mesopotamian | Scriptus Recensera

Categories: mesopotamian, Tags: Brill,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published by Brill

May 30, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

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

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Categories: luciferian, mesopotamian, Tags: SUNY Press,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published by SUNY Press

May 4, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published by De Gruyter

July 7, 2022 by ScriptusScribe

The Canticles of Lilith – Nicholaj & Katy de Mattos Frisvold

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Categories: goddesses, mesopotamian, nightside, qabalah, Tags: Troy Books,

While the output of Troy Books often has a somewhat rustic and grounded feel in their choice of subject matter, reflecting localised folk and witchcraft traditions from different areas of the British Isles, on this, their first release for Troy Books, Nicholaj and Katy de Mattos Frisvold offers something slightly more sinisterly glamorous. As its title makes clear, the focus here is on Lilith, and in particular how she relates to witchcraft, with considerations of her manifestations astrological, Luciferian, Satanic, and erotic, as well as explorations of her multifaceted roles as a vampiric spirit, a Satanic muse, the witch-mother, a spirit of illness, the word of creation, and even the holy spirit herself.

What strikes the reader immediately is the aesthetic quality of the presentation here, with Troy Books replacing their previous, relatively smooth binding with a far more textured one, a gorgeous, thick-thread red cloth that takes the metallic foiling of the cover and spine very well. The interior is equally pleasing with black end papers, a nice weighty paper stock throughout, and formatting that, while functional, is effortlessly professional with it. It is slightly jarring then to be met with the first sentence, suggesting that perhaps the same amount of care should have gone into the editing. This one sentence runs to eight lines of swirling tense, multiple verbs, and minimal punctuation, which we will repeat here in its entirety since nothing else can quite convey all its hallucinatory and exhausting glory. Public health warning: do not attempt to read out loud without a respirator at hand. “Lilith has been tied to the idea of “witchcraft” either as Queen, demoness, vampire, or a spirit of lustful vice and all of these ideas hold a part of her mystery, but for the cunning one she represents the witch-mother herself that with the fallen host and their offspring gave to the fair-daughters of Cain and Seth this special blood that generated the different seed in the world that gave rise to the cunning ones.”

Although thing don’t always approach this befuddling level of complexity, it is indicative of the type of language and structure used throughout this book. Sentences frequently feel as if they are verging on chaos, be it through a breathless running-on, a concatenation of verbs that disorientates with a surfeit of opposing actions, or in the repetition of particular words in a single sentence when a synonym would suffice. There’s also an inconsistent approach to punctuation, where sometimes it is critically absent, while in other instances, its presence is superfluous. What makes this particularly confusing is that the style of writing, and the coherence thereof, seems to shift, possibly due to the double author credit, or due to parts having been written at different times. This is furthered by the way in which there has been no attempt to align the styles, either during the base writing, or at the editing stage. Indeed, one imagines that the degree of editing needed here would have amounted to a complete rewrite of the manuscript, almost negating any author’s credit. However, even a cursory proof-read seems to have been skipped, as things like errant or entirely missing words, not to mention a general vibe of unreadability, have been left intact.

In all, it is very distracting and it is impossible to escape, especially when some sentences have to be read several times to get the intent, or when the reader has to pause to get over unintended comedic moments engendered by the poor structure. Our favourite is the mental image of a caudal humanity when a discussion of huldre makes the statement: “These forest people were said to be creatures created before mankind with a tail.” Hang on, when was mankind created with a tail?

It really is a shame, particularly because Nicholaj and Katy de Mattos Frisvold clearly have an enthusiasm and passion for their subject, with their devotional fervour being quite palpable. There’s a feeling that this should be a poetic book, with florid turns of phrase adorning the language, like Peter Grey’s giddy Apocalyptic Witchcraft or his paean to Babalon in The Red Goddess, but yes, they’re not Grey, with none of his deft command of prose or his attention to detail when proofing and refining. Ultimately, a disservice is done to the book and to its very subject, especially since an unwillingness to write and edit in a credible manner makes one immediately mistrust the credibility of the very words themselves.

The Canticles of Lilith is divided into three parts, with the first two dealing with the theoretical and historical, and the third providing some practical elements. The first of these, The Lilithian Constellation, casts its net pretty wide, largely dealing not with Lilith herself, but with similar themes in adjacent cultures. By its very nature, in which Lilith is effectively treated as a vibe, this is a broad and uncritical survey in which anything slightly resembling Lilithian traits can be picked out, using confirmation bias to build a comprehensive, albeit circumstantial, picture of her as persistent and universal. As we are talking metaphysics here, there’s no need to track, or even claim, some historical path of thematic or cultural diffusion, but even with that allowance made, it can sometimes feel a bit tenuous. This is particularly noticeable when several pages are devoted to discussing Stregoneria with nary a mention of Lilith, save towards the end when there are attempts to fold her back into the discussion. It feels almost as if this was dropped in from somewhere else, which is exactly what happened, as this is Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold’s article Stregoneria: A Roman Furnace, which appeared in Scarlet Imprint’s 2013 anthology Serpent Songs. Amusingly, the 2013 version reads a lot better, as Scarlet Imprint’s copy editor Troy Chambers mush have done a fair bit of work on it, and as a result, that incarnation is deceptively readable; whereas the version copied into this new book is presumably closer to the unpolished original.

