Mogg Morgan

British National Party (BNP) & Bad Faith

2009-06-10T17:54:00.003Z

Here we go again. The BNP - it's hardly a new thing - those guys have been opposed to (mainly black) migration here since goodness knows when - just happens the times are more fertile now. Seems like they have another agenda which they aren't really letting on about just yet but we all know it's there right from way back when they were in the NF (National Front) etc.

If people really were concerned about the mass migration it's not as if they couldn't vote for UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), which many did of course. But I suspect those who vote BNP actually quite like the whole whites only thing. The journalists seem convinced that it's all just a protest vote about MPs expences and has nothing to do with the Brits being jaded by the European Union thing.

Not that I'm carrying the flag for UKIP - but it seems a reasonable enough pressure group. In the current controversy I find it useful to ask myself, am I bothered by the people in my street? I guess I'm lucky where I live (East Oxford) which is very diverse but seems to work out OK - the mosque is next door but they seem like good people. I've never really known anything other than this kind of inner city - mixed race thing - I was brought up in Newport docklands - and in the 1960s can remember the first Asian family arriving in our street. If I ever did feel threatened it was always from the locals who could be a rough lot.

There are xenophobes in Wales as there are everywhere else, but they often come from the valleys where funny enough the migrant population is smaller - and therefore stranger maybe?

I feel a bit let down by the media and other experts. They just don't seem to be getting to the heart of the matter or giving me the facts I need to know. Is Britain being swamped or isn't it? Is it viable for "UK" (presumably minus Scotland, Wales and N Ireland) to return to days of empire or even some sort of fortress UK and still be as prosperous as once were?

May Morning Oxford 2009 - and the "Mitchell" Wall

2009-05-25T11:15:00.011Z

Well for all the careful preparations by our "nanny state" reps on the Oxfordshire County Council - those who wanted to jump in the Cherwell found a way - simply waiting for the police and paid security to clock off early. So leader of the County Council Keith Mitchell - what was the point? In your arrogance you rode roughly over the feelings of the vast majority of East Oxford residents who were excluded from the festivities with a police blockade. The only thing you achieved was dividing the city on this most historic day? Isn't it time you listened to wiser counsel and started thinking about the cultural value of this ancient, interfaith event rather than burying your nose in spurious risk assessments?

I joined the several hundred relectant souls, including a goodly handful of merry Brooke's students on the St Clements side of the "Mitchell" wall. I would rather have been on the west side, where my friends were enjoying the Morris dancing and assorted folk bands. At the risk of sounding completely mazed - I must record that amongst our throng were two young and beautiful identical blond twins, dressed in yellow and gold - strangely appropriate for welcoming the sun on Beltaine.

Here is my first view of across the bridge:

Perhaps so as not to be accused of favouritism, the police, so I'm told, imposed an even more stringent barrier on the western side. And later, as if to find even more rationale for their expensive and unwanted presence, they sent "snatch squads" into the crowds, compelling them to be silent and then confiscating cans of beer and rather pointedly emptying them down a nearby drain. Strange this on a day when all pubs are given dispensation to open all night, or re-open at six am - perhaps they have a special agenda to clean up May Morning of its heavy drinking aspect - five hundred years of merryment is surely enough!!

I'm happy to say that direct action liberated the bridge - the crowds from the West surging through first - the Brookes students on the East being, to my mind, perhaps too well behaved to force things. Although one rather brave attempt to hoist a fellow student over the barrier went badly wrong when he was unceremoniously dropped on his head. He will live but is hopefully not suing Councillor Mitchell and his safety committee for its failure to provide airbags. I was one of the first to rush through from the East side and caught the end of the excellent folk concert. One grumpy policeman shouted at my "you are a credit to the citizens of Oxford" - presumably he was being ironic. I shouted back I thought him a waste of money and that the police budget was obviously too big if they could afford such a stupid waste of it. In these credit crunch days there is an obvious target for a cut. After all the devil makes work for idle hands - or in modern parlance "too big a budget leads to misssion creep".

There is a growing concensus that 2010 will see a return to the status quo and some common sense when dealing with one of Oxford's treasures. I hope so.

* Keith Mitchell is (was?) the leader the County Council
Judy Heathcoat is (was?) the chair of its so-called "safety committee".

PS: for something that looks refreshingly dangerous check out Gloucester Cheese Rolling

Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies, isbn 978-0-19-920451-9

2009-05-03T09:41:00.000Z

Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies, isbn 978-0-19-920451-9

366pp, £14.99 hbk

"The production of grimoires was an entrepreneurial enterprise that thrived wherever the influence of secular and ecclesiastical censors was restricted by geographical, educational or political factors. The opening up of America created just such an environment, and hucksters, quacks, astrologers, fortune tellers and occult practitioners of all shades thrived." p. 188

Which may indicate that the primary audience for this book might not be the "hucksters, quacks, astrologers, fortune tellers and occult practitioners" some of whom might even read this newsletter. Owen Davies has built a strong reputation for himself as author of the groundbreaking Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History re-branded with an eye to the MBS marketplace as Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History. Here again he has taken up a largely neglected topic with some verve and produced a page turning history of the grimoire.

OD's book is likely to be of special interest to those with some knowledge of the genre. Davies gives very few examples of a grimoire's actual content, so there is an assumption that the author has already read one or two. The small examples OD does give tend to underline his thesis that the grimoires are at best a debased form of ancient magick or worst cynical, gibberish. Modern magicians tend to approach the grimoire as an exercise in magical creativity but also as a possible source of Pagan wisdom and occult knowledge that has somehow survived the hands of Christian iconoclasts.

Academic authors are obviously quite keen for the practitioner community to read their work although they are less keen to read anything the practitioners write about the same subject. So you won't find much here of the contemporary magicians approach to the grimoire, apart that is from old chestnuts such as the Necronomicon and the Satanic Bible.

Even so, there is much in here of interest to the contemporary practitioner, once one gets over the slight disappointment at the absence of any mention of the "Goetia", the most popular example of the genre. There is also nothing of what surely be the most famous of all occult trials involving a grimoire, that of Gilles the Rais - Bluebeard. For those with an interest in Aleister Crowley, there is also very little in this book. Crowley of course, represents the way the practitioner community has reframed and rationalised the grimoire over the years. And Crowley penned what is considered to be the best and most cogent of all modern grimoires - Liber ABA.

However most of the book's contents were new to me - although one passage where I would take issue with the author is when he discusses the Theban Magical Library alternatively known as The Greek Magical Papyri or Greco Egyptian Magical Papyri. Davies tells us that these are somehow connected with the very first grimoires in the sequence - which would be my own intuition. But he then says that "There are distinct differences between the magic they contain and that found in the earliest magical inscriptions and papyri from the time of the pharaohs" (p 9) . I read that and thought that must be wrong and wondered where he could have found such a view amongst Egyptologists? My heart sank when I saw the reference to Geraldine Pinch's seminal work on Egyptian Magic, could she really be so out of step with all her colleagues? But there again what does Geraldine Pinch actually say (p. 160-1):

"The openly expressed malevolence of these spells seems un-Egyptian but similar desires may lie behind some of the earlier Letters to the Dead. These do no specify exactly how the akhu are to deal with the writer's enemies. . . Many spells in the Graeco-Egyptian Magical Papyri describe how to make a deity appear and answer questions. The appearance may take the form of a dream for the magician or a vision for the child assistant. These spells are the private equivalent of consulting a temple oracle, or of incubation - sleeping in the temple to receive a divine dream". (my emphasis)

In other words there is quite a lot of Ancient Egyptian religion in the PGM and I suspect the grimoires. Afterall doesn't it say in the Goetia that the spirits speak the Egyptian tongue?

These small issues of the beginning aside, Davies' study is soon on stronger ground after fifteen hundred years of development we arrive at the era of the printed book, when the grimoire really did make it big on the world stage. As the book's publicity confirms, "to understand the grimoire is to understand the spread of Christianity, the development of early science, the cultural influence of the print revolution, the growth of literacy, the impact of colonialism and the expansion of western culture across the oceans."

One tantalizing parallel between the PGM and later grimoires is the "Sixth & Seven Books of Moses" discussed in fascinating detail by OD. These books began circulating in Germany in the eighteenth century and were to become popular in USA. One could of course argue that given the well known existence of the first five, it is just human nature to want to supplement this with a sixth, seventh or even more; just as some bright spark penned a "Fourth" book of Occult Philosophy, a "Fourth" Veda or even "Fourth" chapter of Crowley's "Book of the Law". Interestingly no ancient edition survives of a "Sixth" and "Seventh" Book of Moses. The PGM jumps straight in there with "The Eighth" . There may never have been a sixth or seventh in classical Greco-Egyptian magic, none has so far been found. The explanation advanced for this hiatus is that the number "eight" has special symbolic resonance, perhaps connected with Hermes and the Company of Heaven .

OD calls these "modern" versions "pulp . . . to signify not just the quality of the paper but also the merit of the contents printed on it - worthless, pappy, throwaway literature fit only for those too intellectually limited to digest more serious fare. They were not the sort of publications that found their way into academic and public libraries. Yet their influence was such that, by the late 1930s, American educationalists were waging war on the genre." p. 233. Looking at the few examples of the contents given in OD's study, these would not be so out of place in the PGM - so I wonder where their real provenance lies?

If you want gnosticism and theurgy, one maybe needs to look elsewhere than in this study of grimoire. Owen Davies is revealing the dark underbelly of the magical tradition. I suspect he might even side with the shrinking minority of academics who still follow Frazer's division of magic and religion. Religion from this perspective, being all about social networking and rationality; magick the malign, irrational, solitary practice, bent on material gain. Drive a wedge between Egyptian religion and its magick, downplay the philosophical aspect of the grimoire and it all begins to look that way. It is in these areas that Davies book certainly has an colourful tale to tell. No surprise then that coming up to date, we venture into the explicitely fictional grimoires as instanced in H P Lovecraft's Necronomicon. The book concludes with a discussion of the huge popularity of Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible and the promise that, in case you didn't know it, the history of the grimoire is hardly likely to be over. "As we enter uncertain times . . . There is no sign of these books being closed for good. " p. 283

[Reviewed by Mogg Morgan with some assistance from David Rankine and Jack Daw]

The Way of the Hermetica I

2009-03-26T13:42:00.001Z

The aim of this course is to introduce the core concepts of Hermeticism taking into account a more modern, research perspective. This will include the teacher's own published writings principally his "Tankhem mythos" - viz: "Tankhem"; "The Bull of Ombos" and "Supernatural Assault in Ancient Egypt".

Students will:
Review and critique previous approaches to the topic.
Will gain a new understanding of the modern view of Hermeticism.
Will re-assemble and re-member, the lost fragments of the ancient Egyptian magical religion.

Preparatory reading:
(NB: This reading matter is designed to stimulate debate in the student.
It's presence here does not necessarily imply full or any agreement with the contents.)

Manly P Hall "Secret Traditions of All Ages" - short section on Hermes Trismegistos

Walter Scott "The Hermetica" - abridged edition published by Solos Press.
Publisher's introduction omitting the section on Edgar Cayce. Although even this illustrates some of the problems the student may encounter when approaching the topic.
Translator's introduction.
This will be our core text and worth acquiring your own copy.

Essays and questions
1. Who was Manly P Hall. What are his influences, presuppositions and sources. What do you make of his approach to Hermeticism?

2. Who is Adrian Gilbert? What are his influences and sources. What do you make of his approach to Hermeticism.

3. Of the three, do you agree that Walter Scott is the most academic. Even so, try to address the same questions as above.

4. Is the universe of the Hermetica helio or geo- centric? Is this the same as Plato's Timaeus, with which it is often compared?

More advanced reading:
Plato "Timaeus"

Walter Scott, Hermetica - complete edition

ANTOINE FAIVRE, THE ETERNAL HERMES - From Greek God to Alchemical Magus Informative on Greek and later aspects but little to say on the Egyptian sources.

G R S Mead, Hermes Trismegistos

Iamblicus, On the Mysteries

Athanassiadi, Polymia (1993) "Persecution and response in Late Paganism: the evidience of Damascius" JHS 113: 1-29

Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science. Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 278. ISBN 9780195376135.

Griffith & Thompson, The Leyden Papyrus- An Egyptian Magical Book.
To be read in conjunction with Morgan, M "Supernatural Assault in Ancient Egypt".

Fowden, Garth, The Hermetica

Copenhaver, Brian P, Corpus Hermeticum. More up to date translation based on a better source text than Walter Scott although only covers the Corpus Hermeticum (CH) and Ascelpius. Very useful introduction.

Future reading:
"Libellus" (Little Book) I-IX inclusive of The Hermetica.

(c) Mogg Morgan
Guardian of the House of Life at Abydos

lessons:
1. Introduction
2. Corpus Hermetica in more detail
3. Magick and the CH
4. Egyptian background
5. Technical magick and the CH
6. CH and its Kabbalistic Parallels
7. More on magick of Greek Magical Papyri
8. Conclusions and issues

Hermetic Path II

Golden Dawn Egyptian Gnosis

2009-03-08T12:01:00.005Z

Monthly lectures first or second saturday of every month, live on the
virtual chatroom SecondLife.

Synopsis

1. 3rd January 2009: Pagans & Paganism

[Paganism] is "just a collection of ethnic polytheism whatever was not Judaism or Christianity, but given a name by the lazy cunning of Christian apologists, who could then use their most salacious material to discredit all their opponents at one go." Fowden, review of Lane Fox 1986, JRS 78 (1988) : 176 quoted in Frankfurter : 75

You may have read that “Pagan” was pejorative,
an insult meaning “rustic” or “country dweller”.

The funny thing is that when the early Christians of for example
“Roman Egypt” used this term – they had in mind high profile activists living in some of the biggest and most sophisticated cities of the ancient world.

“Pagan” and “Paganism” was actually early Christian slang, meaning “civilian”.
/Pagani/ were civilians who had not enlisted through baptism as soldiers of Christ against the powers of Satan. By its word for non-believer, Christian slang bore witness to the heavenly battle which coloured Christian’s view of life.
(Robin Lane Fox /Pagans & Christians/. Penguin 1986)

Its only in from our sixteenth century has the origin of the early Christian’s usage has been disputed.

“Paganism” too, is a Christian coinage, a word like “Judaism”, which suggests a system of doctrine and orthodoxy. So even the Christians recognised that Paganism had a doctrine.

"Paganism" came into being principally in the writings of Iamblicus.

Iamblicus was trained in the Ideas of the “Corpus Hermeticum”.

The “Corpus Hermeticum” is an ancient summary of Pagan doctrine.
You can buy edition of this handy little books ranging from the cheap and cheerful (edited by Adrian Gilbert) to the expensive but Copenhaver.

“Paganism” is an eucumenical tradition based on the Chaldean oracles .
It valued all major theologies, especially Babylonian, Egyptian and Greek.

The early pagan "clans" called themselves –
"Neo-platonists",
"Hellenes",
"Chaldeans" or
"Hermeticists" –

They were persecuted by state and the mob for several centuries.

When the Athenian academy was forcibly closed, they took refuge in Alexandria, Aphroditopolis and finally the open city of Haran in Persia.

Here these ideas eventually flowed into the heterodox traditions of early Islam.

When the fanatical Christian emperor Justinian began to really turn the screw, he was stopped in his tracks by the Treaty of Haran, which stipulated that the local philosophical pagans (Chaldeans) be allowed to continue their studies.

In fury Justinian lashed out at the sanctuary of Isis at Philai, in Upper Egypt.

(see Polymnia Athanassiadi "Persecution and Response in Late Paganism - the evidence of Damascius", Journal of Hellenic Studies 113 1-29)

I feel a personal desire to remember the struggles, sacrifices and often martyrdom of those "intellectual pagans" of the late classical world. They, like the modern pagans, were ecumenical and eclectic, hence we should be proud to number ourselves amongst their number.

2. 7th Feb: The Astral Temple or ‘Theatre of Memory’

Every style of Magick has its own particular astral temple.

In Kabbalah it’s sometimes called the Malkuth temple,
and its description is based upon the mystical drawing called the Tree of Life.

In Chaos Magick it is the Chaos Sphere,

In Greek Magick is the Tetratis.

In esoteric Hinduism and Tantra the basic design for the temple is the famous Shri Yantra.

The Renaissance magus Giordano Bruno coined the term 'Theatre of Memory' for this concept.

This was a very important discovery.

GB could use this technique to memorize the relationship between very complex groups of symbols.

Even just thinking about an occult building can have an effect on your consciousness. You can be changed by them and can also discover new things.

You may already be familiar with some of these techniques –
Even so, I wonder if you have considered using a “real” temple as
basis for your psychic explorations?

You can also combine this with real time visits to sacred sites – which may not be suitable for on site voyaging but you can revisit later in the astral.

Dion Fortune recommends that one “sleeps” in your astral temple.

In my own work I was drawn to the Temple of Sethi I at Abydos.

Next time I’ll say a bit more about this important temple and its connection with the Cult of Osiris

(c) Mogg Morgan & Mogg Morgwain

3. 14th March 2009
More on Path working and its relationship to the Mysteries of Abydos

Moon Magick in Ancient Egypt

2009-02-25T12:39:00.001Z

Secret Chiefs

04 March 2009

Time: 20:00 - 23:00

Location:
Devereux Public House,
Street:
20 Devereux Court
Town/City:
City of London, United Kingdom

Description
The importance of lunar mysteries in Ancient Egypt is often downplayed or even denied. MM has over several books revealed much new material on this topic. What began as an exploration of the Myth of Horus & Seth as waxing and waning moon, expanded to include a secret key to the Ancient Egyptian Magical Religion.

Apart from published work, Mogg Morgan is currently exploring this themes online via www.thepaganactivist.com (Golden Dawn Notebook) and his "Golden Dawn Egyptian Gnosis" lecture series for Secondlife and RL venues. Details on request to: mandox2000@yahoo.com.

Way of Hermetica III - in construction

2009-02-16T17:49:00.000Z

"If I had to try to sum up their teaching in one sentence, none would serve the purpose better that, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see god"

Robin Lane Fox, "Pagans and Christians", 1986: 126

Actually "for they shall _be_ god" would be more accurate, which shows the shortcomings of some research and the pitfalls of not allowing a philosophy to speak to us in its own words.

Hermetic Prayer of Thanksgiving (revised)
Having come forth from the sanctuary, they began their prayers to God, looking to the south; for when a man wishes to pray to god at sunset, he ought to face south, just as at sunrise he ought to face east. . .

"We thank thee, O thou whose name none can tell,
but whom we honour by the appellation "God".

Because your alone are master, and blessed by the appellation "creator",
Because you have shown in acts toward all humanity and in all things, loving kindness and affection such as a parent feels and more
you have bestowed on us mind, speech and knowledge,

Mind that we may apprehend thee;
Speech that we may call upon thee;
And knowledge, that having come to know thee, and found salvation in the light thou givest, we may be filled with gladness.

We are glad because though hast revealed thyself to us in all thy being;
Glad because, while we are yet in the body, though hast made us gods by the gift of your own eternal life.

We thank you by learning to know you.
Brightly shining light of the world of mind;
True life of the life of man.
All prolific womb, made pregnant by the creator.
Eternal constancy, unmoved, yet makes the universe revolve.

We adore thee,
who alone art good, and crave nothing save knowing, loving,
and to continue in this blest way of life. "

Asclepius (Epilogue)

Questions:
Who is God in the Hermetica? Is it Thoth Hermes or is he acting as guide or messenger of something beyond himself?

Golden Dawn Notebook II

2009-01-02T12:42:00.001Z

www.thepaganactivist.com/goldendawnnotebook.htm

...unsettled by rampant hippos

The Way of the Hermetica VI - More on the Egyptian Background

2008-12-06T10:00:00.005Z

Another indication of an Egyptian philosophical tradition would be some examples of sceptical literature.

Egyptian ideas did develop and change many times during its long history.

If you don't accept that Egypt was a dynamic culture then try to read some new research on Egyptian theology.

but first take a look at:

"Rebel in the Soul: An Ancient Egyptian Dialogue Between a Man and His Destiny
by Bika Reed (Author) "I spoke to my Soul I replied to what it had said: O! Now this I cannot bear My Soul replies not Indeed, worse than..."

For more information on the Egyptian "Ba" see:

Reeder, G, (1999) "Musing on the sexual nature of the human headed Ba bird" KMT, Autumn pp72-78

Way of Hermetica V - Short Answer Test

2008-12-06T09:55:00.003Z

Short Answer Test
(Your answers may be as long as you like but at least one sentence)

1. What is the Corpus Hermeticum?

2. Approximately when was it composed?

3. In a nutshell, what is its message?

4. What are the names and background of its main characters?

5. Can you describe some contemporary Greek sources that form part of the CH world?

6. How does the CH divide the world both vertically and horizontally?

7. What is a daemon?

8. Who or what is “god” in the CH?

9. How does the CH relate to Egyptian theology?

10. Do Hermeticists practice magic and if so to what end?

11. Any question you would rather answer?

You can email me you answers if you like to:
mandox2000@yahoo.com

Way of Hermetica IX - Relationship to Kabbalah (QBL)

2008-12-04T08:52:00.005Z

On the face it, the QBL shares a similar structure to the Hermetic/Egyptian cosmological model exposed in the previous discussion.

Points of interest are "sephira" as stations in a process of "ascension".

Early QBL has seven spheres although a later model extends this to ten.

The seven spheres or "caves" bears comparison with the seven "caverns" of ascension evident in many ancient Egyptian and later Hermetic "ascension" texts such as
"The Book of Gates".

Here is a short extract from the very beginning of a late classical Kabbalistic text - "The Hebrew Book of Enoch" . Compare this with Libellos I "The Poimandes" of the CH:

in construction

Way of Hermetica IV - The Egyptian Background

2008-12-02T14:49:00.010Z

The Egyptian Background

The Corpus Hermetica benefits from being read in conjunction with a
description of the so-called

"Heliopolitan System of Theology"

ie:

Atum (Re)

¦

Shu (wind) + Tefnut (fire)

¦

Geb (earth) + Nuit (space)

¦

Isis + Osiris + Nephthys + Seth

¦

Horus

as amended by the so-called "Memphite Theology"
of the Shabaka Stone
(now in the BM)

"But much older is Ptah, who enlivened all the gods as well as their life-forces (kas) through this heart and through this tongue . . . His Ennead is in his presence in teeth and lips, which are the seed and hands of Atum; for Atum's Ennead evolved from his seed and his fingers, but the Ennead is teeth and lips in this mouth that pronounced the identity of everything and through which Shu and Tefnut emerged and gave birth to the Ennead."

Basically the Memphite Theology is same as Heliopolis but headed up by Ptah - an ancient Egyptian god often associated with the creation of the physical hieroglyphs.
(This is a role similar to that of Thoth - although Thoth is more often connected with the smaller set of "phonetic" hieroglyphic signs used by scribes)

The so-called "Memphite Theology" can also be seen as a complement to the Heliopolitan system - Ptah makes possible, or mediating the evolution of Atum's "substance" by the power of his "heart" (consciousness) and "voice" (word). In this way Ptah is very like the "demiurgos" of Neoplatonism - although preceeding it by more than 500 years.

"So has Ptah come to rest after his making everything as well as every divine speech (hieroglyph). . . so have the gods entered into their bodies"

Reading:

"The Religion of Ancient Egypt"
by S A B Mercer - Chapter on Theological Systems

"Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the language and culture of the Hieroglyphs"
by J P Allen pp. 171-3 "The Memphite Theology".

"The Epistle of Porphyry to the Egyptian Anebo"
(available online at: http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/porphyry_anebo_02_text.htm)

See also:
http://www.esotericism.co.uk/iamblichus-and-porphyry.htm

Question:
Read these and then consider again who is God in the Corpus Hermetica

next time:
The Mithras Liturgy

Honouring ancient pagans and paganism

2008-11-28T15:56:00.001Z

[Paganism] is "just a collection of ethnic polytheism whatever was not Judaism or Christianity, but given a name by the lazy cunning of Christian apologists, who could then use their most salacious material to discredit all their opponents at one go." Fowden, review of Lane Fox 1986, JRS 78 (1988) : 176 quoted in Frankfurter : 75

“Pagan” and “Paganism” was early Christian slang, meaning “civilian” and not as some say, pejorative terms for “rustic” or “provincial”. Some of the most high profile “pagans” attacked by Christians in antiquity dwelt in sophisticated cities. For example the pagan martyr Hypatia, was from Alexandria, a city notorious to Christians, for its intellectual pagans.

Robin Lane Fox /Pagans & Christians/. Penguin 1986:

“In antiquity, pagans already owed a debt to Christians. Christians first gave them their name, /pagani/. The word first appears in Christian inscriptions of the early fourth century and remained colloquial, never entering the Latin translation of the Bible. In everyday use, it meant either civilian or a rustic. Since the sixteenth century, the origin of the early Christian’s usage has been disputed, but of the two meanings, the former is the likelier. /Pagani/ were civilians who had not enlisted through baptism as soldiers of Christ against the powers of Satan. By its word for non-believer, Christian slang bore witness to the heavenly battle which coloured Christian’s view of life.

“Paganism” too, is a Christian coinage, a word like “Judaism”, which suggests a system of doctrine and orthodoxy, as Christian religion knows one. By modern historians pagan religion has been defined as essentially a matter of cult acts . . . pagans performed rites but professed no creed or doctrine. They did pay detailed acts of cult, especially by offering animal victims to their gods; but they were not committed to revealed beliefs in the strong Christian sense of the term. They were not exhorted to faith: “to anyone brought up on classical Greek philosophy, faith was the lowest form of cognition . . . the state of mind of the uneducated.” Although followers of Plato’s philosophy began to give the term more value in the later third century ad, no group of pagans ever called themselves “the faithful”; the term remains one of the few ways of distinguishing Jewish and Christian Epitaphs from those which are Pagan.”

Robin Lane Fox is always interesting, although he does share the tendency of many historians of his generation, who tend to view things either through the distorting filter of Greek philosophy/theology or from a Christian terminus. But we might ask, was everything in the ancient world just preparation for the coming of Christianity - or can it be examined as a set of ideas in its own right? We might therefore question some of his comments about "pagan" religion being all about "cult acts" and void of any notion of inner piety. As always this tends to avoid the "elephant in the room". Ancient Egypt is now widely acknowledged as being a special case. The ancient Egyptians were renowned for their piety. But why do modern scholars never see things from their point of view when writing about "pagan" religion?

"Pagan" and "Paganism" may be loaded terms but they are not pejorative. What is little known, and little studied, is the organised "pagan" resistance to Christianity, which was recognised at the time as a dangerous, anti-intellectual movement, akin to the "taliban" of modern times.

"Paganism" came into being principally in the writings of Iamblicus, who created an eucumenical tradition based on the Chaldean oracles, that valued all major theologies, especially Babylonian, Egyptian and Greek. These pagan "clans" called themselves - "Neo-platonists", "Hellenes", "Chaldeans" or "Hermeticists" - and they were persecuted by state and the mob for several centuries. When the Athenian academy was forcibly closed, they took refuge in Alexandria, Aphroditopolis and finally the open city of Haran in Persia. Here these ideas eventually flowed into the heterodox traditions of early Islam. When the fanatical christian emperor Justinian began to really turn the screws, he was stopped in his tracks by the Treaty of Haran, which stipulated that the local philosophical pagans (Chaldeans) be allowed to continue their studies. In fury Justinian lashed out at the sanctuary of Isis at Philai, in Upper Egypt. (see Polymnia Athanassiadi "Persecution and Response in Late Paganism - the evidence of Damascius", Journal of Hellenic Studies 113 1-29)

I feel a personal desire to remember the struggles,sacrifices and often martyrdom of those "intellectual pagans" of the late classical world. They, like the modern pagans, were euchemical and eclectic, hence we should be proud to number ourselves amongst their number.

Mogg Morgan

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The Red Goddess

2008-10-27T16:11:00.001Z

by Peter Grey (review)

258pp, Hardback 2008 £37 + p&p

This is a beautiful, provocative, thought-provoking book, one man’s journey in search of the obscure object of his desire – full of odd typography, robust, sometimes rough language and a £37 price tag. Using the latest research from books such as “Strange Angel” , “Love and Rockets” and “The Unknown God” the author blends his own narrative around that which he sees as the three pillars of the Babalonian mythos – Enochian Magick, Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons. Thus one reads:

“Eunuchs have been used traditionally to serve the Goddess, often as sodomitic dog priests. That name is not a slur but most likely comes from their dog position sex. These were important priests who served the ancient Love Goddess by sacrificing their reproductive power. They are no longer men. They cannot penetrate the mystery. I will not advocate the joys of self castration or the smooth root of the Skopsie, but it is certainly one way to serve Our Lady. I prefer Magick with the balls to push shaft deep into the crimson petals of the Goddess.”

Babalon is modern goddess, one of the most recent to emerge from the cauldron of serendipity. Even so, some, Peter Grey amongst them, would claim she has antique roots. She remerged in the modern world via the writings of Aleister Crowley, who is also responsible for renovating the old English spelling as Babalon, which has a significant numerology of 156 as opposed to 165. For Babylon, is an ancient Mesopotamian city, the Bête Noire of the ancient Hebrews, and therefore a natural cipher for corruption and hubris in the strange apocalyptic end game of the Biblical New Testament. I’m talking of the Book of Revelation, a book that exerted a powerful influence on Crowley’s imagination and one way or another figured large in his new Thelemic mythos.

The Book of Revelation is widely believed to contain much hidden and indeed Kabbalistic symbolism, So no surprise that the “anti-gods” of that book turn out to be, according to Thelemites, the true corrective of the modern age. The goddesses of ancient Babylon were Innana, Ishtar and Astarte. These are “Red Goddesses” in more ways than one – and possible role models for the modern woman who is powerful, self sufficient and above all sexual. Whether modern “scarlet woman” is, as Herodotus suggested, willing to give herself to any man for any small coin, seems unlikely these days somehow. So in as much as the author of Revelation was saying that it’s the goddesses that really bring society down, Crowley and the Thelemites say the opposite.

Few would argue that Peter’s Red Goddess is a Mesopotamian creation. Most of us accept Mesopotamia, as the “cradle of civilization” and the dispersal hub for many important things, writing, astrology, technology, religion, etc etc. I must admit my own dealings with “The Red Goddess” are in her Egyptian territory (see “The Bull of Ombos”) Peter devotes a short chapter to the exploration of her possible Egyptian roots, although this is maybe a clear example of where the works of the Victorian Egyptophile Gerald Massey provide an inadequate guide to the material.

AFAIK, Egypt, did indeed benefit from early contacts with Mesopotamia before the rise of the Pharaohs (i.e. 4000BCE) but its main development was independent. So for example although writing may have been invented in Mesopotamia, it was also invented quite independently in Egypt, presumably for the same imperative. The earliest reference in Egypt to the Semitic goddesses Astarte and Anat belongs to the reign of Thutmoses c1500bce, both love goddesses were married to ultimate “Red Bull” Seth. But my Egyptian “Red Goddess” has to be Hathor, a goddess as old as time, goddess of the cattle cult (hence the horns) she is indeed sensual, sexual and intoxicated. (See Les Secrets D'Hathor by Ruth; Rossini Schumann-Antelme, reprinted as Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt: The Erotic Secrets of the Forbidden Papyrus.") When old man Ra is down in the dumps she lifts her skirts and gives him a laugh.

Having said something of the mythology of Innana et al, Peter soon leaves behind the ancient world. I definitely wanted more info on Mesopotamian religion, as his analysis is consistently interesting and engaging. He then follows the tracks of the Belle Dame Sans Merci, through the writings of her numerous modern devotees, including John Dee, Marquis de Sade, Jack Parsons and indeed many a modern mage, including his own dealing with she who must be obeyed, which brings to mind the lines of the song “my knuckles are bleeding and my knees are raw”. This reworking of the Crowleyian material on the nature of the scarlet women, is seen largely through his poetry and forms “The Red Goddess’ ” vibrant core.

Peter has no time for the post modern obsession with transgender and reclaiming the “blossoms of bone”. “Eunuchs” he tells us, “cannot penetrate the mystery.” But there again for me, Babalon might be like “post porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle –the love of whose life is famously the tortured Les, a female to male transsexual.

So all in all an interesting and provocative monograph; worthy I would think of some wider circulation. It might be that this first edition which is perhaps aimed at the “collector” for whom “the medium is the message.” Its white wibeline cover with red embossing is very striking; there are tipped in illustrations, one in colour. And indeed interior text is black and occasional red. Even so I’d be happy to read it in a standard hardback “Starfire” mode or even a good trade paperback. But whatever way you read it, it’s definitely worth a spin. [Mogg]

The Way of the Hermetica - part II

2008-10-25T18:26:00.008Z

Hopefully by now you will at the very least have read the first ten little books of the Corpus Hermeticum, ending with the tenth book "The Key".

Here are some bullet points, covering some points of interest that arise in the tutorials. The internet reader is encouraged to add their own feedback as a comment to this blog and I will do my best to respond:

It was once thought that the Hermetica were essentially works of Greek philosophy with a bit of Egyptian local colour added for effect. The discovery of some of the libellos of the CH amongst the Nag Hammadi Gnostic library demonstrates the Egyptian context. So it may be that the CH is essentially an Egyptian initiatory text with the odd bit of Greek window dressing. Or the true maybe somewhere in between these two views. Keep this issue in mind.

Modern research has made untenable the distinction between philosophical and practical Hermetica made by earlier commentators. Hence we must study the practical Hermetica (eg Magical Papyri) to form a complete picture of the classical Pagan mind.

The texts are in dialogue form and lead the student through stages to a final view.

The text mirrors the structure of the Hermetic universe.

This universe has much in common with other contemporary classical religions - Notably Kabbalah, Gnosticism, the Upanishads and indeed many early part of Egyptian theology - notable that of the priests of Heliopolis, the cult of AmunRa and the religious changes of Ramesside times.

Aratalogies (mythic biographies - not to be confused with Aratology - ethical treatise) of the time, exspecially those of univeral goddess Isis, are also amenable to an Hermetic interpretation. Ie one goddess under a multiplicity of names.

The CH has inconsistencies and this may be deliberate. It is said that Plato's Timaeus, with which the CH is often compared - also has inconsistencies.

One possible inconsistency is whether "God" is part of his own creation
or radically separate.

The CH can appear quite anti "the flesh", ie the created world.

The initiate aims to become godlike.

In practical magic, the magician must also "assume the godform".

Is successful completion of the gnostic, Hermetic path a necessary prerequisite of operational magick? In later doctrines of esoteric Hinduism, this is certainly the case.

Final liberation may not be possible without bodily death or at bodily death when the limitations of the physical are finally transcended.

