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Music in Witchcraft and the Occult: An Anthology

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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

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Qliphoth Esoteric Publication Opus 1: The Awakening (Atavistic Path) – Edited by Edgar Kerval

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Categories: nightside, qabalah, typhonian, Tags:

Qliphoth coverReleased in 2012, Qliphoth Esoteric Publication Opus 1 is arguably one of the first journals in the current glut of darkly-hued occult publishing. Edited by Edgar Kerval and here published by Aeon Sophia Press, Qliphoth would have something of an itinerant life, moving betwixt publishing houses. A second volume would be released in a more conventional occult-book format by Aeon Sophia Press, before Nephilim Press took up the mantle for a time, with still later volumes being released by Kerval’s own publishing imprint.

There is a wide range of both contributors and topics in this first volume, embracing themes of the nightside, voudon, hoodoo, general sorcery and even a little bit of syncretisation of Loki with Azatoth (by which is meant HP Lovecraft’s Azathoth, not the similarly h-deficient Swedish black/death metal band from Uddevalla, or, for that matter, the death metal band from Stockholm – Satan bless you, Encyclopaedia Metallum). From the contributors, there’s a few new names as well as some familiar ones, such as Sean Woodward, Kyle Fite, Aion 131 (whose poem Tua-Set is an excerpt from his Liber Phoenix), Orryelle Defenestrate Bascule (with their nightside notes, some of which also appeared in Anathema’s Pillars journal), and Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold (in a lengthy piece on antinomian sorcery).

Amongst many of the contributions there’s a palpable sense of a giddy delight in darkness and shadow, of a youthful enthusiasm for what the authors hope is transgressive and original, but which old timers might find either sweet or irritating. This is particularly exacerbated by the perhaps unwise inclusion of author photos in some pieces. Formatted into their respective essay as if they’re an integral illustration, fingers contorted into significant gestures, their fresh faces glare out at the reader as if to say “Occultism, it’z serious bidness.” Bless.

The earnestness may account for the roughness in some of the writing, all pleonastic phrasing and reckless disregard for proofing. The consistently spellcheck-averse Daemon Barzai opens a piece on Gamaliel (presumably the qlipha and not the first century leader of the Sanhedrin, but he doesn’t say) by referring to it as the dark side of the moon and redundantly describing it as having an intimate relationship with, wait for it, “the dark side of the moon,” – that is very intimate, onanistically so. What follows are a series of guided meditations in which naked beautiful ladies are only outnumbered by the comedic triumphs of muddled and cruelly unedited English: “Opposite you appeared Lilith. Her body is naked but it is difficult to see her face. Her hairs are red as fire.” So, how many hairs? I’m thinking just two or three for pure comedy gold. “Come a dark mist and go out three black dogs that to be with a woman that wearing a black dress, she has a crown with jewels. His presence commands respect.” Yes, I imagine it does.

There’s other questionable writing, such as The Science of Magic by S. Ben Qayin, although saying that it’s written by him is a bit of stretch. Incapable of paraphrasing, he quotes extensively from a few sources, with some of the quotes running to as much as half a page. As these are not formatted any differently from the main body, the reader will assume that Qayin has written a lengthy, erudite piece, but his own writing only occurs as smatterings between these verbatim quotes, poorly tying completely unrelated themes together with logical fallacies. This approach reaches its surreally ridiculous zenith when he quotes himself in order to promote his Volubilis ex Chaosium book; one wonders how many pages of quotes that must contain.

But these failures are not necessarily the rule and there are a few diamonds amongst the rough, mainly coming from the more grizzled of the contributors. Sean Woodward uses a, one assumes, fictional narrative in a meditation on the Hoo Queen,  with the narrator exploring the coastal town of Blackmouth in search of this Shadow Queen of Sirius. Though it lacks much in the way of cosmic horror (though there is a sense of the cosmos), there’s an unavoidable sense of Lovecraft here, with the lone narrator, a stranger in a strange town, visiting a place whose name alone is redolent of Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. There’s a similar focus of hoodoo  from a name as familiar as that of Sean Woodward, Kyle Fite, who in the past has pursued the fictional narrative as occult lesson, but here has a more straight forward essay. Like Woodward’s contribution, Becoming Hoodoo is very much in the shadow of Michael Bertiaux, discussing the first section of The Voudon Gnostic Workbook, and its guide to becoming a hoodoo, which Fite argues is not the exemplar of low magic that it seems, but is instead a guide to a profound and deep theosis.