The book’s focus makes a welcomed shift to Lilith specifically in the second section, The Atmosphere of Lilith, though once again there is a feeling of things being all over the place, both in the general narrative and in sentence construction, with the tortuous writing and awkward phrasing making it a chore to get through. A favourite line, giving some much needed comic relief, comes early on in an attempt to paint Lilith’s grand history, using a strange and clumsy Mesozoic simile: “She rose from being a spirit fated to die, like a dinosaur – but still her legacy and prominence spread across the worlds as history advanced.”

The difficulty of following this addlepated text is aided and abetted by underused and inconsistent formatting, such as when references to sources texts blend into the body because they aren’t italicised, except when they suddenly are, with things getting to a ridiculous level in one reference to The Alphabet of Ben Sira in which only the second half of the title is in italics. Indeed, this whole section is rough, with sources texts from all over the place being introduced, often with zero context, giving the impression that they represent a cohesive body of lore, but with no regard to gulfs either cultural or temporal. There is the statement that Lilith is mentioned several times in “the Nag Hammadi or Dead Sea Scrolls” as if the two collections of texts are the same thing, but no actual examples are given. Instead, the paragraph refers, by comparison, to the strange woman ambiguously mentioned as a personification of temptation in Proverbs 2:16-19, with Friswold adding the bold claim that the biblical text describes her as having horns and wings (it doesn’t). One assumes that Friswold is referring to the Wicked Woman who appears in a short sapiential poem from the Dead Sea Scrolls, catalogued as 4Q184. She is an ambiguous figure who is frequently compared to the Strange Woman of Proverbs, but none of that is explored in any detail here, as if a secondary reference has been poorly transcribed, with no real investigation of the source texts. This also speaks to a flaw in the overall approach, in which a lack of rigour is combined with unwarranted certainty. There is much that could be made in investigating the Wicked Woman of 4Q184 as well as other unnamed scriptural figures as analogues of Lilith, getting into the weeds and assessing strengths and weaknesses to such arguments. But none of that occurs here, and the opportunity is wasted, replaced with categorical claims that these constitute specific references to Lilith, almost as if she is named as such within them.

The historically amorphous overviews of this section eventually lead to a consideration of the sephira and corresponding qlipha of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, culminating with Lilith’s association with Malkuth. This is a thorough consideration though, and not limited to just Malkuth, with on average a full page of information about each of the other sephiroth/qliphoth being given. Matters then turn back to non-Mesopotamian folklore, with more exploration of figures that can be compared to Lilith, with a particular focus on her association with disease, pulling variously from Greek mythology, Romani folklore and even Norse mythology. One of the key approaches here is to take three figures from a mythos and draw a triangle between them as if the space within connotes some great importance in embodying a ‘lilithian force.’ It’s all a bit arbitrary, putting, for example, Óðinn, Þórr and Frigga/Freyja (because, sure, why not treat them like they’re the same goddess) at each point, as well as bizarrely associating Þórr with the sun, Óðinn with the moon and Frigga/Freyja with Venus. There are also some weird little moments in this barrage of frequently context-lacking folklore, such as the head-scratching claim that in some unspecified legends, Tubal-Cain is the son of Cain and Eve. And then there’s this section’s opening sentence, stating that in his Ars Poetica, Horace “translates Lilith to Lamia,” a claim which appears to have been cut and pasted from a long-since-revised version of the Lilith page on Wikipedia. There’s no explanation as to how the Roman poet was supposedly translating Lilith to Lamia, and no context for the reference to Lamia within his guide to poetics, not even a mention of who Horace was. This abrupt statement thus comes across as something glommed but unexplored from an old Wikipedia page, employed as a pointless opening to the discussion that follows concerning Lilith’s similarities with Lamia.

The excessive excoriation that has typified this review comes from a place of disappointment rather than malice, because The Canticles of Lilith is a book that promises much and could have been so much more if attention had be paid to the quality of writing, in both a mechanical sense, and in the very presentation of the information. There is much that is included here in a raw manner, but it is treated so clumsily and awkwardly, that it is just sad. Such is the degree of disappointment that it is difficult not to list every error that irritates as one progresses through the book, so, for our sanity, we shall draw a line in the sand and move on to the final section, The Rites of Lilith’s Basilica, where things take a more practical turn. These entries are largely invocatory in nature, with a liturgy of a noticeably purple persuasion, with rituals for Hekate and Ishara thrown in too because why not? Running to 55 pages, this is a decent collection of workings, and there’s enough variety in approaches and formulae that for those inclined, there’s much here that can be put to use.