The CH is text of ascension through stages, returning to the source.

Various of the Lebellos offer summaries of the Hermetic doctrine. See for example CH X and CH XVI. The Latin Asclepius also provides a neat summary.

The evolutionary map looks thus:

Sun (Helios, Amun Ra etc)

Sphere of the fixed stars and planets

daemons - who are both good and bad and therefore may function as intermediaries between humanity and the divine source.

Human microcosm.

Union with the divine is not seen as an end in itself.

There must be a flow of knowledge or "gnosis".

In practical hermetica, the magicians quests for gnosis and the power it brings much as the ancient Egyptian had always had a pragmatic approachs to their gods. This may be in contrast to later concepts of religion, where union or communion is an end in itself.

Prayer of Thanksgiven occurs in "The Perfect Discourse" found at Nag Hammadi,
and several other sources, including magical spells.
(eg compare PGM III 591-609 with Asclepius 41)

"we give you thanks with every soul and heart stretched out to you, unutterable name honoured with the appellation of god and blessed with the [appelation of father] for to everyone and to everything you have shown fatherly / goodwill, affection, friendship and sweetest power, granting us intellect, [speech], and knowledge; intellect so that we might understand you; speech [so that] we might call upon you, knowledge so that we might know you. . . "

compiled by Mogg Morgan
Guardian of the House of Life at Abydos
{more next time}

travelswithmyteenager

2008-09-01T08:24:00.005Z

travelswithmyteenager

or here's a link to the review of my tantra talk

Howlings / Scarlet Imprint (review)

2008-08-25T08:37:00.001Z

210 pages hardback journal, nicely bound in gold blocked turquoise wibaline. £33 plus postage from scarletimprint@gmail.com

This particular number focused on grimoires of various ages, with essays on The Picatrix, The Goetia, or Lesser Key of Solomon, Four Books of Occult Philosophy;
The Voudon Gnostic Workbook; Liber 231, Qutub, And the Grimoire itself by David Rankine, Donald Tyson, Peter Grey, David Beth, Stafford Stone, Paul Hughes-Barlow
Krzysztof Azarewicz, Jack Macbeth, Thea Faye, Aleq Grai, and Zaheer Gulamhusein. So a nice range of material, written by practitioner experts. The whole well illustrates the notion that Pagans are very much into their books. I was particularly interested in the twenty-five pages on "Liber 231", of which information is scarce, apart from Kenneth Grant's celebrated, if at times impenetrable (not to mention out of print) "Nightside of Eden". "Liber 231" is one of the more obscure of Aleister Crowley's "Holy Books". Basically it's a table showing two sets of 22 sigils corresponding to the twenty-two tarot trumps and paths on the Kabalistic "Tree of Life". Given that the spheres and paths on the tree are clearly derived from the Ancient Egyptian "Book of Gates" - the array suggest two tunnels through the underworld, one under the patronage of Horus; the other of Seth. It is the Sethian tunnel that has received most attention, I guess because the "Journey of Horus" is well covered by the conventional Tarot sequence.

There is a colour section of four full colour realisations of the "Nightside Tarot" cards, based I would guess on the prototypes in Kenneth Grant's "Nightside of Eden". "Liber 231" itself has no images apart from the very enigmatic sigils, drawn, so it is said, by Crowley's devoted disciple, Major J F C Fuller. Those in "Howlings" were created by Stafford Stone, who has been exploring and painting the cards and the related "Tunnels of Seth" for several years, during which time "his parents, a close aunt and uncle, a best friend and two pet cats all died." He lost his wife and young son, his home and most of his possessions,"close friendships imploded, relationships crumbled, jobs were lost, debts incurred, stupid actions undertaken and grave errors of judgment made." But hey, "Je ne regrette rien". All of which explains, in some perverse way the attraction of this and indeed other grimoires, although for others it might be a good reason to leave well alone. Although some sort of precaution in terms of banishing might be in order, of the kind recommended in the lead article by Krysztof Azarewicz of the Mihrab Camp OTO. He also suggests yogic exercises to calm the ego, before starting. There was much other useful information in this essay, including advice on how to colour the sigils if you decide to dispense with other people's full blown versions and just use the basic sigils and corresponding couplets. The later seems to be the original intention of "Liber 231", as a basic test or "mind gym" for the initiates astral skills.

Well, if the other sections are as meaty as the above, which my friend the cunning man Jack Daw assures me they are, then this is a nifty little volume and well worth the asking price of £33+ My suggestion for the next number would be to maybe make better use of the gold blocking for a more eye catching cover. But on the whole - highly recommended [Mogg]

‘Write and find ecstasy in writing’: The repeal of the witchcraft act and the explosion of occult publishing

2008-05-10T08:37:00.000Z

Mogg Morgan (rough uncorrected proof)

‘Write and find ecstasy in writing’
The repeal of the witchcraft act and the explosion of occult publishing

1951, the year in which the Witchcraft Act was finally repealed, was certainly pivotal in the development of occult publishing. Paper rationing had ended two years previously and this set the stage for a growth of book publishing and enabled newer players to enter the industry. But it was older more established small independent publishing houses that became the real pioneers.

In 1951 G B Gardner, under the pen name ‘Scire’, published an historical novel, written in 1949 and entitled ‘High Magic’s Aid’. Still labouring in what he called ‘the guise of fiction’; Gardner was nevertheless later to claim that his novel was, as far as he knew, the ‘first book written by an initiated witch describing . . . something of what a witch believes.’ (quoted from ‘The Meaning of Witchcraft’ - G B Gardner’s 1959 book for Aquarian Press.

It took a couple more years until in 1954 for Gardner felt secure enough able to drop the disguise and come out as a witch - well almost. He wrote of his book ‘Witchcraft Today’ that it was: ‘the first book [as opposed to novel] ever written describing what witches are and what they do, by someone who had actually taken part in their ceremonies, worshipped their Gods with them and made magic with them.’ (‘The Meaning of Witchcraft’, p275.)

Gardner undoubtedly was right about the dangers and obstacles to this kind of ‘confessional’ writing. He makes a point of mentioning in the same chronology ‘The August number of Fate magazine (American edition) [which] carried a story of how, on July 3rd 1955 in Ojinaga, Mexico, eighty-five miles from Alpine Texas, a woman named Josephina Arista was publicly burned at the stake as a witch, without trial, upon the orders of a local priest, carried out by the alcalde and the city police.’ (Witchcraft Today, p.275)

Gardner’s contention that the 1954 publication ‘Witchcraft Today’ was a groundbreaker is almost certainly true. Nothing like it, certainly in the pagan/witchcraft genre had previously appeared. Authors of previous works, for example the widely quoted Christina Hole, (see ‘Witchcraft in England’ 1945) were essentially works of scholarly folklore. Christina Hole certainly had no broom in her closet. But her works were widely read by contemporary practitioners and were often cited, as for example the bibliography of Doreen Valienti’s first book ‘Where Witchcraft Lives’ (Published by Aquarian in 1962). Christina Hole’s was first and foremost a historian and folklorist and therefore immune from any possible strictures under the Witchcraft Act.

Up until 1951 it was pretty much obligatory that author’s adopt a fairly hostile attitude to the subject of witchcraft: For example Christina Hole’s 1945 book, ‘Witchcraft in England’ ends with the following valedictory:

‘When that faith sank, the witch and his craft dwindled to a mere survival from the past; and today, though witchcraft lives on it is no longer a terror even to those who believe in it, [she obviously didn’t know Maxim Sanders!], and has ceased to throw a dark shadow over any of our lives.’(Hole, 1945:160).

A few years later and in another of her books published after the repeal of the act Hole’s tone is still fairly hostile

‘Reports appear occasionally in the newspapers of the unpleasant activities of secret societies practising the more evil forms of ritual magick.’

The author goes on to give the full transcript of some of these reports;
One of these concerns a supposed ritual murder in 1945 at Lower Quinton, a stone’s throw from the Rollright Stones. This story continually resurfaced in 1954, after the repeal of the act and was given the big treatment by the Daily Mirror on the ninth anniversary of the still unsolved slaying - February 13th 1954.

VIII. MURDER AT LOWER QUINTON, 1945
Daily Mirror, February 13th, 1954
Ask in these parts whether seventy-four-year-old Charles Walton, murdered in a hedgerow here nine years ago on Sunday, was the victim of witchcraft, and even the detectives no longer smile.

For I can reveal that new clues and strange coincidences in this unsolved crime have recently come to light. And the idea that Walton was a twentieth-century sacrifice to black magic is no longer a joke in this Warwickshire hamlet.

At the time it seemed quite a commonplace murder. Walton, a hedger, was found with his throat slashed, beneath the hedge he had been trimming.
'Just find the motive and you find the killer,' thought the police.

But whispers of black magic trickled round the cottages of Lower Quinton almost as soon as Superintendent Alex Spooner, chief of Warwickshire C.I.D., and Superintendent Bob Fabian of The Yard started their enquiries.

The gossip about 'witchcraft' and 'a ritual killing' tickled the detectives. They smiled politely. That was nine years ago on Sunday-St Valentine's Day.

The killer of Charles Walton is still untraced. And today the detectives won't mock the word 'witchcraft'.

MURDER
Although Superintendent Fabian, who spent three months in the village, has retired, his colleague, Superintendent Spooner, has never admitted defeat on the case. Not once has he stopped inquiring. But what facts are there to go on?

First, picture Charles Walton on St Valentine's Day, 1945. The sun was unusually kind for February. It dappled the lanes and fields. Old Charles had a contract to cut the hedges of a local farmer and this was the sort of day his rheumatism would let him work. With his two-pronged hayfork and a razor-sharp hedge-slasher he hobbled from his thatched cottage. He had left his purse containing the little money he possessed at home-Charles Walton didn't believe in carrying money with him. Everyone knew that.
At six o'clock, when he was overdue for his tea, his niece raised the alarm. He was found soon afterwards, dead since about noon.

Those are the facts. Now here are some of the coincidences that have come to light.

The Date. According to the old-time calendar, which is thirteen days behind the present one, the killing took place on February I -the eve of a traditional sacrificial day. On that day a human being was killed in the belief that his life blood dripping into the ground would replace the fertility taken from the soil by the previous season's crops. (1)

The Method. The killer first threw the frail old man to the ground and then, before slashing him, pinioned him by the neck with the two prongs of his hayfork. Then the fork haft was forced over and wedged at an angle-almost as 'though to make certain that his blood would flow to the ground.

The Previous Murder. In 1875 at Long Compton, only a day's tramp across the Cotswold foothills, eighty-year-old Ann Ten-nant was the victim of one of the last known witch killings. She was killed with a two-pronged hayfork.

The police have found one other link between the killings, but I am pledged not to reveal it.

The Dog. Studying books on local superstitions and folklore, detectives have found reference to the 'visions' of a local boy of about fifteen who claimed that he saw headless dogs. That was about sixty years before the murder. The boy's name was Charles Walton. Since old Charles died there has been one other 'murder' on the slopes of historic Meon Hill, where he was found. The victim was a dog. The animal had been strangled by its collar as it struggled to free itself after being hung on a branch of a tree near the murder spot.

The Motive. Though Walton was a bit 'short-tempered', no one held a grudge against him. His only possession unaccounted for was a silver pocket-watch, but there is no proof that he carried it with him that day.

Like Superintendent Spooner-the man who says, 'I will solve this murder yet', but who is left with only one likely motive-I too have made many trips to the hamlet. But at my first mention of the word 'witchcraft', doors have been slammed in my face.

The killer has yet to be found. And that day may be nearer than he-or she-thinks.

This newspaper quoted verbatim in Christina Hole’s book with the added footnote from Dr Margaret Murray saying that the Sabbats of the witch-cult were held on Candlemas Day, May-day Eve, Lammas Day, and All Hallow's Eve. (The God of the Witches, 1933.

Although Murray contributed a preface to Gardner’s 1954 book, they later fell out because of the way she continued to give credibility to stories of the kind quoted above. Stories such as these recorded above provoked Gardner and ‘the witches of England’ to publish to try to set the record straight. Thus Gardner writes:

‘I have been told by witches in England: “Write and tell people we are not perverts. We are decent people, we only want to be left alone, but there are certain secrets that you mustn’t give away.’ So after some argument as to exactly what I must not reveal, I am permitted to tell much that has never before been made public concerning their beliefs, their rituals and their reasons for what they do; also to emphasise that neither their present beliefs, rituals nor practices are harmful.’ (Gardner 1954: 13).

We can see in this that Gardner is still being a bit coy about his connection with witchcraft. He poses as an anthropologist and proprietor of a museum, also founded in 1951. This was the normal way of all occult publishing before this time. For example Francis Barrett’s, author of the ‘The Magus’ (1801) a classic of Georgian alchemy and occultism, is careful to distance himself as merely an observer of certain practices. And this was always the way. The only real exception to this comes in the work of Aleister Crowley from about 1904 onwards. But Crowley, as in many other things is a bit of a one off.

So its maybe not so unusual that writing in 1954 Gardner is very coy and doesn’t really come out as a witch. Being a witch, as Gardner was only too aware, could still be a dangerous thing to admit in the climate of the time. Gardner knew Crowley and his career quite well. Gardner had seen at close quarters the consequences to ones reputation of the wrong stuff getting to the press. Bran, who is someone who was around at the time, thought that the repeal of the act was not really motivated by any libertarian aims of the Lord Chancellor but more as the clearance of obstacles to effective prosecution of other crimes. Another example quoted by Christina Hole shows the sort of farcical incidents that could, given the state of the law before the 1950’s, find there way into the courts:

News Chronicle, January 6th 1947
Gordon Sutton, an Army pensioner of East Dereham, Norfolk, told Dereham magistrates that his neighbour, Mrs Spinks, an old age pensioner, had practised witchcraft on him.

He was summoned for assaulting Mrs Spinks. Both were bound over for six months.
Sutton declared: ‘A witch has been in the witness box. Many a time she tied a bunch of flowers on my front gate and I have spat on them and thrown them away. (Hole adds in a scholarly footnote: ‘Spitting is a very ancient protective charm. Human spittle from time immemorial has been supposed to have magical powers and to be a defence against evil’) [The report continues) You know that is going back to the witchcraft of the Dark Ages. I dare not tell you half the terrible things she has done to me. I have been tortured for five years.’ [Shades of Nora Batty]
Mrs Spinks, who denied she had practised witchcraft, said the trouble was due to her gathering parsley which Sutton wrongly said was in his garden.’ (Hole 1957:106)

What of the publishers?
Michael Houghton, the proprietor of the famous Atlantis bookshop in Museum Street, London, published Gardner’s 1949 novel. But by 1954 he had managed to persuade a much larger and well-established company called Rider to take him on. Gardner says he had to be confessional or reveal something new or they would not have been interested. Ring of truth there. It’s difficult to ascertain whether the repeal of the Witchcraft Act would have played any role in the publisher’s deliberations. Fifty years later and the tracks have gone cold. Rider is now part of global media giant Bertelsmann, absorbed into its UK division Random House. Small presses like to delude themselves that being bought out by a big corporation is some sort of belated compliment to their editorial taste and acumen as publishers. Sadly this is not the case, it’s the backlist the predator craves and has very little sentimental attachments to the entity itself. Rider becomes just another imprint amongst many others. I’m currently awaiting a response from Random house as to whether they have any archived materials of Rider in the 1950s.

Despite these gaps in the record I think it is a reasonable assumption that the legal eagles at Rider would have questioned such a publishing project. They would have asked Gardner’s opinion; they may perversely have liked the prospect of a fight. More likely they would have gone for the publishing maxim ‘Lets take a risk and turn it down.’

Afterall at the time other writers were experiencing censorship problems. I’m thinking of Rosaleen Norton in Australia or Mervin Peak in the UK. Vindictive Christians may well have initiated an action if only to put a spanner in the works. After all, fifty years earlier Madras Christian newspapers, with an eye on ‘market share’ had pretty much destroyed Helena Blavatsky’s reputation.

1951 was also important in other ways. The celebrated Aquarian Press seems to have been founded in that year, with an output of fairly uncontroversial spiritualist books. Titles such as Arthur Bhaduris’s ‘The Key to Health’,
Gilbert Alice’s ‘Telepathy for you: to Mr and Mrs Everyman’,
Bromage Benard’s ‘The Occult arts of ancient Egypt’;
Daphne Viger’s ‘Atlantis Rising’;
Marian Emma Slater’s ‘The Stars at Christmas’,
Vera W Reid’s ‘The Silver Unicorn’.
I wonder whose heard of any of these titles nowadays?

It wasn’t until 1959 that Aquarian as it were ‘moved over’ and published Gardner’s ‘The Meaning of Witchcraft’, a follow up to the 1954 ‘Witchcraft Today: And in 1962 Aquarian published Doreen Valienti’s first little offering ‘Where Witchcraft Lives’.

What of Hale, well known publishers of ‘Eight Sabbats for Witches’ etc - did they play any part in the 1951 breakthrough? Sadly not. A long established company they came later on the scene. It was not until the late sixties and seventies that they really jumped on the bandwagon. Before that their output was mainly of the pre-repal folkloric variety, such as Ronald Seth’s study of the seventeenth century witchcraft trials ‘Children against Witches’
Eric Maple ‘The Dark world of Witches’ (1962)
Ruth St Legers-Gordon’s ‘The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor’.
Or in 1972 Lauran Paines’ ‘Sex in Witchcraft’.

You might ask which book was first out after the repeal of the act? I have to tell you it as John Symonds first version of ‘The Great Beast: the life of Aleister Crowley’ (also published by Rider). The Bodleian pressmark says 20 November 1951. This is probably the most radical book of the times and one that as we shall discuss below. It was a time bomb that finally blew in the sixties.

‘The head of the OTO at the time, Karl Germer was shocked when he read ‘The Great Beast’. The Order of Oriental Templars (or Order of the Templars of the East) is a small international body of adepts who practice sexual magic. Germer said that the book would set the Order back a thousand years. He was mistaken. There is no doubt that the widespread interest today (1973) in Aleister Crowley stems from ‘The Great Beast.’ (Preface to 1979 edition of The Great Beast)’

Symonds is certainly right that it did no such thing, the very opposite in truth. Its interesting that the book has gone through many incarnations and rewrites and its in the words of Colin Wilson ‘a kind of appalling classic’ (on dust-jacket of 1989 reprint as ‘The King of the Shadow Realm: Aleister Crowley: his life and magic’). Did the 1951 act have any effect on the publication of this book? Yes I think it did, notice that there is no mention of magick on the cover of the first edition. Symonds says in another edition that at the time this sort of things couldn’t be too obviously cited on the cover and that in later works he was able to add more of the sexual magick stuff. Indeed the more magical material was not published until 1958 and then by another publisher called Mullers, whose output also included the books of Crowley’s disciple Kenneth Grant. It was not until 1973 that a complete revised edition of the Great Beast appeared in various cheap paperback editions licensed by Duckworth.

Symonds biography ‘The Great Beast’ has never been popular with occultists although its impact on popular culture has been, imo, immense. I remember reading one of the shlock horror editions given to me by a climbing friend. I must say I found the book a revelation, as did countless others. Since then other more ‘sympathetic’ writers have tried their hand at writing a more ‘sympathetic’ biography but few have really matched Symond’s panache. When Cecil Williamson, the owner of the witchcraft museum read it, it was a revelation and he immediately decided he needed to know more about the subject.

Returning to Gardner’s publishing efforts, one might ask what was his motivation in publishing his confessional books such as ‘Witchcraft Today’? Recent research shows that the publication of coven secrets earned him no friends amongst his initiators. Maybe they thought it better that witchcraft remain a largely secret tradition.

I contend that Gardner may well have seen the publication of ‘Witchcraft Today’ as a magical act. Yes it would be good for his ego, what author doesn’t crave the kind of recognition that the publication of a book brings? But his motivation goes further than this. Through the publication of the book he sets in motion a revival or re-creation of a cult that was up until this point largely moribund.

It could also be said that he open the flood gates for a kind of ‘confessional’ writing about witchcraft. Accounts by living practitioners of witchcraft were pretty much non existent before this time. As I said most books were either heavily disguised accounts posed in the form of a novel or semi scholarly accounts often quite hostile or distant from the tradition they describe.

Gardner deserves recognition as a pioneer who started a trend that in later years would lead to the growth of a new kind of occult literature. The massive increase in this area of publishing is in the main in books by self confessed practitioners, developing or revealing the secrets of their art. That’s quite an achievement. Familiar images of the occult, such as those shown in the following montage, would have been impossible without him. In a future article I hope to follow further the long associations between writing, publishing and magick.
[Montage]

Writing and words have always had a long association with magick. Some would contend that writing is the invention of magicians. In ancient Egypt the hieroglyphic script seems to have a distinct moment of creation. Their use was to record accurately magical and religious texts. The earliest function of writing is as an instrument for the public reading, aloud of magical or religious formulae. It was only later in the Greek and Roman world that reading began its long development as a medium for silent and private reading of an author’s text.

Witches and magicians are more than any other the people of the book. I know this phrase is usually reserved for devotees of the Abrahamic tradition. But we are the true people of the book - lots of books. Books, reading and the text have always been a crucial part of magical practice. Let me remind you of the phrase ‘Bell Book and candle.’ Remind yourself for a moment of these concepts so familiar:
Grimoires - or grammars of magick;
The Books of Shadows;
Spells.
Talisma, ‘eating your words’ as in late hermetic practice
Libers.
‘The Great Beast’ is also a good example of a ‘Liber’. The Liber has been especially important to the magicians of all times. A Liber is magical book written at the behest of a discarnate entity or spirit. Aleister Crowley wrote lots of these including the monumental master work ‘Magick in Theory and Practice. More correctly entitled Liber ABA - Aba / father or by simple cabalistic numerology ABA = 4, book four. Four being a significant number in occult symbolism

Liber ABA or Magick grew out of a magical working between Crowley and his ‘scarlet woman’ of the time, Sor Virakam otherwise know as Mary Desti. The working spirit that made itself known to the pair was called Abuldiz, hence the working is sometimes called the Abuldiz working. The final book was issued in the form of a square of four equal sides priced at four groats (shillings).

The book is in four parts, part II for example deals with the fundamentals of ceremonial magick. ‘Crowley exhorts the reader to magical endeavour in brisk prose on the grounds of common sense and practical psychology’

Lawrence Sutin, a gifted modern biographer of both Philip K Dick and Crowley says that ‘Magick’ was ‘a radical break from the veiling, sanctimonious tone that had dominated writing on magick since the Romantic period. Crowley followed on the basic approach set forth in his 1903 essay ‘An Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic’ . That is, he argued for magic as a structured, empirical means for developing unrecognised capacities of the mind. The implements and rituals of magic were extensions or projections of mind - however apparently irrational - constituted a course of self-confirming initiation to the open-minded and educated practitioner. Most fundamental of all was the training of the Magical Will, through which yogic meditation became possible.’ (DWTW: 222)

It was also in this work that Crowley first introduced the more archaic spelling of Magick with a K, a convention widely used ever since. Although on a lesser scale, Gardner’s book published after this time key into this long tradition of Magical books as special things.

It also keys into a long tradition of the book as magical object or talisman. The book as we know it was born in pagan Rome in the form of a Codex in fifth century AD. Before that the book took the form of a scroll hand written of course on Egyptian papyrus. The Egyptians held a monopoly on the production and supply of papyrus for writing. The creation of the standardised book was begun in great Alexandrian libraries of the Ptolemies. Before the book there is the text - usually confined for use by Priestly or aristocratic elite minority. Religious and ritual in content. The book creates a new intellectual space that of the reader who can interact the book by recitation and silent reading. In Rome these were most often the augury texts.

The pagan Romans seem also to have invented the Novel. - Reading out loud greatly facilitated by continuous script - needs spoken voice to make sense of it -

The rise of the ‘codex’ - adopted by the Christians - not pages on a roll but a book with pages - parchment rather than papyrus - cheaper - more portable - easy to read and private where necessary. (p15)

In Latin West - a break with the past - reading became restricted in place i.e. churches and subject matter holy scripture. Reading became a silent or murmured activity divorced from his pagan social or dialectical qualities.

Books became fetish objects - more precious and monumental - punctuation to aid silent comprehension - more luxurious as a form of patrimony.

Throughout the early Middle Ages the Jews of the Christian West seem to have sacralised the book in much the same way as contemporary Christian society. For Jews as well as Christians the book was a religious object with magical properties, rather than an instrument for communication through reading. Its supernatural charge made it a relic for pious and contemplative adoration, rather than a reservoir of contents that could be drawn upon freely. In short the book was doubly closed to direct exploitation, it was closed within its binding, and it was closed within the ark, to which ordinary people did not have access. This view was in clear contrast to the idea of the ‘open’ book (in both senses) that began to circulate after the year 1000. One clear example of this view of the book can be seen in the so-called Chronicle of Ahimaaz, an epic genealogical work composed in southern Italy in 1054 on the basis of oral traditions dating back to the second half of the ninth century. It recounts the story of a woman who brought down the wrath of God on her family, causing the death of several relatives, because one Friday she lit a candle before a sacred book, while she was menstruating. The details of the story are somewhat murky; not is the function of the light (or the contents of the book) at all clear. What seems beyond doubt, however, is the custom of keeping a light before the Book of the Chariot, an ancient Hebrew mystical text. The woman’s act is supposed to have contaminated the holiness of the book, here treated as a genuine relic. (Cavallo et al, 1999:150).

We can learn from this that an important ritual activity of the Kabbalah was the reading of the book - reading or more especially chanting aloud a mystical or magical text was a ritual.

Renaissance pagan revival also revival of books and secular reading; abbreviations, two column spreads - sectioning an aids to broader quick understanding. Renaissance Humanism, whose roots lie with

‘On 10th December 1513 Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a letter to his friend. In the previous year, when Piero Soderini’s government fell and the Medici regained control of Florence, he had lost everything he valued most. He had tried to build a citizen army; it collapsed. He has prized his position in the government; he was sacked. Suspected of conspiracy, he was imprisoned, tortured and ended up on his farm outside Florence. Here he yearned for any sort of political occupation, quarrelled and gossiped with his neighbours - and read:

“ Leaving the wood I go to a spring, and from there to my bird-snare. I have a book with me, either Dante or Petrarca, or one of the lesser poets like Tibullus, Ovid and the like: I read about their amorous passions and about their loves, I remember my own, and I revel for a moment in this thought. . . . When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday cloths, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak with them, to ask them the reasons for their actions, and they, in their humanity, answer me, and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death: I become completely part of them. (Cavallo et al, 1999: 180)”’

Books are and have always been very liberating things.

The 1960s. Renaissance
To close then I have to jump forward to the 1960s, for a brief tour through the major publishing landmarks of the era. For although for occultism, the events of 1950 and the decade represented a sea-change - it was really during the 1960s that the new occult ideology came into its own. If I may borrow a term from Germaine Greer, the 1950s have been called the ‘decade of foreplay’ another the real explosion occurs in the 1960s when for many progressive people the world really began. It was a renaissance although now forty years later, it’s easy for retro historians to try to minimise its importance in the development of the modern sensibility.

To quote from a rather excellent new book on the period, think of the 1960s and you maybe think of ‘a time of revolution - political, social, psychedelic, sexual.
But there was another revolution that many historians forget: the rise of a powerful current that permeated pop-culture and has been a central influence on it ever since. It was a magical revolution - a revival of the occult. Previously rejected and ridiculed beliefs took centre stage, reaching the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, saturating the hippies and flower power, hitting the big screen with Rosemarie’s Baby [a film that featured Anton Le Vey in cameo role as Satan] and the bookshelves with Lord of the Rings. The Tarot, I Ching, astrology, kabbala, yogis, witchcraft, UFOs. Aleister Crowley, yin-yang and The Tibetan Book of the dead became the common currency they are today.’

!960 and the world of occult publishing was pretty much in a state of hibernation. There was interest in occult and magical books but not too much. Then in 1960s France a literary time bomb exploded. It was called Morning of the Magicians by two French alchemists, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. . The publishers Gallimard had expected a modest success but by the end of the decade the mayflower English language paperback alone had sold 1 million copies.

‘Paris in 1960 was the capital of futility, nihilism and dreary ‘authenticity’. It was the Paris of Jean Paul-Sartre and Albert Camus, of ‘nausea’ and ‘the absurd’, of alenation and of being engage, of black turtlenecks and Waiting for Godot. In such an atmosphere, a book on magick would be the last thing one would think would do well. But within weeks f its publication, The Morning of the Magicians had both banks of the Seine talking about alchemy, extraterrestrials, lost civilisations, esotericism, Charle Fort, secret societies, higher states of consciousness and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (Lachmann: 2001:15)

I was about six years old when Morning of the Magicians was first published so I don’t remember too much about it. Even so it was destined to be one of those crap books that change my life. I can’t remember quite when I read Pauwels and Bergier’s flawed masterpiece, but it was destined to be for me one of those ‘crap books that changed my life.’ It became underground classic besides The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Steppenwolf, and Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience. I remember how it spoke of the twentieth century as being locked in a struggle between dark and light occult forces. It told of secret societies and ancient knowledge. Every other sentence seemed to be about some mind-blowing piece of history. After a couple of chapters I could really take any more, I wanted to go and find out for myself. I guess this was how it effected many of its readers. After reading Morning of the Magicians one needed a reality check.

The great antropologist Mircea Eliade wrote, there was something ‘new and exhilarating [in] the optimistic and holistic outlook ... in which human life again became meaningful and promised an endless perfectibility. Man was called to ‘conquer his physical universe and to unravel the other, enigmatic universe revealed by occultists and gnostics.’(Mircea Eliade quoted in Lachman 2001: 16)

Morning of the Magicians is quite a thoughtful book, quite intellectual. Many of its ideas have been repackaged over and over again so you have to try to imagine how it was the first time round. The book contains an epic thesis, spanning the whole of human history.

Future perfect: ‘It may be that what we can esotericism, the keystone of secret societies and religions, is a remnant, which we find very difficult to understand or deal with, of a very ancient branch of knowledge of a technical nature, relating to both mind and matter.’

Magicians and witches are revealed as the holders of an ancient secret that they preserve via secret societies that have existed for time immemorrial under such names as the illuminati, the magi, the Atlanteans, the Rosicrucians, or the golden dawn. And what is the nature of this secret? First that humanity has a purpose. Is that a startling thing. Maybe not although most mainstream science and history would maintain that life has no meaning other than perhaps the replication of its DNA. But to the secret council of adepts, humanity’s purpose has always been the creation of a race of perfected beings - the superman if you like. This thesis has lead to a widespread conspiracy and indeed struggle between adepts of the black and white brotherhoods, either to preserve the secret agenda of humanity or to mould it to their own ends. In the twentieth century things are said to have come to a head when the struggle between good and evil magi culminated in two brutal world wars.

In Morning of the Magicians this thesis about the secret history of humanity is illustrated firstly by the presentation of previously unknown ‘secrets’ of ancient technology. The mysteries of the pyramid builders, the ‘miracles’ of ancient medicine etc. Coming up to date it introduces lots of suggestions from literature that talk of dark goings on - thus we read about H P Lovecraft’s paranoid visions of a race of trans-dimensional creatures plotting and dreaming of there return. Or think of Arthur Machen’s Welsh tales about strange races of fairy folk who lurk in the deep forest or snowy heights.

You might not accept all this but, good or bad, it has been a very influential idea within occultism. You can see most of the books of that followed as developments of this theme of the perfected individual ready to take humanity into the future. Take only one example, say the whole sixties psychedelic revolution where drugs and alternative lifestyle are seen as the growth of the new person fit for the future expansion of human consciousness beyond the planet. I wonder if Gerald Gardner in the twilight of his own life was not influenced by Morning of the Magicians. I have in my possession a letter from a then student who describes Gardner as obsessed with pyramids and pyramid power. Impotent and with failing health, Gardner spend long hours within a special constructed pyramid in a bid to renew his powers.

These are quite radical ideas and they cannot be easily dismissed. Perhaps the interest in them as waned slightly but they cannot be completely avoid. The modern magician ought at least to think about them and decide whether in some form or another they ought to be extended or perhaps rejected. Some like Gary Lackman see them as what went wrong in the sixties and what turned magick and occultism into wuite a reactionary trend. What do you think?

It is with this kind of thing that Gary Lackman begins his magical mystery tour of thee occult philosophy of the sixties (no apologies here to Frances Yates: The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age). H P Lovecraft, Conan the Barbarian, Maharishi Yogi, Timothy Leary, the two Kenneths (Anger and Grant), Aleister Crowley, Tolkein, Castaneda, Alan Watts, Idries Shah, Charly Manson. Down the pub I asked can anyone think of a so-called sixties guru who doesn’t have feet of concrete? Silence for a moment then ‘Alan Watts’ (author of Zen classic ‘The Spirit of Zen’). He who, according to Lachman ‘masturbated daily, drew pornographic pictures, read pornography and had a taste for “various tortures” which he inflicted on himself in order to achieve orgasm’ (p115). He succumbed to ‘alcoholism and killed himself in 1973’ - could happen to any of us after all.

Maybe that why it is so important to know the dark side of the guru. That’s why I like Crowley, what you see is what you get, prepare for your disappointment now. He doesn’t have any skeletons in his closet . . .

The dangers of letting the guard down are nowhere better illustrated that in the tales of Idries Shah recounted in ‘Turn off your mind.’ Shah whose Octagon press published (and perhaps ghost wrote many of witch patriarch Gerald Gardner’s early works). Meeting J G Bennett of ‘The Fourth Way’, a disciple of Gurdjjieff and the founder of a successful alternative community known as Coombe Springs. Bennett became convinced that Shah was the guardian of ‘the secret’ and at the master’s request signed over the deeds to the estate as a gesture of good faith. Shah promptly evicted the entire community and sold the property for 100K, enough cash to prop up his publishing empire.

To my mind, the real dark side of the sixties was the cult of personality and the obsession of good interesting occultists (and not so good) with celebrities. Whether from the music or film world, these people offer rich pickings and an easy path to popularisation of important ideas. But maybe, as Gary implies, the road these people have taken to success makes them inherently empty, craving for novelty; dilettante - good cash cows but not the most serious students. Modern occultists and pagans would do well to heed the warning - not to be dazzled by these fake Lucifers. In the sixties is was Mick Jagger who had some style, now we have some bimbo from Hercules or Zeena signing initiation certificates for quite a well known magical grouping - stop - read this book!

Since the publication of Morning of the Magicians there have been many imitators and indeed if you go to the Psychic Questing Conference or Alternative Egypt you will see many books that follow in the footsteps, not always with as much elegance. Other pagans have reacted against it but picking single themes, such as Tantrism and discovering for themselves whether these were really the work of an ancient super race. In my own case remember reading about supposed wonderful ancient feat of medicine such as ancient transplant surgery or vaccination. As with so much of this kind of thing, if you depart from the main picture and start looking at the individual details in context things may not look quite so clear.

