My friends,
I have been in a starry eyed reverie since The Bumper Book of Magic arrived on my backporch yesterday and have pretty much ceased to function aside from reading the book and reexperiencing years of magical progress and regress. I'll have a post up tomorrow, until then- seek me in Fairyland (best avoided).
AC
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| Michelle Olley (from the Cosmic Trigger play website) |
Holding the slim volume in your hands, you're surprised by how flimsy it seems to be, its papery viscosity. Curling covers and splayed pages like some sort of Gutenbergian seaweed, there's something in the tactile sensation of this reprint that reminds the reader that it is insubstantial. This slick-covered and salacious slender novella could have easily not been written or worked into publication. It could easily have been made real, in a small, behind-the-counter manner of real-ness, and still been easily, confidently forgotten. What you're holding in your hand(s) is, at the very least, an improbability.
Michelle Olley, being characteristically classy, opens her essay with some Sun Ra lyrics. I've seen a lot of people online and in the fleshier immediacy who have cast long shadows in the light of Crowley's new Aeon's light hail Sun Ra as a musician-cum-magician (or is it contrariwise?) who tuned into the 93 Current.
I've only read Michelle's intro and talked to her for about an hour, but I feel confident in calling her "characteristically classy." Olley's credentials take up nearly a page and her information and experience-laden Introduction to The Sex Magicians is full of the easily-given and hard-won wisdom of anecdote and reflection. Dinners with Bob Guccione and ruminations on the merits of looking backwards and inflicting modern values are deftly handled as our author-at-hand performs an extremely important task:
Michelle Olley contextualizes and absolves The Sex Magicians. Olley is in a unique position of being a pioneer in sexual expression and one who has come out on top of the game. As far as I know, Olley hasn't declared any extraordinarily ugly sentiments about any groups, peccadillos or ways of being. Instead, she applies her myriad and extraordinary experiences to a multi-fold (multi-folderol?) interpretation, framed in empathy and understanding. Having Olley as our barker and initial interloper with the raw material of Wilson's first published novel is a very good thing, and very apropos, for our clarity-by-convolution century.
When I read her introduction for the first time, while I was drafting my afterword time and again, I mostly felt a massive rush of relief. I had tried to make an unobstrusive apologia for the novel while still trying to dive into the "real" magic of the book and I wasn't hitting my stride. My unvarnished enthusiasm for the book and my dubious demographic made me a poor choice to explain anything. I was moved to splutter, condemn, excuse and shrug. Michelle made everything crystal clear with an authority I could only ape at. Thank Horus for her work.
In our conversation on the Hilaritas Press Podcast, Michelle endeared herself to me, even more, after unknowingly swatting away my sweaty-palmed concerns over speaking on a topic I am wholly unqualified to write about, by professing her intuitive understanding that Wilson was a force of good. Whatever outdated prose and off-the-mark suppositions Wilson makes in his texts, he is always working for the betterment of existence. He's still working on it. Michelle also does a great job in the podcast and her introduction by drawing the listener/reader's eye to Lost Girls, a corollary text to the one you hold in your hand that delineates the boundary between reality and porn and the health of the intertwining ecosystems.
As such, I welcome you to Wilson's first novel and a few months of serious smut. Let's feel those vibes.
Love is the law, love under will.
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| Original cover art illustration of The Great When (Nico Delort) |
Such is the tone of The Great When, and I feel a lot like Dennis Knuckleyard until this day. You'd think the intervening years would matter, but I guess as the human conception of time is an illusion caused by our dimensional constraints, I'm still the cough cough cough slackjawed wishful secret agent I was when I was eighteen, and I wasn't even bombed.
Moore's only novel when I began reading him was the extraordinarily gnomic Voice of the Fire, with it's famously prophylactic first chapter and geographically hyperspecific references. It took me a couple times and a few years to get much out of it other than crying during the John Clare chapter. Jerusalem was Something Else. Echoing and expanding upon Voice, the gargantuan novel was a haunting chrous of self-turned-universe. Reading it was like being rendered. From the first time I heard him read the Michael chapter in the Northampton Library and strenously, and still imperfectly, transcribed it and reread it as a personal treasure. A jewel of the future. But I digress...