Kyle Fite - Gran Bois

Given the title of the journal, the qliphoth does loom rather large throughout this first volume. In addition to Barzai’s error-ridden piece on Gamaliel and Orryelle’s nightside notes (in which they briefly detail their exploration of the tunnels of Set, accompanied by darkly-reproduced paintings of the same), there’s a working with the tunnel of Malkunofat from Andi Moon and Sarah Price.

Of personal interest to me is Ljossal Lodursson’s Loki and Azatoth – Lords of Fire and Chaos, in which he compares Loki’s disruptive, maddening and ultimately transformative quality with Lovecraft’s madness-inducing Outer God. He calls this composite figure Azaloke (presumably a play on references to Loki as Asa-Loki), and defines him in fairly anticosmic terms as an alchemical-chaotic symbiote that destroys the kingdom of all creation. The potentially alchemical etymology of Azathoth’s name, with its echoes of the universal solvent Azoth, provides Lodursson with a way of categorising Loki, via his progeny and his relationship with Gulveig, into red, black, purple and green azoths. Lodursson describes his long experiences working with Loki and presents a series of runes received from him: a bindrune called Lokekvisa, and then a set of eleven Hjärta Rúnar, divided into three aetts of creation, destruction and chaos; though those of a mathematical bent will quickly note that these aetts don’t have the traditional eight characters each, and instead group the runes into sets of five, four and three. These Hjärta Rúnar each have a name and properties assigned to them, and resemble traditional runes in some cases, but not all, so there’s a certain inconsistency to their style.

Azaloke

As one of the first, if not the first, publications from Aeon Sophia Press, the design and formatting of Qliphoth leaves a lot to be desired and is nowhere near the consistently high standards that the publishing house now has. The book has an oversized magazine size, which despite its light weight and soft cover makes for a cumbersome read. Text is formatted into dual columns for the most part, but in some cases, this inexplicably becomes a single, full-page column in the middle of an essay, which, given the width of the page, makes the line length intolerable for reading. In an inescapable feeling of layout-by-Microsoft-Word, the body copy is rendered in a point size too large, and the same face and size is used for captions, biographies, references and even adverts, all of which bleed into one. Distorted images abound, whether they be vertically stretched, as seems to happen more often than not with photographs, or pixelated or soft in several instances of graphic elements. This is particularly egregious when it comes to some striking images by Hagen von Tulien, where the impact of his crisp, presumably vector lines, is rendered null due to pixelated reproduction. The image quality encapsulates the problems with this first issue of Qliphoth, indicative of a lack of refinement and attention to detail that is mirrored in the minimal layout, the non-existent proofing and a certain dearth of quality control when it comes to contributors. All of which tends to overshadow the elements that are good.

Hagen von Tulien: Elemental Emergence (looking significantly less pixelated than it does in print)

As is Kerval’s style, this issue of Qliphoth was accompanied by a CD of ritual music, mainly consisting of tracks by his musical guise Emma Ya, but with also a piece from Sean Woodward as his project Gothick, and the track Orpheus’ Lament from the combined talents of Orryelle, Kestral Knox and Amordios Gobblyn-Smyth. My second-hand version of the journal didn’t include the CD, but you can imagine what it sounds like, and many of the Emme Ya tracks are available online, scattered across a variety of other releases.