The Canticles of Lilith has been released in the traditional Troy Books range of editions: paper, standard hardback, and already sold-out special and fine editions. All have a page count of 264 on 90gsm cream paper stock, with the paper edition featuring a gloss laminate cover showcasing a painting by Katy de Mattos Frisvold. The standard hardback edition is bound in a dark red cloth with a spine title and a crest-like device on the cover blocked in silver foil, finished off with black end papers, and black head and tail bands. The 125 copy special edition replaces the cloth binding with a black faux leather, and silver foil blocking on the cover and spine, with red end papers, red head and tail bands. Finally, the fine edition was hand bound in a red leather with blocking in black foil to the spine and cover (with a different sigil design than the other editions), all housed in a fully-lined black library buckram blind embossed slip case.

Published by Troy Books

June 12, 2022 by ScriptusScribe

Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible – Reed Carlson

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Categories: mesopotamian, Tags: De Gruyter

Bearing the subtitle Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena, Reed Carlson’s Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible is an exploration of how the Hebrew Bible treats the phenomenon of spirit possession; something more commonly associated with late Second Temple Jewish literature and Christianity’s New Testament. Carlson is an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies and the Director of Anglican Studies at the United Lutheran Seminary and this book is based on his 2019 doctoral dissertation at Harvard Divinity School, Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena in Biblical Literature, which it hews to very closely. In both dissertation and book, the core thesis argues that hitherto little-explored themes of possession and other spirit interactions are present in the bible, though rarely conforming to those paradigms established by Christianity and Western intellectual history.

Despite this book’s obvious grounding in Hebrew texts, Carlson begins with a contemporary if somewhat incongruous scene from the 1980s, detailing a case, later used as the basis for one of the Conjuring movies, in which Arne Cheyenne Johnson was convicted of first-degree manslaughter for the killing of his landlord, having unsuccessfully pleaded not guilty by reason of demonic possession. This is used, not by way of comparison to what follows, but in contrast, as exemplary of the more dramatic and popular idea of spirit possession, but one that is not found in either the Hebrew Bible, or in many contemporary spirit practices.

Given the dearth in considerations or even acknowledgements of this theme within the Hebrew bible, it is understandable that the examples here are rather limited, with Carlson beginning with, and making much hay from, King Saul’s encounter with the witch of Endor and her summoning of the shade of the prophet Samuel. As Carlson shows, this emphasis makes a lot of sense, not just because of the strength of the image of a dead prophet being summoned from his grave, but because Saul’s involvement with spirits predates that later sequence, with 1 Samuel providing a catalogue of incidences that confirm his standing as one of the most dynamically spirit-affected people in the bible. He is possessed by the spirit of the Lord whilst entering the city of Gibeah, temporarily becoming a prophet and being explicitly “turned into a different person” as the text has it. Later, though, after displeasing his fickle divine patron, Saul finds that not only does the spirit of the Lord depart from him (seizing, instead, his successor, David), but that the Lord doubles down on the punishment by sending an apparent replacement, a harmful spirit that torments the king. Carlson argues that these events, as well as the later séance scene, are indicative of how Saul, along with Samuel, David and the Endor witch herself, are presented as having porous spiritual borders. They are possessed of a metaphysical permeability that makes sense of actions that, by virtue of having their root in the spirit world, may otherwise seem erratic or irrational. Carlson uses this premise, in which spirit interaction is so integrated into society that specific technical details are deemed unnecessary and left unsaid by the narrator, to cast the Endor séance not as a visible summoning but as an act of possession, with the witch channelling Samuel’s spirit and acting as a vessel for the prophet to speak through.

Carlson’s core methodology compares the sparse clues found in the biblical record with extant spirit practices in contemporary communities. He often leads with these anthropological and ethnographic examples, providing an experiential context from which the reader can themselves draw comparisons when the biblical text is discussed, and which he then affirms in commentary. In the case of Saul’s spirit sickness, the template is found in twentieth century Cuban Espiritismo, in particular the most popular form in Cuba, the Santería-adjacent Espiritismo Cruzado, in which each person is connected to their own collective of spirits, with whom Espiritistas (mediums) cultivate a relationship. Similarly, Brazil’s Yoruba-influenced religion of Umbanda is used as the analogy for the fifth chapter’s discussion of intersections between spirits and medicine, contrasting the use of spiritual triage in Umbanda with the preponderance of medical idioms that are used to describe spirit phenomena in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple literature.

Carlson employs these analogies with a masterful narrative touch, never drawing analytical attention to them immediately, but patiently calling back to them later in the chapter when they’ve been almost all but forgotten. In the interim, he presents engaging explorations of biblical sources and themes, crafted with an erudite and engaging voice that assumes a reasonable degree of knowledge and familiarity from the reader, but never asks too much.

The spirit interactions of the Gullah people of the Lowcountry and Sea Islands of the United States preface the third chapter’s general discussion of rûah as both spirit and breath in Hebrew cosmology, with the analogy providing an emphasises on talking with the dead. Later in the same chapter, a Sakalava spirit-possession ritual from Madagascar is compared to the story of the prophet Micaiah from 1 Kings, with Carlson picking up on the motif of competing spirits, in which narrative and existing political alliances and hierarchies find their proxies in the supernatural realm. A similar motif can, it is suggested, be seen in the myth of the fallen angels, but the analogy seems generously stretched in order to make it.