Around about the same time that I read Morning of the Magicians I remember pasting the pages of the Daily Mirror into a scrap book. It was another even bigger literary phenomenon. The Chariot of the Gods had arrived. Its author, a Swiss hotel manager was awaiting trail for embezzlement when a book he written in his spare time sold the first of over 42 million copies! Erich von Daniken had arrived. Like many of my generation it was the first time someone had something interesting to say about pyramids and the wonders of the _pre-Christian_ realm. It may have been crap but it was a our crap.

Van Daniken’s books are essential a reworking of Morning of the Magicians aimed at a less intellectual audience. The first line of his book reads ‘it took courage to write this book and it will take courage to read it.’ He gives the global conspiracy of the illuminates a novel twist. The ‘secret’ now becomes ‘was god was an astronaut?’ He was not an intellectual or good historical researcher but like his many imitators he knew how to present a good yarn and his mad theories about ancient times struck a chord amongst a people hungry for knowledge of their ancient pagan past.

Personally I see the sixties as part of the process of sharpening Occam’s razor - trying out new philosophies and lifestyles. Its seems mad when you look at it but it is part of the collective move away from the really ‘evil’ forces of global governments, whose slaughter policy makes Charlie Manson look quite tame. We are growing and learning from our mistakes, but to make sure we are not just destined to repeat them, I suggest one needs to know what they were, to debate them - and move beyond.

Abstract
The repeal of the witchcraft act signalled a sea change in occult writing in terms of quality and quantity. As the real ‘people of the book’, pagans have been connected with writing and publishing since the beginning of recorded history. I want to explore some of the mysteries of the book and the injunction to write and publish as magical acts. It been said that even a crap book can change your life, never was this more so than in the 1960s when an cultural renaissance was ignited by a couple of incendiary magical texts.

Arthur 'Pendragon' - what I don't like about him and other self-styled 'kings'

2008-04-12T10:04:00.000Z

The 'king' in question is not the legendary Arthur but a laterday pretender to the crown. See link for an example.

'King Arthur' in 'action'

As a pagan myself I find this kind of thing slightly humiliating. I'd like to be able to say this is just a joke or a bit of post modern irony. Trouble is over time what started as role playing is getting serious (again see the clip).

I'm not doubting 'King Arthur's' commitment to his own personal trip - but do we really have to be involved? Trouble is there are plenty of moderately high profile pagans who find it personally advantageous to buy into this whole thing. They start writing about him and feeding even more the guy's delusions that he somehow represents something other than a small circle of friends.

Hence the current message which if we are not careful is sure to be repeated ad nauseum at various pagan gatherings and forums over the coming months. In it the 'king' tell his 'followers' and anyone else who will listen, that they should stop going to Stonehenge or Avebury for the solstice. They should instead organise things in their local area. He has been a slightly bedraggled and largely ignored 'kingly' presence strutting his stuff at Stonehenge since its the 'liberation' in 1999. It's unclear from his 'message' exactly where he will be next year. Does it means he will be absent from the media scrum at Stonehenge or are these instructions for everyone else?

Now on the face of it what he says might not seem unreasonable. It's the tone that is irritating. If you're a newcomer to all this you might be forgiven for thinking that 'King Arthur' is singlehandedly responsible for the 1999 'liberation' of Stonehenge and indeed the growth of pagan activity at sacred sites up and down the land. But in fact 'King Arthur' could be viewed as a relative newcomer to all this. Moreoever he is a newcomer whose instinct is far from inclusive.

Indeed he wouldn't be the only one of our largely self-appointed 'leaders' who seem to want to cherrypick the best of pagan Britain for themselves. These people often are created for and by the media; a fact that they use to their own advantage. But is it to the advantage of you or I; the average man or woman in the street? Yes there are those amongst us who cling to the outmoded 'values' of feudalism. But I say raise the banner of 'Everyman/woman', and consign the would-be pagan aristocrats to the dustbin of history where they belong.

'When Adam delved, and Eve span,
who was then the gentleman?'

PS: The open invitation to the funeral of Druid
Tim Sebastian had the following rider:

It was Tim's wish Rollo Maughfling and Arthur Pendragon do not
attend. They will be receiving a letter to this effect.

www.grahamharvey.org/Tim.htm

-------------------

Druid wars: How a drunken row over 4,000-year-old bones is causing
chaos in pagan circles.

The last time I met King Arthur Uther Pendragon — at a summer
solstice ceremony at Stonehenge — he was staggering about blind
drunk, sword in one hand, warm can of Stella in the other, his long
white robes rather worse for wear.
He proudly told me that he had loads of children, but couldn't
remember exactly how many — `the King's a bit of a tart, you see' —
and very thoughtfully invited me to join his harem if I `fancied a
bit'. He then made a great show of pretending to grab my right breast.
So as I park on a stretch of muddy grass next to his very small and
tatty caravan which overlooks the famous pagan site, I am a little
nervous.
Not just because he's a randy old lush, but because he has a pretty
fearsome reputation as a self-styled warrior, political activist, new
age militant, very enthusiastic demonstrator — he's camped out here
on some sort of protest about the Stonehenge Visitor Centre — and
Battle chieftain of the Council of British Druid Orders, or COBDO.
Happily, this year, he's sober (if very keen to get down the pub) and
extraordinarily chatty, with a tendency to ramble.
`I'm a spiritual warrior. I'm here to bang heads together to get
everyone on the same side and I'm prepared to fight for what I
believe in. . .
`Like this huge row over the skeletons — don't whatever you do listen
to that other bunch of idiots who make up COBDO West. No one bothers
with them, I'm Battle chieftain, I decide the policy and what I say
goes — I think we should let those who lay at rest, stay at rest. You
wouldn't want someone digging up your grandma from the churchyard,
would you?'
It's difficult to know where to start...
The `skeletons' are the 4,000-year-old remains of a young girl
called `Charlie' and seven other sets of prehistoric bones, excavated
near the ancient stone circle in Avebury, Wiltshire, and now on
display at the Alexander Keiller Museum in the village.
The `row' concerns a small breakaway group of druids (known to some
as COBDO West) who've requested the museum release the remains so
they can rebury them where they came from. King Arthur and mainstream
COBDO want the same thing — but are upset that COBDO West have taken
matters into their own hands. `COBDO West are just a joke — three men
and a dog, without even the dog,' splutters King Arthur. `I've got
thousands of members in my Arthurian War Band all round the world and
loads more in the UK. I could field hundreds of activists at the drop
of a hat. Bunch of idiots.'
Gosh. Silly me, I thought druids were just a bunch of tree-huggers
who wore flowing robes, paid homage to the sun and were full of peace
and love. I couldn't be more wrong. Because the Council of British
Druid Orders is at war.
Or, more accurately, a few key members are at war, after a punch-up
in a pub and a horribly acrimonious split back in 2006.
Today, no one seems able to remember exactly what it was all about
but for the past two years, they've been busy slinging mud, insults
and the odd fist at each other.

The bones at the centre of the row were found at Stonehenge
On one side is my old friend King Arthur, an ex-soldier, ex-builder
and ex-Hell's Angel who changed his name by deed poll to King Arthur
Uther Pendragon in 1976. He sports long grey locks, a big grizzly
beard and a slew of tattoos.
On his `team' are Rollo Maughfling, alias the Elder Arch Druid of
Stonehenge, and his COBDO supporters.
On the other, the breakaway COBDO West, is Paul Davies, Druid Chief
Reburials Officer, who lives on a narrow boat in Bath and started all
this fuss about the skeletons, and the very hirsute Archdruid of
Exmoor, who merely identifies himself as `Steve'.
The latter, now 53, is teetotal and claims King Arthur is a drunken,
self-invented, aggressive fraud who has a nasty tendency to throw up
in sacred circles and is a hazard with his faithful sword — `I've
seen him wave it about when he's p***ed and nearly decapitate
people.'
`A lot of people are embarrassed by it all — very embarrassed,' says
Emma Restall Orr, a druidic teacher and priestess from Warwick-
shire. `They're feisty, burly lads who are very much on the edge of
druidism but are rowing in public and giving druids a bad name.'
And there are an awful lot of druids out there — according to
Professor Ronald Hutton (a leading authority on paganism) there are
more than 10,000 in the UK. There are countless cults, covens and
orders, and with meetings (or moots) just as likely to be down the
pub now as in a moonlit wood, this 9,000-year-old branch of paganism
is becoming more and more mainstream.

Peacemaker: Terry Dobney, aka Chief Druid of Avebury, is calling for
a Druid code of conduct
But the definition of druidism is also pretty vague. It has been
described alternately as the `nature religion of Albion'; `the
sacredness of the earth and nature and all living things'; and
a `natural spiritualism'.
Terry Dobney has been a druid for 50 years and has been Chief Druid
and Keeper of the Stones at Avebury for the past 11. He wears long
white robes and an antler on his belt, clasps a hazel staff and has a
rook's feather in his cap.
`Druids are supposed to have a balanced view and see both sides of
the argument,' he explains. `But there are some strong egotistical
characters who need keeping in check. We're drawing up a code of
conduct for being a druid.
`There are very few actual time-served druids. It takes a minimum of
21 years before you can call yourself a druid.'
According to Terry, it starts with a year and a day learning all the
ceremonies with a mentor druid. The next seven practising what you've
learned — `it's an oral tradition, so you're not supposed to write it
down'. Seven more dressed in blue, getting a handle on the poetry and
music. And, finally, the white robes and a political role.
Which, if you believe King Arthur as he sits nursing a pint of
Strongbow in the pub with his girlfriend Kazz, 49, is where he is
now.
`I work out the political tactics for the druids. My order is the
political arm. We're the guys in white frocks, up the trees. We're
the ones trying to stop the Newbury by-pass.'
Hasn't that been open for a few years?
`Whatever — we're at the sharp end. We're the political arm of the
whole spiritual movement.'
But it's tricky to get a handle on what this lot actually believe in.
Terry's take is: `We're born, we reproduce if we're lucky, and we
die. I certainly don't believe in any sort of goddess.'
For the Archdruid of Exmoor it's all about helping and healing,
though he dismisses Terry's 21-year druidic training scheme as `a
complete load of rubbish — no need to take any notice of that because
every druid is different'.
Paul Davies, for example, says: `It's all about respecting nature as
a living being, and beauty and power and love of nature — the
ceremonies help us become part of nature and the local landscape.'
King Arthur, meanwhile, seems more preoccupied with his passport,
which he produces in the pub. `Look — look! I'm the only subject of
Her Majesty the Queen who is allowed to wear a crown on his passport
photo!'
There does seem to be a certain lack of spiritualism among some
Council members.
Which is a terrible shame for the rest of Britain's druids, quietly
getting on with their lives, planting trees, performing ceremonies
and trying their utmost to live at one with nature.
And finally, the skeletons — what's that all about?
Paul Davies kindly explains. `It's very simple. Christian remains are
automatically reburied if they are exhumed for any reason and it
seems reasonable that non- Christians should have the same rights.'
Which, on the face of it, seems pretty reasonable. Indeed, pretty
much the only sensible thing I've heard all day and the only thing
they all seem to agree on.
Meanwhile, back in his local, I buy King Arthur another pint and make
my farewells to him and Kazz.
`Sorry about the summer solstice,' he mutters. `It's always quite a
long night,' adds Kazz, diplomatically.

From: Mail online
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1127430/Druid-wars-How-
drunken-row-4-000-year-old-bones-causing-chaos-pagan-circles.html#

Omphalos Magical Fair 2007 (cancelled)

2007-07-01T09:37:00.000Z

Bath Omphalos at the Chapel
Bath Omphalos at the Chapel

Saturday Evening: Roberto workshop (Zivorod ).

Sunday Afternoon: 'Blood Lust and the Evil Dead' - extended workshop on supernatural assault. Workshop and performance of the Zar exorcism dance; audio/visual installation based around Mark Mirabello's Cannibal Within. Special altar and apotropiac rites. Illustrated lecture by Mogg Morgan based on his forthcoming book: Supernatural Assault in Ancient Egypt (Seth & Egyptian Magick volume III). More to be announced. A gathering of the clan rather than a commercial event so tickets £2-3 pounds.

Space in the chapel is limited so it would be handy to let the organisers know if you are coming. Bring food.

Website: http://www.omphalos.org.uk/

Yahoo elist: omphalosmagickalfair/
Sunday Afternoon: 'Blood Lust and the Evil Dead' - extended workshop on supernatural assault. Workshop and performance of the Zar exorcism dance; audio/visual installation based around Mark Mirabello's Cannibal Within. Special altar and apotropiac rites. Illustrated lecture by Mogg Morgan based on his forthcoming book: Supernatural Assault in Ancient Egypt (Seth & Egyptian Magick volume III). More to be announced. A gathering of the clan rather than a commercial event so tickets £2-3 pounds.

Space in the chapel is limited so it would be handy to let the organisers know if you are coming. Bring food.

Website: http://www.omphalos.org.uk/

Yahoo elist: omphalosmagickalfair/

Samkhya Dualism

2007-05-07T09:27:00.000Z

In ancient India what we now call a philosophy was termed a view (skt darshan). This is in contrast to the western tradition where philosophy can be more doctrinaire in its approach. The Indian intellectual tradition is relativist, any philosophy is a point of view, correct only on the basis of a set of presuppositions. The six most important views were, according to one important text said to be:

Nyaya or the logical school;

Its close relative the school of Vaisheshika or Atomism;

Mimamsa, literally 'enquiry', a school dedicated to the defence of the authenticity of the Vedas;

The Vedanta non-dualist school;

Yoga (1)

The Samkhya or Reasoning School.

Samkhya is widely believed to be one of the oldest of the six and along with the Vaisheshika Atomic school the main influence on the medico-scientific (Ayurveda) tradition and Tantrism. Samkhya represents an extremely important philosophical tendency in Indian thought. All of the later philosophies defined themselves in relation to its theories, either for them or against.

In reality there were many more than six philosophies in India. One important view was preserved by the Raseshvara (mercury lords), ranked as about eighth in an imaginary league table of important views.(2) This system almost certainly comprises alchemical practitioners like Nagarjuna and is closely akin to the later Tantrik and Ayurvedic views. It is worth noting that ideas connected with medical science (Ayurveda) are also extremely pervasive and very authoritative. In fact, there is hardly any text in the Indian intellectual tradition from the Late Upanishads onwards that does not make some reference either directly or otherwise, to Ayurveda.

continued at www.mandrake.uk.net/samkhya.htm

Pagan Federation Wessex Conference

2007-04-29T10:57:00.000Z

Glastonbury
I'm speaking in the afternoon on 'Typhonian Magick'

Deconditioning - the wrong way (from JSM0

2007-04-21T08:53:00.000Z

Mogg wrote:
Aleister Crowley recommends that magicians
cultivate the ability to argue the case from both sides -
as in the classical techniques of the sophists.

That kind of practice found its way into Pete Caroll's reworking of the whole
Crowley thing into his first book on Chaos Magick - _Liber Null_.
AFAIK chaos magicians still take this idea quite seriously -
ie i sure i read an article either in Chaos International or Oracle where one high level member of the IOT says how he was a 'lefty' most of his life but then decided he would be a 'fascist' for a while as some sort of intellectual exercise - which strikes me as about rhetoric - perhaps with the aim of deconditioning etc.

Personally i was never that impressed by that idea in crowley et al
- always struck me as 'bad faith' -

Mark said:
Clearly, if one already feels a conscious inclination toward fascism, the sincere adoption of a fascist world-view won't enact any profound de-conditioning. If in fact one finds it repugnant ( another mode of desire to be sure) than an engagement that seeks to find the truth or genius of the perspective might well be productive. Any sincere engagement with abjected material is potentially productive. In terms of Crowley, I immediately think of the squalor of the Abbey--an engagement with a basic form of the abject--filth.

As to playing at fascism, one need look no further than the west coast post-punk demi-monde of the 1980s, a'la Exit and ReSearch magazines,Feral House Press, Boyd Rice aka NON etc. Clearly the engagement exhibited by this group is as much about an interrogation of fascism as it is an embrace.

mogg said:
Thanks - that does help clarify the issues -
i suppose 'abjection' works on, or implies that these are arranged in some sort of binary pairs of opposites.
The middle way or equipoise (ie deconditioning)
comes by using them for some sort of intellectual kartharsis.
hence the famous binaries of hindu philosophy - pleasure/pain, attraction/revulsion etc

But I suggest that there is an unlimited number
of choices available to someone wanting to engage -
the other points of view -
and that some things (eg: fascism)
can be viewed as sui generis -
i.e. they don't stand in any meaningful
contrary with anything -

Of course the Buddhism philosopher might also say that the
idea of contraries is also an illusion -
ie: just a construct of some kind -
ie: in what sense is black really the opposite of blue ??

'love and do what you will'

mogg

ps: There is also the issue of ego -
imo an egotist believes that their personal development is more important than the suffering of others - but ego is the enemy of liberation - so they are caught in a paradox??

mark said:
Of course the abject can also be a function of suspended opposition. Those things considered monstrous or Other are abjected because they violate presupposed oppositions. Indeterminate race and/or gender is often construed as abject. The various figures of the undead also enact the kind of boundary crossings that call forth banishment. Most conceptions of the left-hand path--utilization of bodily pleasures or identification with "evil" as paths to spiritual elevation--enact this "impossible" co-presence as well. All of which is to say that the embrace of the abject may serve to reveal the illusory nature of binary opposition.

m

Dear Mark

that's very well put but a bit tricky for me to understand ; )
But guess you are talking about the nature of taboo ?
I.e. that the ideas of constructing a set of binary opposites -
often involves a lot of unexamined presuppositions
about what is 'good' and 'bad'?

So for example in
'tantrik' praxis a 'low caste woman' may be seen as defiling
and therefore as a source of powerful, liberating encounters.
But we might well question the initial assumption of
'low caste women' = 'impure'
- that kind of thing??

'love and do what you will'

Mogg

ps: in western magick the equivalent of the 'middle way'
is AFAIK the 'middle pillar' - which lies between
the twin poles of 'mercy' and 'severity' -
perhaps an idea influenced by Buddhism?

Blood lust and the 'Evil Dead' in Ancient Egypt (talk)

2007-03-16T14:59:00.000Z

A talk in march at the Dark Arts Society, Deveraux Public House

I intend to continue my admittedly 'leftfield' exploration of the darker aspects of Egyptian folk magick.

The 'Zar' cult is probably a survival of a popular ancient Egyptian cult that involved 'demon dancing'. I will touch on this at some point in the talk although it might be even better to have someone demonstrate the Zar dance - perhaps one of the regular dancers might be able to have a go - as I believe Zar is part of the modern repetoire. I was wondering if anyone had a copy of Hassan Ramzy's 'Introduction to Egyptian Rhythms'.

Jan Fries has written an interesting chapter on Zar in his Seidways: shaking, swaying and serpent mysteries - he based that on the work of a eminent german anthropologist Enno Littmann, whose results are not otherwise readily available in English. I was pleased to find a connection between 'seething' and egyptian magick.

Magus: The Invisible Life of Elias Ashmole (Review)

2007-03-13T19:20:00.000Z

By Tobias Churton, 2004, Signal Publishing.

'Elias Ashmole is a particularly striking case of someone who did well out of the Restoration through his flair at 'remembering' a largely apocryphal golden Stuart past before the civil war. His lasting fame and 'name' rest (in the title of the Ashmolean Museum) upon his dubious acquisition of another man's lifetime collection of rarities, and his subseqent gifting of them to the University of Oxford'

Lisa Jardine (2002) On a Grander Scale , her biography of Sir Christopher Wren, quoted by Tobias Churton.

The above quote from Jardine provides the raison d'être for Churton's less eloquent but arguable more informed study of the life and impact of the famous antiquarian Elias Ashmole. The house that Elias built as a repository of one of the world's' first museums, is still Oxford's small but wonderful treasurehouse of scientific history. Recent work to extend the basement turned up Ashmole's alchemical laboratory complete with instruments and human and animal remains. The main exhibit is now divided between the Bodleian library, and the founders room of the new Ashmolean in Broad Street - surely one of the world's great museums. Tradescant's original collection of curiousities is still on display - along with the only known portrait of John Dee and one of Ashmole himself, along with the gold chain presented to him by a Swedish monarch in gratitude for his monumental History of the Order of the Garter. It is said that the actual chain is missing a few links, a sure sign of the frequent ebbs and flows in the fortunes of the old magus.

Churton's excellent redaction of the life is only made possible by the five volume compilation of Ashmole's diaries, autobiographies and related notes published by OUP in 1966. The author, Conrad Hermann Hubertus Maria Apollinaris (Kurt) Josten (Pheeww! you don't get names like these very often these days) solved Ashmole's cipher and was thus able to do the work. Awarded an honorary DLitt by the university for his troubles, after his retirement as curator of the science museum, he become curator emeritus.

Which all goes to show that Jardine has probably got it wrong and Ashmole was no Hasolle and does deserve his fifteen minutes of fame. If you need more persuasion read Churton's book. Perhaps aimed more at the museum bookshop than the serious contemporary magi, it does nevertheless contain some gems, especially concerning his struggles to remake himself after the defeat of the royalist cause (hurrah) during the protectorate of Cromwell (booo). Ashmole tells how he "went to Maidstone assizes to heare the Witches tryed, and tooke Mr Tradescant with me." The six witches were hanged, accused of bewitching nine children, a man and a woman and £500 worth of cattle lost and corn at sea by witchcraft.'

Or account of his relationshp with otherwise puritan ministers who nevertheless had a perchant for 'sorcery'. Mrs John Pordage, whom he was amazed to see 'Clothed all in white Lawne, from the crown of the head to the sole of the Foot, and a white rod in her hand. She was hailing as a prophetess by those dancing country dances about her 'making strange noises". Explaining that they were rejoicing because they had 'overcome the Devil.' Dr Pordage then appeared 'all in black velvet' and pressed everyone to join in.'

or even the more intimate touches of Ashmole's struggles to find a wife or love or was it both? It's difficult to see whether his failures were down to a lack of good looks or the necessary finances : 'I dreamt in the morning that I put my hand into Mrs Marche's placket (slip) and then to her next petticoat and then to her third and then to her smock, and then pulled it up, and with very little struggling felt her bare cun(?) - well who hasn't had a dream like that??

This is a lively picture of the times. I could have had more information on the magical work but I learnt a hell of a lot from this densely illustrated and well made book. If you've an interest in the times then buy it. - mogg

Legend of the Witches (Review)

2007-03-11T10:10:00.000Z

Written and Directed by Malcolm Leigh
Produced by Negus-Fancey
Edited by Judith Smith
Lighting Cameraman: Robert Webb
Border Film Production (London) Ltd
Year: 1969
Featuring: Alex and Maxine Sanders and their beautiful coven.
Format: DVD

‘In the beginning was the Moon, Diana. Her lover was the Dawn, Lucifer - God of Light. They created man, and built the monuments, which tracked their paths across the skies. Now man could predict the movements of the Gods, he sought to control them, through priests and ritual…’

Originally X-rated, this newly released DVD, is a real period piece this, documenting the beliefs and practices of Alex Sanders and the circle of witches, which under his leadership, electrified the popular imagination and attracted many into the Wiccan path.

The film's leisurely pace requires the modern viewer to make some adjustment to their viewing habits. Nevertheless this is a minor masterpiece and really manages to tell one of witchcraft's many 'stories'. We've perhaps become a little too knowing to accept all of the certainties of 1960s Wicca - but nevertheless we can all agree, that this 'warts and all' view, really does capture the spirit of the time. It's a beautiful film, shot I think in 16mm black and white, which lends it a very artistic feel, reminding me most of the experimental films of Maya Deren or indeed UK classics of 'socialist realism' such as 'Night Mail', the 1936 movie by John Grierson, with music by Benjamin Britten.

The documentary begins with lovely sweeping shots of seascapes and ancient, elemental landscapes over which the film's narrator begins his tale of the ancient witch mythology, of the Goddess Diana and her consort Lucifer, the sun. Now whether or not one buys into this spirited mythology, we have strayed into controversy almost immediately. Who amongst the current glut of media witches even dares to mention that name - Lucifer?

Almost half the film explores these ideas, covering issues such the mysteries of earth energy, altered states, the pagan traces that survive in pre-reformation churches, the persecutions and the rebirth of the old religion. It's foundation myth, easy to sneer at, but strangely wonderful just the same.

Seamlessly, the film now deliverers us into the hands of a modern coven. We see them perform a variety of rites. First, an outdoor initiation. The candidate, referred to throughout as Michael, not because that's his real name but presumably because of the ancient folk myth of 'crazy man Michael', Britain's very own 'holy fool'. The priestess repeatedly calls 'Michael' to various encounters with elemental forces, the whole rite done at Alderley Edge in Cheshire, itself a place of power, just a stone's thrown from Lindow Moss, where in Iron Age times, other, darker rites were done by our pagan ancestors.

Now the action moves into the temple, after some exploration of the many cursing exhibits, still to be seen at the Boscastle's Witchcraft Museum, we are prepared for the notion that witches sometimes curse. The coven, prepare such a curse, using the traditional and extremely ancient technique, in which a poppet is given life through the agency of Alex and Maxine's act of sexual magick - fascinating stuff.

We even get to see something seldom alluded to these days - the so-called 'Black Mass.' completed with a very lifelike 'sign of Osiris slain' - . These witches, known these days as Alexandrians, do not see such as mass as any form of inversion of Christian principles. They knew something that we have all perhaps forgotten - there is no impervable barrier between primitive Christianity and classical paganism. It was around this time that Professor Morton Smith wrote his groundbreaking book Jesus the Magician. The 'Black Mass' is only 'black to the blind' - it is in fact a celebration of life in all is bounty.

The film concludes with a nod to the future, when the special powers of the witch will be understood more in terms of the newish science of ESP and indeed the 1960s first forays into the psychedelic, encounter groups and other techniques of obsession and transcendence. Of course some in the new millennial will find this all too embarrassing and bad for business - but what do they know? Who are then the true successors to Alex Sanders and the witches of the 1960s? If they were still here I'd say the Temple ov Psychic Youth would be a likely contender. The film will outrage some but inspire others to take up where they left off after a generation or more of stoney sleep. Buy this and be refreshed. - Mogg Morgan

Ardhanarisvara or Ardhanari - Notes (in construction)

2007-01-30T10:04:00.000Z

A modern cult of Ardanari draws upon its ancient manifestations but differ in many important respects. For example the historical Kaulas worshipped a Goddess possessed of special abilities including the ability to produce an androgynous elixir or 'goddess semen'. The experts say that Ardanari was viewed as androgynous in a different way and that this does not include the production of male and female seed or both semen and menstrual blood. see (White 2003 : 278)

The modern cult would be more flexible in its mythology - but is still able to draw inspiration from older sources for the idea that the male and female adepts can be the source of a (if not the) androgynous elixir. Inspiration for this could be drawn from the Tantrik kingship rites of Bali and Java - medieval centres of the Ardanari cult:

'An Old Javanese court poem, the Smara'Dahana ("The Burning of Kama"), translated and commented by C. Hooykaas, ends on the following verses:

Such is her loveliness, moving and sweet,
to be compared with mead in a chalice;
together with her as his principal spouse
did Smara come down to earth;
King and Queen as Ardhanaresvan
continuously on the jewel lion-throne;
King Kamesvara in [the] lotus' inner part,
having as sakti the eight goddesses after their arrival.45

This poem is in fact a reference to the Indonesian royal consecration, which was Tantric. Hooykaas explicates this verse on the basis of Balinese Saiva ritual, in which Ardhanaresvan is praised in the following terms:
"Hence a rain of nectar pours down, therefore on all the limbs and junc-
tions, born from the meeting of husband and wife, this is proclaimed to be
the 'real life.'"46

Here, the king and his queen, husband and wife, embody the divine pair Siva and Uma, who together are called amrti'karam, the "making of nectar, holy water." It is at this moment in the ritual, in which nectar or holy water is said to descend from the sky to earth, that the water in the vessel before the priest becomes transformed into holy water.47

This is the central mystery of Balinese Hindu religion. On the one hand, this consecration ritual transforms a man into a king: whereas as a boy, the king may have had an ordinary name like Ayam Vuruk, the Young Cock, following his abhiseka he is given the official name of Kamesvara. On the other hand, it transforms him and his spouse into the central deities of the Tantric mandala, vivifying the world with the nectar of their union:

in the moment of their consecration, the newly consecrated King Kamesvara and his spouse are identified with Siva and Uma bestowing the nectar of their supreme bliss upon humanity.48 The mandala is completed by the array of women that surround the royal couple: the king, together with his spouse, as Ardhanaresvan, are said to be seated in the padma'guhya, the hidden recess of the lotus, where they are surrounded by their eight Saktis, perhaps the king's lesser queens.49 However, as we noted in the previous chapter, the lotus and its heart are, in Tantric parlance, none other than the female sexual organ, and certain Kaula groups represented the Sri Cakra as a yoni surrounded by eight lesser yonis.50' (White 2003 : 135)

Thus we read in
Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit:

'Ardhanarishvara "The Lord Whose Half Is Woman" represents a transgendered being created by the union of the Hindu deities shiva (male) and shakti (female). Ardhanarishvara, above all, speaks to the totality that lies beyond duality. In Chinese Taoism (or Daoism), this concept is symbolized by the coming together of YIN AND yang in the Tao (or Dao). Like the Greek god Hermes, Ardhanarishvara is associated with communication; the intermediate being often serves to mediate between women and men, mortals and deities, and between other entities. For this reason, Ardhanarishvara is said to dwellin the chakra (sacred center of the human body) of the throat. In tantra, this chakra is also sometimes associated with oral intercourse, linking the deity not only to androgyny but also to homoeroticism. In the past, Ardhanarishvara was served by gender variant, cross- (or mixed-) dressing, priests.

Alain Danielou* writes, "The hermaphrodite, the homosexual, and the transvestite have a symbolic value and are considered privileged beings, images of the Ardhanarishvara. In this connection, they play a special part in magical and Tantric rites." To devotees, Ardhanarishvara, like Ganesha - Shiva's non-biological son and a companion of Ardhanarishvara - brings prosperity. In artistic depictions, Ardhanarishvarais typically shown with the left half of his body being female and the right half, male. The female (Shakti, or parvati, or Uma) half is usually garbed in red and often holds a lotus, while the male half (Shiva) wears a tiger skin or an ascetic's cloth around the waist. The skin of the female half is tan, while that of the male half is light blue. His/her gaze is pensive, serene; his/her pose sensuous, inviting. The cult of Ardhanarishvara appears to have reached a pinnacle during the tenth through the twelfth centuries and again in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when he-she became a popular subject in sculpture and painting.

*Danielou, Alain (1907-1994) French musicologist, writer, translator, musician (especially of the vina), dancer, and sportsman known especially for his works on Hindu music, mythology, religion, and mysticism, which include Hindu Polytheism (1964), The Ragas of Northern Indian Music (1968), Shiva and Dionysus (1982), and While the Gods Play (1987). Inspired by a deeply religious mother, at age four he constructed a sanctuary in the woods with images of the Virgin Mary and small crosses. His attraction to the sacred eventually led him to explore other spiritual traditions, particularly Hinduism, and to view eroticism as a bridge to enlightenment. He described his first homosexual experience in beatific terms - he felt suddenly "infused with light." "In that moment of intense pleasure, a god of sensuousness, happiness, and light was revealed to me - that god of love whom mystics [of ancient Greek religion, Sufism, Christianity, and Tantra] write about, the god of Jalal al-Din RUMI and Saadi, of Saint John of the Cross [San Juan de la Cruz] and Saint Theresa of Avila [Santa Teresa de Avila], of Dionysian and Tantric rites."

In the 1930s and 1940s, with his lover Raymond Burnier Danielou immersed himself in Hinduism, visiting, photographing, and writing about many otherwise neglected Hindu temples. In Fools of God (1988), one of his works which depicts the interrelationship of homoeroticism and the sacred, Danielou describes the erotico-spiritual dimension of the lives of certain sadhus(Hindu ascetics). For these, he insists, "the repression ofs ex is out of the question. The path of complete abstinence is considered impossible in the age of strife in which we live... The man who wishes to conquer heaven and earth must cultivate both sexual and mental energies and at length learn to channel the one into the other." While some sadhus have female companions, others, for reasons including the desire to avoid fatherhood, have male companions Danielou confirms that "relations between person same sex are . .. very widely practiced." Observing"this connection between homosexuality and spiritual life, and the sacred view of this kind of relationship, are well known in all religions," "Sex allows the pupil-teacher relationship to achieve fullness in which the flowering of the body leads to ennoblement of the soul."

see also

david white the alchemical body
david white, the kiss of the yogini
Sahajanath's Tantra Sadhana

website: O Grand Bucca, both Dark and Fair, divine androgyne, be in all heartsand on the tip of every tongue. For your time has come again as it does with the beginning of each moment! )http://www.geocities.com/cronnekdhu/Traditional_Cornish_Witchcraft.html

Pagan Theology & Ethics

2006-12-30T08:17:00.000Z

In construction

Is it possibly to derive ethical views from pagan values?
Assuming we can use the term 'pagan' to capture a specific set of religious practitioners - it's unlikely they would be able to come up with an agreed list of values. Its the nature of paganism to be vague about these things. Even so here are are some possibilities.

pagan values
1. Cause no unneccessary harm
I've a feeling that might be a self-evident truth.
You have to be pretty bloody minded to think the opposite.
Can you think of a counter example?

2. The necessity of polytheism
Some would say monotheism is the only necessity.
But true monotheism is rare.
For example, Christianity is a good example of polytheism masquerading as monotheism. The complexity of nature implies a natural polytheism

3. The plurality of ultimate truth
A great deal of effort has been devoted to the discovery of one 'ultimate truth' or one 'Theory of Everything.' But theories such as Godel's Theorem of incompleteness surely imply this issue will always be unresolved. In which case ultimate reality is always plural - which is expressed in certain pagan mythology such as that the world comes into being from the interaction of a god and a goddess.

4. Tolerance

5. Principle of Honour

6. Compassion

Issues:
Abortion
Conflict

Death and Burial
I take it Caliban's long comment is intended for the issue of 'Death & Burial'. He seems to be saying that the intellectual paganism of the classical period (Greeks and Romans) is responsible for a loss of the richer attitudes to death and the otherworld, traces of which are still discoverable in older cultures. It's an interesting idea and one that is evidenced in the literature. It maybe goes hand in hand with the idea that magicians of the period were such trouble makers that they provoked their own demise. Certainly it can't all be blamed on the Christians - bad as they were - the first laws against magick were enacted by Augustus way before the Christian hegemony.