Published by Aeon Sophia Press


Review Soundtrack: Emme Ya – Erotognosis (Voices From The Void)

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

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Categories: enochian, esotericism, grimoire, Tags:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published by Aeon Sophia Press

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The Explicit Name of Lucifer – G. De Laval

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Categories: luciferian, satanism, Tags:

If there’s one word to describe The Explicit Name of Lucifer from Aeon Sophia Press it’s ‘cute.’ This is a tiny volume, 112 pages in all, measuring 11 by 18cm, just a little bigger than one of the current generation of mobile phones. The Explicit Name of Lucifer is something of a diversion from Laval’s considerably more voluminous works also available from Aeon Sophia Press. It expands on gematria systems from their previous work, Black Magic Evocation of the Shem ha Mephorash, which funnily enough has since had a revised second edition that is, in turn, informed by this work. That’s the circle of life, I guess. It moves us all.

The intent of The Explicit Name of Lucifer is to provide a magickal script that is, to use the language of cryptography, a perfect cipher, by which Laval means a script that is a letter-for-letter mirror of the English alphabet. The value of such a script, Laval argues, is that it makes for a more empowered, internally consistent system that allows the English language to be used as a “direct channel of occult energy.” With that said, though, there’s still a reliance on Hebrew here, with each of the letters (or rather, the demon associated with each letter) given a name derived from an acrostic based on the Hebrew letters from three verses in Psalms 73. The gematrial value of each letter/demon is, in turn, taken from these Hebrew names.

This script, then, forms the explicit name of the book’s title through the combination of the 26 demon names; good luck pronouncing it. The use of the letters must be preceded by the creation of a reliquary, a ritual invocation and the creation of a conjuration seal of Lucifer. The reliquary features an ingredients list that will put off all but the most dedicated, or foolhardy. There are 26 ingredients in all, though just one of these is dirt from thirteen cemeteries no less, and another is dirt from eleven gates (not sure if you can count one of these as ingredient number twelve, dirt from a church, just for the sake of efficiency). These, along with other choice items like a small magnet, tallow and a stone from the top of a mountain, are mixed together, set on fire, turned into mud and placed in a vessel with the letters of the script inscribed on the outside.

The 26 spirits of the Luciferal Alphabet takes up the lion’s share of this book with each of them presented consistently, with a page for the respective glyph from the Luciferal Alphabet, followed by a one page description of the demon. That is with the exception of the demon Bour, who is given a full page illustration as well. And why not? He’s adorable. Look at what a dapper chap he is, with his little frock coat, and gentleman’s walking stick; not to mention his generous endowment. He’s like some character from a more demonically inclined Wind in the Willows or Redwall.

In the information for each demon, Laval provides a description, a list of attributes, suggested incenses and offerings, and propitious times for summoning. It isn’t explained from whence these attributes have been derived, especially in the case of some of these spirits where they are given a whole retinue of other named spirits: Lemelel, demon of the letter N, for example, is part of something called the Kaphim (presumably taken from a word used for ‘beam’ in the book of Habakkuk), of which there are eight other spirits, no less: Mekem, Miyn, Nalakyah, Namiy, Niym, Pheyiy, Yayeph and Yenam. Similarly, Memadiah, the demon of the letter R, is part of something enigmatically but unhelpfully referred to as “the four amethysts of Shakti, the Achlemoth,” alongside her ungoogleable friends Avochel, Chavaa and Medam.

There are a couple of other things that give one pause. The 26 spirits each have a numeric value assigned to them, but with no explanation this is referred to as a gematria value in the case of some spirits, and as an energy current in others; despite indeed all being just Mispar Hechrachi-derived gematria values. Meanwhile, in one endearing erratum, things are apparently so antinomian that verses from the Book of Psalms are referred to with the homophone ‘versus.’ There’s also another script included in this book without any explanation other than a legend showing its corresponding letters in English and the Luciferal Script/Alphabet of Lucifer, the latter of which is here confusingly called yet another name, the Ceremonial Altar Script. This third script is referred to as Demotic Common but it doesn’t resemble any historical version of Demotic in the upper case sense of the word, and has more of a Lovecraftian look, all spirally and curved with tentacle-like terminals. This Demotic Common is used to render the three page invocation that must be made before the Luciferal Script can be used, making for yet another level of effort and translatory flicking of pages back and forth.