This speaks to a common experience when reading Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible and it can sometimes feel like Carlson is finding exactly what he wants to find in his biblical sources. Interpreting the Saul séance as an act of possession, though appealing, goes against most conventional readings of the scene, and uses the smallest of ambiguities to extract thesis-corroborating details. Similarly, one can sense a palpable preference in how the concept of ‘spirit’ is interpreted in texts, leaning towards the idea of actual entities, rather than a more pragmatic approach which would see the phrase as referring to metaphorical embodiments of abstract concepts, such as the spirit of jealousy mentioned in Numbers or the general idea of the spirit of the Lord. There’s also the risk when analogous models are used to unduly apply a wholesale interpretation from one situation to another, confusing minor correlation with total similitude. This is very much the case when Carlson draws on the sometimes irreverent approach to the gods and spirits in Haitian practices, applying it to Elijah’s competitive encounter with the 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. When Elijah mocks the rival prophets for their inability to entreat Baal, Carlson deploys the Haitian comparison and frames the event not as two separate rituals but as a joint ritual in which the two cults battle. The 450 prophets killed on Elijah’s orders in the waters of the Kishon river might not see it in quite so cooperative a light.

With all that said, even if one finds Carlson’s conclusions not as convincing as one would hope, Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible makes for an interesting and indeed valuable consideration of its themes. Its survey of rûah and of the distinction between abiding and migrating spirits, along with the in-depth considerations of the Saul séance and other key moments, makes this a work that has much to recommend it.

Published by De Gruyter

April 25, 2021 by ScriptusScribe

The Mark of Cain – Ruth Mellinkoff

Categories: esotericism, mesopotamian, middle ages

Ruth Mellinkoff’s body of work mines a particularly grotesque and atypical vein of Judaeo-Christian tradition, dealing with the appearance of monstrous and aberrant body parts, often incongruously placed, such as in her study of the horned Moses in medieval art and thought, or her meditation on Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. This interest in anatomy that is both sacred and profane is continued in The Mark of Cain, a slim volume for a concept whose source material is but a single verse in the book of Genesis.

It is testament to the evocative nature of the mark in question that just over a hundred pages can be dedicated to it here, and as the blurb on the inside cover notes, few biblical verses evoke the power of the imagination than the scant and ambiguous words “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, that whosoever found him should not kill him.” Nevertheless, the back matter does qualify that this is by no means a definitive work, offering a demonstrative and suggestive approach as opposed to a comprehensive or conclusive one. This is something that is evident throughout the book, with Mellinkoff pulling various strands together, but inevitably and understandably drawing no conclusions, if they were hers to make, based on the meagre scriptural evidence.

Given the brevity of its biblical mention, the Mark of Cain acts as a gateway into wider discussions, and this is how Mellinkoff begins, by following in the footsteps of early church fathers and considering not the mark itself, but how it relates to the idea of Cain’s repentance and forgiveness. In these instances, dating back to early Jewish thought and into the early church exegetes, the ‘what’ of the mark was less important than whether it served as punishment or protection for Cain, with Cain himself thereby being the mark, the example, the lesson.

In her third chapter, Mellinkoff turns to the more explicitly corporeal interpretations of the Mark of Cain, noting that the idea of it being on Cain’s forehead, despite this positioning not being mentioned in the book of Genesis, has become so popular that it makes its way unquestioned into not just common retellings but academic texts and encyclopaedia entries. This is the largest chapter within this title, and Mellinkoff covers off a variety of options from across three millennia of Judaeo-Christian thought, including various text marks (the tetragrammaton, the Greek omega or some unspecified Hebrew letter from the Torah), a cross (linking Cain with his close analogue, the Wandering Jew who is similarly marked), blemishes such as leprosy or horns, and even beardlessness. One interpretation that receives much attention here is not a mark on Cain’s body but a mark created by it, with the sign being popularly regarded as a trembling condition he possessed, thus aligning with an excerpt found only in the Septuagint version of Genesis in which God curses Cain with groaning and trembling; the curse becoming the mark itself.

Being an academic work, and one from 1981, there’s no consideration given here to contemporary interpretations of the Mark of Cain from various Qayin-focussed occult traditions; such as in the 218 current where a threefold Mark of Qayin and Qalmana was bestowed on the couple by Satan and Lilith, or in the work of the Cultus Sabbati, whose Psalter of Cain features a total of eight Marks of Cain, each denoting an area of expertise or a moment in his story. With that said, there are moments included here that provide interest for those that way inclined, such as a discussion of Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), in which the Cultus Sabbati’s eight marks have a near analogue in seven wens that afflict crooked Cain, as it pointedly calls him, marking his forehead, his cheeks, his hands and his feet like diabolical stigmata. Similarly significant is the Cornish mystery play Gwreans an Bys (The Creation of the World), in which Cain appears alongside his sister Calmana and doubts the apotropaic properties of the horn with which God has marked him, echoing Byron’s later Luciferian Cain by saying: “Trust him I will not, for fear of being deceived.” The image of the Mark of Cain as horns is a darkly resonant one that is remarkably widespread despite being unattested canonically, appearing in early Armenian texts, an early tenth century Irish Adambook, twelfth century French sculpture, and thirteenth and fourteenth century English illuminated manuscripts. One particular thirteenth century English psalter illustrates this profoundly, with an image of God marking and cursing Cain (one of the rare depictions of this scene across Western art), showing a scythe-wielding Cain adorned with two distinctive black horns ‘pon his head.