The high culture of Egyptian had three classes of sentient being-

the ankhw, the akhw and the neterw -

the living, the spirits and the gods.

All that talk of 'spiritualism' is really about the Akhw - the spirits of departed who have some continued existence - sometimes in a way helpful to us sometimes not so. Death customs may be for the benefit of the deceased or serve some other aim - perhaps display or redistribution of wealth. Nothing so far implies an afterlife in some otherworld. The Akhw live amongst us not somewhere else, if they did maybe they would be less troublesome? Some death customs clearly do implie an otherworld - as for instance when someone is buried with a sword presumably to do some fighting on the other side. The death customs I like seek to return the body to the biosphere in respectful but also quick and efficient manner. The departed spirit is reborn or otherwise reintegrated into the living world of those that come after. That to me seems a more pagan way.

Divorce
Drugs - use & abuse
Ecology
Euthanasia
Gambling
Medicine & its limits
Politics
Sexuality
Sexual politics

A dialogue - please leave your feedback

Seidr & Seething - the saga continues

2006-12-25T18:12:00.000Z

UK's Pentacle magazine issue 19 has a response to the updated chapter of Seidr from the new edition of Jan Fries, Helrunar: a manual of rune magick. An extract from the said chapter was reproduced in the Beltain edition of the same magazine. At the moment the pagan scene is gripped by 'academeitis' - that's when someone attempts to end an awkward argument by invoking some supposed academic authority. I say 'supposed' because those cited are often no more of an authority on the matter than us regular mortals. I've heard it several times now - 'academics say that whatever else seidr might be - it can't posssibly be seething'. Given the supposed impossibility of proving a negative - that seems a rather reckless statement from a supposed cooled headed scholar.

I'm still not quite sure why some people get so hot under the collar about Jan's interpretation of the mysterious seidr practice. Surely there is room for more than one view on what it might have been. Jan attempts through various arguments to link it to the universal phenonemon of the shaking trance. But some heathens will have none of it - pamphlets have been published in the vain attempt to repudiate Jan's view; he is accused of an unspecified eastern influence; speakers have been known to digress from their scripts in order to warn their audience of the dangers of following Jan's lead.

Jan's seething hypothesis is hardly that threatening. Afterall it's not as if Jan isn't also sympathetic to the new American style seidr. He may point out the uncertainty of its theoretical basis but recognises that authors such as Diana Paxson have developed a nice syncretistic divination ritual which works well and to which they have appended the classy, ancient name seidr. All Jan does it point out that this same title is also associated with lots of things they don't like. Perhaps this explains why they loathe his theories and try to argue Nordic literature away?

Jan Fries is very much in favour of people making up new things. Afterall there is no necessity for all good things to be ancient in order to be genuine. I'm sure he would want them to be proud of their new interpretation of seidr which now has an ethical frame it probably lacked in its historic version.

Alan Nash is the latest to enter the fray. The intentions of Alan's letter in Pentacle may have got a bit lost in 'translation' but I suspect his interest is to provoke discussion and see the arguments rehearsed. Alan questions why Jan's appears to deny that that the lady in Erik's Saga was doing seidr. Erik's Saga is one of the prime sources of information on Seidr, and in it there are details of a supposed seidr rite (see Jan Fries Seidways: shaking, swaying and serpent mysteries, for the full text). I'd say that Jan merely asks why, if this really is an account of Seidr, the priestess isn't referred to as a seidkona as one would expect, but is instead almost invariably called a spakona (seeress)?

Alan Nash also questions Jan's apparent characterisation of seidr as 'evil' - now things are really getting serious as that could be seen as an insult to the whole heathen tradition! What Jan says is that historically seidr did have such a reputation in Nordic literature. Like it or not - there is apparently not a single text in Nordic literature that says anything kind about the practice.

Finally - as has been common on this debate - which has rumbled on for a while now - Alan evokes the shade of Edred Thorson, who apparently has strong views on this issue. The great man may have spoken but whether what he says stands up is another matter: "One thing I must vigorously insist on is that the word seidr can in no way beconnected to the English word 'seethe'."(Witchdom Of The True: A Study of The Vana-Troth and the Practice Of Seidr, Runa-Raven Press, 1999).

As any student of logic knows, definition is supposed to explain what a term means, not what it does not mean. Irvin Copi once wrote: "to define the word 'couch' as meaning not a bed and not a chair is to fail miserably to explain the meaning of a word." But to be fair I've not been able to see the article and perhaps it has some stronger arguments. I'm told Edred is an expert on etymology - so presumably he meant to say "Old English word 'seethe' ", occuring as it does in citations before 1100 AD. According to the lexicographers at the Oxford University Press it is in fact an Old Teutonic word - infinative seothan* - with an obsolete form sod.

There is a related word in Gothic sauth* which brings out its ritual connotations - as a sacrifice - which as Jan says in Helrunar - has the literally meaning of 'boiled meat' - the sine qua non for a Nordic sacrifice. The Oxford Lexicographers explain the limits of the OED's remit in their introduction, thus it is true that they do not mention Seidr as one of its cognates. The connection between the two is thus still, AFAIK, an open question. They do however say that seething had certain figurative uses not found in later texts - meanings such as 'to try someone by fire' or 'to afflict with cares'.

I suppose I ask myself does the word seidr survive in any form in the languages of Europe. If it does, then Old English or Modern English Seething, being very similar in sound to Seidr, would be a far from ridiculous suggestion that might yet be proved correct. The connection between Seidr and Sauthr is not something Jan made up. It has been argued before in many academic tomes, including Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie in the 1830s.

But as it happens, Jan's characterisation of Nordic Seidr as 'seething' was probably never really based on linguistics - his arguments are more about the nature of magick and trance activity. The English word he choose turned out to have a fortuitous and evocative history all its own. Seething takes us right back to the appropriate time and to the rich sacrifices that go into the steaming cauldron of magick.

Check it out for yourself. By all means let's debate the issues but let's also stick to the facts rather than spurious appeals to authority.

E&OE - comments welcome

Yvonne comments (probably tongue in cheek) that 'Seidr' might be related to 'Cider'.
Strangely enough if you check that in the OED - it turns out to be a very old loan word from
Old Testament Hebrew - 'Shekar*' meaning 'strong drink' ; )

I may be facilitating a workshop of this style of Seidr/Seething
at London's Beltain Bash, May 2007. A chance to meet other seethers,
talk about problems, exchange ideas and techniques.

Curse of Merlin IV - Magical Journey

2006-12-01T17:41:00.000Z

I never did find out why it was that Newport's Reference & Lending Library acquired so many magical books. I spent such a lot of my time in that library it was just a matter of time before I read them all. Best of all was Aleister Crowley's masterpiece - Liber ABA - Magick in Theory and Practice. The reference library must have bought a copy almost as soon as it was published in an edition edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant in 1973. It's a lovely book with the most evocative of covers. It was kept in a special cupboard, along with the Kinsey Report and Masters & Johnson. If you wanted to read it, you had to ask and I did ask.

continued at:

http://www.myspace.com/moggmorgan

Evil Sleep - lecture

2006-11-28T19:30:00.000Z

London Earth Mysteries Circle
7.00pm Tuesdays (2nd & 4th in month)
Diorama Centre
34 Osnaburgh Street
London NW1
Admission: £4.00
(Meetings in Skylight Studio or Work Room at
34 Osnaburgh Street or Cherokee Room on Triton Square). Tubes:
Gt Portand Street, Warren Street & Regents Park.

Check London Earth Mysteries Circle website www.lemc.ic24.net for venue details and Autumn Programme 2006.

Next Meeting:
Nov 14: Pyramids for the future with Bob Harris
Nov 28: Evil Sleep of Egyptian Magick with Mogg Morgan

‘The night was man’s first necessary evil, our oldest and most haunting terror’
A Roger Ekirch (2005) At Day’s Close.
It is widely supposed that the night was always a source of fear, the domain of frightening and threatening entities. Thus Plato wrote:

‘Evil spirits love not the smell of lamps’
It may be well to remind ourselves that the humble lamp, that we take so much for granted, had in the ancient world wider connotations where is was a complex magical instrument with which the huddling masses did battle with the monsters from the Id.

I will discuss some of the Ancient Egyptian responses to the terrors of the night. This will bring us into the realm of ancient psychology and demonology. It will also reveal the domain of private, freeform Egyptian magick and witchcraft. We will touch upon the natural history of the Egyptian vampire. It will cause us to read the most ancient of dream books, and also look at almanacs of lucky and unlucky days. It will also uncover some hardcore 'spellkits' designed to fight evil with ‘evil’.

'I may be wrong' is not a phrase one ever associates with Richard Dawkins

2006-11-27T09:52:00.000Z

From Giles Frazer, 'Doubters do it from the pulpit' in The Independent on Sunday, 26.11.06

CATHARSIS - POETRY AND HEALING (draft)

2006-11-02T12:04:00.000Z

Mogg Morgan (c)

The literary vocabulary is peppered with metaphors of food and eating. We talk of 'good taste', 'to savour something' or of 'food for thought'. In this article I hope to show that this use of language is not accidental and in fact leads us to the heart of poetry. The contention that the mental feelings of enjoyment are indebted to bodily or physiological feelings may be difficult for some people to accept. We are inclined to draw a strict dividing line between mind and body; but this has not always been so, nor need it be in the future.

Aristotle in his Poetics speaks of 'Catharsis' which is also a medical term meaning cleansing or purging; a crucial component of the medical practice of his time. Aristotle was a physician as well as a philosopher and in the system of healing he practiced, which was based upon the Humours, Catharsis would have brought the sick person back to a state of psycho-somatic equipoise or isonomia

The similarities between Greek ideas and those of ancient Indian aesthetics are so striking that it is highly probably that they derive from a common source.
The oldest system of Indian medicine is called Ayurvedic, which is a compound of two words, 'ayur' meaning longevity and 'veda' meaning knowledge [anglicised spelling]. The main textual sources of Ayurveda go back to about the beginning of the present era. Many of its ideas are much older and derive from a very creative period in Indian culture at around the sixth century BCE. Ayurveda views the world rather like a vast organism, in which all the parts are interconnected. The essence of this organism is a constantly changing liquid called 'rasa', and so one analyses all its various parts by the sense of taste, which in Sanskrit is the same word - 'rasa'. This homonym has a number of interesting and related meanings, including sap, liquid, essence, elixir, serum, chyle, mercury, semen, taste, feeling, and sentiment. Therefore the sense of taste is the connecting link between an individual and the larger whole; an idea that has very wide implications in art and culture. In this system there are said to be six varieties of taste:
Sweet, Sour, Saline, Pungent, Bitter and Astringent.

According to the Ayurvedic system what one eats, and therefore tastes is also the cause both of health and illness.(1) This is because all foods are broken down in the stomach into a pure liquid food chyle (rasa), and its waste products. In this process three humours are also produced, in Sanskrit they are called Vata, Pitta and Kapha, and they are sometimes translated as Wind, Bile and Phlegm. The term 'humour' is a translation of the Sanskrit word 'dosha' which means 'to spoil. These substances are essential constituents of the human body, but if they are produced in too great a quantity or in the wrong part of the body they are the fundamental cause of all diseases that afflict humanity. Thus one form of Bile keeps the skin in a good tone, but if there is too much of it leads to swelling.

The Ayurvedic system tells us that there is a dynamic relationship between the three humours and the six tastes. For example:

Bile, which is oily, hot, sharp, liquid, sour, fluid and pungent is soon overcome by medicine having opposite qualities.

Wind, which is rough, cool light, subtle, mobile, non-slimy and coarse, is reconciled by medicines having opposite qualities.

Phlegm, which is heavy, cool, soft, oily, sweet, immobile and slimy is relieved by medicine of opposite quality.(2)

The relationship between tastes and humours is complex but can be represented in a very simplified form by the following diagram: (add diagram)

Equipoise is achieved by manipulation of these relationship through the food that one eats, so that a person is restored to or maintained in good health by an appropriate diet.

How all these factors effect the Mind gives us the link between medicine and poetry. The Indian intellectual tradition makes a division between consciousness and the body which is quite alien to that of the Western tradition. The Indian tradition divides all phenomena into two broad categories of spirit and matter. On one side is purusha, the transcendental aspect of ones personality, and on the other is ranged all our physical attributes, which in this system includes the Mind (manas), the Intellect (Buddhi) and the Senses (indriya). Thus ones mental sensitivities, although they are constructed from a finer material than the more gross aspects of the body, are still essentially part of the same model of causes and effects outlined above. The Mind has its food just like any other part of the body. Thus insanity (unmaada) means literally intoxication. Mental equipoise is achieved by reference to an allopathic model of mental tastes designed to counteract a particular temper.

The aim of Sanskrit poetry is to create a state of bliss in the hearer, an "impersonalized and ineffable aesthetic enjoyment from which every trace of its components..material is obliterated."(3). Aesthetic enjoyment is both a means of achieving perfect mental balance and ultimate salvation. This transcendental aspect of poetry is something lost in the present day, but would have been taken for granted by our ancestors. Plato spoke of the power of art to bring about spiritual liberation, and this tradition flows strong in the history of Celtic Bardic traditions. A good poem is often still recognized by the mysterious frisson it brings about.

Sanskrit poetry has several different moods designed to provoke particular emotions. "Mood" is another possible translation of the Sanskrit "rasa", literally the taste or flavour of something. This is more than an accidental homonym. The fact that the same word occurs in medical and poetic texts has to mean that there is a fundamental unity of outlook.(4). There are eight or sometimes ten moods in Indian poetics: Love, Courage, Loathing. Anger, Mirth, Terror, Pity and Surprise and optionally tranquility and paternal fondness .

Interestingly Yeats used the term "Mood" in a short piece on the purpose of poetry published in Ideas Of Good & Evil, page ?? this volume.
Perhaps the most widely used Mood is the erotic one, as it is a remarkable feature of Indian culture that the spiritual truths are most often conveyed by erotic images. Thus the story of Krisna's dance with the Cowherd's wives conceals an essential spiritual message. Each girl dances with Krisna and feels that she is unique. This symbolizes the mystery of the communion of the multiplicity of all human souls with the undivided Absolute. This theme is the subject of one of Indian most treasured poems, Jayadeva's Gitagovinda or "Love Song of the Dark Lord". which should be sung with Raga Vasanta or Spring Mode

Soft sandal mountain winds caress quivering vines of clove.
Forest huts hum with droning bees and crying cuckoos
When spring's mood is rich, Hari roams here
To dance with young women friend--
A cruel time for deserted lovers.(5)

Indian poetry is created within a totally integrated philosophy of the human psyche and body. Our aesthetic sense, literally our sense of taste, connects us to the wider universe of which we are only a small part. Perhaps here lies the mysterious secret of poetry. Its ability to lift us up out of ourselves, at the same time purifying and healing our alienated nature. The basis of which Indian poetical works may strike some as too literal an interpretation of the facts. However these ideas completely permeate the art of the sub-continent and have generated some of the most sublime artistic creations of any culture.

Mogg Morgan

1 Agnivesha's Caraka Samhita translated in English by R K Sharma and Vaidya B Dash (Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, Varanasi 1976) I.xxv.29
2 ibid I.i.59-61.
3 S K De History of Sanskrit Poetics (Calcutta 1960) page 37
4 R K Sen Aesthetic Enjoyment and Its Background in Philosophy and Medicine. (Calcutta 1966)
5 Jayadeva's Gitagovinda - Love Song of the Dark Lord Edited and translated by Barbara Stoler Miller (Columbia University press 1977)

Further reading

Medicine of the Gods:
Basic principles of Ayurvedic Medicine
by Chris Morgan
(If you would like to read a short essay explaining some of the principles of Ayurveda, click here)
ISBN 1869928377, 120pp. £9.99/$14.99
Order this book

Ayurveda is an Asian medical system which has its beginnings in the sixth century BCE and thrives even to the present-day. There was once a celebrated doctor called Caraka who lived in the second century of our era. He was one of the greatest physicians that has ever lived. He recorded the fact that the gods themselves were perplexed by the continued existence of disease, which was a hindrance to humanity's progress to enlightenment. These same gods, he says, therefore prepared the way for Ayurveda, which literally means the 'science of longevity' to be taught to the human race. Thus the title of this book is Medicine of the Gods.

Medicine of the Gods is the first of a series that aims to introduce the physical and metaphysical concepts of Ayurveda to a non-specialist audience. Medical ideas underpin a great deal of Eastern thought especially Tantrism, alchemy, yoga and the science of love. The book is not intended as a series of health tips or as a textbook for the clinical practice of medicine, which in the Ayurveda tradition requires at least seven years intensive training. The book is aimed at students and lovers of South Asian culture, perhaps also anthropologists and others with a need for a straightforward introduction to the core principles of another scientific tradition.

Praise for first edition:
'The author's main purpose, introducing ancient Indian medical theory in a relatively trustworthy manner to the interested general reader in easy language, while at the same time being intellectually challenging, is served well by this book.' Rahul Peter Das in Traditional South Asian Medicine Vol 6 2001

This book contains virtually everything you could want to know about the Hindu system of Ayurvedic medicine, which began on or about the sixth century BCE and is still thriving today. The history, correspondences or "humours', and other intriguing aspects of this intricate system are described in easy-to-understand language for those unfamiliar with Ayurveda. There is also a catalogue of ailments and how Ayurveda views each of them, and illness in general. I found this fascinating reading, both as a western herbal practitioner, and as a reader fascinated by how other cultures view the world and what goes wrong within it. Highly recommended!
Reviewed by Cerridwen Connelly in The Pentacle

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Persian 'Mar Nameh': The Zoroastrian Book of the Snake (review)

2006-10-11T17:46:00.000Z

The Persian 'Mar Nameh': The Zoroastrian Book of the Snake, Omen and Calendar and the Old Iranian Calendar, essays by Payam Nabarz and S H Taqizadeh. ISBN 1905524-250, 128pp, £12
This is Payam Nabarz's follow-up to very well received Mysteries of Mithras. As one might expect he is extending further some of the cultic material available to initiates involved with that mythos. In this case he presents a short omen text from the Zoroastrian tradition.

Essentially this is a reprint of an 'Old' Iranian omen text in 30 verses with an accompanying short modern commentary plus the author's own rendering of the text. This rendering is rather misleadingly referred to as a 'transliteration', which might indeed have been useful too. The second part is a reprint of Seyyed Taqizadeh's 1937 essay on Persian calendar studies. This essay is obviously very erudite but likely to be mainly of interest to fellow researchers in calendar studies, although doubtless there have been other more modern studies in the sixty odd years since its composition? This is certainly the case with some of the Egyptian comparative material - Egyptian calendrics has experienced a continual renaissance over the last fifty years. Even so it presents quite a lot of highly informative material on the topic although it is at times impossibly heavy going for the non-specialist such as myself. The whole could have done with some sort of glossary or editing to provide the reader with a way through the jungle of unfamiliar terminology which obviously would only make sense to Persian readers.

The subject is complex because Persia, like so many countries in the region, has had many different calendar systems over the thousands of years of its existence. For example, Professor Taqizadeh tells us: 'the theory of the Persian New Years' Day originally falling on the Vernal Equinox is not supported by any convincing proof' (p52). In other words prior to the rise of Zoroastrianism in the sixth century BC, the original Persian New Year, may well have fallen on the summer solstice and not as is nowadays the case, on the spring equinox! Professor Taqizadeh was a prominent Iranian politician, responsible, so we are told, for many modern calendar reforms. He moved modern Iran away from the Arab based lunar calendar to a solar based system based firmly on Zoroastrian principles. Which made me wonder how very different the current situation might have been, if the learned professor had instead reconnected with the far older lunar-solar tradition of his land before the coming of Zoroaster!

Turning then to the 'Mar Nameh: the book of the Snake'. The observation of omens of one kind or another is an ubiquitous feature of the culture of the Ancient Near East. This particular omen text gives a Zoroastrian spin to what is a very ancient tradition. We are told this is a relatively modern exemplar, first translated into English in the nineteenth century and presumable composed a few centuries before that? The core of this edition is a metrical rendering, based on that first translation: For example:

1. If you see a snake on the day of Hormozd
Your honour, property and pay will increase'

The useful commentary tells us that Hormozd, is the lord of wisdom, (Ahura Mazda), the Zoroastrian name for God. It is also the name of various kings of the Parthian and Sassanian dynasties. The Zoroastrian calendar reprised an older tradition that linked particular gods with particular days (originally) of the lunar month, and indeed different quarters of the moon. These days were mapped onto a fixed year and the older lunar mysteries largely submerged and forgotten. On the whole I found Payam's book a useful stimulus to debate. There is also something for those non specialists in need of a short guide with which to interpret interesting dreams or alarming physical phenomena. - [Mogg]

Hindus and Neo-Paganism

2006-09-17T10:02:00.000Z

Hindus and Neo-Paganism

Interesting piece but one has to bear
in mind that what he called 'sanatana dharma' or 'old time religion' is
really a construction of the nineteenth century when hindus were
striving to present a sanitized version of hinduism to their colonial
masters. Many commentators - including this one - are far from disinterested
academics but have a definite axe to grind. So for instance where he
says:

'From an orthodox Hindu viewpoint, most neo-Pagan groups would have a
status similar to the tribals of forested Central India. Though the
tribals are recognized as Indian fellow Pagans, Hindus by Savarkar's
definition, they are nonetheless commonly perceived as savages because
of their disregard for certain taboos and because of their not so
strict morality (as in the common youth dormitories where sexual
experimentation is encouraged). The city jungles of the West have
somehow spawned a lifestyle similar to that of the tiger infested and
snake haunted jungles of India.'

infact what he calls the tribals are closer to the religious diversity
of the indian subcontinent - where for instance the eating of meat is
definately Vedic or 'pukka' - and is still used in Ayurvedic medicine.
To get behind the propaganda you have to read something like David
White's Kiss of the Yogini and indeed tantrik material - but even
here you have a different set of prejudices with which to deal.

om ganeshaya namah

mogg

The Curse of Merlin III - Identity what Identity?

2006-09-13T18:05:00.000Z

There's nothing quite like a trip to North Wales to make you think about who you are. Am I getting out of touch with my homeland? I was born in Pill (Pillgwenlly), still Newport's most deprived (and depraved) borough. It's a long time since I left Wales to become a 'quizling'. We used to called the Welsh speakers the viet-taff (or is it Taffi-ban?) - so the tension between the different regions of Wales is still as strong now as it was then.

Wales' south-eastern industrial population may not have all the trappings of other regions but is it any less the Welsh for that - I don't think so? We refuse to learn Welsh because we don't want to lose our welsh identity - English is our mother tongue - English is a language of Wales - is it not?

Then there is the question of Nationalism. During my teenage years I was an paid up member of the ultra-left - it goes with the territory afterall. I think it was Kate Roberts who wrote that Wales is under the 'triple net' - language, religion and politics. So for me politics has always been a stronger force than the others - which is hardly surprisingly given my roots.

Whatever the problems that beset the people of Wales, are they really deep down about nationality? I think lifestyle and social class are as valid a candidate for the core or base of society - from which so many structures and problems grow. Isn't it always the way of the demigog to play the nationalist card on any and every issue?

Back in Newport in the 1970s I was a young radical - not even out of school and bunking off to be on the picket-line with striking building workers. It brought me into contact with Irish labourers, amongst whom were fugitives from Ireland's 'troubles'. Into this melting pot - welsh nationalists were drawn. It was a bit of a dilemma for the neo-marxists, who had but recently inherited the mantle of the moribund communist party of Wales.

'Rebel in the soul'
How did it all start this political thing? Being a rebel was the only way to survive at school after age eleven. Either that or a victim be. Casting my mind back to my first overt act of political rebellion - it was always intimately connected with the whole nationalist thing - but never straight forwardly so. It was the tour of the Springbok rugby team - a racially segregated side from South Africa and therefore very controversial. I lived a stone's throw from the rugby ground - but had no natural affinity for the players - I was too much of a wimp for that. The newly formed anti-apartheid thing was in the news but was hardly expected at a redneck place like Newport. There was to be a picket of the match - I can't remember from whom I learnt it - but it seemed like such a good idea. I'm not sure i really understood the issues but the idea of standing outside the ground with placards sounded perfect to me. It was my first meeting with my own kind. I remember being particularly shocked then impressed by the presence there of the school Religious Studies teacher - I forget her name. I guess she had me marked down as just another oik but that day she made a point of saying hello.

But whoa - did it cause a row at home. I never did manage to get my placard out of the house. It can't have been too long after that my older brother Roy, who had actually joined the Communist Party, was asked to leave. I was grounded. Why such a strong reaction, my father had afterall been brought up in Moscow - the Maesglas suburb of Newport that had consistently elected communist town councillors? Maybe that was it - familiarity breeds contempt? Stories of the 1926 General Strike still did the rounds of Maesglas - lots of railwaymen lived there. When my grandfather - a former stoker - cold-shouldered someone in the street - my father asked why - 'because', came the reply, 'he went over the wall during the strike. Such was the bitterness following the defeat of the strike that nobody spoke to that man again - nobody went to his funeral. Politics was a serious business - the kind of thing that could ruin your whole life if you weren't discerning. And in the 1960s, apart from the occasional Labour interlude, most people were happy with the conservative consensus. The communists were seen as a moribund fifth column.

I asked my economics teacher what he thought of the communist newspaper the Morning Star. He told me it was the worst of the gutter press. I never could bring myself to read a copy afterthat even though I guessed that was not a balanced view - but it maybe gives an idea of the zeitgeist. The communist party was a spent force, a pale reflection of its glory days. A new ghost was haunting Europe - Leon Trotsky. Legend has it that my brother went to one of those monster Anti-Vietnam war demos in London - maybe he was even there on that fateful day outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. There was a splendid riot. He met one of the new trotskities called Pat Jordan and invited him to come speak to the communists of Newport. After the meeting the whole branch upped and joined a little organisation, headed by the likes of Tariq Ali and Jonathan Guinness which went by the soubriquet of the International Marxist Group. I being still a minor was earmarked for its youth section - the Sparticus League. My first ever political outing, was to London for the unification conference of both organisations.

The Curse of Merlin (Part II)

2006-09-09T10:10:00.000Z

I like to walk. I always liked that, usually alone, sometimes with a friend. One of my favourite places when I was a teenager was Belview Park. It must once have been a part of the estate of the ruined house of Tredegar or is it Morgan. Tredegar park, passed into the ownership of the local council many years ago when the last scion of the Tredegar family died childless. They were an interesting bunch, gone mad over the years, more genteel than their merchantile origins would justify. They had names like 'Octavius Morgan the antiquarian', but that's another story. I'm still in Belview park, another of their bequests to Newport. It seems so much smaller now but so much has happened. Last year my mother gasped her last agonising breath in a hospital ward overlooking that same park, overlooking the very spot where i sat so many years before, locked in and wondered how to get out.

The entrance to the park passes through wrought iron ornamental gates, painted green and emblazoned now with Casnewedd's grand crest - the one that has my face. The vegetation is so luxuriant, almost tropical, covering the sides of the steep valley through which gushes a vigorous stream. I love the fenced walkways that snake the way over bridges until I am deposited just below the huge Victorian plant house, tea rooms and toilet. I love the view across the docklands to the Peterstone flatlands beyond. But when you look down, over the balustrade, into the seedy bushes, the sight is often not so good.

Time to move on, to the west end of the park. The feeling I had that first time I found the megalithic stone circle, right there in the park. The beautiful, hungry stones of local old red sandstone, blackened by the Casnewedd air, encrusted with lichen and moss. The secluded grove of ancient oaks lent it a synister feel that spoke of sabbatic rites to a god unknown. At its centre a single step led to a stone platform of appearance. Was this a place of sacrifice? The atmosphere darkens, the picnickers in the nearby meadow fade from view. Once I sat and quite spontaneously began to meditate - although back then I did not know that's what I was doing. A shiver ran through me anyway. Was this a magical place?

It was a while before I told anyone about my secret place. When I did I learnt that although it looked old it had been put there in the early part of the twentieth century as part of the celebrations for the eistedfod! The circle was 'false' but also real? But there again was it really false? Now Paul tells me all these 'bardic' circles are modelled on one very special instance from Boscawen in West Cornwall. I've still never quite been there. How can you not quite be anywhere? That's very Welsh isn't it? Simple - I got to within a few yards but had to turn back. Paul tells me Boscawen is the most perfect example of all the megalithic circles - that's why it was chosen as a form. I have a photograph of that day in 1910 when the vast crowd, now all ghosts, but then dressed in their sunday best, as they swirl around their priests. So maybe afterall I really did get a message from the past, that day in Belview park amongst the wind lashed trees?

Earth 'Marmas'

2006-09-01T10:30:00.000Z

From Talking Stick discussion of Earth Mysteries:

The discussion initially ranged around the twin poles of 'places of power' and 'ley lines' - whether or not they existed. These two phenomena are often linked with certain types of bodily 'energy' such as chakras and nadis - thus it provides a neat example of the occult doctrine of 'as above, so below' - the body as microcosm of a worldly meso- or macrocosm. The erotic and otherworldy quality of landscapes was discussed, leading to ideas about how to harnness this power, or interact with it as in some more recent ideas of eco-sexuality. Most agreed that the 'earth' was the source of much power in magick and this was one of the central mysteries in question. Another interesting new concept (for me) was that of places of negative power - to use a sanskrit term - 'earth marmas'.
example:
(?) in Israel
Hell Fire caves

reading:
Phillip Heselton Earth Mysteries
Mogg Morgan: 'The Erotic Landscape Revisited' in Tankhem: Seth and Egptian Magick

The Green Man and the Dragon (review)

2006-08-22T17:54:00.000Z

By Paul Broadhurst, isbn 0951323679, £12.95, illustrated (some in colour)

George, in origin a Greek name meaning 'farmer' or 'tiller of the soil',. St George was a Roman military tribune martyred at Nicomedia in 303. The dragon-killing legends were attached to his name later. His cult was brought to England from the East by returning Crusaders; he was said to come to their help under the walls of Antioch in 1089 and was then chosen as their patron by the Normans under Robert of Normandy, son of the Conqueror. There are 126 churches dedicated to him in England. But George as a christian name was slow in taking root. The earliest example noted is one George Grim at the end of the 12th century and there are occasional occurences in records of the 13th and early 14th c. Edward III had a particular devotion to St George and in 1349, on St Georges Day, founded the Order of the Garter, which he placed under his patronage and dedicated to him the chapel of the order at Windsor. From this time he was regarded as the patron saint of England.'

The above is the subject matter of Paul Broadhurst's solid tome, although taken from The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (ed E G Withycombe), not quoted in Broadhurst's bibliograpy unlike many a lesser source.

Of course when you examine the early part of the myth - the trail soon runs cold and one is left with the unsatifactory conclusion that there must have been more than one 'holy Geo' - or is he some sort of god in disguise? The saint in roman armour is precisely the form than late images of the god Horus take on in Roman Egypt. This last fact has led many to suppose that the glyph of St George and the Dragon, is a cypher for the Contending of Horus & Seth, a theme explored in one of the many chapters in Broadhurst's book.

After his migration to England, St George is soon embroiled in the spirit of Beltain, into whose season his feastday on 23rd April falls. I wasn't sure how to take some of the more technical arguments in this book, especially those around calendar reform. One often does hear grumblings about the use of modern (Gregorian) dates, but to me the previous dates derived from the Julian calendar seem just as arbritrary and divorced from any natural cycle? In parts the narrative could be a little clearer and I personally could do without some of the more wacky linguistic arguments (shades of Kenneth Grant here). For example is the name really the trisyllable 'Ge - Or - Ge'. 'Or' cannot be the root of the name Horus - whose name is spelt 'HR' in Middle Egyptian. Egyptian vowels are largely a mystery - the 'O' just a publishers convention with no historical significance. But these and other quibles aside - this book presents all the pertinent facts in a stimulating manner and is a welcome addition to the literature on the topic. [Mogg].

Handfasting of Dave Rankine & Sorita D'Este

2006-08-20T21:01:00.000Z

I was honoured to be invited to their long awaited handfasting at the beautiful Rollright Stones, on the Oxfordshire/Warwickshire border. I was also pleased to be asked to do one of the readings, no only that but also to invoke one of the four 'patron' gods for the ritual. It fell to me to invoke Lucifer - a complex deity - perhaps even a post modern contruction. The first line that popped into my head: 'Got your priest in a whirl, not sure if you're a boy or girl' - but sounds familiar.

The name Lucifer first occurs in one of the many translations of the Bible and is perhaps the product of scribal error. The entity actually being referred to is the morning 'star' - Venus. Because of its position as 'herald' of the dawn, it receives the epithet 'lightbringer' or Lucifer. So no evil intent there afterall - although having erupted into the language - the godform perhaps denotes things that are outwardly dark but when you get to known them are not.

There aren't too many good poems or hymns to Lucifer - which surely is a gap in the market? If you know of any good ones please do add a comment. Whilst researching this I found one very wordy example from the mystic 'AE'. And I hope one day to pen my own 'Great Hymn to L'

In the meantime I offered up the following short prayer - which I prefaced, for reasons of my own, by the vibration of the Aurochs rune:

I invoke Lucifer Rising - The Lifeforce
I invoke Lucifer Rising - the morning star
I invoke Lucifer Rising - the evening star
I invoke Lucifer Rising
come in peace, beautiful god
blessings be upon you and this company

I invoke Lucifer Rising - trickster with the crooked smile
I invoke Lucifer Rising - the morning starfire
I invoke Lucifer Rising - the evening starfire
I invoke Lucifer Rising -
come in peace, beautiful god
Lucifer I

here's another from the web:
George William (“A. E.”) Russell (1867–1935). Collected Poems by A.E. 1913.

120. The Morning Star

IN the black pool of the midnight Lu has slung the morning star,
And its foam in rippling silver whitens into day afar
Falling on the mountain rampart piled with pearl above our glen,
Only you and I, beloved, moving in the fields of men.

In the dark tarn of my spirit, love, the morning star, is lit; 5
And its halo, ever brightening, lightens into dawn in it.
Love, a pearl-grey dawn in darkness, breathing peace without desire;
But I fain would shun the burning terrors of the mid-day fire.

Through the faint and tender airs of twilight star on star may gaze,
But the eyes of light are blinded in the white flame of the days, 10
From the heat that melts together oft a rarer essence slips,
And our hearts may still be parted in the meeting of the lips.

What a darkness would I gaze on when the day had passed the west,
If my eyes were dazed and blinded by the whiteness of a breast?
Never through the diamond darkness could I hope to see afar 15
Where beyond the pearly rampart burned the purer evening star.

