaning than images” mirrors his belief in improvisation. The use of improvisation, he argues, is closer to real, direct communication, whereas the rules of academic musical tradition create impediments to this lingua adamic-like flow between musician and listener with the use of premeditation and intellectual mediation.

Left-Handed Blows photography by Bruce Russell

Not all the writings here directly concern Russell’s own music, and there are liner notes for several releases by Ralf Wehowsky as well as considerations of two of Russell’s fellow New Zealanders: Douglas Lilburn and Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel. In a piece I remember reading in The Wire in 2005, Russell reviews the then freshly-released complete electronic works of Lilburn, arguably New Zealand’s greatest composer, and someone he memorably describes as wearing an acrylic sweater and looking like his uncle. Russell’s discussion of Kneale, meanwhile, is from the liner notes to the Birchville Cat Motel album Gunpowder Temple of Heaven, whose hallucinatory slabs of noise are given a religious analogue: the massive drones of metal pipe organs, the cavernous acoustics of cathedrals, the walls of Jericho succumbing to Joshua’s barrage of sounding trumpet.

The writings in Left-Handed Blows are never long, providing easily digested little excursion into particular areas of Russell’s interest, but with each running to usually three pages or more, they are always complete and fully realised. Russell’s ability to draw from Marxist philosophy, various strands of occultism, as well as music both conventional and atypical provides the collection with diverse frames of reference that makes you feel smarter just for reading it.

Left-Handed Blows spread

Funded by Creative New Zealand and supported by the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, Left-Handed Blows was designed by Warren Olds and sub-edited by Gwynneth Porter. It is bound in a rich brown card with full-page French flaps, and the title and author foiled in gold on both the front and rear covers. Double-sided end-papers feature full page black and white photographs by Russell, providing the book’s only visual accompaniment.

Published by Clouds

The soundtrack for this review is The Dead C: Vain, Erudite and Stupid: Selected Works 1987?-?2005  

by

The Fenris Wolf 9 – Edited by Vanessa Sinclair & Carl Abrahamsson

Categories: art, chaos, esotericism, hermeticism

The Fenris Wolf 9 coverAdorned with stunning, numinous cover art by Val Denham, this is the latest issue of Carl Abrahamsson’s irregularly published esoteric journal and contains material from the 2016 Psychoanalysis, Art & the Occult conference held at the Candid Arts Centre in London. The Fenris Wolf has come a long way from its first issues, as evidenced by a much-loved copy of the third volume from 1993 in the shelves at Scriptus Recensera: its blue perfect-bound spine now sun-faded to a yellowy grey, pages printed with somewhat erratic toner integrity, and images reproduced with very noticeable halftone dots, as was the style of the time.

As one would expect given the title of the conference, this issue of The Fenris Wolf has a particular focus on the intersection between psychoanalysis and the occult, with art being often the child thereof. Visual artist and writer, Katelan Foisy, kicks things off with an invocation to the spirits and history of the host city, documenting everything in its history, starting with the Roman founding of Londinium, although ending abruptly in the 1960s, as if anything that happened after Swinging London didn’t amount to much. The first essay, Art as Alchemy, proper brings art to the fore with folk musician Sharron Kraus discussing the cliché of the tortured artist, and questioning whether there’s any truth to that conceit. One such alchemical artist is John Balance of Coil, who is considered here by Graham Duff, not for his musical works but rather his considerably lesser known paintings and drawings. This is an affectionate and generous survey of Balance’s, how do you say, naïve oeuvre, with Duff importing a lot of intent and meaning to what in many cases are doodles of, well, doodles.