With its small format and 112 pages, The Explicit Name of Lucifer is a brisk, one-sitting read, and so feels a little brief; obviously it takes longer if you go the applied route and factor in the dirt-collecting visits to thirteen cemeteries and a trip to a mountain summit. This does, of course, reflect its status as an adjunct to Laval’s longer works (his expanded edition of Black Magic Evocation of the Shem ha Mephorash is over 500 pages), but it feels like more could have been drawn out of this system as its presented here.

The Explicit Name of Lucifer is a black Italian cloth bound hardcover of 112 pages, with a gold foil print title on the cover, black end-papers and black head/tail bands.

Published by Aeon Sophia Press.

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The Serpent Siddur of the Nachash El Acher – Matthew Wightman

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Categories: anticosmic, Tags:

serpentsiddur-coverI always find the title of this book from Aeon Sophia Press a little confusing. Is it The Serpent Siddur of the Nachash El Acher, as it appears on the cover, or is it Lyrics of Lilith, Songs of Samael, as it appears on the spine and the internal title pages? If it is both, then which comes first, which is the main title and which is the sub? Either way, this book is a siddur, in that it is largely a collection of prayers and devotional formulas directed to Nachash El Acher, the serpentine god of the Other Side, otherwise known by the portmanteau of Samaelilith.

Matthew Wightman writes very much from an anti-cosmic perspective and if you’ve read some of the other reviews on this site before, you’ll know that I have something of a disconnect with that most metal and misanthropic of metaphysical mind-sets. My misgivings are by no means assuaged when the opening line of the first chapter bleakly informs us that: “Existence is trauma.” A cheery start, to be sure.

Although Wightman is clearly and admittedly indebted to the Temple of the Black Light and their 218 current, he marks a divergence with their philosophy, talking of a realisation that he had which effectively means that the Temple just aren’t anti-cosmic enough. The crux of the issue is that in the qliphothic sorcery of the Temple of the Black Light, the Qliphoth is seen to be in anti-cosmic opposition to the Sephiroth and everything else on the dayside. Wightman, on the other hand, now sees the Qliphoth as part of a ruse, an agency of disinformation if you will, with the denizens of the Sitra Achra merely reinforcing, by their actions and their nature, a narrative that has been dictated by the Demiurge. Both the dayside and the nightside, these two opposing forces, are therefore, in actuality what makes up the Cosmos, so for Wightman, a true anti-cosmic force needs to be found elsewhere. Instead, Wightman turns his affections to the concept of Ain or Impossibility, seeking a return to the Ayin or Void, and attributing this same desire as the fundamental modus operandi of the Serpent. Wightman describes these ideas as being part of a Current 61, the Current of Ain and the Nachash El Acher, which he describes as even more “anti-cosmic than those that have come before it.” It does comes across a little like misanthropic hipsterism, evoking an image of duelling denizens of some qliphothic Shoreditch questioning each other’s commitment to an obscure band: “I believe in more dissolution into more nothingness than you do.” “Oh yeah, well my rejection of existence is so rejecty that I reject the rejection of existence.” And so forth.

As a disinterested party, these qabbalistic metaphysics can get a bit overwhelming and it’s hard to quiet the inner sceptic who sees it all as pointless speculation about concepts that are just made up anyway. Of course, that’s the nature of any belief system for which there is barely, if any, empirical evidence, but it seems particularly obvious here where so much time is given over to elaborate concepts and conclusions based ultimately on a matter of opinion and a little too much pondering.