Hindu Mâyâ & Vipra

2006-08-13T16:02:00.000Z

A guide to Hindu Magick

The Yoginis whose cults were central to Kaula practice had the following features: (i) they were a group of powerful, sometimes martial, female divinities with whom human female "witches" were identified in ritual practice; ' (2) their power was intimately connected to the flow of blood, both their own menstrual and sexual emissions, and the blood of their animal (and human?) victims; (3) they were essential to Tantric initiation in which they initiated male practitioners through fluid transactions via their "mouths"; (4) they were possessed of the power of flight; (5) they took the form of humans, animals, or birds, and often inhabited trees; (6) they were often arrayed in circles; (7) their temples were generally located in isolated areas, on hilltops or prominences and were usually round and often hypaethral; and (8) they were never portrayed as practicing yoga for the simple reason that yoga as we know it had not yet been invented. David White/The Kiss of the Yogini

(work in progress began - feedback and advice welcome)
started: Full Moon 9th August 06
diacritics omitted for now - ie anglicised spelling

'Truth is singular although sages (vipra) call it by many names' (1)

Maya(2) is a feminine noun whose original meaning was magic or uncanny power. In late Hinduism it came to signify illusion. It is the earlier meaning that most interests me here, although the story of the change of meaning from 'magic' to 'illusion' is not without interest and is well represented in the literature.

Maya is often hypothesised as the goddess Maya(qv).

Mayashastra (science of magick)

Before considering the more advanced mayashastra it is probably a good idea to look at the more 'orthodox' and 'classical' ideas of the texts such as Yogasutras. The Yogasutras below to the so-called 'sutra' period of Indian intellectual history. This period is usually dated circa 2nd century bc to 2nd century ad. The text consolidates all previous ideas concerning yoga. Yoga is a technical term meaning 'work' or 'activity'. It shares some of the connotations of maya or magic. Famously, the yogasutras are where we first encounter the idea of eight limbs or branches of yoga:

The eight 'limbs' of yoga
The eight limbs are a progressive series of steps or disciplines which purify the body and mind, ultimately leading to enlightenment. These 8 limbs are:

Yamas - The Yamas or restraints (Don'ts) are divided into five moral injunctions, aimed at destroying a supposed lower nature. It is tradition to list five such Yamas:
Ahimsa or non-violence
Satyam or truthfulness
Brahmacharya (control of all senses).
Asteya or non-stealing
Aparigraha or non-covetousness

Niyamas - The Niyamas or observances (Do's) are also divided into five and complete the ethical precepts started with the Yama.. These qualities are:
Saucha or purity - this internal and external cleanliness.
Santosha or contentment
Tapas or austerity
Swadhyaya or study of the sacred texts
Ishwara Pranidhana which is constantly living with an awareness of the divine Presence (surrender to God's Will)

Asanas - Postures
So-called Hatha yoga is considered by some to be a path to enlightment in it's own right. Even if that way doesn't suit your temperament, most find work on posture usefull. I use yoga as part of the warm-up, which i recommend before any act of magick. It's also handy to be able to sit properly for long periods of concentration. I am guided by the words of the Bhagavad Gita, where is says posture should be easy and steady. I interpret this as meaning something less than the famous lotus pose but maybe a good confortable posture sometimes known as 'perfect posture.' Aleister Crowley recognised the value of Patanjali's Yogasutras but IMO he lacked a competent/humane teacher and therefore his advice on posture is best ignored in favour of a more contemporary approach.

Pranayama - regulation or control of the breath. Asanas and Pranayama form the sub-division of Raja Yoga known as Hatha-Yoga

Pratyahara - withdrawal of the senses in order to still the mind.

Dharana - concentration. The last 3 steps constitute the internal practice of Raja Yoga. When Dharana is achieved, it leads to the next step:

Dhyana - meditation is that state of pure thought and absorption in the object of meditation. In contemporary idiom this is very like 'visualisation'.
In Hindu ritual the worshipper (pujari) calls to mind a mental image of the goddess or goddess. Eg: imagine an island made of seven sacred stones, etc. In the Victorian occult revival 'visualisation' was known as 'astral projection'. In my opinion the quest for 'astral projection' has driven many into the buffers. For a more contemporary approach to the technique i recommend Jan Fries' book Visual Magick: a manual of freestyle shamanism.

Samadhi - the superconscious state. In Samadhi non-duality or oneness is experienced. This is the deepest and highest state of consciousness where body and mind have been transcended and the Yogi is one with the Self or God.

Success in the eight limbs of yoga leads to great powers of concentration or one pointedness. These supersensual ability can be used to accomplish certain temporal ends. This is perhaps another parallel with mayashastra or magic way of thinking.
The special powers known as 'siddhas' of the accomplished yogin, are described in the third chapter of the Yogasutras.

For example:

Yogasutras chapter III
25. By making Samyama on the strength of the elephant and others, their respective strength comes to the Yogi.

. . .

27. By making Samyama on the sun, (comes) the knowledge of the world.

28. On the moon, (comes) the knowledge of the cluster of stars.

29. On the pole-star, (comes) the knowledge of the motions of the stars.

30. On the navel circle, (comes) the knowledge of the constitution of the body.

By way of contrast here are some ideas from the more overtly magical tradition sometimes known as 'Tantrik'. In practice many tantrik magi have some acquantance with the pan-Indian techniques of the Yogasutras. Tantra has a range of meanings worth exploring. In this context it means 'simplified rites'. Tantrik ideas probably developed after the sutra period to which the Yogasutras belong. That is to say some time, perhaps centuries after the second century ad. However these ideas have a context and do not come out of vacuum. In fact the tantrik magi viewed themselves as the essense of or as completing all other previous systems. So some knowledge of what came before, the context, is handy.

The technical term 'tantra' has a range of meanings, exoteric and esoteric. In some sense all Hindu religion is tantrik or has tantrik elements. Tantra went mainstream (esoteric) a long time ago. 'Tantra' is as in 'vague' in meaning as 'Hindu' or 'Magick'. It's probably a waste of time looking for neat essential definition. In my opinion, the most productive approach is to look instead for specific activities. This is like looking for a medical syndrome or perhap a synodic definition. There are said to be eight signs of the tantrik magician.

Ashtalinga or Eight 'marks' of the Tantrik
diksha (initiation)
Traditionally this is said to be an essential prerequisite to adepthood. I guess we would all agree that some kind of contact with a mentor or teacher is advantageous. This is illustrated by looking at mantras, one of the things exchanged between adept and candidate during initiation.

Take for example the mantra:

om maya, mamaya, mahamaya, bodhi svaha

You may not have a clue how to 'vibrate' this. The initiator may well save you a lot of time in that regard. This is not to say that you wouldn't find your own solution given time.

sâdhana
Means 'leading straight to a goal' hence particularly applied to magical practice, medicine and alchemy. Sanskrit roots 'sâdh' and 'sidh' - from which derive words such as Sâdhaka, Sâdhu and Siddha as practitioners or followers of a particular practice or the direct path.

Vipra
In the third edition of Jan Fries' book Helrunar: a manual of rune magick, there is a discussion of nordic seidr or seething which links it with sanskrit vipra. Mention the word vipra and most people will think you are referring to a brahmin or other kind of Hindu holy man. But its linguistic origins are very revealing and lead us to the legendary times of the seven shamans of the extremely ancient Vedic texts. Vipra come from the linguistic stem vip, meaning to tremble, and a vipra is someone overcome with religious ecstasy. I therefor suggest that vipra might be considered part of sadhana.

One of its earliest occurances is in the famous words of the Vedic sage Atri who says: "By birth every one is a shudra, by samskars he becomes a Dvija (i.e., twice-born). By studying the Vedas, he becomes a Vipra and by realizing Brahman, he attains the status of a Brahmana" (Janmana jayate ....etc.)

To be continued offline now - so if you want the latest version let me know.

mantra,
mandala,
mudra,
nyasa,
dhyana,
puja

leading to:

The six magical acts:
pacifying, subduing, causing enmity, driving away, uprooting (uccatana) and causing death. (see Yogini Tantra) Six Shaktis appropriate to these acts. The Padmini is suitable for pacifying and Sankhini for subjugation. He then outlines the mantras appropriate to the six acts.

Notes

(1) Vedic proverb - 'ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanthi' Rigveda-verse 1.164.46

(2) diacritics omited from here on

(3) vip 1
vip (or vep), cl. 1. Ā. (Dhātup. x, 6) vepate (ep. also ○ti
• p. vipāná RV
• pf. vivepe Gr
• vivipre RV
• aor. avepiṣṭa Br
• fut. vepitā, vepiṣyate Gr
• inf. vepitum ib.), to tremble, shake, shiver, vibrate, quiver, be stirred RV. &c. &c
• to start back through fear Pañcar. Kathās.: Caus. vipáyati or vepayati (aor. aviivipat), to cause to tremble or move, shake, agitate RV. &c. &c. [Cf. Lat. vibrare ; Goth. weipan ; Germ. wîfen, weifen, Wipfel Eng. whiffle.]
≫ vip 2
víp mfn. inwardly stirred or excited, inspired RV
• f. 'easily moved or bent, flexible (?)', a switch, rod &c., the shaft (of an arrow), the rods (which form the bottom of the Soma filter, and support the straining cloth) RV
• a finger Naigh. ii, 5
≫ vipa
vipá m. a learned man (= medhāvin) Naigh. iii, 15
• (ā), f. speech (= vāc) ib. i, 11

Quote of the week

2006-07-15T10:15:00.000Z

'. . .our editorial policy not to publish articles
centred around 'prophecies' or 'revelations'. '

From editor of Pagan Dawn
upon being offered an article by David Conway

Alchemy - a romance

2006-07-12T19:10:00.000Z

'Ah my good friend,' says my correspondent, a researcher for a company currently making a documentary about the poet Shelley.

'I've spoken to my bosses and they want to ask you these specific
questions, you don't need to answer them fully now, but if we interview you
these are the exact themes of what we will be discussing: Can you talk about Alchemy at the time of Mary Shelley?'

I say 'I'm not sure if you are using alchemy as a metaphor for the renaissance of Georgian magic - seems like Shelley's main interest then was natural magic - which includes some alchemical topics - but yes I can do that although Adam Maclean is probably the expert on alchemy per se. BTW I would assume that Shelley might have at least known of Francis Barrett - whose book the 'The Magus: or Celestial Intelligencer' was published in 1801, (the poet Robert Southey wrote some v critical letters about Barrett - who was all over the news for his ballooning adventures.) Barrett wrote a very influential new synthesis of older grimoires such as Agrippa. There is a very interesting eye witness account in that of the old folk believe that a corpse bleeds in the presence of a murderer - and this reanimation could also be an influence on narratives such as Frankenstein - as well as the alchemical homunculus thing.'

OK he says 'Can you easily define European 17th/18th century Alchemy in a way which the viewer can grasp quickly?'

To which I reply: 'Alchemy is a very powerful myth of the 17th/18th century. A kind of spiritual chemistry. Humanity's religious quest reduced to the manipulation of the world's physical components on the assumption that this will unlock the secrets of life itself - which is occasionally does. Alchemical texts are written in code. Some alchemists took this code quite literally ie lead into gold. Others realised that they were dealing with religious metaphor - ie lead into gold - stupidity into inspiration by meditation. There is of course a third, middle way. . . '

Ah, he says 'Can you explain the search for the philosophers stone, can you tell us the history behind it, and explain why people want to find it so much
(especially during Shelley's time).'

'Yes, i think so but it would flow from my own theories concerning the Tantrik quest for immortality via the ingestion of transformed bodily 'medicines' .'

The he asks: 'Can you give us a demonstration of a philosophers stone type experiment?'

This last question needs multiple exclamation marks. Can I do something that eluded all known alchemists? but I give it a go:

'In my view this would involve the creation of a 'cake of light' which is made from sexual fluids - wouldn't have thought this could be demonstrated on TV but might be possible to get round this with some sort of hieros gamos - ie bbc scotland have film of a part of the 'gnostic mass' which could be brought to bear??'

Lunar 'standstill'

2006-07-12T19:04:00.000Z

Last night the moon hardly rose at all, just skimming the horizon, which because of its very low declination is known as a lunar standstill. This phenomenon occurs evert 18.6 years which might well be connected with the Babylonian etc., lunar cycle of 19 years (12 years of 12 lunar months, 7 years of 13).

I went out abut 11pm to take a look - it took a while to find a good vantage point. Being so low in the sky - there were wispy clouds in an otherwise clear sky with moderate light pollution. The moon appeared bigger than usual, very cheesy with a horizontal band passing directly through its midpoint - a lunar omina?

Sunday I was in Bath for the Omphalos moot and met Storm Constantine for the first time ever. The topic was truth in magick - are all systems ultimately contrived or are some more 'authentic' than others?

Solstice 06

2006-06-21T19:26:00.000Z

Althought the sun was obscured by clouds at dawn, those final
few hours spent in our secret places on the cursus more than
compensated for that. So what we missed in terms of the Golden Dawn was compensated for by a fine lunar omina (a gift of Seth) - which would have been all but invisible in the arc lights of the main drag and henge. From our vantage point we could watch the mahem, sheltered some by trees from the predawn cloud burst - that left the sky clear enough to see some stars rising before dawn.

We even saw off some very officious and intrusive patrols from English heritage. Like all bureacratic types - they can't resist trying to control even what is supposed to be an open access - to a site that is besides that on a right a way. The first landrover crept by in the darkness - the driver only leaving his cab to slam the gate loudly to the cursus barrow enclosure where we lay hidden. Half an hour later a second came - then a young man with a torch asking us what we were doing - his false bonhomie barely able to conceal his nervousness. What a pointless life. When I told him we were pagans engaged in pagan worship and this was the second unnecessary intrusion, he soon shut up and beat a quick and apologetic retreat.

The atmosphere this year was the best i've known. Very little loutishness. Some truly friendly pagan greetings. So maybe JD is right and the place is changing people?

Thought for the day:
Britain's catholic cardinal, the one with the unlikely Celtic name, says he has a Disquiet growing in his garden. He thinks he's found a scientific argument against abortion, but his 'bad faith' is all too obvious. So he is afterall into 'necessary evil', but can't quite bring himself to recommend a condom.

Talking Stick Blog

2006-06-16T11:16:00.000Z

Check this out for a reflection on the regular Oxford Pagan's Talking Stick down the pub

Beltain Bash

2006-05-31T19:14:00.000Z

Beltain Bash happens every year around this time. That's the end of May rather than beginning so as not to clash with the eponymous religious festival. It's really kym's thing as I'm not into shopping as much as she. But even that has lost some of its lustre since the retirement of Zia, mistress of 'Seven Veils', to the fleshpots of Spain. Zia really was one of the best robe makers and her creations were used in BBC Scotland's Crowley doco 'The Other Loch Ness Monster'. Another unexpected sun seeker is Freya Aswyn, whose gothic looks wouldn't seem to imply a love of the mediterranean sun.

Anyways - we arrive for the second and what turns out to be the quieter of the two days. Lots of familiar faces, some not so. Professor Ronald Hutton is due to speak on sexuality and paganism - so we sit through the Daughters of Gaia, (who have a website) - and have somehow managed to turn some of the slightly overdone pagan chants such as 'we all come from the goddess' etc into new age torch songs. Not quite to my taste but the audience seem to like it. For me it adds to the slightly faded quality of some pagan events these days - they hardly seem cutting edge and I wonder whether they ever did?

Ronald's talk was as entertaining and comprehensive as we've all come to expect - which is amazing considering he is recovering from quite a serious illness AND has to run a large university history department. Makes me feel quite lazy. Some of the ground covered in his talk is familiar to me from my own researches for Katon Shual's slim volume 'Sexual Magick'. I.e sooner or later we all have to face up to the fact that some classical pagans, eg the Stoics, were every bit as puritanical as their Christian nemesis. Although I'd still say not all good things are the gift of the modern pagan. The lifestyle of the high culture of Egypt shows some of the same predilection from 'Sex, drugs and R&R.'

Time for a breath of air, outside I bump into lots of old pals in the smokers circle - and suitably refreshed - I can face an hour with 'Scots' Mary in the incredibly stuffy Bertrand Russell, or is it Mani Shinwell room? I should say that 'Scots' Mary is one of the alumni of Alex and Maxine's 1970s magical coven - so respect. But the talk is hardly rocket science but twenty years ago I would have appreciated this kind of thing - but I'm wondering if the younger members of the audience are impressed? Actually twenty years ago i would have been a bit of a bolshevik and might have protested or even have asked what is it that wiccans actually do with their wands? Or as my friend Alex says, was Gerald Gardner smoking behind the bike-shed when that particular topic was discussed in the Hairy Potheads skool for wizards?

Two lectures under my belt I can safely head for the pub where all the other cynics have decamped for a gossip and another smoke. After an hour I decide to take a look at the valedictory rite more as an anthropological exercise than anything else. It's billed as a two hour psycho-drama based around the mysteries of The Wizard of Oz. The whole crowd of 'munchkins' sighs ahhhh in unison as the high priest enters in his Toto costume - you get the drift. I suppose one shouldn't be too sniffy. Levanah Morgan regularly lectures on the occult symbolism of this and other Hollywood films. Perhaps Julian Vayne is right afterall, we are all Chaos Magicians now. Many moons ago I walked out of an 'Erisian' ritual based around the energy of football - among the other lurkers on the threshold I met my future wife and partner - so chaos magick can't be all bad. - mogg

In Frequently Asked Questions about the Occult (i-FAQ)

2006-05-28T11:24:00.000Z

Vowel Chanting

J writes: 'I have been looking through tantra sadhana again, as I have been using a form of the opening ritual mentioned in the text. As an extension to the opening ritual you mention vibrating the vowels whilst drawing invoking pentagrams. I have come across this idea of vibrating the vowels in both the works of Jan Fries and Peter Carroll. I was wondering if you could give me some tips as to the origins of this method?

For my personnal practice I also use a combination of the elemental tattwas and vibrating of the vowels as a method of getting energy to flow through the chakras that correspond from the root to the neck.

Is there a relationship between the Sanskrit Bija mantras and the vowels? I also thought of it having a more mystical origin, but perhaps someone found pronouncing english more practical and simple?'

Dear J
The issue of the seven vowels is quite interesting - the seven vowels are those of the greek language but of course like all vowels they are part of the universal nature of speech - so will be constant all over - approximately 2000 years ago the egyptian religion went through a great reformation - and the seven greek vowels and attendant mysteries were incorporated and accepted into the mix - it was either because it already had resonance with egyptian practice or that they recognised the value of this part of the greek tradition (despite their dislike of their greek colonisers) Contemporary reports say that egyptian temple musick was essential vowel chanting - It seems natural enough to extend this idea to the hindu realm - which was also in contact via alexandria etc - and also acknowledged the power of mantra, sound and vowel chanting.

The physical postures are i think the sevenfold heptagramme rite of egypt - which has parallels as part of the international language of magic of the classical world.

love and do what you will

mogg

PS as the research continues, one project you (and others) might like to add to yours is the whole business of lunar observation for omens - ie observe the moon and note and phenemena such as halos, patterns, unusual colours etc - these are collated for lunar omina.

'Most descriptions of rituals I have seen involve having the altar at the centre of your working and generally moving around it, but what happens if you haven't got space? However in the "House of Life" you say "be content with the corner of your bedroom, this is what most of us use and it's perfectly adequate". In such a setup the altar would be outside of any circle created with say the LBRP?'

The problem for me with some descriptions of GD rites is that it leaves me wonderering if the folk are really doing it? It's part of a specific tradition that has its advocates - but there are other, equally valid streams of thought. 'House of Life' is closer to the tradition of a domestic shrine or altar - as attested in religious belief from the beginning. Another possibility is some sort of 'shrine box' fixed to the wall. All these things act as a focus but i'm not sure its such a good idea to always have something in the centre of your 'circle' or sacred space. In some outdoor rites, people build a fire then do the ritual around it. However that then gets to be a bit too focussed on one thing - the centre. I've found it handy to move the fire to a place outside the circle - where it is still available for useful things like keeping warm but leaves the circle a clear space to move, dance etc. It also preserves night vision and lets one make things such as veve etc.

In 'chaos magick' there is an idea that all magick is much more about intent than getting the details right. The circle is a virtual space really - and wherever you are, it's always going to be more of an idealised space than a real one - after all most people's rooms are square not circular - so what happens to the folks next door?? See Now That's What I Call Chaos Magick for discussion of this kind of thing.

Mogg (18.3.6) 'Red Moon on the day of Rams'.

Are Kenneth Grant's 'typhonian' books, and indeed other sabbatic titles really worth the premium prices being asked on the secondhand market? Is there another way for the beginner to learn more about this important new current?

I understand the problem. And yes I agree the prices for some things are stupid - and I suspect those books don't quite 'deliver' as promised - as you say - its about 'grass is greener ' complex as much as anything else. The best KG book is probably 'Aleister Crowley & The Hidden God' - but even that commands a very high price on the secondhand market so i'd say do as you're doing and read in a good library or via interlibrary loans. Take advantage of the availablility of stuff when it first appears at the normal price - eg you won't regret that - (for example look at those ebooks editions of Francis King's Secret Rituals of the OTO' (see mandrake Speaks (archive) for details). Are books such as the "Secret Rituals of the O.T.O.," by Francis King, one of the occult’s ‘banned books’ worthy of $25 for a pirated electronic copy? I’d say definitely worth it if you want to read that book – as its pretty much impossible to find otherwise and enormously expensive if you do. Whether there are any real secrets in there - that can't be found elsewhere is a moot point. At least you will have the background to the debate - and for $25 it could work out a lot cheaper than the grade fees you might pay only to find all that glisters is not gold.

I also think that some of the newer books in the 'sabbatic' and 'typhonian' tradition can be equally enlightening - if not in some cases better - eg try Nathaniel Harris' 'Witcha: a book of cunning' and indeed my own books: 'Tankhem: seth and egyptian magick' & 'The Bull of Ombos'. Check out Jack Daw's Cornish witchcraft site - for much info on that current and indeed get a copy of Paul Huson's 'Mastering Witchcraft' before that disappears again. I know I'm recommending lots of my own stuff but I have been involved in various aspects of this mythos for a while now and think you will find important aspects of it in our list and websites.

How do you feel about Kenneth Grant's notion of the 'Tunnels of Seth'?

tankhem has turned out to be a short work more on certain themes that will be
elaborated as time goes by - hence the exploration of temple of Sety I ends
at the shrine of amon ra - kind of homebase - but if you work more with the temple you will in fact discover there is a real live 'tunnel of seth' - (personally i think each individual as they work will find these tunnels individually in different locations within their own 'erotic landscape' - ie not always in the egyptian mythos.

The idea of the klippotic tree is related I guess - also the tankhem mythos is more about the roots that lie behind the tree - but one theme i have noticed is the dialectic between 'plurality' and 'unity' - the equivalent of 'Kether' in the nightside tree, is, I believe called 'thaumiel' - meaning duality - and this is set against the unitary aspect of kether - it's interesting to compare this with ancient (egyptian) kingship - where at various times to ideal situation was thought to be dual rulership - rather than one unitary or despotic (Horus?) king - i think people are led to believe that a good strong solitary leader is better than a collective
entity - but i wonder if that is really true??

Is a 'guru' really necessary in order to learn magick,
especially the 'tantrik' variety?

The Hindu intellectual tradition has several different points of view on this - although one tends to hear the most recent. The personal teacher or mentor is pretty essential although it's obviously possible to get by without them - most people have no choice but to plough on without one. A good teacher can speed one's progress long the path. I'm not sure if the institution was ever meant to be a permanent relationship. People in the ancient world changed gurus as they needed more specific information. The invention of the book in the pagan world, shook things up a lot. The book becomes the teacher and the student is released from the need to memorize text. If the tantrik texts are insufficient without the guru - then why did those teachers bother writing them in the first place?? It's like those modern practitioners who insist they are giving secret knowledge, but if so, why do they put it in a book?? Max 'Moksha' Muller once criticized the Theosophical Society for saying there was a 'secret doctrine' - he maintained there was no esoteric tradition in India - its all there - in the text - the trick is in making it work - doing the practice.

An Indian friend once gave me a little Sanskrit phrase that for me puts the whole thing about teachers and paths into perspective - in my own words I have this as:

Footsteps of the Gnostic Sphinx
ÂOne foot from the teacher comes;
A second from others on the path;
A third from your very own self;
Lastly through the passage of time.Â

The Book of Shu

A little bit of fun but there is a truth in it - ie the teacher is only one quarter of the conditions necessary for spiritual growth - the others parts come from other students, from yourself or just through the passage of time.

Drugs (Etheogens) and Magick

'I am currently reading Visual Magick by Jan Fries. I really like it. Also it really resonates with me due to myself also being an artist.What intrigues me though - and this is the reason i am inquiring of you, having searched internet for some feedback about this - is he seems to not value hallucinogens. This is confusing to me, mainly because of my own experiences iwth hallucinogens which have been the most profound experiences in my life, but also from research I have done regarding their significance in shamanism worldwide, and other forms of spiritual movements.

I have also read from various sources that Mircea Eliade, who first claimed that hallucinogen use withing shamanism was a decadenct developmment coming later from non non-hallucinogenic ritual. A view it's claimed he changed in the later stages of his life. I also have read Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda by Dan Russell, who argues the world-wide prolific use of hallucinogens within shamanism and for spiritual inspiration, also influencing mythology--much of the hallucinogenic-plany symbolism being 'hidden' in the mythiologies. So, can you see why i wonder why Jan Fries doesn't seem to take this history into account?

'Its not true to say Jan doesn't value the use of etheogens etc - its just that, IMO, he is just as interested in how people learn to produce these drugs inside their brains by ritual, dance, seething etc - there is a lot more discussion of the things in Seidways - shaking, swaying and serpent mysteries, especially the chapter 'the cauldron of ceridwen' - its not the drug its the trance that is important surely - hence there is quite a lot on plant drugs in this book - but also some powerful physical techniques to replicate the experience that can indeed initially be opened up by drugs.

Varieties of useful meditation techniques

In your 'House of Life' document Mogg (p21 I think), you mention that you practice a Buddhist sitting meditation. Is this something likeinsight or vipassana meditation? I am familiar with this and would tend towards using it daily, although most occult guidence which I have seen seems to favour pranayama. I find pranayama better for concentrating my mind, but vipassana more beneficial all round.

Answer:
I think at that stage I had in mind what to do whilst preparing for the more specifically magical meditation/visualization -I found at least three buddhist meditation techniques useful:

1. 'mindfulness of breathing' - which could be seen as a form of pranayama anyhows -

2. 'being compassionate' (vipassana)

3, 'just sitting' when you do a visualisation its often the way that you run out of mental stamina at some point- hence unless you want to just stop - its handy to have something up your sleeve to do until the 'visuals' restart or the time runs out - Not too many people favour ACs techniques these days although they probably do have their uses and certainly help to build mental stamina - he seemed to favour a kind of 'one pointedness' technique and that won't suite everyone - so its best, IMO to let it mutate into a targeted vision - or oscillate between various types.

Perhaps all these techniques lead to the same place - ie 'one pointedness' tends to mutate into lurid visions - and vice versa. Magick requires a good imagination - perhaps the tankhem ideal is closer to the tantrik 'overload of the senses' scenario - ie you try to form quite elaborate imaginal worlds - its what been called a 'rule governed creativity' - a middle way between absolute chaos and a blank
slate.

What can the ancients do for us?

Whilst reading Tankhem, it has become glaringly obvious the extent of the intricacy of the ancient mind. I have never been crass enough to assume that the scientific mind is superior, or even that it can draw parallel to the ancient mind, but I have been left in awe at just how far the ancient mind excels its modern contemporary. It just leaves me inquiring to the extent of their knowledge. Just how much and what did they know? More importantly for me, is how did it all start and is it possible to trace a genesis point of such thinking?

Answer:
Tankhem only scratches the surface - more is coming all the time. The technology of the ancient world was far more advanced than we think - but was destroyed in one of those taliban moments starting, to be fair, just before the Christian story. Imagine how it would be if we had built on that base with no gap of 1500 years until the renaissance? In medicine alone it was only in the nineteenth century that physicians began again to wash themselves and their equipment before touching the patient!! We have caught up and overtaken now in most areas but probably not in the domain of consciousness and secrets of the body Âthat, IMO, is where there is still much to play for - imo

Why are the Abrahamic faiths so convinced they are right?

Why do they see themselves as so superior?
It is quite clear that the bible is opposed to polytheism, but why? Why do they consider their god superior? It may seem that I have started down the magickal path for the wrong reasons (that being to oppose my early conditioning) just by reading that last paragraph, but I am only asking that question because even though I was christened, I know little about Christianity.

Answer:
As to Abrahamic religions Â they too have a hidden history of things like polytheism (see Patai: the Hebrew Goddess) But its the old story of the victor's writing the history - perhaps its also a bit of ethnocentric bias - the way we see things from the western metropolis - Asian scholars find it hard to understand how such a confused theology is given such a positive PR. It claims to be monotheistic yet has a singular male god - true monotheism would require an abstract principle. Besides Hindu scholars long worked out that polytheism was a more reasonable theistic approach to the prolix nature of reality.

Is the Necronomicon and its contents genuine?

Answer:
To borrow some words from the historian Michael Woods Â its fake but also real'.

What is 'Occult Crime'?
Answer:
As I write this a self-styled ÂsatanistÂ is in the news at the conclusion of his trial for the slaying his girlfriend. It is unlikely to be the last time such as crime is in the headlines (The Guardian 22 Jan 05). Coincidentally it is also the week when a picture of prince Harry, an heir to the British throne is also on the front pages. His photograph in Nazi uniform together with friends, one dressed in the white sheet of the Ku Klux Klan, another as a Âblack and white minstrelÂ has made quite a splash. I leave it to you to sort out what the theme of the fancy dress party might have been. Of course no-one ever thinks to link those kind of ÂoccultÂ images with violent crimes. But shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, thatÂs another story ainÂt it? Psychopaths exist in all societies. Restricting the discussion of taboo issues such as sacrifice and cannibalism will not, in my opinion make the world a safer place. Afterall weÂve had the way of restriction for a long while now and the results are every where to be seen. So called ÂoccultÂ crime has its own causes one of them being ignorance. ThatÂs why IÂm particularly keen to discuss this material in an informed way. We may not be able to stop violent crime but perhaps we can discourage the psychos from traducing the ideals of magick. The Hidden God and some taboo practices is undergoing something of a renaissance. The stream of thought leads to the contemporary magical conclusion that there is no need for violent sacrifice. The most powerful of all magical sacraments is freely given and does not involve harm to the donor. - mogg

'Naked in your rites'?

2006-04-13T08:24:00.000Z

Mandrake

I travelled up to Cumbria to visit some wiccan friends. They had a house full of people for a second degree initiation on the saturday night. We watched the rather excellent 1960s film 'Legend of the Witches', just released on DVD. It prompted a discussion on the whole topic of 'sky clad' rituals. I should say that our hosts have always been keen on that particular aspects of wicca. But as some of us get older and less 'body beautiful', it become more and more tempting to consider other options.

Why do some magical people think this issue is so important? There are, in my opinion, two main issues here: Firstly there is an implicit eroticism in many wiccan rites. Secondly there is a strong believe in nakedness as a sign of deconditioning, as a visible sign of freedom from societal norms, and this includes an attempt to see the person beneath the clothes, even beneath the bodily shell. Fat or thin, beautiful or not so, it's not supposed to matter.

Mainstream culture is dominated by quite normative views of the body. What was once called 'body fascism' is back with a vengence. So whatever people say, there an awful lot of looking and judging of how others look. The magical community is as much prone to that as everyone else. Perhaps more so, given the current dominance of the commercial form of wicca as evidenced in several mainstream magazines such as 'Witches & Wicca', 'Spirit & Destiny' etc.

For these and many other reasons people's views are changing. Witchcraft & Magick is being eroticised. Nakedness will always retain its role in initiation - but could it be that the sight of older initiates, joyously obese, will become less common? There are many, 'performers' and 'audience', who would prefer it so : ) Eroticism in a rite is a lot more complex than nakedness. Nakedness per se is not erotic. Eroticism necessitates the selective exposure of flesh - the form in which it is concealed being almost as important as what is exposed. Consider the way the ancient Egyptians dressed. None but the gods were ever totally naked, although much flesh was on display, from the kilted, but bare chested men, to the topless women in their sleeve dresses.

On reflection I think eroticism is the way to go, and maybe for the time being forget all the 1960s stuff about 'the real you' which doesn't seem to apply anymore. The naked body is still a surface and can be as much of a mask as clothes. Perhaps our focus can shift to the adopting of a magical persona, which can also include being naked. It's a question of what works for you.

For many years the Sexual Freedom Coalition* has been working with these kind of issues. The magical world can learn something from their experiences. In their social events they are trying to creat a theatre of individual freedom - a pleasure dome if you like, in which a kind of gentle 'flirting' and 'posing' is the norm. Some people are just too sexually predatory or consumerist to really enter this environment without infringing another's space. The obvious example is the platoons of desperate heterosexuals in dinner jackets who are determined to get their money's worth. They often carry with them the same kinds of consumerist and judgemental attitudes that the majority of people in the pleasure dome are trying to avoid. The organisers of such happenings should and in fact do try to restrict their number to a manageable few or exclude them altogether. Perhaps that is one lesson we can learn from the social experiments of the 1960s - you have to learn to be free - it requires training and work - and some people maybe to just too damaged to ever make it to the pleasure dome?

[some of these thoughts sprang from a discussion of these issues at the recent Oxford Talking Stick. The Sexual Freedom Coalition has a conference on 6 May with guest speaker Alison Lapper. See http://www.sfc.org.uk/news-conference2006.htm for details]
Comments?

Egypt & The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

2006-04-01T10:11:00.000Z

The GD grade signs may have something in common with genuine Egyptian techniques such as what's been called the Heptagramme rite of PGM XIII 824-841 and the Mithras Liturgy , the most widely read of all the PGM. If I remember rightly this also has grade signs used in the initiation of a female adept (That the initiate in this ancient rite was female was omitted from previous translations).

Skrying, astral contact and other freeform ritual work is indeed another important but often neglected aspect of GD. Again, new research is revealing that dream and vision questing was also a feature of the late antique Egyptian magical religion. Some contemporary practitioners tend to write off this feature of Victorian GD type work, thus it is often hidden or edited out in favour of a more masonic interpretations. Same goes for much Crowley ritual work. Doing so restricts your magick to one 'channel' and robs it of the valuble use of music, dance and trance induction. The same goes for ancient Egyptian magic, which for a long time was interpreted through the lens of the (supposed) Victorian GD techniques - which few people find very effective. It's worth thinking about this issue of multi-channel magick (I've borrowed the term from educational psychology.)