The Great When takes place during what was perhaps the bleakest twentieth-century phase for London; in the shadow of the Second World War. Postwar London/Britain is a behemoth I've learned about in scriptures such as Moorcock's Mother London (cited in the Acknowledgements of the present novel) and John Higgs' luminary Live and Let Love. It's all paraffin stoves and washbasin baths, pilchard on toast and communal toilets. Miserable shit, ripe for the weedy growth of nostalgia. Moore has always excelled at building atmosphere, whether in the visual or verbal medium, and this is his greatest trick yet. One smells and feels unfamiliar senses, vividly. (The whole weighty atmosphere is enough to make the geo-political non-entity sistrum of British culture in the Sixties seem a breath of fresh air for a drowning person.) The characters, long and short, have some more heft that the usual combination of names and dialogue. From name to attribute, the reader doesn't have a moment to question who they're meeting at the moment. It just is.
Moore, as he is at his best, has no shame showing off his mastery of his work. No character is described the same way twice and we're all the better for it. I found myself having to look up adjectives for their meaning, references for their provenance, for the first time in many years. The task is not tedious or pretentious, at all- rather, it is like the joy of discovery hearing some unfamiliar term is in our youth. This novel is the work of a Magician at the top of his Age, chronicling a city that isn't even his, in the most poignant and exciting way possible. Now that he has laid in the certain stone of the mind his beloved Northampton, Moore has turned his eye towards the metropolis...Behold, the real London!
I almost got to see him there once, in person. It was a show, a performance, on the behalf of Lex Records of his hagiography of Steve Moore in some disused tunnels that were once part of the London Underground. Unearthing- I won my tickets on the merit of my cough cough cough "essay" about why Alan was the greatest author. I didn't make the leap, couldn't have because of the bitter reality of logistics. But in my mind, I've been to Shooters Hill and Charing Cross. Shoreditch and Cripplegate are in my backyard.
This is a non-spoiler review, if anyone would like for me to go further into depth into the book, let me know!
[One of my students saw me reading the book and asked what I was reading. I simply replied it was the first book in a series of novels. They replied: "Is the next book going to be called The Great How?"
I thought that was pretty good.]
Slicken thy thighs and stiffen thy prick.
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| Slicken thy thighs and stiffen thy pricks |
- A.C.
The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic Prospectus
“Alan and I tend to see all this as an ongoing process, somehow. Somnium, the non-fiction Selene book, Unearthing, Alan’s forthcoming novel Jerusalem, The Bumper Book Of Magic… they all seem to be part of some sort of vague, barely-defined Moon And Serpent project to provide an alternative view to simple materialistic reality. We’re willing partners in the project, but control’s been delegated upwards. It all kicked off with that ritual in October 1976, but where it’s going from here… well, I guess the gods know!”- Steve Moore
The Contents
“ a beautiful eight-page Steve Parkhouse strip that opens is, a silent little eight pager from me and Steve Parkhouse”
“Adventures in Thinking”- The keynote essay that will provide “reliable advice as to how entry into the world of magic may be achieved. There is an article on the theory of magic, as we understand it, a practical theory of magic.
“Things To Do On a Rainy Day”- Illustrated by Rick Veitch; will describe “activities such as divination, etheric travel, and conjuring of spirits, deities, dead people, and infernal entities from the pit, all of whom are sure to become your best friends”; Veitch on Moore’s pieces in this setting “I'm happy to report [they] are hilariously brilliant.”; “It's divided up into a number of different areas where we tell them how to get into the magical state, or at least ways that people have done in the past, where we've been pointing out the potential dangers, as well as the potential benefits, of any of these particular methods that we're talking about. We're not advocating any of them, we're simply saying, "This is how people have done it in the past, this is what we think about the techniques, these are some potential dangers you might want to watch out for."; “Once the magical state has been attained, we are talking about things that can be done including mentally projecting into real or otherworldly mindscapes, contacting people at distance, scrying the future, divining, conjuring entities, invoking or evoking.”; “We talk about the important of art and magic, considered in union, and we propose a very artistic form of magic that will actually get some results that you can show other people.”; “We also talk about "old school" magic like how to conjure a god, how to conjure a demon, things that might go wrong with it.”