In her penultimate chapter, Mellinkoff turns to those examples in which, as she defines it, the authors consciously and intentionally distorted the idea of the Mark of Cain. Chief amongst these is Hermann Hesse’s treatment of the mark in his 1919 novel Demian, in which the eponymous hero defines the otherwise invisible mark as a feeling of elite otherness, worn by possessors of a secret knowledge who recognise it, like for like, on those who also wear it: “But whereas we, who were marked, believed that we represented the will of Nature to something new, to the individualism of the future, the others sought to perpetuate the status quo.” Suffice to say, Mellinkoff is not a fan, and having never met a swaggering misanthropic, nihilistic 21^st century nightside occultist, she finds the appeal of the concept inconceivable, describing it as puerile, with it being impossible, even with all our modern abstraction, to treat Cain’s act of fratricide so superficially that we elevate him as an anti-hero.

Mellinkoff concludes with a brief chapter on how Cain and his mark have been given a racial interpretation. This follows on from an earlier discussion on how Mormon founder Joseph Smith established blackness as the mark of Cain, thereby supporting slavery, forbidding intermarriage and disqualifying black members of the church from the priesthood; a status that as of the first publication of this book in 1981 had only been overridden for just four years. The racism of this chapter concerns itself not with skin colour but with the Jews, with Saint Augustine being the first to influentially identify Cain as an allegory of the Jews: cursed, faithless murderers both, set to wander the earth, yet eternally preserved as an abject lesson to the faithful. As for the Mark of Cain in this allegory, Augustine obliquely hinted at a sign of Jewish law that had always marked them as separate, with later commentators such as Isidore of Seville and Bruno of Asti being less delicate and explicitly identifying it as the mark of circumcision. Mellinkoff traces the history of this idea of Jews not just being faithless outsiders but identifiably so, to medieval badges that Jews were prescribed to wear and which reach a modern apex in Nazi Germany.

Despite its brevity, there is a thoroughness to The Mark of Cain, with Mellinkoff writing in a clear, authoritative style, though not without personality, such as in her unabashed love for the Syriac Life of Abel, a fifth or sixth century work she considers to be without parallel until Byron’s Cain. The Mark of Cain includes an exhaustive reference and end notes sections, and concludes with a 22 image gallery of various depictions of Cain and his mark.

Published by Wipf and Stock Publishers

December 26, 2020 by ScriptusScribe

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

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

Inner 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.

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.

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 5^th-6^th 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.

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 15^th 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 15^th 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 15^th 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).

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

October 31, 2019 by ScriptusScribe

Underworld – The Sepulcher Society

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Categories: classical, hellenic, magick, mesopotamian, underworld, Tags: Theion Publishing,

Adorned with a gold-foiled version of a symbol representing Mictlantecutli, the Aztec god of death, Underworld resembles in length and dimensions another recently reviewed title from Theion Publishing, The Cult of the Black Cube. And, just as that book was credited to the pseudonymous Dr Arthur Moros, this volume is presented somewhat anonymously as the work of the infuriatingly-spelt Sepulcher Society, an organisation for which precious little information can be found; and, after fruitless Googling, I’m almost certain they’re not the Sepulchre Society of Sussex in M.J. Trow’s novel Maxwell’s Grave… or are they? Dun dun dunnn.

Where The Cult of the Black Cube dealt with various incarnations of the Saturnine deity, Underworld, as its title suggests, considers the subterranean world of the dead, following a similar approach to Moros’ book by exploring examples of the theme from a variety of cultures, consolidating the wisdom so gleaned, and then throwing in a few bits of practical work. Like Moros, the pseudonymous author (who uses a singular first person ‘I’ despite the credit to the presumably multiple-membered society) provides something of a personal touch, opening with a brief biography that stretches back to their childhood and encounters there with death and general spookiness.