A useful corrective to mono-channel type magick come IMO from Chaos Magick and works by Jan Fries, especially Visual Magick. Incidentally it's been quite hard to get this message across - one recent encyclopedia on nature magick refused a piece on Crowley, because their 'crowley expert' said there was no need for him to be in - presumably because they felt he didn't practice nature magic - so the circle of misinformation continues!!

More information on the Heptagramme Rite is available in the modern reconstructed version in Steven Flower's interesting book
'Hermetic Magick: the postmodern Magical Papyrus of Abaris'
Its also recommended in my own book
'Tankhem: Seth and Egyptian Magick'
and elsewhere.

Because of the sevenfold nature of the rite - it is currently in use by several 'sethian' and 'sabbatic' groups as an alternative to the LBR. The whole business about the symbolism of the number seven, the starry plough etc., is something whose significance is spreading to many other practitioners.

Which leads on the the question of how many of the barbarous names of the occult tradition are based on Egyptian godnames, rubriks and stereotypical formulae? Many of the later were 'mistaken' for god names or voce magicae during the Roman revival. The best example off the top of my head is 'Ouphor' - which is not a god name but the name of the ritual for the opening of the mouth. In the PGM, only the name survives. The rite alluded to is extremely ancient and important in the animation of mummies and other fetish objects.

Thaphthartharath occurs in one such medieval grimoire as an invocation of Thoth.
Chris Lehrich goes through the whole QBL analysis of the name - which is interesting although I would have thought the first place to look would be in the Egyptian language itself - then Greek then Hebrew - I was thinking about it yesterday in my own 'house of life' and it could be something like:

Thaph thar tharath

Which is very close to the name Thoth, 3 times by reduplication -
which is a very egyptian thing - hence Thrice Great Thoth!
Incidentally a new edition (text and translation) of the egyptian 'Book of Thoth'
was published last year - the mss thought to be the work of eqyptian hermeticists.

A Stele for Mogg (From AkashaNath)

2006-03-11T18:39:00.000Z

2006-03-11T18:38:00.000Z

Mandrake Home page

Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau

2006-01-07T14:23:00.000Z

'The forty-four cemeteries of New Orleans lend themselves to mystery, ghost stories and occult tourism. Local citizens call them 'cities of the dead'. First time visitors receive a surreal shock - ancient ruins, marble monuments and tall crypts celebrate death and refuse to sterilize, deny or make it merely a medical fact Against the skyline, angels, crosses and statues of grieving mothers make the aura of decomposition exquisite. Mile after mile of tombs resemble houses, small mansions or places of worship - neighborhoods where another branch of the family lives . . . The Creole citizens of New Orleans came to be infatuated with tales of open graves, gruesome deaths and skeletons or ghosts who lead independent lives along the avenues of the cities of the dead. . . (p. 94)

This new biography by Martha Ward is published by University of Mississippi Press, at approx 20 UK pounds (ISBN 1-57806-629-8). Beneath the dull gray cover lurks a colorful hardback documenting the history of the New Orleans Voodoo clan of Marie Laveau and her eponymous daughter. Marie I, born in 1801 died 1881, is buried in the famous New Orleans Tomb which every year is visited by many thousands of pilgrims. She and her daughter lived extraordinary lives, spanning the purchase of Louisiana by the fledgling USA, the civil war, the decline and suppression of Voodoo and the rise of segregation.

Its unlikely that any earlier author had as much freedom to research the subject, using original documentary material, her own intuition and the extensive archive of oral history compiled during the years of the depression by the Federal Writer's Project. Marie Laveau's magick is clearly neither wholly black nor white - she was charismatic enticing her second racially white husband to declare himself black despite the vicious race laws of the time. Time and time again her actions emerge as not quite what they seem - the accusation that she owned slaves changes significance when the author's painstaking research exposes how she and her husband manipulated the law to resist slavery and secure a kind of freedom to anyone in their orbit.

Her daughter (also Marie Laveau) at first resisted but later embraced Voodoo. 'she liked parties, she loved the attention men paid to her striking good looks. She danced the Bamboula and the Calinda in Congo square on Sunday afternoon. There each time she ran into Jim Alexander (Dr Jim not Dr John??) a voodoo practitioner and respected two-headed doctor of Hoodoo, he confronted her; he told her that she radiated power. He offered to initiate her, to be her mentor, to take her through the door to the spirits. She turned him down time after time, because "she would rather dance than make love". One night however ' a great rattlesnake entered her bedroom and spoke to her.' p110.

Some say that in 1999 she returned to a St John's Eve Voodoo gathering on Bayou St John - hopefully she will return. Highly recommended book [Mogg]

Combining Egyptian & Hindu Pantheons

2006-01-07T14:17:00.000Z

The whole 'Tankhem' project is predicated on the hypothesis that there some sort of synthesis is possible between Egyptian & Hindu religious concepts. How that's going to be, is still to be discovered - it's an intuition that they share something but not yet fully articulated.

Yesterday, in the House of Life, I was reading Jan Assmann's 'Search for God in Ancient Egypt' - which I really recommend, even if some of his theories are very controversial - he does also talk about comparative religion and how it might apply to the Egyptian quest.

Many people talk about different _forms_ of deity or contrast for example Tantrik ‘ideas’. Seems like many people are in their personal religious quest, seeking a common religious experience rather than a narrow cultural expression. Personally I am very drawn to the project of reconstructing this common ground between traditions - including the 'international' language of magick.

Jan Assmann talks about three types of religious experience:
1. Ecstatic/shamanic
2. Mystical / personal piety
3. Historic or religion of personal destiny

Corresponding examples would be -
1. Neolithic 'shamanism' (having no real geographical domain)
2. Hindu mysticism & yoga
3. e.g.: Judaism

Incidentally Assmann says none of these models quite fits the Egyptian material 'as a whole' but there are notable exceptions - which is where we all come in. For example, the cult of Hathor is very ecstatic - involving crazy dancing and consumption of beer - laced with red ochre - (Guinness might work here ;) is very apposite in this context). Another important exception occurs in the Cult of Seth - which probably has all the aspects of ecstatic/shamanic religion, a mystical or path of personal piety and perhaps (as in the case of the King Ramesses) - an notion of personal destiny.

A Resh Alternative

2005-12-27T18:25:00.000Z

(c) Tankhem House of Life & Mogg Morgan

Liber Resh vel Helios is a favourite ritual of mine although it seems a bit garbled. There's probably no hope of ever weaning the born again Thelemic types(1) from the Crowley version - but others might like to consider an alternative version. In Egyptian Theology, Seth was said to be one of the emanations of 'Ra' or 'Amun Ra'. Thus in the famous image of Ra in his night time boat in the underworld, the passive 'authorizing' image of Ra, has various emananations, most famously as Seth to ward off Apophis, the demon of 'non-being' at one of the dangerous twilights just before dawn. The theology of Amun Ra was put together during the so-called Ramesside period. The Ramesside's had a continued loyalty to their Sethian ancestors. Amun was originally a mysterious god of wind and air .Amun-Ra’s role is very like the 'pantocrator' of later Hermetic philosophy - a fact that underlies the Egyptian roots of Hermeticism. Egyptian theology conserved Amun-ra to have three aspects - much as they divided everything else up into three, the day, the years etc. The three are :
Morning sun - Kephra (Beetle)- literally the 'becoming one' (2)
Midday sun - Ra (Falcon)
Evening or setting sun - Tum or Atum (Ram)

Crowley, along with a lot of contemporary magi, felt compelled to cast all ritual material into the fourfold schema of earth, air, fire and water. (see Crowley's reframing of PGM ?? otherwise known as Liber Samech.). I agree this is all very psychologically pleasing to the modern mind but it MAY be alien to the Egyptian mindset. Even so - the above schema lends itself to a fourth, 'hidden' or 'secret name' of the sun at midnight. You might like to remind yourself of the legend of Isis and the secret name of Ra, a version of which is given in my book Tankhem. Now it might be that you prefer to keep this as an individual secret? Alternatively if there is a secret name or midnight version of Ra, then i would think it could be a Hidden god such as Osiris, or maybe even Horus. They all have lots going for them in this role. Whereas 'Kephra' as the midnight sun doesn't really get you very far and seems at odds with the original mythology. So the rite lends itself to personal customization depending on the magicians own will - but one version could be:

1. In a footnote to a new edition of Crowley's Magick - there is a feeble attempt to explain the apparent 'mixed metaphor' engendered by the insertion into the schema of the goddess (A)Hathor - who otherwise really seems out of place - Bast/Sekhmet/Hathor/Tefnut can sometime represent other aspects of the sun in its course, especial the counterpart of Bast (morning sun), Sekhmet (fiery sun)

2. The contemporary Temple of Seth seem to have adopted this as their titulary diety, hence ‘Xeper’ - the ‘X’ is actually Greek 'Kh'

1. HAIL UNTO THEE WHO ART KEPHRA IN THY RISING
EVEN UNTO THEE WHO ART KEPHRA IN THY STRENGTH
WHO TRAVELLEST OVER THE HEAVENS IN THY BARK
AT THE UPRISING OF THE SUN

2. HAIL UNTO THEE WHO ART RA IN THY TRIUMPH
EVEN UNTO THEE WHO ART RA IN THY BEAUTY
WHO TRAVELLEST OVER THE HEAVENS IN THY BARK
AT THE MIDCOURSE OF THE SUN

3. HAIL UNTO THEE WHO ART TUM IN THY SETTING
EVEN UNTO THEE WHO ART TUM IN THY JOY
WHO TRAVELLEST OVER THE HEAVENS IN THY BARK
AT THE DOWNGOING OF THE SUN

4. HAIL UNTO THEE WHO ART HIDDEN IN THY HIDING
EVEN UNTO THEE WHO ART HIDDEN IN THY SILENCE
WHO TRAVELLEST OVER THE HEAVENS IN THY BARK
AT THE MIDNIGHT HOUR OF THE SUN

TAHUTI (or SETH) STANDS IN HIS SPLENDOR AT THE PROW
AND INTELLIGENCE IS AT THE HELM

HAIL UNTO THEE FROM THE ABODES OF NIGHT!
HAIL UNTO THEE FROM THE ABODES OF MORNING!
HAIL UNTO THEE FROM THE ABODES OF DAY
HAIL UNTO THEE FROM THE ABODES OF EVENING!

Mogg's Diary - 1 Sept 05 - 3 Dec 05

2005-11-25T14:22:00.000Z

Magick vs Religion?
Is there any real difference between magick and religion? I don’t think so – and indeed this issue has been raised in several recent books, including my own Bull of Ombos. On the whole, magick has not been well served by anthropology, starting with the old Frazerian distinction between magic and religion; magic and science. Apparently the eminent historian Ronald Hutton has now entered the fray, with a slightly different take. Speaking at the recent Witchfest, he acknowledged that ancient Egypt is the big exception, (which is a very big and important exception). Even so, he thought a parting of the ways did occur from the early Christian era onwards and only in very recent times was this supposed difference between magic and religion beginning to break down. His views coincides very much with that of the Christian theologians, who were at great pains to persuade people that JC was neither a magician nor exorcist! But is that really true? When looking at the classical roots of magick, the key questions are :

Do the gods practice magick?
Is there a god of magick?
Are priests and magicians the same people?

The answer for ancient Egypt is yes to all of the above
Answer in non-Christian world is yes to all of the above
Answer in Christian world is maybe?

The other issue we discussed at the recent Talking Stick was on the related matter of the roots of magick. The eminent Egyptologist Jan Assmann, argues in his book, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, that liturgy is the root of the Egyptian magical religion and not as you might think, some form of individual mystical experience. Liturgy equals ‘public worship in accordance with a prescribed form’ – for example actions performed at rites of passage such as death. Liturgy is not so far away from magick – especially if one contemplates, as the Egyptians often did, what happens when you threaten the gods to abandon their liturgy unless they give you what you desire!

Reburial
Emma from an organisation called HAD - canvassed my opinion on reburial of museum artefacts. The subject of archaic burial seems to be very much on my personal agenda just now. Here are my initial thoughts - feedback welcomed:

1. Death House
I'd say that the artefacts should, where possible placed in a non-volatile, collective 'valhalla' , 'death house' or 'ossary' in such a way that they can be reexamined or reinterred if necessary. This also makes it possible for people with a reconstructed religious sensibiltiy to have some sort of ongoing interaction with the remains (an indeed future academics to do new research).

2. Cardinality
Special attention needs to be taken with orientation (this could equally apply to human remains in museums)
The first principle is cardinality - the head should be orientated to one of the cardinal directions, probably in the north but facing east. Care should be taken to avoid inversions - eg: skulls should be prevented from rolling jaw uppermost ( a common feature of ancient execration burial) - if the remains come from an existing execration burial then this raises the issue of whether this arrangement needs to be preserved.

3. Ochre:
The collection of 'red ochre' is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous of human activities and this is almost invariable a feature of archaic burials - so replenishing the ochre in some actual or symbolic way might be appropriate perhaps as the inner lining of the 'death house'.

4. 'Opening the mouth'
This is another archiac and almost universal practice accomplished via spoken prayers of transfiguration said over the reinterred remains - unknown remains could be given a 'name' or possibly an 'epithet' as part of this process. Otherwise, i'd say the rites should involve other forms of sound especially music - the bottom line being the intoning of the seven sacred vowels and other forms of polyphonic music, such as flutes, didgeridoos, gentle drumming, etc.

5. Remembrance
The eventual resting place should be marked and facilitate at least the occasional ceremony of remembrance.

Remembrance Day
Seems like Samhain continues as a season right up to Armistice day on the 11th, or perhaps Remembrance sunday - maybe even until the end of this moon on 15th November? Although feeling a little blank - I went along to the G.O.D.S. samhain ritual on the 5th November. A dry windy night during which the leaves fell from the trees like departing souls - which reminded me of Omm Sety's account of Thoth's 'Tree of Destiny' quoted in my book, Tankhem:

She says there is 'a belief among the Moslems in Egypt that in Paradise is a tree called 'Tree of Destiny', which bears as many leaves as there are people in the world. Each leaf bears the name of each person living, but in the middle of the Arabic month of Shaaban (which is followed by the fasting month of Ramadan), the tree shakes, and the leaves bearing the names of those persons destined to die in the coming years fall down. It has long been the custom for children to gather in groups at sunset on the evening of the fateful day and go round the streets singing: 'O Lord of the Tree of Destiny, make our leaves strong and green upon its brjanches, For we, O Lord, are your little children.'

Samhain 05

Its been a samhain I won't forget - my mother died just two weeks ago and the funeral a week later. She was 80 years old and had been fading for a few years - so it wasn't a surprise but the her struggles at the end were quite traumatic.

So it was particularly poignant to be again leading the samhain walk and visit to St Cross churchyard for the annual pilgrimage to the grave of Kenneth Grayam, where we read the following extract from Wind in the Willows:

`This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. `Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!'
Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror -- indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy -- but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend. and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered. (from chapter 7)

After that we went to the tomb of Charles Williams, Inkling and member of the GD. Being a poet thought he might appreciate Yeats' All Soul's Night. We finished with a sung lament and individual poems. Thanks Wayland for the Irish ghost story, Payam for the poem and Sharron for the voice.

Next stop Bath Omphalos for a talk on Seth:

'contemporary magical practitioners have always been interested in the 'problem of evil' - the nature of good and bad action. Take for example Helena Blavatsky's statement - 'demon est deus inversus' to be found in her highly influential and monument work 'The Secret Doctrine' (1888:1.411). This was later adopted by the poet W B Yeats as his magical motto in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Most practitioners believe that the ancient Egyptian god Seth is the prototype for the contemporary archetype of Lucifer, Satan or the Devil. I want to take a brief look, in context, at the famous image of Seth deriding Apophis, (the demonic / chaotic serpent of 'non-being') as a leitmotiv for the nature or 'personification' of evil in ancient thought. '

here's a report of the talk - someone must have been paying attention:
The Egyptian God Seth: the Personification of Evil?
>A talk by Mogg Morgan for Omphalos 12/11/05

The existence of evil poses as much of a dilemma for practical
occultists as for philosophers and theologians. One possible solution
was presented by Blavatsky in chapter ten of "The Secret Doctrine",
and may be summed up by the phrase "Demon est deus inversus", which
was subsequently adopted as the magical motto of W.B. Yeats.

Mogg discussed how Blavatsky, whose work drew upon Coptic and
Ethiopian sources for the Bible as well as Vedic texts, saw Satan as
an eternal power "required by the equilibrium and harmony of things
in nature." She used the Qabalistic image of a double pyramid (much
like the Yin Yang symbol, combining black and white as a reflection
of each other). This imagery suggests that Satan is no more or less
than the mirror image of God. Some of the greatest Qabalistic
scholars were believed to be descended from Cain.

Moving on to the iconography of Seth, depicted as a dog-like creature
with a long snout and square-tipped ears, Mogg explained how the
detail of Seth's fork-tipped tail may be identified as the Pesesh-Ket
knife, a ritual tool for severing the umbilical cord. This tool was
made from meteoric iron, a metal associated with Seth. Interestingly,
the name of Apophis, the Demon of Non Being who is slain daily by
Seth, is also the same as the Egyptian word for "umbilical cord".
This reflects an important distinction between the Osirian funerary
rites, which focussed on death and an afterlife, and the earlier
Sethian rituals which looked to rebirth.

Mogg commented upon the genesis of contemporary Setian groups, from
their origins with the Church of Satan, from which a faction evolved
into the Temple of Seth, and then subsequently gave birth to a group
called The Storm. As these groups have developed, their methods and
philosophy also appear to have undergone a radical transformation
from Anton LaVey's original "Word of Indulgence". Mogg eschewed a
rigid stance on the claim that Seth is not Satan, suggesting
that "the jury is still out on that one."

Many Victorian translations of Egyptian texts glossed over attitudes
or ritual methods that were thought to be inappropriate or shocking.
More correct translations are now coming to light, and reveal
Egyptian magicians threatening the gods, much as a Goetic magician
might threaten and compel demons. Mogg quoted from "An Invocation
Against Osiris" and "The Cannibal Hymn", which speaks of the dead
king becoming a god so powerful that he eats all the other gods.
Neolithic Egyptians practiced dismemberment and ritually ate part of
the deceased's body.

Many Egyptian spells involve eating or drinking magical texts to
absorb their power. These practices derive from the oldest forms of
Egyptian beliefs. In the Greek Magical Papyrii, names of power may be
distinguished by the care taken to ensure correct pronunciation, and
this enables us to identify "Seth" as a name of power,
whilst "Typhon" is merely a title made accessible for the Greeks.

Describing a detailed image from the Payrus Heruba, Mogg commented
that the Egyptians may have perceived the greatest possible evil
as "Non Being", represented by the serpent Apophis, who is shown here
being slain by Seth.

An informal and original talk that left me pondering over some of
the "sacred cows" of Egyptian magic.
>
Black Cat

Seems like Samhain continues as a season right up to amerstice day on the 11th, or perhaps Remembrance sunday - maybe even until the end of this moon on 15th November? Although feeling a little blank - i went along to the G.O.D.S. samhain ritual on the 5th November. A dry windy night suring which the leaves fell from the trees like departing souls - reminded me of the Omm Sety's account of Thoth's 'Tree of Destiny' quoted in my book, Tankhem:

She says there is 'a belief among the Moslems in Egypt that in Paradise is a tree called 'Tree of Destiny' , which bears as many leaves as there are people in the world. Each leaf bears the name of each person living, but in the middle of the Arabic month of Shaaban (which is followed by the fasting month of Ramadan), the tree shakes, and the leaves bearing the names of those persons destined to die in the coming years fall down. It has long been the custom for children to gather in groups at sunset on the evening of the fateful day and go round the streets singing: 'O Lord of the Tree of Destiony, make our leaves strong and green upon its brranches, For we, O Lord, are your little children.'

11 September 05 – Ganesha Chaturti
Well actually that was last week on the fourth day of the new moon, but near enough. Ganesha is our house deity and has been ever since I can remember. My interest in the Mercurial/Jupitarian God dates back to my student days in the 1970s, when I travelled to Chennai to study Sanskrit. I was also engaged in spiritual work for the fourth degree of the OTO (Typhonian style). The instructions, such as they were, were based upon the grade-work of Crowley’s Argentinum Astrum. They required a period of devotional work to a deity of one’s own choice. Ganesha seemed more than appropriate although in the end my work was deemed inadequate – largely because it only lasted four weeks – and I had to repeat the whole exercise. Even so, it was quite prescient, as since that time I’ve witnessed the steady growth in popularity of Ganesha among the neo-pagan movement. Some of my ideas have just emerged in a new ebook called ‘Tantra Sadhana’ which can be obtained for a modest $14 from: www.OccultArts.co.uk.

I really enjoy cleaning up the hearth, which can get a bit cluttered over the months. Then rearranging the sacred things, the centrepiece a large bronze statue of Ganesha, which after a good polishing, is adorned with his favourite red and white flowers. Ganeshsa always gets at least one of those India sweets known as Ludoos he loves so much. Ludoos are often the ritual offerengs (prasad)_ at temples such as Tirupati near Chennai (Madras). Every pilgrim comes away with at least one. The sweets are also used the weigh down the eyes of the recently deceased – either as offering to the ferryman, or as some sort of sympathetic magick to ensure a good rebirth. The ludoo’s round shape is supposed to mimic that of the foetus awaiting birth in the womb. I don’t know when Ganesha ate his ludoo, but it’s already gone. A sign of good luck for the coming year – there are already signs that it is so.

This year, another innovation. Like many occultists I tend to accumulate little trinkets from either mine or others travels. Tidying up, my partner and I decided to pile them into the cauldron, so they can receive the blessings of the house god. It’s full to brimming now with good things – all of which will do service whenever we have need of a little offering – or want to pass on the blessings to a curious visitor.

Most years I make little plaster castings of Ganesha to be offered up in the local sacred river on the final day of the festival. This year we took some of the special stones from the cauldron and offered these instead. Seemed the right thing to do – this day is sometimes called ‘stone-throwing’ fourth – and in the poetic invocation, that was one of my earliest efforts in translation it asks the listener to ‘imagine an island, made of seven previous stones.’ Several of these semiprecious stones are now lying on the bed of the Cherwell, near to where it forms a sacred confluence with the Isis. May the god’s blessings be on all who read this.

Mystical Vampire by Kim Farnell

2005-11-01T18:53:00.000Z

The Theosophical Society still presents many of us on 'the path' with a highly instructive narrative concerning the vicissitudes of magical organisations or 'Orders'. Founded, in the year of Crowley's nativity, it has outlived many of its rivals, although in these, its twilight years, it has become a hereditary clan (See K Paul Johnson 'Hereditary Successors').

One of the Theosophical Society's best selling guides to its ideals is and was Mabel Collins' Light and the Path. This book even made it into the curriculum of Crowley's Argentinum Astrum. Old Crow was obviously a serious admirer, saying of Collins' novel The Blossom and the Fruit, that it was 'probably the best existing account of the theosophical theories presented in dramatic form'. With such admiration I wonder if there is any link between Crowley's 'Star Sapphire' ritual and Collins' novel of the same name, published in 1896? But in the words of this recently published and first ever biography: 'who was Mabel Collins?'

It's surprisingly easy for someone as magically connected as Mabel Collins to suddenly sink without trace, submerged by a pseudo-scandal cooked up, in this instance, by the larger than life founder of the Theosophical Society, H P Blavatsky or HPB for short. HPB was the archetypal 'charlatan and magus', setting the theosophical ball rolling, and at the same instance a magical current that eventually gave birth to the Hermetical Order of the Golden Dawn and all of its neo-pagan successors. Cantankerous and addicted to celebrity, she recognised Mabel Collins' talent but eventually dropped her in favour of an even brighter star called Annie Besant. In hindsight many might now wonder how different the fortunes of the TS might have been, if Collins had been able to fulfil her destiny to lead it after the death of its founder. Perhaps even Crowley would have abandoned his own secret pretensions to take over the reins of power (see The Unknown God/Starr 2004)?

I very much liked the Mabel that emerged from this bitter-sweet biography. Of humble origins, she rose far above what the Victorians might have considered her natural station, to become a popular sensationalist novelist. Later she developed her distinctive brand of the spiritual writing - selflessly signing over the copyright to the Theosophical Society, and this, despite their later callous rejection of her. Undaunted, she soldiered on, still writing and campaigning on the related spiritual issues such of anti-vivisection. That animal welfare is a good barometer of a culture's spiritual health is a truth first attested by the rise of Buddhism. It's a remarkable fact that 2500 years ago, the Buddhist emperor Ashoka built hundreds of dispensaries all over his kingdom for human and veterinary medicine - it should tell you a lot about that civilization.

In the end, Mabel was laid low by the vagaries of the publishing world, especially the ad hoc nature of American copyright law, which seemed to allow any number of pirate copies of her novels - at the same time driving her into bankruptcy. Tolkien suffered a similar fate!

Mabel sunk into genteel poverty and obscurity, eventually dying of heart disease, in the Cheltenham home of one of her remaining admirers. If you think she deserves more than that, why not read her story and in the words of the bard:

'So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.'

Mysteries of Mithras:

2005-10-17T18:22:00.000Z

Mysteries of Mithras: the pagan belief that shaped the Christian world. By Payam Nabarz,
Inner Traditions, 2005 isbn 1594770271 $14.95 approx £14.99, 230pp, heavily illustrated.

This is an engaging and entertaining book encompassing the author _ s personal journey into the magick of a Roman mystery cult. The author, who has an Iranian background, was drawn to the schema of initiatory work, as set out in Aleister Crowley _ s Liber Astarte. The idea of this particular practice is to counteract the overly intellectual character of the western mystoi, to thereby activate a more devotional mind set. Many on this path find it useful to work in a tradition that already possesses some form of cultural resonance. It was for this reason that the author chose to work with Mithraism. This book is one of the fruits of that labour. Not surprisingly the book therefore presents a lively combination of mystical insight and academic research.

The first half of the book sets out the basics of the Mithraic history and iconography. This section is a mine of interesting information, perhaps a little breathless in delivery; only occasionally inaccurate, well illustrated and often thought provoking. It is here that the author sets out certain facts concerning the influence of Mithraism on Early Christian iconography. In reality this is a minor component of the book, although the one that the publisher, rather misleadingly in my opinion, chooses to make the book _ s chief selling point. Personally I wasn _ t too convinced by this line of reasoning. I agree that Mithraism had some impact on Christianity after its rise to Roman state religion in the third century. However I cannot see how this justifies the conclusion that it shaped the Christian world _ surely if anything, Christianity shaped the Christian world?

The book _ s real core is the revivalist material, where over several chapters, the author sets out the main components of the cult. Here it adheres as much as sources will allow, to the inner workings of the Roman cult. Thus there is a chapter on the celebrated _ Mithras Liturgy _ _ a sorcerous rite used by the mage, whose library of magical books was only discovered in the last century, after two millennia buried in the sands of the desert. Into this mix, the author adds some material from the Persian manifestation of the cult, with a chapter on the pre-Zoroastrian goddess Anahita. This does much to correct the false impression that the cult of Mithras is only for the macho.

Some of these themes continue in what is undoubtedly the core of the book, a modern reconstruction of the seven fold initiatory schema of Mithraism. Archaeological and textual records demonstrate that the cult shared the classical world _ s obsession with the symbolism of the number seven _ seven stars in the starry plough, seven steps to heaven, seven Hathos etc., etc. Perhaps we shouldn _ t be surprised that the actual details of a mystery cult are now lost to us. So the author uses whatever is to hand, grafting material from classical and Persian sources, and indeed where necessary reusing contemporary magical material, until the result is a pleasing revivalist version. I sometimes found it a little hard to see the join. Also, although the material works well as a literary fugue, I wasn _ t sure how it would pan out as an actual set of ritual workings? The rubric was a tad confusing. But I for one was happy to just read it as a literary creation - which is indeed a form of trance or meditation work. Anything else and I wouldn _ t be sure if I was supposed to be breaking off from the train of thought, to put more wood on the bonfire. Seen this way, this book did take me on an interesting and thoughtful excursion into the uncharted territory. - [mogg]

The Ninth Arch by Kenneth Grant

2005-10-01T09:40:00.000Z

‘a rush of mephitic air from the unsealed depths’

Kenneth Grant, The Ninth Arch (Starfire Publishing 02) £30
available from www.mandrake.uk.net

‘Can you in good conscience recommend "The Ninth Arch" to someone who is only familiar with some of the early work of Grant? That is, is the new book comprehensible to a neophyte of Grant's work or should I resume investigation elsewhere in his canon, in the improbable event that copies can be found? I've read "AC and the Hidden God" and part of "The Magical Revival".’

Umm good question. I regard myself as a child of the first trilogy, Cults of the Shadow, Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God. I never really expected the second trilogy to even appear – Nightside of Eden, Outside the Circles of Time and Hecate’s Fountain; and I never even looked at the third trilogy, Outer Gateways, The Mauve Zone and now the Ninth Arch. So perhaps I am a bit of a guinea pig and give it a go. I was surprised how intriguing the Ninth Arch can be. I found it, to use KG’s own words ‘a rush of mephitic air from the unsealed depths’, a ‘Kamsin blast.’ truly something different in a word of publishing mediocrity.

‘The Ninth Arch is an ancient Masonic concept relating to the legend of the three Grand Masters engaged upon the erection of King Solomon’s Temples. After it was completed, the three deposited therein those things which were important to the craft, such as the arc of the covenant, a pot of manna, the rod of Aaron, the book of the law etc.’ Inscribed about it was the lost or unutterable Word.’ The purpose of Grant’s book is to explain this mystery and reveal the word.

The heart of Grant’s book is a 924 verse Book of the Spider, a mystical text channelled to Grants New-Isis Lodge in the 1950s. Around this sutra, Grant weaves almost six hundred pages of comment, mainly in the form of mini essays. It sounds an unpromising structure but it really works and is well suited to the lucid dreamers or to use Grant’s parlance, the inhabitants of the mauve zone to whom this books is addressed. Having no acquaintance with Grant’s earlier work might actually make this book even more evocative. There were some very obscure sections that would only really make sense if I totally entered into Grant’s system, but there were many comments that seemed to throw light on almost any style of magick.

After all it is the books central thesis that something out there is trying to tell us something using a whole variety of mediums and modes of communication. Crowley, he tells us, ‘with prophetic acumen [ ] presaged the massive interest in alien phenomena which erupted soon after his death and which was caused by Kenneth Arnold’s ‘flying saucer’ sighting [in 1947]. Whatever one’s attitude to such phenomena – positive, negative or indifferent – there is no just denial of the fact that the wave initiated an era of psychomythology unparalleled since man conceived the idea of the ‘gods’…. unless, therefore, we are to write off the entire ‘myth’ as an unprecedented mass delusion, we have to accept the fact that something approaching a seemingly new and inexplicable nature began slowly and insidiously to disturb the world in the year 1947.’. (p xix)

Acting on the assumptions that ‘Many a true word spoken in jest’; ‘the ‘ritualists of the New Isis Lodge utilized certain novels and stories as other magicians might use paintings or musical compositions to effect perichoresis and astral encounters’ xxxvi. Apart from the usually occult litany, H P Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood et al Grant primary source is Richard Marsh’s novel The Beetle which contains the only published account known [to Grant] of the Children of Isis who emerge in the channelled text in rather startling form.

I haven’t read Marsh’s novel but guess that Grant’s reworking of it is likely to be far more evocative. Really Grant’s books are a new artform what I have in the past called ‘auto-romance’. I picked it up near the end of the day, not expecting a factual hit, although there are some fascinating facts here somewhere – but more as a collective grimoire. I take a little snort and am then primed to enter the mauve zone. Here’s a little taster.

The oracle
31-2 below the tunnels of the spider hanging athwart the network of alleys choked in the mud, the sand of the Mokkatam hills …

The comment
The spider is here symbolic of the web of alleys that existed at the time Crowley received from Aiwass “The threefold book of the Law”, not far distant from the Mokkatam hills. This verse sets the scene for a series of events concerning the Children of Isis, of whose activities a fragmentary account was given in fictional form by Richard March writing in the 1890s. It is assumed that he was oblivious of the actuality of the events he described. It may not be so easy to assume that he was not an indirect descendant of that Obed Marsh of who Lovecraft writes in The Shadow over Innsmouth. It is also not impossible that he was related to Dr. Phineas March Black, a great uncle of the present commentator. Details of Dr. Black’s mysterious life are given in Against the Light, which contains much information relevant to this Book OKBISh. Note that the present verse constitutes verse Thirty-One of the Books as a whole.’

Kenneth Grant’s numerology may be suspect, his historical sources unreliable, but his poetical intuition is strangely prescient. I may not want to be part of the only true order but I can’t help admiring his eclecticism, his culture, his generosity towards other artists and writers. So this book is not be quite the triumphal arch many were hoping for to top out the edifice of previous books, but it is a final act from a highly creative magician and writer who has done more than any other living adept to explicate Crowley’s magical universe and to initiate us all into some very sinister mysteries.

The Bull of Ombos (share your feedback)

2005-09-15T18:29:00.000Z

Hello Mogg,

Many thanks. Received your books today. Always interested in the deep & wide-ranging work you present.Although I have great respect for your viewpoint, I have reservations about the "central role" that is being given to Seth by yourself & some other authorities. Of course, this is the revival of an ancient argument - within the multi-dimentional world of the ancient Egyptian's belief-systems there was much paradox & contradiction, all of which to our modern & more dogmatic age is still somewhat inexplicable - therefore your viewpoint is quite acceptable, as are others, such as Ptah as the Heart & Tongue of the Gods , or of Neith, Weaving the Universe. If later Egyptian history could be discounted & the psychological importance of Horus as the Pharaonic paradigm could be set aside, then the very importance of the "Sethian Fire" being cast in the role of Shadow & Enemy could perhaps be discounted. Yet who are we to be able to do this? These Neters or divine personas all play their part in a great Cosmic Drama. Thanks for sharing your ideas with us & forgive these words, if they seem critical, for this was not my intention. The subtlety of ancient Egyptian thought which has been my life's study, is all I seek to affirm. - JS

Dear JS - its refreshing to get some feedback - there is always an element of distortion whenever one takes a point of view - i'm not really meaning to minimise the role of the other gods - merely to discuss Seth - who is a little neglected - especially in relation to magick -and in the process to throw a light upon some unusual aspects of his cult - even in ancient Egypt there must have been those who were out of step with the main thrust of Egyptian religion if only because, by accident of birth, or whatever - they find themselves custodians of the cult shrines of that god.