“Old Moores’ Lives of the Great Enchanters”- “history of magic from the last ice age to the present day” consisting of pictorial, one page, biographies of fifty great enchanters; “we just come up through all of the important magicians, fictional, real or otherwise, the ones that you can't decide about, whether they were real or whether they were a heavily romanticized version of a real person, or whether they were a complete fantasy. The thing is that they're all important in that they added to the ideas about magic.”; in the style of Ripley’s Believe It or Not
the Dancing Sorcerer from the Trois Freres cave in France- “the picture of the guy with antlers prancing around – it’s the first representation of a magician”
Persian Magi and Zarathustra- “after the Stone Age shamanic period, that is the first record of actual magic”
King Solomon
Circe
Medea- “Medea flies through the air and she works her magic using the cauldron, so that's obviously where a lot of the ideas about the contemporary witch come from, like the witches from Macbeth stirring their cauldron.”
Apollonius of Tyana
Simon Magus- “Simon the Gnostic, the head of Gnosticism, basically a rival religion to Christianity, and it's conflating him with Simon the Magician, who was traveling charlatan and magician, who was allegedly invested in a magical competition in front of the Emperor Nero against St. Peter”
Sosipatra- “very definetly a kind of magical figure in her own right”; “the sort of second-century Alexandrian period female magician we settled upon”; [“we had to rule out Hypatia, strictly for reasons of space, but also because she was a Hermetic philosopher rather than an actual magician…so we give passing reference to Hypatia”]
Merlin- “he never existed, but that’s not really important. He was the first Christian-approved magician.”
Roger Bacon
Dr. Faustus- “Here we've worked out the tangled web of Georgius Sabellicus Faust, the child molester and “Fountain of Necromancy” as he styled himself, Johannes Faust, who was the completely blameless doctor of divinity at Heidelberg University, who was known as the “Demigod of Heidelberg”, and we've worked out how these two got mixed up together by people who were just confused by all these Fausts and that even Georgius Sabellicus Faust, in the first reference to him, he refers to himself as "Faustus Secundus," and we were looking at this, and I said, "But that makes 'Faust Second,' and this is the first Faust that we've ever heard referred to" — he's refered to by Johannes Trithemius — so we thought, "Who was Faust the first, then?" And Steve looked up in his Latin dictionary, and the word "faustus" means "fortunate, lucky, prosperous, auspicious," so it would have been a great generic name for a sort of generic folkloric magician, like we might say, "Oh, he was a bit of a Merlin," and they were saying, "He's a bit of a Faust, he's a lucky man,"”
Paracelsus- “We also found out that Paracelsus invented modern medicine.”; “What we happened to notice was that Paracelsus had actually created something called the "Alphabet of the Magi" which in some places looked similar to Dr. Dee's Enochian squiggles and, more importantly, it was used for writing the names of angels, backwards apparently.”
John Dee [Edward Kelley]- “Also, for our money, probably the greatest magician of all time was John Dee. No one else comes close.”; “who was a flat-out necromancer”
Emanuel Swedenborg
William Blake
Aleister Crowley
Austin Osman Spare
Jack Parsons
“The Adventures of Alexander”- “There's a little comic strip by Kevin O'Neill, I think there's about eight one-page chapters in it, and it's done in the style of old British radio fun, or film-fun comedy comics of the 1940's and 50's, { “a Radio Fun kind of thing”} and this is the adventures of Alexander, and it's account of the life of Alexander of Abonuteichos, the charlatan who created Glycon, who is the deity I am personally attached to, and that's very funny and very scurrilous, but it's got an awful lot of important factual material in it as well.”
“helpful travel guides to mind-wrenching alien dimensions”- “We’re currently stumbling through a series of pieces on ‘magical landscapes’ that can be visited in trance or by ritual, each of which is being compressed into a single page.”;
“profiles of many quaint local inhabitants”- “There’s this bestiary of demons and gods and other things that you might be lucky or unfortunate enough to bump into.”