Underworld is divided into just three chapters, but these would be more fittingly described as parts, each being lengthy and consisting of smaller chapter-like sections, rather than a straight forward narrative, all divided up with the appropriate formatting. In the first, the author, as we must pseudonymously call them lest we henceforth laboriously refer to them as the Sepulcher Society, gives a survey of various examples of the underworld, with summaries running to up to five or six pages of the Babylonian, Greek and Roman, Celtic, Germanic, Aztec, and Hindu conceptions of the underworld. These are all as thorough as one can be with the amount of space afforded, although, as with the rest of the book, there’s very little in the way of referencing, be it in-body citations or footnoted sources. Given the specialised nature of the discussion here, in particular Aztec and Babylonian conceptions of the underworld, it is frustrating having no sense of the source of the information, and no indication as to whether it’s from primary texts or secondary academic discussions or synopsises. There are occasionally footnoted references to suggested further reading on particular areas of consideration, as well as a bibliography at the rear of the book, but there is never any indication that these titles are necessarily the source, and there’s certainly no direct referencing to specific pages within them.

Having described the mythological precedents of the underworld, the author concludes the first chapter with a synthesis of common chthonian elements, highlighting those geographical features found in many accounts, irrespective of distances in space or time: a twilight realm between the living and the dead, a barrier of dark water be it river or sea, the black gates that guard the underworld, and finally, the underworld itself, its city and its inhabitants, ruled by a dark queen and a black king.

The second chapter turns to the gods of the underworld themselves and begins with the author establishing several working hypotheses, principally that the gods are real beings with agency of their own, not simply aspects of one’s unconscious, or even archetypes or thought-forms made manifest by the collective members of a society. The author does provide something of a syncretistic angle, though, suggesting that one’s cultural context may create the lens through which the same deity may be viewed differently, adopting a name, characteristics and appearances that draw from the prevailing cosmology. This belief in the very literal existence of the gods, indeed all gods, does go down some rather specious rabbit holes, such as suggesting that Jews, Muslims and Christians must all worship different deities since clearly tension betwixt the three religions is the result of three different deities battling each other for control. An intriguing proposal, but an alternate hypothesis might be: people are dicks. Similarly, the author suggests that the growth and subsequent power of a religion is indicative of the respective deity’s standing in ye olde god stakes, but once again, let’s proffer the more circumspect suggestion that, yes, as previously mentioned, people are dicks, and the growth of a religion is often demonstrably due to said people being said dicks and making that happen because it is in their best dickish interests to do so.

With the theory out of the way, the author returns with a greater focus to the gods whose realms were discussed in the first chapter. Referring to these gods as chthonians, the author begins in Mexico, initially exploring the godforms of Mictecacihuatl and her partner Mictlantecutli, the Aztec goddess and god of death and the underworld. This gives way to two figures that, it could be argued, are their contemporary embodiments or descendants, the Mexican saint of death Santa Muerte, and her male equivalent from further south in the Americas, San La Muerte. Given the well-documented nature of Santa Muerte’s cult and praxis, the author is well equipped to provide an extensive, multi-paged section on practical devotion towards her, both summarising her place in Mexican folk magic, and ending with a few ritual suggestions and a little liturgy. The same cannot be said for San La Muerte whose relative obscurity in comparison to his popular Mexican sister is reflected in the paucity of information presented here.

The other mythological systems covered here don’t provide the same luxury in terms of contemporary usage as Santa Muerte, but the author does try their damnedest to fill those gaps. They turn to Babylon next, discussing Erishkigal and then Nergal, with descriptions of each godform and suggestions for contemporary ritual or devotional techniques, before a similar exploration of the natal demoness Lamashtu. The same then follows for cultures Germanic (Hela), Greco-Roman (Nyx, Pluto, Persephone), Celtic (the Morrighan), and Indian (Yama, Varahi). Each deity is given a brief description or background, a summary of how they are or can be worshipped now, followed by descriptions of shrines, offerings and images, and an example of a ritual. These are not techniques cut and pasted with the respective gods swapped out, but there are certain recurrent themes of practice here, principally the development of devotional altar space or effigies, a pretty fail-safe approach to dealing with deities.

Underworld concludes with its third chapter, Necromancy, where the author puts the dead to work, defining necromancy not just as the raising of the dead for mantic purposes, but any magic that deals with death and the underworld’s entities and energies. This builds on the syncretism and basic ritualism touched on in earlier pages, incorporating from a practical perspective the use of ritual and devotional space, and then providing techniques for travelling in trance and dream, and communicating with the dead. These are presented as broad guidelines that can be built upon by the practitioner, and while they don’t cover much in the way of new occult ground (what does?), the instructions are clear and consistent.

Underworld comes in two editions, a standard cloth hardcover, and the Auric Edition. The standard edition of 720 copies is bound in black fine cloth, with a design debossed and foiled in gold on the cover, with the same for lettering on spine. The sold out Auric Edition of 52 copies is fully hand-bound in chthonic dark-brown fine leather, with raised bands, embossing on spine, and a ribbon. The cover of each Auric copy carries an embedded specially manufactured brass obol coin as used by members of the Sepulcher Society to traffic with Hades. Each Auric copy also includes an exclusive additional page of fine paper, containing a ritual to awaken the Shadow Self for necromantic contact.