Yes I agree Egyptian thought is not one monolithic whole - there are several trends - I’ve been reading jeremy naydler's new book 'shamanism and the pyramid texts' where he tackles the vexed question of the invisibility of any supposed 'Egyptian wisdom' or 'mystery'. He is criticising, from the perspective of phenomenology of religion, those specialists who say the Egyptians were practical people - not given to introspection - where all this religion stuff is shunted off for some time after death -

In my book I discuss the way in which ‘the dead’ are ‘used’ for the benefit of living. And I wonder whether this might not be further support for the Naydler’s thesis concerning an Egyptian mystery cult – in that it shows how the living think and use magick to benefit their own lives, whilst still living and how this involves a transaction with the dead and the ancestors.

Magical Art Manifesto

2005-09-09T19:10:00.000Z

[Label on the outside of a bottle. Sealed inside this bottle was a piece of aged papyrus. After great difficulty the text was deciphered and is transcribed below. Where the manuscript was shielded from the sun, the original red ink was still plainly visible
text inside bottle
Manifesto of the Magical Artist
When we first started out on this project the language was prim-evil. Midnight is now. [...]

Every spirit has its age and every age has its spirit.
Every beginning is a beginning.
Time for another one.

Art, always the spirit of its age, be open. [. . .]

[. . .] We live for one hundred and twenty years.

OK scrub that - maybe its not making sense. Ask yourself why do pagans and liberatarians have an instinctive affinity? What is it about modern musick that drives those, who listen to it, closer to their pagan roots? Should the members of your tribe be blood relatives? What intelligent person thinks that the family is the pinnacle of social evolution? How about 'love, well made, leads to liberation'?

Maybe you are an artist with a pagan heart?

Text Ends

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Interpretation or commentary
Maybe its time to rewrite the surrealist manifestos, as the surrealists in turn rewrote those of the rosicrucians. Art and magick need a new statement of intent. As magical artists we can take as a starting point, any random or found object that comes our way. Thus the importance of the fragmentary statement found in an imaginary bottle. Its seems to be a fragment of a conversation, perhaps between the magi, discussing their own history and the need for a new beginning. There are parallels here with the writing of history. History is a creative act - history has even being called the selection or creation of facts. This is not to deny that such and such an event actually happened at some point in the past. But the number of forgotten events outweighs those that have escaped the ravages of time. The survival of a 'fact' from the past is a fortuitous or magical event in itself. Magi call these things 'apports', surrealists call them 'found objects' and in connnection with them talked of the 'certainty of accident'.

Magical artists are fond of reconstructing the past. You may ask why. Maybe it is because the past provides us with a font of found object, through which we can construct something new. Everyone assumes art is creation out of a vacuum. Some of the greatest works of art have been excerises in rule-governed creativity. The painter of the Sistine chapel may have been surprised when the Pope gave him a list of rules that should be observed in his work - size, number and overall nature of the composition.

The art of the European renaissance, besides being based on pagan principles, was catalysed by 'found objects' - classical sculpture emerging in the back gardens of the rich and famous. The earth has revitalised them, stripping them of their patina, so that they were an illusion of the past. These 'found objects' formed the basis of a new pagan art of the renaissance. The process has been repeated, so that 'objects' seen in theosphical trance become the working stuff of abstract art. The biggest found object of the last two hundred years is the remergence of Egyptian art from the sands of the desert where it had been exiled by the evil Roman emporer Theodosius after the closure of all the temples of Egypt. The early christians hacked away the faces of the gods so that their magick would be turned back, then they systematically looted the temples, burning 'worthless' paper and forgetting the rest in the desert. Egypt will not be with us for much longer and will soon retreat in a feint memory.

For the magical artist, creativity is not mererly the construction of something new but the revealing or uncovering of something already latent in the world, perhaps something secret or hidden. For example when you look up at the clouds and see pictures or faces, you may be bringing to conscious manifestation what is already there. Crowley, when discussing the Devil card from his tarot, spoke of the twin gaze of the artist, one eye creating a universe and the other accepting all that is created.

Art is what artists do. That is to say that the definition of art can only be found in the activity of artists, who are, in a way, like shamans. A shamanic artist like Picasso produced images and metaphors that were new and unfamilar. People said it did not look like the real thing. His reply was that we would come to see it in the way he had described it - his vision would transform ours. To go with this process you need a lot of faith in the integrity of the artist and one part of this is knowledge that he or she has gone through some sort of 'initiatory process', only then can we trust their vision. Perhaps this is what is meant by the well known phrase 'drawing is the integrity of art'.

What is the new artform of the Magical Artist
Something tells me this will be 'auro-romance'; which is defined in the surrealist dictionary as 'the artist entering into the mythology of his or her creation. An early example is to be found in the work of the Marquis de Sade (q.v.), although the principles of auto-romantic art are being redefined in the post-relativist scientific era.'

V.T.Felix

. . . to be continued

---------

Glossary of terms, in group magical artists and, as yet, unused literary apports 'Always astonish' Gurdjieff. 'A preposterous exordium.' Dadaji PEOPLE ARE FREE TO BE FAMILY WITH WHOEVER & WHEREVER THEY ARE, And YES! Of course the time is now, when else would it be? Hey, I LOVE J Jennie asks 'do you think the meaning of the new feminism is the power of hysteria? Science is not cheating. Madness is a spiritual state. All attachments become idolatrous. Trust bed stroke touch let go moult shine sting dream

Mogg's Diary - 1 July 05 . . .

2005-08-21T12:24:00.000Z

25th August 05
Talking Stick at the much improved local hostelry - the Port Mahon. The discussion on power animals and animal spirit guides. Which brought to mind how several friends had their first contact with 'power' animals in rather traumatic ways. I remember how Chesca said she was once thrown from her horse and trampled, but from then on, the horse was always a special presence in her magical universe. Another friend, Dwina, was once repeatedly bitten by a venomous spider. She woke from a lucid arachnid dream just in time to prevent further bites. I remembered one of those seminal dreams when I was pursued night after night by a large wolf-like or alsatian canid. It only stopped when I turned and confronted the beast - letting it do its worst. Consummed by the dog, there was always a part of me that could not be eaten - which brings to mind the lines from the Bhagavad Gita - that the transcendental Self cannot be killed.

23 August 05 - Pagan Animal Rights

Judith writes, having recently moved to Carcassonne, France, and rather upset to discover that bullfighting is still practiced locally, despite the fact that in August 2001 it was outlawed in Carcassonne as there was no proof that this blood sport had ever been in existence in the area. But somehow the promoters, aided by the Spanish Mayor got their way. Since that date three days in August of every year have been set aside for the killing of bulls!

She is calling upon one and all to help halt the next round of bullfights (Corrida) in Carcassonne, France. And with this in mind constructed a sigil to help provide a focus for those who want to see an end to this brutal practice. The dates we need to concentrate on are the following:-

Friday 26 August
Saturday 27 August
Sunday 28 August

Please forward to others. - May Set be with you.'

[There's a sigil to go with this which i will try to display here]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OxfordPaganCircle/files/Set%20Sigil%20Aug2005.pps

18 August 05 - Pope attacks Neopaganism

'And in the twentieth century, in the darkest period of German and European history, an insane racist ideology, born of neo-paganism, gave rise to the attempt, planned and systematically carried out by the regime, to exterminate European Jewry. ' Pope Benedict, Cologne

It is worth emphasizing that people of many religions, including magicians and occultists, were arrayed on both sides of the conflict, probably more with the allies than the fascist. It is an important issue that IMO needs careful discussion - several occult authors have, in a way, made similar claims.
See for example Hitler and the Age of Horus or Morning of the Magicians. It is probably one of the most important issues facing the neo-pagan movement and the new Pope is very clever to have found that weakness. Personally I see this as all the more reason to engage with 'blood and soil' runesters - and indeed 'satanists', even 'theosophists' and those who promulgate the so-called 'western way' - engage so that they see the error of their ways. This is not to concede the argument to the catholic church - of course it is a smokescreen – fascism is an economic system developed from capitalism - the 'occult' elements are overplayed - more a symptom than the cause. Some would argue that anti-semitism stems as much from the Christian message, others have seen it as even older, coming from events in ancient Egypt. There is a danger that those who aspire to lead the pagan movement - will have a poor understanding of the issues. For a very informed historical background I recommend goodriche clarke's occult roots of fascism. I'v also posted on this blog an old essay, Fascism and the Occult, that discusses some of the history in more depth

BTW: If you don't think it is still a live issues take a look at this passage, reputedly from an interview with Edred Thorson.

'Stephen Flowers and the Third Reich
mc> Can you say a little more - the quote you give below is IMHO a bit ambiguous. What does Flowers mean by 'the Third Reich's dynamism got out of hand' -it sound as if he saying that the third Reich had some positive qualities, at least
when starting out. I could never accept that proposition.

Of course the Third Reich had some positive qualities when first starting out -- every social system does, since it's almost impossible for mankind to invent any system which is 100% evil. If there weren't *some* positive qualities to the Third Reich, it never would have gotten the power it had.

The Third Reich offered a sense of pride to a people that had been trampled into the mud during World War I and insulted terribly and treated like mud in the aftermath of that war.

The Third Reich offered a vitality and a sense of hope to a people who had lost such vision.

The Third Reich, or more specifically those people leading and pushing the Third Reich, used horribly wrong methods to gain more power than they otherwise would have had, and they used horribly wrong methods to maintain that power once they had it.

It reminds me somewhat of the Republican Party in the U.S.A. If you look hard enough, you can find some positive qualities in their stated goals of scaling back the federal government, in reversing the moral/ethical decay of modern society, of reducing federal spending, etc. Unfortunately they've hitched their horse to a wagon which has so many negative qualities (belief that morals can come only from
Christian religions seems to be one of them) that it sometimes looks like we're going to have to fight long and hard here to prevent the U.S.A. from becoming yet another Reich.'

end of quote

17th August 05
JD asked me to write up the previous meeting on 'Time' even though i wasn't there - not sure I’m up to it really apart from to say that according to Immanuel Kant, Space and Time are both human abstract concepts - or as i understand it they are human mental concepts that we use to order our world - they have no existence apart from us as human beings. Space and Time were concepts personified in Egyptian wisdom - which rather undermines the idea that the Egyptians were incapable of abstract thought.

Last night we discussed Oxfordshire’s very own 'Blair witch'
i.e. wittenham clumps - a site occupied for millennia and
therefore a happy hunting ground for the odd disembodied Ka spirit. It has several classic ghostly phenomena - the spectral coach and horses - racing down the 'high street' at midnight as a warning of impending catastrophe (I wonder if anyone has seen it recently/). A white lady or goddess who appears near the lake and was exorcised by a whole bunch priests in times of yore. And yes - the clumps were one of the resting places of Bran's head on its journey to London - a spectral raven has been seen hovering over the ditch - and this is said to be the location of buried treasure! In the Green Stone saga, Andy Collins and pals discovers one of the 'lights of knowledge' there (Yesod). Wittenham Clumps is certainly a very spirited place, especially the woods between the clumps and the river.

14th August 05

Bath Omphalos to hear Anton Channing’s thoughtful exploration of six key concepts within alchemy viz: the caduceus, the auroborus, the cosmic egg, the spiral, alchemical trinities, and the hermaphrodite. Nice crowd, including people from Friends of the Witchcraft museum. Things slightly overshadowed by a rather bitchy ad hominem attack in the reviews pages of the Cauldron; aimed at the author of Witcha: a book of cunning, and the OGDOS newsletter (Hem Neter). The target is his article on ‘Cain: the first Satanist’. Informed criticism is no bad thing. Dialectics, is, afterall, a science that emerged within the ancient pagan intellectual tradition. However, it is difficult to answer a critic who is convinced you are wrong but can’t say why.

With The Bull of Ombos now at the printers, and Pan’s Road with a reader, I find myself at a loose end. I plan to start work on the final part of my ‘sethian’ trilogy’ in a few months. In the ‘House of Life’ a book on Çatalhöyük caught my eye. It turned out to be a whole new thread that has led me to a rich vein of Neolithic culture that shares many features with the people of Ombos.

The first 1960s excavation has become a cultural phenomenon. The excavation, restarted in the 1990s, the publication of the new finds, with analysis, is due soon. In the meantime, all sorts of snippets are trickling out via the campaign’s website. The latest, just a few days ago, is the discovery of a beautifully made stamp seal that for the first time, reveals the full identity of one of Çatalhöyük’s most famous, and controversial ‘goddesses’. Turns out to be a bear. A beast is every bit as significant to Neolithic magick as the Red Ochre Bull. Bull and Bear are both ‘Sethian’ animals. The bull was associated in Egyptian astronomy with the constellation known later by the Greeks as Ursa Major – ‘The Great Bear’. At Çatalhöyük the Bear ‘rides’ upon the ‘bull’ – which is an image to conjure with, or maybe meditate upon.

According to the press release, the above-mentioned stamp seals were probably used to stamp designs on skin or clothing. This example shows an animal with its front and hind legs raised upwards. Such figures have been known from Çatalhöyük for some time as plaster reliefs on the walls of houses. An example excavated by James Mellaart is shown in Figure 2. These plaster reliefs have often been interpreted as ‘mother goddess’ figures. But the heads and hands of the plaster relief examples have always been cut off, so it was never possible to say whether the figures were humans or not. But now the stamp seal provides a key. Here the head and the hind paws remain. They clearly show that the figure is an animal, probably a bear. So it is probable that the reliefs with upraised arms and legs are not goddesses but bears. Depicting animals, such as leopards, in houses is common at Çatalhöyük, and so it is not surprising that we should find a bear.

For more information visit:

http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/index.html

5th August - Hiroshima Day
The topic of last night's 'talking stick' moot down the pub, was the Pagan response to current world events. Contrary to what G Fukiyama wrote in his book, 'The End of History' - it's not all over but the shouting. The issue he thought a dead one is our relationship to Islam. For me this is as a pagan. Perhaps the answer is to say we're all muslims really - we're certainly not 'unbelievers' - we pagans are definately believers - some even share the concept of AL & LA (see Crowley, Liber Al vel Legis). The same discussion came up in another forum - and what I wrote there may also be of interest:

Seems like there is a difference between ‘Muslims’ considered as a historic/cultural people – - presumably a community of people who emerged in about the 6-7th century. The ups and down of those people, and indeed whether they still exist, is a moot point, that can be separated from ‘Muslim’ considered as a religious ideal. This could mean that a ‘Muslim’ is anyone who regards themselves as ‘one of the peaceful’. Of course, like any religion, there are centres of doctrinal authority and more dogmatic manifestations of the ideal. As in many other religions, Hinduism, Buddhism etc, the body of primary and secondary texts tends to grow through time – but the essence is the mantra like ‘There is no god but Allah’ – ‘there is no God but the principle of divinity itself’ – who could object to that?

At that point, someone remembered a telling parable from the life of the prophet –
Every morning, whenever he went out to teach, he found his doorstep littered with rubbish, thrown there, so it is said, by a lady of another faith. This went on for some time, years maybe. Then one day, there was no rubbish anymore. The prophet asked why and was told the culprit was ill. So, being a wise and kindly soul, he went round to see her, took her a present, helped to nurse her back to health. Why, she asked, did you help me, when I was your enemy? Because, he says, one should always respond to ‘evil’ with kindness’. Now there’s a thing you don’t hear everyday?

1 August 05 'Lammas Day'
That well known pagan chant can be heard in many a newly mown meadow - 'lammas day is the devil's day' - well not quite. Although someone in the Bath omphalos group did suggest that this was the beginning of the 'Sethian' year - an idea that does has something going for it. The myth of John Barleycorn springs to mind - sung beautifully at last night's ritual by Sharron. Who is JB but another form of the ancient god of the harvest - Osiris - here cut down, dismembered and baked into the lammas loaf - all washed down with beer, the product of fermented bread - died with red ochre - the bloodlike 'desert' of the gods?

31 July 05
There is talk of doing even more work on a local urban cemetary to convert it from a vandalised wasteland to a nature reserve. But having begun to read Ken Worpole's Last Landscapes: the architecture of the Cemetery in the West, I see it from a different point of view. He argues that turning this graveyard into another nature reserve is not necessarily the way to ensure a valued future. People value a space like that when they have some of their own relatives and friends buried there. A space full of the names from a hundred years ago has very little meaning to the current generation. In Europe, they have many fine cemeteries, much loved by the local families that use them. In UK our cemeteries are full, and often neglected and vandalised. The difference is that Europeans allow reuse of the same plot after a decent interval, the bones are re-interred in a charnel house. In UK graves are sold in perpetuity. It might seem counter-intuitive, but the way to revitalise our urban cemeteries is to adopt the European model. Otherwise we are forced, if only by reason of cost, to opt for the ecologically damaging option of cremation - and our once loved cemeteries are places of neglect.
A version of this was published in the Oxford Mail 4:8:05)

30 July 05 - 'The means determines the end'
Is it maybe time for us to devise arguments to counter the fundamentalists but from the more tolerant 'pagan' perspective? One lesson might be that using violent means to achieve some sort of 'Islamic' utopia of social justice - will fail - such efforts usually do. Polical violence is a like the djinn or a genii in a bottle - once used, it's difficult to know when to stop.

25th July 05 - 'When Your Guru Goes Gaga'
I forget the exact date of my initiation into amookos but it was some time in the early 1980s. It was at about the same time as I was being expelled from Kenneth Grant's Typhonian OTO - indeed my membership of amookos was a factor in that whole affair but that’s another story. Sometime in the summer of 1989 a fat envelope dropped on the mat. Amongst its enclosures was the following communication from Dadaji, the last guru of the tiny sect of Tantrik magi that I had joined some years earlier. What I read, with sinking heart, gave me an acute sense of déjà vu:

'Guru Purnima, Tuesday, 18th July 89
THE SPLENDOUR OF THE BRIGHT SHINING
(A Corrective to Corruption) etc etc'

Had my guru gone gaga? Either that or he had turned into a total arsehole like every other guru before him. Certainly over the recent years he had suffered a series of strokes the most obvious symptom of which was his current inability to write cursively (you can see examples of this on ION’s website). There were also several glaring errors of fact in the letters he sent. The immediate one concerning Lokanath, was the possible accusation of a treacherous conventional marriage by conventional Christian based ceremony. Lokanath had in fact married in 1978, just after his return from meeting Dadaji for the first time in India. It was no secret. Indeed contrary to what Dadaji says the nath traditon is very diverse and has often included married householders. Perhaps Dadaji resented it at the time but said nothing for the ten years of highly productive work. He finally snapped in 1998, a few years before his death. The full truth will probably never be known.

When i wrote this, circa June 2004, I was in the middle of an exchange of emails with Kapilnath (John Pilskog) the editor of Open Door and the person who ‘benefited’ most from Dadaji’s volte face. Once upon a time I had the ultra leftist type opposition to marriage but nowadays I must say it doesn’t seem that important an issue. But the fact was that Mike had married way back in 1978 and so it was hardly a recent revelation? When Mike returned from his fateful first meeting with Dadaji in the early part of 1978, he resolved to marry his longtime partner Jan, thus putting his affairs in order. I remember he said how lonely he had been during is stay in India, and that obviously influenced his decision. Perhaps when he wrote to Dadaji and told him what he’d done, he had inadvertently infringed one of Dadaji’s own taboos?? Even so the work continued , AMOOKOS was born and began a fitful, painfully slow growth.

Another issue was whether members of AMOOKOS could claim to be Adi-Naths. The problem started with the original charter, written in Dadaji’s own inimicable style. Whatever the ambiguity of the wording, noone claimed to be an Adinatha sannyasi. The documentary evidence shows that Lokanath certainly made no such claim. In fact, he stated that ‘when my dear Gurudev Mahendranath initiated DC in India in Spring 1978, we decided to transform the tradition into an international and cosmopolitan order. This is in line with the Adinatha tradition of old, who always sought true spiritual values and repudiated the artificial.’(Azoth: 13, Spring 1981). Towards the end of his life perhaps Dadaji did regret the ambiguous wording of the original charter, and, as he had done with the Uttara Kaulas, found it easier to pretend the whole thing had never happened.

It was about 1981 that I made contact with Lokanath, after buying a copy of his celebrated occult fanzine Sothis. Lokanath was an influential member of the UK's growing occult scene of the 1970s, and next in line to be head of the typhonian OTO. What I learnt of Dadaji was from his excellent articles in Sothis magazine. In an important sense - Dadaji and amookos were guru each to each.It represented a new covenant which aimed to transcend the past’s inadequate magical organisations. A switch from the dominant ‘masonic’ model to a more freeform ‘rosicrucian’ mode. When Dadaji went gaga he forgot all this. But whatever these are the bare facts. It was never going to be clear cut. Perhaps it is a good thing that there is confusion right from the very beginning

postscript: well now i've received a communication from a Nath from another lineage -
so perhaps the order blown apart by its own guru will come together - watch this space.

24th July 05 - 'Mystical Vampire' in Independent on Sunday.

Mystical Vampire is the new and only biography of Victorian Theosophist, Mabel Collins. The Independent is really proving its name by publishing Gary Lackman's humourous and informative review of Kim Farnell's biographical efforts. Judging by the review, which takes up three quarters of the page. I love some of the bullets - viz: 'Mabel Collins - a writer who knew what upper-class ladies really did with their lap dogs'; 'Theosophists? I take them two at a time' or 'Kim Farnell has done devotees of gaslight a service.' Gary obviously enjoyed reading it?

22 July 05

'The Day of Rams'
This week, the faceless members of a Pagan Federation 'committee' decide to cancel its national conference, because London was getting too dangerous. They say they were prompted in their action by the withdrawal of three speakers and two stall holders. So at a time when the whole country is discovering a new stoicism in the face of concerted terror - one slightly moribund pagan organisation has decided to bottle out. So all that talk of 'never again the burning times' was just talk. They heard on the radio that the muslims want to get the pagans - and that is it - they crumble. I feel deeply ashamed and upset that this organisation - which I've supported for many years - has whimped out. It must the one the final acts of non-leadership in the last declining years of what was once a good idea.

PS: silly syncronicity - at exactly the time the second lot of bombs were due to go off - the plug shorted out in my room - and one of the computers went down. People near the failed bombers said they could smell burning electrical cables. I only mention that because since 7th July the amount of spam I get has dropped off from 400-500 a day to almost none - not sure why - ghost in the machine perhaps??

17th July 05

A book about magick in the review section of the Independent on Sunday - not Harry Potter - but Now That's What I Call Chaos Magick by Julian Vayne and Greg Humphries, from my own firm - Mandrake of Oxford. Reviews of books from the actual practitioners of magick are rare, but becoming more common. They are usually dismissed by review's editors as either 'genre' or just too 'left field' for their gentle readers. So a third of a page in the reviews section makes me feel very happy. And I really like this book - for me it has the final word on the significance of the neo-pagan art of 'chaos magick'. Gary Lachman's informed and intelligent review, traces the roots of Chaos Magick, to Eliphas Levi's 19th century redaction of magick to its real essence - 'will and imagination' or in Gary's own words 'Free your mind - and your spells will follow.' Independent on Sunday (ABC magazine 17:7:5)

15 July 05

Another very hot day in London. Kym and I are there for the launch of Kim Farnell's biography of Mabel Collins - Mystical Vampire. Mabel, a theosophist, despite her interesting life, or should it be lives, has languished without one. Known outside of Theosophical circles as the 'mistress' of Robert Donston Stephenson - one of the suspects in the infamous 'Jack the Ripper' murders of 1888.

Despite the heat, and the aftermath of the July 7th bombings - there was a reasonably showing. The was still much talk of Islamic fundamentalism - which seems to be becoming more rabid than its Christian cousin. IMO it is that whole 'choosen people' thing - that's the heart of the matter. What the world needs now is a bit of pagan style tolerance and pluralism.

10 July, year 05

A very hot day at Kensal Green Cemetary Open Day. Shame that the WW2 veteran's event was cancelled due to security concerns from the police. Now is the time for us to be strong - as the 500K people at the main commemoration in the Mall demonstrated - I guess. This year took the tour of General & Military graves - included the 'common' or 'pauper's plot' also know as the 'guinea' graves - many of the obligatory military funerals were put in this plot! But there again, what does it matter - the whole story of Kensal Green, is really just a variation on the theme of human vanity afterall.

1 July, year 05

The Connaught Hotel, Drury Lane, right next door to Freemasons Hall - and incidentally it is owned by the craft. I was there to do my 'talking head' bit for a forthcoming BBC4 documentary about Dennis Wheatley - 'prince of thriller writers'. DW is well known to the community through eight 'black magic' thrillers - the first of which, The Devil Rides Out, written in 1934, is still regarded as a minor modern classic. Despite a massive peak of sales, running at 500K per year in the 1960s, all of DW's books are currently out of print. Book Club Associates plan to reprint half a dozen of the occult books later this year. Despite the total lack of political correctness, DW stills has a nostalgic attraction to the many fans of 1960s 'crap books' - everyone i've told about the show has said they now want to get a copy and revisit those glamourous 'satanists'. My line was, although things have moved on - DW did still hold some sort of mirror to the magic of his times, albeit one that was a very twisted and distorted.

Fascism and the Occult

2005-08-20T12:02:00.000Z

Fascism and the Occult
by Katon Shual & Shanti Devi Nath

First Published in Nuit Isis Magazine Voo I no 7 (circa 1989)

1- Politics and the Occult:
An Overview
It cannot have escaped many people's notice that this year marks an important anniversary of the most savage war in human history. It is therefore timely to add our own postscript to the history of the period with an examination of the role magick played in this second world war and the subsequent progress, if such it may be termed, of the ideas that did so much to tip humanity into the abyss: Adoph Hitler. Many now want to drawn attention to the connection between extremist politics and the occult. The prime example is the alleged connection between occultism and reactionary, rightwing politics. The usual example was the "mystical" racial myths of the Nazis or the secret manipulation of power wielded by Freemasons. However it can be easily demonstrated that there is no necessary connection between occultism and any particular political stance: right wing or left. Occult or mystical views can constitute a powerful ideological component of any political or social movement. Furthermore a roughly equal number of both progressive and reactionary movements have drawn upon such ideas. Four examples reflect this rough balance: Fascism - Psychological warfare and the New Order Freemasonry and Civic power Voodoo and the world the slaves made Witchcraft and the Land.

However for the purposes of this article we will confirm ourselves to a detailed examination of the first of these and leave it to future issues and perhaps other writers to examine the other three. In the first part we look at the argument that Fascism was some kind of New Age Magical Crusade.

"The modern mythology of Nazi Occultism, is typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources is common to most authors and inaccuracies and wild claims are repeated by each new-comer until an abundant literature exists, based on wholely spurious "facts" concerning the powerful Thule Society/ the Nazi links with the East and Hitler's occult initiation. "(I)

This issue aside, it is additionally sometimes claimed that Fascist ideas were iconoclastic and even a radical project in deconditioning! I hope we will help dispel this dangerous and obscene theory once and for all. For it is indeed an obscenity that the ideas of people so inimical to everything Magick stands for, should still be bandied about by those who should know better, judging by their self proclaimed initiation.

1. Fascism: Psychological Warfare
What follows is necessarily restricted to the study of fascism in Germany. During the Second World War, both the Allied and Axis powers resorted to psychological warfare. NB: occultists were to be found on both sides of the conflict. This included the use of faked horoscopes and prophesies designed to weaken the enemy's resolve. This particular practice began on the German side for the following reason. From about 1920 onwards there had been a remarkable revival of interest in astrology in Germany. Ellic Howe says in his book that a "surprisingly large number of Germans, including many well-educated men and women, began to study astrology in the early 1920s. The reason for this sudden pre-occupation with the hitherto unfashionable, even mildly disreputable area, is not difficult to discover. The aftermath of military defeat, with all its problems and uncertainties, including a runaway currency inflation that was only brought under control at the end of 1923, persuaded many to look to the "stars" for information and portents of better times to come. Before 1914 the comparatively few German astrologers were mostly Theosophists and occultists or both. They regarded astrology as an essentially Hermetic science. However, a large proportion of the newcomers were interested in neither Theosophy, its offspring Anthroposophy nor traditional occultism and preferred to think of astrology as a science in its own right, which given time and the breakdown of traditional prejudice, would be widely accepted as such."(2)

During the Second World War, the Allied Secret Service became convinced that Hitler and his cronies were benefiting from the advice of a professional astrologer. In response to this they employed their own "tame" astrologer, Louis de Wohl, on the basis that knowledge of the kind of advice Hitler was getting, would be a useful piece of intelligence. The Secret Service eventually produced a number of faked horoscopes and predictions that were then infiltrated into Nazi Germany. One example is a faked edition of the prestigious German astrological magazine Zenit, which made certain unfortunate predictions about Hitler.(3)

It is difficult to assess the amount of credence the Nazis actually gave to the astrological and other advice they undoubtedly received. For instance, Hitler's private secretary (1933-45) wrote that "There were popular rumours that Hitler allowed himself to be guided by astrologers before reaching any important decision. I must confess that I never noticed anything of the kind and the subject was never mentioned in conversation. On the contrary, Hitler refuted this by his firmly held conviction that people born on the same day, at the same place and at the same hour, in no way had the same fate. For this point of view he thought that twins provided the best evidence. He always vigorously denied the proposition that the fate of individuals depends upon their stars or constellation. Nevertheless, the prediction made by a Munich fortune-teller (Frau Ebertin) in the very first years of his struggle for power had greatly impressed him. It seemed that here predictions had fulfilled themselves in every respect. But Hitler only spoke very ironically about this coincidence and considered the whole thing as a joke". (4) There are some other reports that show that Hitler's attitude may have changed in the desperate twilight of the Third Reich.(5)

However, the Nazis were undoubtedly aware of the propaganda value of astrological and other predictions. On the eve of Germany's invasion of Poland in August 1939, Dr Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, was shown an interpretation of one of the prophecies of Nostradame. It "read":

"Seven times you will see the British nation change, dyed in blood for two hundred and ninety years. Not at all free through German support, Aries fears for the protectorate of Poland".(6)

The interpretation offered said that the seventh of the changes would occur in 1939 - a critical state of affairs in Poland at the same time as Britain faces a great crisis connected with Germany. Goebbels grasped immediately the possibilities for propaganda inherent in prophesies such as these and he resolved to obtain the services of an expert in order to "extract" further prophecies concerning Britain.

The man he got hold of was none other than Karl E Kraft, who as it happened had already been working in a department of Himmler's Reichssich-erheitshauptamf (RSHA) or Intelligence service, for some months. Kraft was just about the most skilled astrologer in Germany at that time, as well as an expert on Nostradame. In October 1939 he miraculously predicted an assassination attempt on Hitler's life - it was this rather dangerous prediction that first brought him to the Nazis' attention. Most of the professional bodies of astrology had been thoroughly Nazified by about 1934. Ie, Jews expelled and Nazis moved into leading positions. This would not be enough to "protect" them from Government oppression and astrology and all other occult activity were completely banned in 1941. Kraft was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and willingly offered his services to the RSHA. He soon produced a new edition of the Prophecies of Nostradame, although it never got more than limited circulation. The Nazis were very intolerant of the circulation of rumours other than their own. The fact is that Kraft really believed in his techniques and failed to be as pliant in the production of myths as the RSHA demanded. He was placed in protective custody in 1941 and employed in the calculation of horoscopes of various Allied notables, horoscopes destined for propaganda purposes. He died of the effects of typhus en route to Buchenwald concentration camp on January 20th 1945.

Few professional astrologers or known occultists escaped his fate. Thousands were rounded-up after the "defection" of Rudolf Hess in May 1941. However, for every astrologer or occultist arrested, dozens escaped unscathed and continued an underground interest in Hitler's destiny.

2. Fascism Iconoclasm?
Was fascism about the smashing of idols? Did it signify a new and revolutionary political force? Many apologists for fascism claim that it was. Including Hitler himself, of course: "Die National-sozialistische Revolution ist als revolutionaerer Machmassiger Vorgang abgeschlossen!...Das neruose Zeitalter des 19. Jahrhunderts hat bei uns endgultig seinen Abschluss gefunden" implies a two-fold attack on the Communists, claiming that National Socialism was in fact revolutionary in its aims and also was the inevitable culmination of the events of the nineteenth century.
In view of our present knowledge of the horrors of the Nazi holocaust, it seems difficult to understand any reason why this supposedly "revolutionary" force should appeal. Perhaps one reason could be a feeling of disillusionment with liberal democracy, parliamentary committees and majority votes, a sharing of the anti-intellectual and anti-bourgeois tone of Mein Kampf, a belief that with Bismarck, decisions should be made "not by majority votes in national assemblies but by blood and iron". But it can be shown that Hitler's "national socialism" can hardly be seen as a revolutionary and certainly not a desirable alternative.

For one thing, it is difficult to see much revolution taking place, despite the Nazi rhetoric. In theory a revolution should change the fundamental structure of the society. The Nazis certainly made grand gestures, such as the Winterhiife, the Hitler Jugend for boys of all backgrounds and the much-vaunted "peoples' car" (Volkswagen). But did it really herald a decrease in the power of the current ruling classes? The top tax rate increased by a massive 0.8% to 38.2% (even less than the top rate under Thatcher) under the Nazis, although the income of the wealthiest increased by 148% from 1933-9. The concentration of capital in 1939 was also greater than in 1933, and there was more inequality in income and property. The rich East Elbe estates were still in the hands of the gentry and the army still under the command of generals whose names began with the German nobility title "von". As for being a workers' movement, organised labour under the Nazis became a thing of the past; in 1933 the Trades Unions were dissolved and replaced by the Labour Front, a Nazi organisation. Finally, the fate of women in Nazi Germany is not exactly desirable. Marriage loan schemes, pressure to have increasingly large numbers of children while Eva-Braun like "maidens" are scarcely appealing as role models.

It is obvious that the Nazi revolutionary rhetoric is no more sincere than Hitler's other propaganda: for instance his claim in 1930 that he had nothing against "good Jews". Alongside this is the sheer banality of everyday life in the Third Reich. Germany's most gifted writers - Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertholt Brecht - exiled abroad, sexual repression and the anti-feminist tone of the Nazi rule. Fascism can hardly be called iconoclastic.

3,The New Order Cultus
One of the best selling books of the sixties alleges that the second World War was an ideological struggle between Humanism and Magick. This book: Pauwels and Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, has recently been reprinted and there are several clones including Francis King's Satan and. the Swastika; Gerald Suster, Hitler and the Age of Horus. There is even a genre of fiction, assuming that the former books are intended as non-fiction, beginning with for example Dennis Wheatley's They Used Dark Forces.