The Fenris Wolf 9 spread with work by John Balance

Given the subject matter, two names that spring up repeatedly within the pages of this volume are Sigmund Freud and Austin Osman Spare, with Carl Jung and David Bowie along for the de rigueur ride. The contrast between the dogmatically pragmatic Freud and the mystical Jung is something mentioned across contributions, with Gary Lachman asking in title and body, Was Freud Afraid of the Occult, and Steven Reisner covering similar ground in On the Dance of the Occult and Unconscious in Freud. Meanwhile, in matters of the spiritual and artistic, Spare is a natural touchstone for Balance in Duff’s piece on him, and he can also be found name-checked throughout this volume. The largest consideration of AOS, though, comes from Robert Ansell of Fulgur Press in Androgyny, Biology and Latent Memory, in which he conversationally talks of themes of the androgyne within Spare’s works, drawing from individual pieces, as well as most notably, The Focus of Life.

The Fenris Wolf 9 spread with work by Austin Osman Spare

The line-up of the Psychoanalysis, Art & the Occult conference, as befits its title, drew on artists, occultists and psychologists; with some lucky presenters like editor Vanessa Sinclair going for the trifecta. Perhaps the most, how you say, clinical account comes from Ingo Lambrecht whose Wairua: Following Shamanic Contours hits closest to this reviewer’s geographical location. Lambrecht discusses the use of Te Whare Tapa Wha as a M?ori model for mental health in which the wharenui of the title is comprised of four supporting cornerstones: tinana (physical), hinengaro (mental), wh?nau (family) and wairua (spirit). Wairua is defined here as being an abyss of unmanifested potential comparable to the Ain Soph in Kabbalah, the notion of Zen, and the Via Negativa of Meister Eckhart. Lambrecht shows how a model such as Te Whare Tapa Wha can sit alongside a more materialist psychological one, allowing for an acknowledgement of the sacred and unheimlich. It is worth noting that this is not the only consideration of things from an Aotearoa perspective and artist Charlotte Rodgers in her Stripped to the Core suggests that growing up in a then-isolated New Zealand gave her a magickal edge of sorts.

The Fenris Wolf 9 spread

The more satisfying contributions in The Fenris Wolf 9 are less the considerations of psychology and psychoanalysis and rather those that focus on art and how that intersects with the latter. This is particularly so in instances where artists consider their own work. In a far too brief piece, ending just as you expect it to go further, Ken Henson discusses what as he refers to as the American Occult Revival in his work, connecting his own processes with nineteenth century mesmerism and spiritualism; though it is largely only a singular piece of work, Miss Maude Fealy as Hekate, that he considers in these far too brief pages. In her Proclaim Present Time Over, Val Denham describes how dreams influence her life and work, both visual and aural, presenting the process, as intimated by the William Burroughs and Brion Gysin inspired title, as a magickal act that draws creativity from the subconscious. This is something also explored by Katelan Foisy and Vanessa Sinclair, who are similarly indebted to Burroughs and Gysin and in particular the use of techniques, such as cut-ups, that tap into magickal creativity by disrupting linear time and narrative. Though it is hard to always tell for sure which of the two collaborators are speaking, Sinclair appears to begin first, giving a thorough discussion of the use of cut-ups, emphasising a psychological paradigm concerned with memory as befits her doctorate in psychology, while Foisy takes a more biographical route, describing a series of events and synchronicities concerning the channelling of Burroughs through creative outputs.

The Fenris Wolf 9 spread with work by Malcolm McNeill

This combination of magickal techniques that incorporate the horological and oneiric makes a claim for the preeminent experiential expression of the occult within these pages, drawing on a heady mix of influences from Burroughs, Gysin and Spare. This makes The Fenris Wolf 9 feel very, well, Fenris Wolf, pulling on the same TOPY, chaos magick, Beats and counter cultural strings that can be seen in the journal’s earlier issues. In addition to the examples provided by Sinclair and Foisy, the use of cut-ups reoccur in Fred Yee’s self-evidently-titled Cut-up as Egregore, Oracle and Flirtation Device, in which he namechecks Sinclair and Foisy as teachers and inspiration, reiterating many of their points and techniques. Similarly, the use of dreams already explored by Denham is appraised again by Derek M Elmore, in what is inevitably another consideration of Spare with Dreams and the Neither-Neither. Here, Elmore looks at the themes of love, sex, obsession, unconscious, dreams and death, comparing Spare’s conceptions of them with those in the published works of Freud.