Published by Theion Publishing

April 10, 2016 by ScriptusScribe

Lilith: Goddess of Sitra Ahra

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Categories: anticosmic, devotional, mesopotamian, nightside

Serving as the inaugural publication from Black Tower Publishing, Lilith: Goddess of Sitra Ahra is, as one would expect, an anthology of material about Lilith. Its content is principally sourced from unknown authors, with only Edgar Kerval and Matthew Wightman generating any sparks of recognition. It is this roster that presents the most immediate problem with this volume. Yes, the nature of occult literature may mean that content is often provided by authors who are not professional writers, but to paraphrase Groundskeeper Willie: I love amateur occult writing, and your occult writing is the most amateur occult writing I ever saw.

This is not helped by the fact that many of the contributors come from South America and clearly do not have English as their first language. While there is something to be said for giving non-English speaking writers a place to have their works published, if the final product is going to be in English, and only in English, then I would expect the publisher to do a little tidying up to save face for their authors. As it stands, the reader spends half of the book wondering if they’re being spoken to by a Nigerian crown prince ready to transfer a lot of money from a dead relative, such is the jarring, disconcerting quality of the bad English. In one ritual, a sigil that is created as part of the process is said to be able to be ‘used in posterior work with the Goddess,’ leaving me genuinely unsure what they mean, and a little worried as a result.

Unfortunately, the untidiness is not limited to the worse-than-Google-Translate English and extends to all areas of this book. Proofing appears to be non-existent, with the spelling and punctuation errors starting off early in the Foreword and getting worse the further you go. The formatting is inept, with page margins set at an inconceivably tiny half a centimetre, the paragraphs are both separated by a space and indented (with an inadvisably huge indent of course), and the type for pathworkings is inexplicably bolded and centred. A lack of care means that notes to the editor marking where an illustration should go are left in text, while in at least one example, a whole paragraph is repeated immediately after its first appearance. Illustrations range from the mediocre to the risible, with the single exception coming from Kazim with their Shamshan Lilith, an image that has already been published in the second volume of the Qliphoth journal.

The lack of rigour extends to many of the contributors, and it’s pretty early on that the reader will give up any hope of seeing many academic sources mentioned, let alone cited and referenced. To the various authors of this book, Lilith often seems to exist in a haze of vaguely understood history that intersects with half-remembered mythology and recycled, usually unattributed, teachings of other magickal orders. In one essay, Inanna receives two hits from a wildly flailing Hammer of Inaccuracy within just one sentence, first by being described as a goddess of the moon, and then being located in “ancient Babylon.” In another, it is claimed that you won’t find many mentions of “the Goddess” in the Old Testament and that the word ‘goddess’ doesn’t even exist in Hebrew, something easily disproved by the use of ‘asherah’ as both a specific and generic goddess name in the biblical record; as thoroughly and magnificently documented by Raphael Patai in his The Hebrew Goddess.

Given the number of contributions, their relative brevity, and the focus on one deity, there’s an inevitable duplication in some of the entries here. Both Salomelihecatel and Daemon Barzai address the idea of Lilith as a spider goddess, drawing extensively on material by the Temple of the Black Light, but not offering much more. Both pieces feature rather similar invokations that close, somewhat jarringly, with the familiar Dragon Rouge refrain Ho Drakon Ho Megas. Similarly, too many of the contributions descend into word salad, breathlessly listing Lilith’s attributes in a whirl of glamourously dark language, which, aided and abetted by the poor English and the poor editing, can make it quite an aggravating slog to get through.

There are a variety of contributions here with 25 written pieces in total, divided into the brief salads of words, slightly better longer pieces (still let down by a lack of rigour and poor formatting), poems, rituals and invokations. James L. George has a couple of invokatory poems scattered throughout the book, and these, by their very nature, prove to be a highlight as they are better composed and show more attention to detail than many of their companions. In the way of rituals, Matthew Wightman’s Rite of the Seduction of the Virgin (also found in his book The Serpent Siddur of the Nachash El Acher) is the most elaborate, and well written, here, with many of others making one wonder whether the instructions were worth writing down. Elsewhere in these reviews I have lamented the tendency for ritual, when lazily formulated, to be basically “cast this sigil, says these words, hope stuff happens” and that’s unfortunately the case here, with several rituals being nothing more than that: an interchangeable sigil is focussed on, an interchangeable invokation is uttered (hopefully without giggling), and the presumably not interchangeable person sits in the dark feeling the dark energies flow through them, and/or just a bit foolish.

Ultimately, Lilith: Goddess of Sitra Ahra feels like a missed opportunity. With some extensive editing, of both contributors and contributions, the content could have been tightened up and the errors wouldn’t feel so glaring. The same is true of the formatting, with the entry level mistakes helping to draw attention to the failings in this volume. It would seem that the perfect devotional for Lilith, containing well-structured and well-written academic essays, alongside equally well-written poetry, well-executed artwork, and interesting rituals, remains to be published.

Lilith: Goddess of Sitra Ahra has been released in two editions. The first was limited to 200 copies and came as a hand-bound and hand-numbered volume with a dust jacket. The second, reviewed here, is a paperback edition capably printed by Amazon’s print-on-demand service.