“The Soul”- a decadent pulp tale of the occult; illustrated by John Coulthart; set in the 1920s; Coulthart on the story “This evolved from a comic strip idea which would have originally been published in one of the ABC titles to a text-story-with-illustrations, which is how we now intend to do it. One part of this has already been completed for the forthcoming Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic which Alan is writing with Steve Moore. In all there should be six parts, presented across the book. The idea is quite a simple one, taking the old idea of the “occult detective” but twisting it slightly by having a female character.”; “This is a fictional story, but it basically contains real magical information that we couldn't contain in any other way. One of the main things about magic is that a lot of magical experiences happen entirely within the mind of the magician.”; “So personal experiences that me or Steve might have had, it's not really proper to talk about them in the factual parts of the book where we've been very careful to give a logical account of magic that is actually very rational, where we're checking all of our facts,…that stuff we're working into the fiction which, we think, will give a lot of the flavor of what it is like to approach magic without actually saying, "We did this, I did that, this is how it happened," without making any claims that people might justly argue with. There's that running story.”
“a full set of this sinister and deathless cult’s Tarot cards”- collaboration between Alan and Jose Villarrubia; “We've also got a complete set of tarot cards which we are designing ourselves and I believe that me and José are going to be... me and Steve, I mean, I will probably be coming up with most of the design ideas, but I shall be consulting with Steve. It's just that I happen to know more about the tarot than Steve does; he's more of an I Ching man. But Jose has said that he would very much like to do this tarot deck, so that in itself will be a huge job, but yeah, they'll be a complete set of all 78 tarot cards with a book or instructions for their use and interpretations.”; “It’ll be a Tarot deck that will be included in the Bumper Book with cut-out cards, but we probably will be bringing it out in a separate deck as well for people who don’t want to cut up the Bumper Book.”; “has to be as good as Crowley’s, that the standard to meet”
“a fold out Kabalistic board game”- “There will be a Qabalah board game where the winner is the first person to actually achieve enlightenment as long as they don't make a big thing out of it. We've got that kind of half-designed, but we're still having some trouble fitting it even onto a fold-out board. We think we've got the main, the way in which you play the game, pretty much sorted out.”
“pop up Theatre of Marvels that serves as both a Renaissance memory theatre and a handy portable shrine for today’s multitasking magician on the move”- designed by Melinda Gebbie (hopefully); “pop-up is one of the most magic things there is as any sort of six year-old would tell you.”
“a matching pair of lengthy thesis revealing the ultimate meaning of the Moon and Serpent”- “makes transparent the much obscured secret of magic, happiness, sex, creativity, and the known Universe”; “at the same time explaining why these lunar and ophidian symbols feature so prominently in the order’s peculiar name”
Some materials, that may preview what will be in the Bumper Book, have been released over the years. Along with the aforementioned Somnium, Selene and Jerusalem, (one should also mention Alan's Illuminations and the works of John Higgs) we have:
So, you have a month to review these works if you're so inclined. We also have the first Long London novel, The Great When, by Alan Moore coming out the first week of October. Magic is afoot.
Consider Alan Moore, the closest we're ever going to get to Merlin or Prospero, upon his mouldering isle. Consider where we are and open yourself to the possibility of "real" magic. Things can only get better.
Most appropriately for a tome encouraging active participation, Lion of Light ends with two questions to the reader. The questions pertain to an alternate cover illustration submitted by Chris Mazur that had garnered serious consideration.
I love this cover submission; it reminded me of Horus as the Crowned and Conquering Child but there was some concern that the figure didn't resemble Crowley enough. However, if you've seen any photographs of little Alex at age 4, it appears the spitting image of the precocious tyke who would grow up to become either the Magus of the Aeon or the Wickedest Man in the World depending upon one's point of view; or both or neither or something in between.
And then there's the extensive, but occult qabalistic imagery that appeared on every cover submission thanks to publisher and graphic designer Richard Rasa who wrote the end note: "A Search for a Cover." Note that the "t" in Robert and the "t" in Aleister bear an uncanny resemblance to the torso and arms in the illustration. An important Thelemic formula = the word ON which acquires multiple ramifications in its wake. It landed briefly a few weeks ago in the comments here. ON occurs no less than four times in this cover: Lion, Anton, Wilson, on. This suggests Tetragrammation, the four-fold aspect of God: Yod He Vau He. In some respects, O + N represent the Yang and Yin of Qabalah. O = male energies and you can probably infer what N represents. When these are equally balanced in one body you get a hermaphroditic nature. Cue up Rebel Rebel by David Bowie.