The Fenris Wolf 9 spread

The ninth volume of The Fenris Wolf is a weighty tome at just under 250 pages, with type set in a small point size serif face, surrounded by large margins and a fairly generous footer. Predominantly text-based, in-body illustrations are limited to a few examples where appropriate, while a section of full page images provide examples of the work of Balance, Henson and Malcolm McNeill. Writing quality is overall high, with the dryness of some contributions (and the tiresome spectre of Freud) being offset by the more interesting, chaos and Beats-flavoured ones.

Published by Trapart

by

Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism – Algis Uždavinys

Categories: classical, esotericism, hellenic, hermeticism

Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism coverIn the preface to Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism, Juan Acevedo, director of the publisher Matheson Trust, provides an initial outline of the work, being one in which, he says, Dr. Uždavinys’ intoxicated enthusiasm for his topic is tempered with a need to carry out exposition in a discursive and academic manner. It is a work which, would you believe, moves uneasily between the apophatic and the cataphatic, and we all know what kind of shenanigans that leads to. No? Alrighty then.

Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism runs as a single, 99-page monograph, divided into 24 chapters or sections that are given titles in the contents page, but infuriatingly, not in the actual body. Without these appearing within the body, the journey that Uždavinys takes the reader on can feel a little unstructured, as he jumps from one topic to the other without preamble. Laborious though it is, it becomes helpful to flip back to the contents page when encountering a new chapter, just to give you a sense of what is coming; and even then, that sometimes helps little.

Its sub-100 pages belie this volume’s density, with Uždavinys employing a multi-layered, polymathical style of writing that crams the pages with as much information as possible and often seems to divert into detail. Conversely, though, Uždavinys avoids using any theoretical framework or providing definitions of terms, so his highly specialised lexicon can be intimidating for those not familiar with it. Contrary to the title, there’s not always a lot of Orpheus involved, and this is no clearer than in the first chapter which begins, sans Orpheus, with a discussion of madness as a melancholy-like gift of the gods that can be poetic, telestic or prophetic (poietike mania, telestike mania and mantike mania).

Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism contents

Indeed, the roots that Uždavinys speaks of are more likely to be found in Egypt and more broadly, Mesopotamian, most notably Babylonia and Assyria. Even here, though, Platonism itself begins to lose its status as the focus of the text with Uždavinys spending an inordinate, though enjoyable, time considering the nature of prophecy and divine utterances in ancient Mesopotamia. These mantic experiences are explored exhaustively and range from the kind of channelled material generated by priests and priestesses standing within temples and embodying the gods, to local prophets who received messages from the gods involuntarily. This thorough exploration is divorced from what one would assume, given the title, is the focus of the book, and when Uždavinys does make reference to parallels in Greece he uses the rather less than satisfying, and possibly euphemistic, example of Pythagoras teaching from behind a curtain.

Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism spread

That isn’t to say there isn’t any mention of Orpheus or Orphism here, and the following four sections explicitly bear his name in their titles. Given the scarcity of extant information about a mythic figure like Orpheus though, and the lack of definition Uždavinys gives in turn to Orphism, these sections are brief, considerably more so than those that precede and proceed them, before yet another tangent is enthusiastically and abruptly pursued.

To return to the introductory words of Juan Acevedo, whether Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism does indeed move uneasily between the apophatic and the cataphatic this reviewer cannot say for sure, but it does succeed in its inability to sit still, ensuring that little gems spark interest amongst the turmoil of Uždavinys’ generously-described “discursive manner.”

Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism spread

With the expectation generated by the title ignored, what Uždavinys provides is an interesting consideration of a variety of matters of interest to the esotericist, whether it be prophecy, initiation, divine inspiration, cosmology and eschatological conceptions of the soul. That these are hidden away within Uždavinys’ somewhat desultory text may make the journey all the more satisfying.

Published by the Matheson Trust

1 2