Published by Black Tower Publishing. ISBN-13: 978-1511792356

October 4, 2015 by ScriptusScribe

Into the Great Below: A Devotional to Inanna and Ereshkigal – Compiled by Galina Krasskova

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Categories: devotional, mesopotamian, underworld, Tags: Asphodel Press,

It’s full disclosure time yet again: I created the cover art for this devotional from Asphodel Press, and also contributed some internal illustrations. So, as ever, proceed with due caution as we venture into the world of potential bias and nepotism. With its eyes turned towards Mesopotamia, Into the Great Below is a change of theme for Asphodel Press and its usual, albeit by no means exclusive, focus on the Northern Tradition; although the names of many of the contributors, including that of editor Galina Krasskova, will be familiar from other Asphodel works. This is addressed in Krasskova’s foreword in which she identifies herself as Heathen but details her early magical history in the Fellowship of Isis where a mentor’s devotion to Inanna had a lasting influence on her ritual and devotional practice. This book, then, is considered by Krasskova to be the beginning of a repayment to Inanna, and to her sister, Ereshkigal.

Into the Great Below is divided into three sections: devotions to Inanna and Ereshkigal, a collection of rituals for both goddesses, and prayers to other Sumerian deities. Rebecca Buchanan provides the lion share of the prayers to Inanna and Ereshkigal, with short little vignettes addressing various aspects of both goddesses. Her work is joined by contributions from Elizabeth Vongvisith, Raven Kaldera, and others. Perhaps the strongest piece from this section is provided by the enigmatically anonymous J.D. with Katabasis, in which they detail an initiatory journey into the underworld, mirroring Inanna’s descent through seven dismembering tiers, before being remade and reborn by Ereshkigal. These themes of initiation and dismemberment naturally feature strongly in much of the material here, with devotees addressing Ereshkigal in particular as an initiatrix and spirit of transformation. Janet Munin, for example, takes the phrase “naked and bowed low” from The Descent of Inanna and slightly tweaks the interpretation of it, making it indicative of an act of humility and grace, rather than the result of being tortured and broken by the process of the underworld descent.

The second selection of prayers addresses deities from across the Sumerian pantheon, with the chance for the attention to shift in several cases to the male of the species. Lee Harrington has a poem to each of Ereshkigal’s husbands: first with a call to Gugulanna, the bull of heaven, and then with a song addressed to Ereshkigal but sung by her second husband, Nergal. A similar approach is taken by Raven Kaldera in Neti, where the poem is directed towards Ereshkigal in the voice of her titular servant and gatekeeper. Amongst the goddesses, Kaldera celebrates the warrior Ninshubur, while Elizabeth Vongvisith and Anya Kless both explore the intersection of Sumerian and Judaism with paeans to Lilith. Tiamat also receives some attention with poems from Dee Bellwether, Kira R. and an anonymous invocation previously published in Asphodel’s Pagan Book of Hours. Bellwether’s For Tiamatu is particular striking with its stark iteration of occasionally alliterative words celebrating Tiamat as an almost anti-cosmic Queen of Unmaking.

The final section of Into the Great Below features a relatively weighty five rituals for Inanna and Ereshkigal. Krasskova’s Dark Moon Rite of Ereshkigal is a lengthy, invocatory-heavy ritual that begins with quaternary calls, a call to the centre, and then an invocation to Ereshkigal herself. This is followed by an oracular portion and sequences involving a construction of a ritual box. Krasskova’s liturgy is well written, picturesque and evocative in its use of language; a quality that occurs in another of her rituals included here, The Sharing of the Me – a Ritual to the Goddess Inanna. Another lengthy rite is Kaldera’s The Descent of Inanna, which is exactly that, a ritual staging of the descent from the Enuma Elish in a mystery play read by two narrators.

Unlike some devotionals from Asphodel, in which essays are combined with rituals and poetry, the content of Into the Great Below has a focus on the poetic, with nothing in the way of lengthy articles. This is, perhaps, to be expected given the dearth of existing written material on these subjects without wandering into territories of unverified personal gnosis or academic minutiae. Despite the range of contributors, there is a certain similarity of tone and themes, with a feeling that everyone is coming from a similar place in the interpretation of Inanna and Ereshkigal, and the descent narrative in particular. Into the Great Below runs to 125 perfect bound paperback pages, with type set in the usual clean and functional standard of Asphodel publications. Space seems to be the enemy as all empty areas are filled with my illustrations, or an assortment of various, inconsistently rendered, archaeological images.

Published by Asphodel. ISBN 978-0-9825798-3-1

Scriptus Recensera

Reviewing books magickal

Categotry Archives: mesopotamian

The Rephaim: Sons of the Gods – Jonathan Yogev

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

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

The Canticles of Lilith – Nicholaj & Katy de Mattos Frisvold

Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible – Reed Carlson

The Mark of Cain – Ruth Mellinkoff

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

Underworld – The Sepulcher Society

Lilith: Goddess of Sitra Ahra

Into the Great Below: A Devotional to Inanna and Ereshkigal – Compiled by Galina Krasskova