This anti-cosmic worldview permeates much of The Serpent Siddur of the Nachash El Acher but the lion share of the book is given over to prayers and rituals, rather than theory. These prayers are recited using several ritual props borrowed from Judaism and Christianity and reoriented to a serpentine focus: a Serpentine Prayer Shawl (made from both linen and wool just to get the Demiurge really miffed that his instructions in Deuteronomy are being flouted; talk about sticking it to the man), Serpentine Phylacteries (with the original Judaic scrolls burnt and the ashes placed back in the tefillin) and a Serpentine Rosary. The prayers themselves are very long with the evening meditation running to sixteen pages, while the Serpent Sermon is comparatively short at only nine pages. On the blessedly shorter side of things are a Hymn to Qayin and songs for each day of the week, as well as a listing of thirteen principles, and prayers for prosperity and for the close of service. There are also meditations for before bed, for morning, and for afternoon, as well as prayers for before and after meals, and a series of prayers and invocations for the spirits of the twelve Qliphoth; although, given the earlier dismissal of the nightside of the Tree of Life as part of the Demiurgic problem, it’s not really explained what they’re doing there.

There’s a certain repetition of themes across this liturgy with much cursing of the Demiurge, praising of the Serpent and a total dissing of the Clayborn; boo, really hate those guys. The negativity of it all gets a bit much for my tender sensibilities and the constant blasphemy against the Demiurge and remarks about what a big meanie he is wears thin very early on. Similarly, the repeated mutterings about the Clayborn ends up making you feel like you’re on an Alex Jones website with people complaining about the Sheeple that just won’t wake up.

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The second half of The Serpent Siddur of the Nachash El Acher is, at least in the regular version that I have, bound as a separate book and acts as expanded appendix to the hymnal of the first half. This is a collection of essays, some previously published, as well as an interview with Wightman conducted by Aeon Sophia Press, in which he is able to elaborate more fully on some of the cosmological and metaphysical concepts that are considered only briefly in the first volume. The essays are presented, as far I can tell, as they were originally printed and have not been updated and edited for this collection; something they may have benefited from. For example, in the first two essays, written in 2012 and 2013, Wightman refers to what he calls the Ain Sof Choshek by the name of Tiamat, which stands out somewhat incongruously within a sea of qabbalistic Hebrew, but in a later essay (and in the first volume of the siddur) he adopts the appropriately Hebrew name Tanninim as the result of a discussion with the Temple of the Black Light. What this lack of retroactive editing means is that Wightman allows you to effectively track his changes, revealing the evolution of his thought process. Jesus, for example, goes from being someone to be completely despised in an earlier essay to being seen within a more sanguine worldview in which he is a time bomb double agent whose sacrifice is used to disrupt the Demiurge and their plans.

Across both volumes, Wightman writes very well, presumably benefiting from his theological studies at Yale. Having edited a previous Ixaxaar title, he obviously has a thorough grasp of his subject. The content is largely proofed well and the only time things really go awry is when biblical turns of phrase get the better of Wightman and yoke is, one assumes, mistakenly rendered as yolk, with the phrase “the yolk of the Demiurge was around my neck” bringing to mind some rather sticky cosmological culinary accident.

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Both volumes of The Serpent Siddur of the Nachash El Acher feature occasional full page images by Patrick Larabee in his trademark, slightly naïve style. The type is set cleanly throughout, with chapters beginning with dropcaps in the blackletter Killigrew font that is something of an Aeon Sophia Press trademark. Chapter titles, meanwhile, are rendered as small caps in de rigueur Trajan Pro. The two volumes are bound in cloth, black for the first volume and red for the second, with the title rendered in gold foil lettering on the front of the first volume, and a sigil based on a Penrose triangle on the covers of both. Part one has the Lyrics of Lilith, Songs of Samael title running along its spine, but part two doesn’t have anything, making it infuriatingly anonymous when sitting in a bookshelf. It seems a missed opportunity that an attempt wasn’t made to connect the two volumes together, maybe with some treatment that could spread across both spines whilst still working when viewed in isolation. This regular version is sold-out from the publisher but a deluxe leather bound edition, limited to 50 copies, is, at the time of writing, still available.

For anyone who resonates with this kind of blasphemous, transgressive anti-cosmic Satanism, this book will be a valuable addition to their library. For others, it may mine those veins too frequently, and the negative anti-existence talk could begin to grate. While it lacks the ritual rigour and internal complexity/consistency of N.A.A. 218’s similar writings published by Ixaxaar, it does have an enthusiasm that may appeal to some.

Published by Aeon Sophia Press.

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