When I began this journey of self-Initiation in the early 1980s I invariably had difficulties putting the words into concrete action. I had to get by with a little help from my friends along the way. If the intention is there, synchronicities, or as John Lilly put it, Coincidence Control, opens doors and presents opportunities. On the other hand, as Crowley notes in The Confessions, as soon as you make the intention to make these efforts, all kinds of obstacles, challenges, distractions and barriers pop up in a variety of ways attempting to thwart your efforts. Believe it or not, that appears a good sign.
Aleister Crowley's elder brother, G.I. Gurdjieff, writes of two basic laws in the morphogenesis, manifestation and process of voluntary human evolution: the Law of Octaves and the Law of Three. The latter maintains that it requires 3 different types of energy or forces to manifest any phenomena. He labelled it as affirming, denying and reconciling forces. It aligns with the Christian trinity of the Father (affirming), the Son (denying) and the Holy Spirit (reconciling) and from the Hindu, Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer. More scientifically and practically speaking, the Law of Three can be compared to Ohm's Law of Electricity which describes the relationship between Voltage (V), Current (I), and Resistance (R). It shows that V = IR, that voltage (spirit) results from the multiplication of current and resistance. I call this practical, due to the fact that the brain and nervous system function through electricity. My guess: higher states of consciousness increases the voltage of certain parts of the brain. A psychedelic will electrically stimulate the brain; it can also be stimulated through non-chemical means. Timothy Leary originally called the Sixth Circuit the neuro-electric circuit. I connect C6 with Tiphareth and the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This seems a long-winded way of saying that the resistance of obstacles and challenges facing the seeker becomes necessary for pushing the current of spiritual growth.
The Ezra Pound quote that opens this post was inspired by Confucius. For all I know, it may be the words of Confucius translated by Pound. It shows that this information exists and has existed for a long time outside of Crowley; he channelled or created a particular assemblage of it known as Thelema or Magick and attempted to make self-empowerment and mutual respect more widely known. For me, studying different things: Joyce, Gurdjieff, Deleuze, The Beatles and Stones, etc. etc. helps with understanding Magick and Magick helps to understand and deeply appreciate these various other disciplines.
* * * * * *
I was in the happiest place in the world when I first read some of Crowley's Eight Lectures on Yoga. It was humid, odd and unattractive. But Crowley was writing about how to be, how to deal, if you will, with humidity and oddness.
Welcome to the plateau of humidity and oddness. The two of us write this together. Since each of us is several, there is already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as what was farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is of no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied. (Slightly paraphrased from Rhizome by Deleuze & Guattari.)
A quality Deleuze and Crowley share in common = re-contextualizing standard philosophical principles and beliefs to suit their own purposes. Some people wish to know how an advocacy of Horus gets reconciled with an advocacy for Peace being that Horus commonly gets thought of as a God of War. To start, Crowley emphasizes the dual aspect of Horus – Ra Hoor Khuit (the male, war-like aspect) and Hoor pa Kraat (the female, silent aspect). Things change when becoming more balanced. Crowley also introduced the concept: "the Red Triangle reversed" which describes Horus as a triangle on the Tree of Life with its base formed by the path Teth (= Horus) connecting Geburah (Severity) with Chesed (Mercy) and the paths of Yod and Lamed going down from there to form the apex of the triangle in Tiphareth. Crowley said he saw Horus as an aspect of Tiphareth that included Geburah and Chesed. He said that the Red Triangle reversed came from Rose, that it was new to him. The triangle in Goetic magic ritual is where the spirit or demon manifests. Red = anger or war. Reversing the red triangle reverses the manifestation of war-like spirits. To repeat: Horus = an aspect of Tiphareth that balanced Severity with Mercy.
Crowley heard about Thelema from Rose. John Lennon heard about it from Yoko. Love is the law, love under will helped inspire the song All You Need is Love which Lennon wrote for the first satellite transmission around the world. Later, Lennon wrote:
My friends, I have been in a starry eyed reverie since The Bumper Book of Magic arrived on my backporch yesterday and have pretty much ce...