The story goes that the top Nazi leaders were all members of a secret esoteric group called the Thule Society. The myth of Thule is very much a German equivalent of the Atlantis myth. The Society was supposed to have been founded sometime in the early decades of the twentieth century by Hitler's mentor Dietrich Eckardt. It included amongst its members the seven founder-members of the NSDAP or Nazi Party. Karl Haushofer was its Grand Master and chose the swastika symbol for the flag.

The "unknown superiors" of the Thule Society are supposedly the secret directors of the Third Reich. However this assertion and other details are entirely fallacious. The Thule Society was dissolved around 1925 when support had dwindled. (7) Nevertheless, there are several characteristics of the Nazi regime that can make it appear like a parody of a "holy" order.

Take, for instance, the Nazi flag. This was designed by Hitler himself. In his book Mem Kampf he devotes a whole chapter to a discussion of its symbolism. Hitler's unconscious capacity for self-parody is fully revealed in this book along with a lot else. A serious book it is not, although subsequent events show how disastrous it can be to underestimate the possibility of a cosmic joke. Concerning the design of the Nazi flag, he says that "As National Socialists we see our programme in our flag. In Red we see the social idea of the movement, in White the nationalist idea, in the Swastika, the mission of the struggle for victory of the Aryan man, and by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has and always will be anti-Semitic"'.(8)

It must be fairly common knowledge that the "swastika" is an ancient Indian religious symbol, probably solar in significance. The term "swastika" is in fact a Sanskrit word from swasti meaning success. It is also a reference to the distillation of the divine psychotropic drug soma, a key component of the religion of the Vedic Aryans. In Indian iconography this mystic hooked cross usually has its hooks bent around to the left so that the whole emblem rotates in a clockwise direction, the direction of the earth's rotation. Thus early Buddhist stupa temples were laid out on such a swastika ground plan. Significantly the Nazi's iconographers reversed the usual direction so that it rotates anti-clockwise, the direction of the Hermetic cross, as drawn by members of the Golden Dawn.(9) Astrologers have long adopted the convention of charting their calculation "back to front" as it were. Thus the eastern horizon appears on the right-hand side of the page and the western on the right. If one bears in mind the comments I made earlier about the popularity of astrology in Germany from the 1920s on, then the reason for the inversion is manifest and not as sinister as it appears. Whatever inherent meaning once possessed by this symbol, the Nazis managed to destroy it as a benign symbol. Rudyard Kipling had it removed from the covers of his books of Indian stories, which it had previously graced. Kipling was of course a pacifist, his jingoism destroyed by the death of a beloved son in the First world war.

Hitler does not mention where he derived the swastika symbol, but it was probably from the principal "philosopher" of the Nazi party - Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg's eight-hundred page epic The Myth of the Twentieth Century was only outsold by Hitler's Mein Kampf and it was the main source of the Nazis' absurd racial theories. This book has a large section dealing with Hindu/ Aryan history. In this Rosenberg attributes the foundation of the civilization of ancient India, with its caste system to Aryans who flowed over the mountains from the northwest. They contrasted their own light complexion with those of their dark-brown subject races. These Aryans, so he says, created the philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanishads. Eventually, so the theory goes, race mixture destroyed the basis of their doctrine and Aryan mysticism was corrupted by systems of magic and sacrifice. Thus the swastika on the Nazi flag was a symbol of racial purity and also an evocation of their supposed racial spirit.

An examination of the Nazi "cult" would be incomplete without some mention of the SS or Defence Staff (Schutz Staff). They were molded by Heinrich Himmler into a grotesque parody of medieval Teutonic knighthood. They were selected on rigorous "racial" and physical grounds and wore special uniforms. The SS badge was soon metamorphosed into a double lightening flash in imitation of ancient runic characters: Sig Sig: The Sun/Victory. One writer describes their initiation as:

"a mystic rigmarole of his "sworn fellowship" before counterfeit bones of King Henry I, founder of medieval German power in the East. All this taking place at midnight in the crypt of a local cathedral''(10)

All the pomp and circumstances cannot hide the fact that the SS were little more than concentration camp guards. The first camps were organized in 1933, almost immediately after the Nazis came to power. Their first inmates were communists or people labeled as communists. Himmler's deputy, Heydich, who was no mystic "but a ruthless careerist" took over the administration of them. One bizarre feature they retained throughout was the almost "masonic" system of prisoners' badges, later extended outside the camps by Heydich. The eighteen or so categories of prisoners were identified by a complicated system of interlocking triangles of various colours - Yellow for Jewish prisoners. Red for political. Pink for homosexuals, brown for gypsies, and Mauve for Jehova's Witnesses etc.

The relationship between the Third Reich and the Occult emerges from this as something rather superficial. The Nazis were no more magical than the clients of a successful advertising agency. It is surely telling that General J F C Fuller, one time disciple of Aleister Crowley. as well expert on Tank warfare, eventually rejected Hitler's brand of mystical blitzkrieg. Torn between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, his patriotism eventually got the better of him.

(C) Mandrake of Oxford

Notes:
(1) N Goodrich CIark, The Occult Roots of Fascism, (Aquarian Press ) pp 225.
(2) Ellic Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare during World War II (Rider 1972) page 21.
(3) E. Howe op cit
(4) H Trevor Roper, Hitler's Table Talk 1941-44, (1953) page 76
(5) H Trevor -Roper, The Last Days of Hitler
(6) The Prophesies of Nostradamus. III.57. Translated by Cheetam
(7) Goodriche Clarke, op cit page 221.
(8) As quoted by Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Condor 1972).
(9) RG Torrens, The Secret Rituals of the Golden Dawn.
(10) Eugen Kogen, The Theory and Practice of Hell. (Secker and Warberg 1950) page 17.

Stonehenge 2005

2005-06-27T17:31:00.000Z

Just got back from a Paul and Charlotte's handfasting in Cornwall - before that - solstice at Stonehenge, which seemed a lot more mellow this year - fewer belligerent drunks - a more spiritual atmosphere - for me there are always obstacles on the way - two closed roads (one by a narrowly missed car pile-up, the other bridge repairs), police roadblocks etc - it seems part of the journey now. For many years when Stonehenge was closed to the public - OGDOS sought sanctuary at Avebury. When we first went there, it was pretty quiet - but over the years its grown in popularity - so nowadays - if you want to spend solstice at Avebury - you have to commit to it. For old time's sake, we try to stop at Avebury for a drink on route - but those days are gone now -

We drove on past the police road barricades towards Stonehenge - just outside Shrewton, the road was totally closed (shades of paranoia) - we parked up near a traveller van, to study the map for another route - screams and shouts from within the van - so we moved off quickly - the road twisting and turning, then it cleared and we were there.

A few hours R&R, then out for walkabout - 2am - plenty of time till dawn - we went through yet another police checkpoint - before being let onto the path they wanted us to follow, straight down to the henge. But we had other plans - out of sight we wheeled left down a footpath, that leads across fields and roads, until it comes to the end of the mysterious 'cursus', as it pokes its nose through the Fargo plantation. First we must cross an overgrown style - the other side of which is parked a minibus full of police! They look at us but move very slowly in our direction - all is silence - we keep walking - and before the police can get their act together, we are across the road, over a second style and disappearing into
the darkness. Paul is muttering a quiet prayer to keep us safe - but somehow I know we are meant to get through.

And indeed, after much scrambling about in the pitch black of the woods - barbwire and brambles - - hunting for the path - we stumble out under the stars. I mention this - because is you ever do come along to one of these ad hoc quests - you are quite likely to get lost. So back to the cursus - which we had completely to ourselves - the stars were shining above us - not the clearest of nights but good enough. We draw down the plough - to remember the hidden god - before meandering down in the peaceful deserted plain - back to the floodlite henge - whose generous curves, are more than able to absorb upwards of 21K people.

We did our little ritual at the little 'fairy tree', much loved during the free festivals of the 1980s. But now we have to hide again - as an official looking pickup comes up the trail - perhaps the police radioed ahead and they are looking for us - if so - can't think why?? But we gave them the slip in the darkness - blending back into the crowds just at the final checkpoint - then into the melee of the henge - to greet Ra, Seth's father, on his birthday. 'More horns' - that was my thought as I wind my horn to the most magnificent solstice dawn - among all those people - there were only two of us playing - music is a most acceptable offering to Ra at dawn - and works well with the festival atmosphere - so hope to see a few more from this list next time?

love and do what you will

mogg

PS: next chance for a meet is at the Omphalos moot in July and September -
if you're holidaying in bath area why not try to come along
- see mandrake speaks for details.

Rise of the 'Zines

2005-06-13T11:16:00.000Z

It's a sure sign that we are experiencing renewed growth of interest in things occultural when a whole bunch of new fanzines suddenly emerge from the shadows. Back in the 1980s there were dozens of fanzines - ranging from our own Nuit Isis, to Lightning Flash and Chaos International - most now ceased publication. But just recently a number of new 'zines have landed in my lair. The poshest is the very fine Strange Attractor - which has no title anywhere on the front cover but neverthless has a fine selection of extended forteana - Tim d'Arch Smith on Montague Summer, the Marquis de Sade and the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, and another informative offering from Justin Woodman on H P Lovecraft. My favourite is Lost Wax - Blackpool's Passed Attraction. This is an illustrated exploration of the famous wax works - now sadly closed. A very long time ago - when I was a teenager - I went to Blackpool along with a whole! charabanc full of the folk in my street. Sooner or later we were drawn into the waxworks - and I was much intrigued by the 'adults only' section - which despite my youthful appearance, the attendant seemed to want us to see. Reputed to be a real anatomical museum full of medical curiousities and the horrible final acts of diseases such as syphilis, unchecked by the modern pharmacopoeia. Viewing such a museum at an impressionable age is one of those privileged moments - so I was pleased to see it preserved in text - I do hope the models are in storage and not melted down for candle wax.

Talking still of fanzines - at the other end of the scale - is Oracle Occult Magazine - a coated A4 very like Chaos International, but with a catholic range of material - aiming to bridge the gap between magick and witchcraft. Articles are well written ranging from Archaic Witchcraft, Voodoo, to Freemasonry - all interspersed with some intelligent and detailed reviews - as well as more occultural stuff such as Steven Ashe's article on Picasso. So all in all, a welcome addition - and worth supporting at £3.50 (£21 for first six issues - which it is planned to issue annually - which might be a bit optimistic.)

For details of both these publications visit:www.oracleoccult.com (actually Mandrake.uk.net also has some stock) andwww.strangeattractor.co.uk

Oh yes while I'm at it - have a another very witchy magazine called Dragonswood - which although very much in the Pentacle/Pagan Dawn type genre has a few surprises and is edited by some very cool dudes from Peterborough - worthy of support from www.dragonswood.org.uk

Smallest of the lot - but still packing a punch is the latest edition of Hem Neter - newsletter of the Oxford Golden Dawn Occult Society - available for a modest £2 from trisburden@hotmail.com (paypal available)

Well that's your holiday reading sorted - have fun - mogg

Triumph of the Moon - 5 years on (review)

2005-06-12T19:57:00.000Z

I’ve been rereading Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon, a masterful history of pagan witchcraft, published in 1999. It’s maybe inevitable that a book that covers such a huge spectrum of ideas is bound to suffer from the criticism of individual specialists. For example I would dispute the idea that after 1902, the poet Yeats’ ‘religious ideas reappear only in fragmentary form, embedded thereafter in his later poetry and plays’ (Hutton 1999: 157). I would say that Yeats’ greatest religious and magical revelation comes after his marriage to George Hyde Lees in 1918 with his vision for the phases of the moon. The influence of these ideas about the moon on the contemporary magical scene is something overlooked until quite recently.

But I refuse to fault-judge Professor Hutton’s book given that the overall thrust is so provocative in the best possible sense. There were several themes that particularly stuck in my mind.

Firstly the positive effect of the transference of pagan witchcraft to USA from whence it returned politically refreshed. It’s so easy for the little Englander view of witchcraft to overshadow the novel contributions of our American friends. Hutton shines the spotlight on the latent conservatism of the UK magical world (for an earlier expose see my own book Sexual Magick.) I too remember as a breath of fresh air the words coming from American witch poets such as Robin Morgan. In the 1980s I helped form a group inspired by Starhawk’s groundbreaking Spiral dance. It was then by no means taken for granted that other pagans would share our anti the bomb agenda. The conversion of modern pagans and magicians to these causes was something that had to be worked for – via organisations such as Pagans Against Nukes, the Greenham Women and the Stonehenge free festival, all causes strangely absent from the lips of Professor Hutton’s informants.

Many felt that Tanya Luhrmann’s infamous study of the uk magical scene was itself flawed by its restriction to a very narrow and conservative bunch of magicos, as well as her outright refusal to meet with any representatives of occultism’s new wave. Many linked this with ‘her apparent dismissal of their practices as founded on delusion. Perhaps that’s unfair but then as Ronald points out ‘The feeling of the latter were to some extent enhanced by Luhrmann’s own return to United States as soon as her project was complete, her entry into the academic profession assured and her subsequent lack of any obvious interest in Paganism or magic. (Hutton 1999: 376) It is a feature of the book that Hutton is as hard on fellow academics as he is sympathetic to the magical practitioner.

Professor Hutton levels some very telling criticism of the internecine strife that has been a feature pagan witchcraft since its very beginning. The often-termed ‘bitchcraft’ hardly waned, even when during the 1980s ‘satanic child abuse panic’ when the stakes were very high indeed. Whilst not a complete stranger to wiccan circles, I was at the time firmly within the magical fold. I remember feeling much got at by the intemperate outbursts from wiccans, ‘great and good’. They seemed to be fuelling the press views witch hunt against ‘black’ practitioners. Ronald’s book has at least helped me to get that in perspective. These attacks were not aimed at occultists but at other rival wiccan priests and priestesses! Whether the press saw it that way is another story. In Oxford a local Christian wannabee attempted to get our speaker meetings banned from council property and the ‘oh so liberal’ Bishop of Oxford (still in post), stopped our path working group using the local community centre.

Personally I wonder whether the abusive and bitchy nature of many covens is perhaps linked to the unhealthy influence of the fourth way philosophy of Gurdjieff or indeed the worst excesses of some of Aleister Crowley’s training regimes?

There is a common misconception that Professor Hutton has somehow undermined the basis of pagan witchcraft. I didn’t really get that impression, if anything he has cleared a space in which it can thrive. If anything his work reminds me of the kind of approach taken by the late Andrew Chumbley, whose credentials are anything but undermined by this book. I once asked Andrew about all these claims to a lineage older than the 1940s emergence of Wicca and he replied that although initiated by traditional witches with a long pedigree they didn’t actually know very much. It was still down to him and his colleagues to reinvent or flesh out the tradition.

Likewise on the topic of the goddess, the learned professor’s position is really a form of enlightened agnosticism –

‘The effect [of the ‘Murrayite’ fall from grace] upon professional pre-historians was to make most return, quietly and without controversy to that careful agnosticism as to the nature of the ancient religion which most has preserved since the 1940s. There had been no disproof of the veneration of a Great Goddess, only a demonstration that the evidence concerned admitted of alternative explanations.’ (Hutton: 1999: 282)

Which does not mean that goddesses were not worshipped in prehistoric times or that none of them achieved to greatness. For example Isis; who may not be a prehistoric goddess but is certainly the first to go global. Ronald Hutton’s book is a reminder that a god or goddess wants you to encounter them as they truly are and not as a mere cipher with which to work out your frustration or bitterness about the way your life is going just now.

'In Our Time' - BBC R4 - Alchemy (Comment)

2005-06-12T19:23:00.000Z

'In Our Time' offers such promise but rarely delivers.
The discussion on Alchemy (22.2.5) being a case in point.
The programme's two major faults are ethnocentricity and snobbery.
Ethnocentric because it rarely ventures east of Suez; snobbishness because it hardly ever steps outside the academy. Hence in a discussion on Alchemy there is no mention of its probable origin in South Asian philosophy of the body, 'Ayurvedic' medicine and the important discipline of plant alchemy.

Intellectual snobbery means that the views of expert 'practitioners' are rarely if ever heard - even when it becomes obvious that the so-called experts don't really have a very good grasp of the topic - or worse have merely jumped on a bandwagon set in motion by independent scholars.

Melvin Bragg, I'm a fan of the show but does it have to be this way?

Liber T: Tarot of Stars Eternal (review)

2005-06-12T18:21:00.000Z

Liber T: Tarot of Stars Eternal (review)
by Roberto Negrini, artwork by Andrea Serio
review by Mogg Morgan

Liber T is a new rendering of the famous Crowley/Harris Tarot deck into what some might say is a more contemporary mode. The person who first drew my attention to the deck - assumed, perhaps rightly, that the pun on liberty was another blow in the 'fightback' against the current corporate copyright holders of Crowley / Harris deck. It is said that it can be difficult to gain the appropriate permissions to reproduce images from the old deck and there are rumours that those who have managed to do so have lived to regret the experience. How much of this is true - i dunno - but such are the rumours that go round bookfairs. Redrawing an image is one way to circumvent any existing copyrights - and the result is often quite pleasing - as in this case the colours seem fresher. The style is distinctly stellar.

Overall this is a nice deck, and the artwork is of very high quality. The deck claims to sponsored by the OTOA - which according to the rather informative page of Albion Lodge of the (Caliphate?) stands for 'Ordo Templis Orientis Antiquas [whose] history . . based upon suggestive charters and few documentations about its historical facts. [Let's not forget that there were times when even Crowley mislaid the odd certificate!] In spite of this its egregoric power and dynamic has proved to be resistant to falling into sleep and forgetfulness. By this fact one can at least assume that the line is capable of a certain power. In a letter to Peter Koenig, Bertiaux said the following: "Whether or not the Jean-Maine lineage was linked to the OTO of Reuss probably can't be ever proven" (Bertiaux, letter dated 4 April 1990). So from this let us proceed in the history of an order that started in the same place as all other OTO bodies with Theodor Reuss.'

I garnered a lot of information on the deck from Diane Wilkes review for the http://www.tarotpassages.com/liber-t.htm principally that: the subtitle of the deck (Tarot of Stars Eternal) hints to the impetus behind this deck; the revisions to the Minors are based on the Decans, also known as the 36 Symbolic Constellations of the Egyptian Star Cult, the SIBU SEPESU (Eternal Stars). Negrini's sources of inspiration include Liber Hermetis of the Corpus Hermeticum, Indian (Vedic) astrology, Picatrix, and the writings of Agrippa and Bruno. The deck is intended for ritual use, based on the spread/ritual provided in the Little White Booklet (LWB).' There is also a useful table setting out the differences in keyword between the Crowley / Harris and Liber T. So probably a deck for those caught up in the OTOA trajectory, but may also be of interest to any lover of the Tarot. - mogg

The Works of Michael Aquino

2005-06-10T18:18:00.000Z

Until 1996, Michael Aquino was the founding High Priest of the Temple of Set; before that one of the illuminati of the Church of Satan. I've just been reading two new monumental ebooks published by Michael Aquino and, remarkably for such extensive works, are available free of charge. http://www.xeper.org/maquino.The setanic groupings are viewed from a critical distance by most LHP magicians. One informed commentator recented wrote to me: 'that the isolationist 'black brother' approach is flawed, . . . the TOS seem to equate the LHP with this position and that the aim of magick is to become an isolated, inviolate self.' I'd add that I think any truly sethian magical organisation would be more rosicrucian than old style 'masonic'. The TOS say they are closer in spirit to Crowley's AA, and although that involves the wellknown sequence of 'masonic-type' grades, they still see in this a valid magical structure. And, it has to be said, they do not charge for initiation. Even so, the Temple of Set and before them, the Church of Satan stumbled onto a mythos which is uniquely relevant to modern magick and for that they deserve credit and indeed respect. I haven't read either book through yet (one is 1000 pages of detailed research with over 50 photographs) but whatever the possible bias i! t's sure to be crucial reading for anyone who really wants to understand the magick of this important emerging archetype. - [mogg]

Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion (review)

2005-06-09T17:23:00.000Z

Andy Worthington, Alternative Albion 2004 Isbn 1872883761, 14.95pounds
(the book is available from mandrake, plus a few independentbookshops as well as AMAZON. But as is often the case you probably won't find it in one of the corporate bookstores)

'This innovative social history looks in detail at how the summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge have brought together different aspects of British counter-culture to make the monument a 'living temple' and an icon of alternative Britain'

And indeed everything you could want to know about the stones from the Druid revival in the 18th century, Gerard Gardner's celebration of the 1951 repeal of the Witchcraft Act (complete with bagpipes), to the events of the Beanfield in 1985 (that's twenty years ago this year folks). The counter culture didn't end that day but rather it mutated into the Rave Party scene, the Road's protest and Neo-paganism. It's poised and ready under the banner of the Save Stonehenge Campaign to respond to government's latest scheme to run a dual carriageway just west of the circle.

They say history is written by the winners, and in this instance there are many who wish to claim the victory. As a pagan I was surprised to sense the animus among anarchists et al, against what they call ' uniformed druid hierarchy' (see Frazer Clark's Parallel Youniversity UP!223). How could it be that the druids are seen by many as the enemy of the counter culture? Surely it was not always so? Well read this book and you learn a little how a 'small section of the druids' (and indeed the pagan) movement appeared at times to support the establishment's attempts to ban free festivals and make access to sacred sites for a small self promoting elite only. But this isn't the whole story - these people are expert self publicists and in the absence of accurate information they managed for a time to monopolise the truth about places like Stonehenge. As Andy says:

Not all Druids are 'a bunch of middle class accountants and dentists'. The Druids at Stonehenge come in many forms. These include:

- The Ancient Druid Order, who may well fit your bill these days, but
who were the original agitators for solstice access after the first fence was
raised around Stonehenge in 1901.

- The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, founded in 1964 after a schism
in the Ancient Druid Order, who abandoned Stonehenge on a point of principle
after members of the public were prevented by the authorities from attending the
solstice in the early 1960s. the original donor having stipulated full public
access.

- A number of newer Orders, whose founders were part of the Stonehenge
Free Festivals' vast congregation, and who campaigned for open access to
Stonehenge after the festival was brutally suppressed at the Battle of the
Beanfield in 1985, >> which i always refer to as the Beanfield Massacre a
more accurate description, despite how half a dozen hardened mushy & special
brew nuts might have told it in the pub that night :)

- Arthur Pendragon's Loyal Arthurian Warband, the Secular Order and the
Glastonbury Order.

That's why Andy's book is so important - it sets the record straight and arms the reader with all that facts they need to counteract lies and prepare for what is to come. The truth is that the pagan / new age movement and the free festival scene are intimated connected, always were and will be again. The editors of the recent Channel Four 'Banned in the UK' would have done better had they read Andy's book. How else could they have failed to recognise the connection between the UK government's ban on Acid house and 'repetitive beats' with the earlier assault on the Free Festival scene including that at Stonehenge. Perhaps it needs someone like Andy to document all this and as Professor Hutton points out, he does such a thorough job it's likely to remain the standard history for a very long time to come. See you at Stonehenge.

Mogg
PS: to see my pictures from the 1999 'Return to the Stones' go to: http://homepages.tesco.net/~mogg.morgan/solstice.htm

'Concentration Camp Guard' vs 'Jobsworth' (comment)

2005-06-05T17:41:00.000Z

Johann Hari thinks that

'human rights abuses commited by Jews provoke far more rage
across the world than human rights abuses committed by any other group'
(Independent 23.2.5).

Which is an odd way of seeing things. If it were true then surely Israel would have been bombed and invaded by now? I guess that Israel gets away with a lot because of European guilt about the holocaust. From a Middle East perspective this latitude seems unfair given the fact that that particular piece of genocide had nothing to do with Arabs and yet they have to pick up the bill. Surely it should be the Germans who are expelled from their land to make way for the new state of Israel - its the least they could do - an outrageous suggestion I know - but it seems ok when those asked to pay have brown skins and live far away.

Ken Livingstone's remark may be a bit OTT but lets remember that 'concentration camp guard' is a common figure of speech - signifying those who are basically just doing a job without worrying too much about those on the receiving end. It's a stronger version of 'jobsworth' - sometimes you have to sting people if you want them to wake up to the fact that whats good for their career is trampling on my head

Exorcism! C4 (25.2.5)

2005-06-04T17:30:00.000Z

Well maybe not - after the big build-up - the spooky credits, dry ice and discordant musick, the stentorian tones of the presenter, author, so my informant tells me of several best selling 'self help' titles. Krisnan Guru Murti - strained and came forth . . . with a gnat. C4 late night exorcism was a bit of a damp squib. If you're going to scan someone's brain better make sure they got one.

Krisnan struggled to extract some blood out of the panel of stone faced talking heads - many of them sporting dog-collars or the earnest look of the recently delivered. It was definitely a case where the advert was more interesting than the product.

After all the recent publicity concerning the so-called god spot - one wonders if that theory is going to go the way of that other G? Take some fundamentalist Christians, with a few other Abrahamic types for 'balance' - then a willing subject - although this one found it hard to conceal the fact that he had rehearsed - well more than that actually - this was not his first exorcism - or 'deliverance' to use the nice new term suggested by the COE PR department. Our subject turns out to be well known to the exorcist - well his friend actually - having been exorcised for something or other most weekends at his local church - this week is was a nice gentle demon called 'paranoia' which duly upped and left at the first mention of 'the mighty name of Jesus'. Lest we forget that JC was first and foremost an exorcist. Thank your lucky stars it wasn't a more intractable 'demon' like 'homosexuality' or sparks really might have flown. Come to think of it might have been more interesti! ng.

Those clever scientists had to work very hard indeed to find anything significant in those brain waves - other than the kind of changes that might occur possibly during meditation or even - dare I say it - the kind of changes in brain chemistry that might occur if someone touches you in a kindly way on the chest. (mogg)

Sickert and the Ripper Crimes

2005-02-06T16:18:00.000Z

Sunday, February 06, 2005

A letter rejected by The Guardian newspaper - oh well better luck next time. Although a small publisher's lot is not a happy one. Your work can be ignored as 'genre' but when the self same ideas are picked up by a corporate author it suddenly becomes mainstream:

In his review of Sturgis/Walter Sickert: A Life (29.01.05) - Jad Adams makes the mistaken claim that the theory concerning Sickert's obsession with the infamous crimes is from Patricia Cornwell via Joseph Gorman (Sickert) - it is not. If anything the theory was first laid out in Jean Overton Fuller's 'Sickert and the Ripper Crimes', published by Mandrake in 1990! Mandrake is a small independent press which may account for this strange lacunae in Adams's and indeed Sturgis's research. Jean Overton Fuller is a national treasure and the basis of her strange book is the rumours amongst Sickert's artistic contemporaries. For example Florence Pash, friend of Jean's mother, was Sickerts business partner. Hints concerning Sickert's obsessive behaviour are dotted throughtout the earlier biographies. And who, ten years ago, was prepared to even admit that Sickert had created a painting called 'Jack the Ripper's Bedroom'?

Patricia Cornwell's book is a welcome entry to the debate - although due to the author's high profile, not to mention corporate clout - it has monopolised a great deal of the publicity. Cornwell did make a great deal of Sickert's assumed impotence. Accounts of Sickerts midlife philandering do undermine that contention - it certainly warrants another look. But the idea that Sickert couldn't have done it because he was 'abroad for _most_ of the _summer_ of 1888' leaves me wondering whether someone is not protesting his innocence a little too much. The first murder was in august, then the killing went on into the autumn of 1888, not the summer. Sickert was in Dieppe, abroad but still only a few hours away. Even if the Dieppe season were to be extended to the autumn, this is hardly a firm alibi is it?

Of course it leaves open the whole question of whether brainy people ever commit murder? You mean could someone like Caravaggio ever be on the run for murder and could it be reflected in his art?

Mogg Morgan

a comment:
LT said...
Thank you for this post. I just finished reading a new edition of Fuller's book in which she deals with Cornwell. To me Cornwell comes dangerously close to plagiarism because of the "evidence" and "deductions" she came up with that happen to be in Fuller's book of 10 years before. Whatever the merit of the theory, Cornwell has lost a lot of respect and credibility both for producing a shoddy book and not acknowledging her sources completely.

10:13 AM

The Smugness of Mainstream Authors

2005-02-05T18:33:00.000Z

Jim Crace's 'The Secrets of My Success' (Guardian review 05.02.05)
has been running round in my mind all week. A few tips would be nice, like don't sign up for those proof reading courses - but apart from the idea that a little local colour makes up for zero research - eg in the desert one 'sleeps
like a donkey'. After that the article became an overlong if truish journey through the guy's own personal slush pile.

Crace, a 'modesty successful author' is blissfully unaware of the institutionalised corruption that helped make his name - whether he approves or not. I hate that - when those who have caught (or is it bought) the media ear - then turn round and criticise others who would like their own bite of the cherry. Like oh so radical Will Self, slagging off the internet - well yes - he doesn't need that type of publicity - so why he rants would anyone else? But maybe things are changing - journalists so love to build something up then tear it down. James Naughtie this morning (8.2.5) interviewing two rival publishers of hotel guides, one who charges for an entry, the other (The Good Hotel Guide) that does its own research. Icebergs and tips spring to mind. Or memories of a tourist board recommended guesthouse in Dorset where we were treated to an endless description of how nice the breakfast would have been had the dining room been open. And where the landlord started banging on our door from nine am sunday morning to make sure we knew we had to vacate by ten - yes we did know that. Businesses like that have to pay 'bribes' or they never get on.

Can it really be true that when you ask your friend or cousin to read your unpublished books ' . . . they will pretend they loved it or they will
affect amused indifference if your success would be threatening.' Umm, methinks another grain of truth there - friends can be jealous of each other's success? I've heard that a few times recently - maybe it was Gore Vidal who said that nothing was more pleasing than seeing great piles of your best friend's latest book in the remainder dealer's shop. - Mandrake

21st Century Grail / Andrew Collins (Review)

2005-01-25T18:52:00.000Z

21st Century Grail or JC's Eggcup?

I've been reading Andy Collins' latest - a rather lucid account of the modern day quest for the grail. In it Andy returns with some panache to the old psychic questing stomping ground - part psychic part literary detective. All across the English speaking world there are those who still believe that the King James Version of the Bible was actually translated by God himself. To those same people, the idea that 'Jesus was not divine, he was married to Mary Magdalen and had a child with her, his bloodline survived in France and the Holy Grail was not a chalice but a woman is a bit of a revelation. Hence the success of the tale's many retellings, including the multimillion copy best seller,"The Da Vinci Code". It makes for a good novel but as magical history it covers too vast a range of times and cultures for my taste - the papering over of the cracks a little too blatant. But remember the Surrealist golden rule - 'people prefer the preposterous.'

Andy's take on this differs slightly in that he also wants to write himself into the story - to be one of those questing grail knights - and why not I hear you say? Why not indeed? The first half is better than the second. The excursus into early Christian history is interesting if maybe a bit unreliable. I think there were more than one 'Mary' in the New Testament. The C4 programme Who Wrote the Bible was in a way much more enlightening where it uncovered the evidence that Mary Magdalen was probably one of the leaders of the first Christians - a fact that needed to be edited out by Constantine's Roman spin doctors. A heretical medieval sect, inspired by the 'eastern' Gospel of Mary is a real possibility.

After the promise of the first half of Andy's book most of this material is put to one side as everything moved off into the realm of farce. There are too many false trails and loose ends that don't quite get tied up.

The ideas of Aleister Crowley are given an airing but it all seems a bit unconvincing. Indeed the idea that the grail is a women not a cup ought to fit well with Crowley's cult of Babalon and Oriental Templarism. But Andy seems to prefer artefact to the reality of magick. At what should be the climax of the quest, there is a blinding flash of light but nothing thereafter. Enter Graham Philips, one of Andy's many friends who back in the 1980s also wrote a 'best selling book' on the grail culminating in its discovery! Only we're now told he is depressed because power, fame and fortune didn't follow. And he now wants to destroy the precious object and is persuaded to give it to Andy so he can complete his book - maybe he will do better. Is it a good sign that members of this coterie of authors are beginning to reference each other? Or is it just another grail castle in the air?

Trouble is that the Grail, (or should it be THe GRAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIILLLLLL) is only one and half inches high - JC's Eggcup!! It impresses no-one in particular, certainly not the keeper of Roman antiquities at the British Museum. Perhaps not even the authors who are soon off on yet another quest, leading to yet another artefact - is this product placement for the next book?

Right on cue comes the following story concerning material discussed at length but inconclusively in Andy's book:

Code traced to religious sect >From correspondents in London November 26, 2004

A MYSTERIOUS carved code at a British manor house, which has defied understanding for hundreds of years, is thought to be a cryptic message from an 18th century Christian sect, experts said today.

The series of apparently random letters inscribed on a monument at the Shugborough Estate in Staffordshire, central England, were analysed for months by veterans of Britain's World War II code-breaking service.

The experts said today that a US researcher had now come up with a likely explanation for the code on the Shepherd's Monument.

The marble tablet, commissioned in 1748, features a carved image of a painting by French 17th century artist Nicolas Poussin, with the letters "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M." underneath.

According to popular legend, the code revealed the whereabouts of the Holy Grail, in Christian teaching the cup used by Jesus to drink from at the Last Supper.

In May, managers at Shugborough decided to invite experts from the famous World War II Bletchley Park code-breaking centre, along with their modern counterparts, to tackle the code.

The experts said that the US researcher, using a mixture of normal code-breaking systems and historical context, thought the letters stood for "Jesus (As Deity) Defy", a message from the Priory of Sion.

The Priory, a mysterious organisation perennially linked by conspiracy theorists to the Holy Grail, viewed Jesus as an earthly prophet rather than a son of god.

Such a message insisting on Jesus's mortal status would have to have been put into hard-to-decipher code because it defied conventional Christian thinking, the experts said.

The new theory is buoyed by the fact that the Priory of Sion was a spiritual successor to the Knights Templar, an organisation which Poussin reputedly once headed.

The painting from which the carving is drawn, "Les Bergers d'Arcadie", is housed in Paris's Louvre Museum, and has long been subject to speculation about its supposed Masonic symbolism.

Poussin, the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion are frequently invoked by groups convinced that the Holy Grail is at the centre of some grand mystery concerning the Roman Catholic Church. Such theories have acquired massive popular exposure through "The Da Vinci Code", a best-selling novel by US author Dan Brown which expounds the theory that Jesus had a number of descendants, a fact that was covered up by the Church.

The book has been so successful that France, where much of the action takes place, has benefitted from a mini-boom of US tourists visiting sites mentioned in the novel such as the Louvre and the church of Saint Sulpice on Paris's Left Bank.

All of the above must count as a significant synchronicity coming as it does on the tails of Andy's fascinating and very readable book. Check it out for yourself - Mogg