Semmens, Jason. The Witch of the West or the Strange and Wonderful History of Thomasine Blight. Plymouth, 2004, £3.99. (review)

Cornwall certainly holds an important place in Britain's esoteric history and culture, and in terms of witchcraft, Cornwall has a particularly 'witchy' reputation. Local legends of standing stones and other landscape features suggest a history of witches' night meetings, Cornwall is the home of the Museum of Witchcraft, and today the territory hosts a vibrant Pagan community and receives Pagan spiritual tourism from around the globe. There are witches, pellars and cunning folk who were captured in legend by Cornish folklorists such as Robert Hunt and William Bottrell, but what of the stories behind the legends? It is doubtful that Cornwall was historically any more witchy than other place in Britain, but the idea that Cornwall is perhaps a more suitable conduit for supernatural activity has certainly helped to establish quite a reputation for this western peninsula. There have been quite a few small books addressing witchcraft in Cornwall but the majority has been written to suit a popular or tourist interest in the topic. Despite the incredible interest in witchcraft in Cornwall, there have been very few rigorous and unbiased studies of actual historical Cornish witchcraft traditions.

Finally, some of the history surrounding legendary Cornish witches and witchcraft practices is starting to emerge. Jason Semmens' valuable contribution The Witch of the West: or the Strange and Wonderful History of Thomasine Blight is a microhistory and biography of the Cornish Cunning Woman more popularly known as Tammy Blee. This book is truly a step forward in research about Cornish witchcraft traditions. Semmens, who hails from the Camborne area of Cornwall, is certainly no stranger to the material. Currently a documentation officer for a museum in South Wales, Semmens holds an MA in Witchcraft and Literature from the University of Exeter, and was previously a curator for the vast witchcraft related holdings in the private library of the late Robert Lenciewicz. In The Witch of the West, Semmens provides a detailed account of Blight's life and work in Cornwall in the mid nineteenth century, drawing upon archival material, newspaper accounts and early folklore research.

We learn that Blight was born Thomasine Williams in Gwennap, a mining town near Redruth in 1793, and had two marriages. It's likely that she practiced her trade in conjuring in Redruth market at first, and then later took private clients in her home after her reputation had been established. Her trade consisted of finding lost objects, taking spells off of ill wished livestock, keeping people from being bewitched, and telling fortunes. Blight was a keen strategist, moving to Helston after her first husband's death, to expand her trade and opportunities, and was often able to manipulate local gossip and personality conflicts to her advantage. Semmens portrays Blight as a resourceful and independent woman who was cunning in many senses of the word, defying the common stereotype of such people as being simple and superstitious. Blight was certainly a dynamic personality, and well known as a local character which ensured that a number of her escapades and encounters were chronicled by well known Cornish folklore collectors of the nineteenth century, William Bottrell and Robert Hunt. Yet despite her contribution to our understanding of popular beliefs of the past, we must remember that Blight was a shrewd, individualist business woman who was thriving off of her wits in an often harsh economic and social climate.

Perhaps the most important contribution of this volume, however, is that it places Cornish witchcraft and Cornish conjurors in a historical context. Cornish witchcraft is moving out of legend and speculation into the realm of history and ethnography. These were real people, who had motivations and good reasons for taking up this trade. Almost more importantly, we learn about the people who became her clients and what they believed. The stories, especially those of ill wishing, healing sick animals and securing a good harvest, are similar to stories of witchcraft worldwide and we find almost identical practices in Ireland and Africa.

This microhistory and biography is an excellent contribution and a great companion piece to wider studies of witchcraft and folk belief such as Owen Davies' book Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History. Of course it has special relevance for anyone specifically interested in Cornish folklore or the supernatural in Cornwall, which is generally a pretty hot topic.

Amy Hale

Rock, Ice Perdurabo

The next issue of Rock and Ice an U.S. publication, covering the world of rock climbing and mountaineering, has an article about Crowley, the leading climber of his day, who went on to fame that far outstripped and overshadowed his climbing.

The article paints Crowley as a pioneering climber and visionary who was little recognized during his time. Today, his routes are still feared as being dangerous, and are seldom climbed. The article doesn't much go into the accident. It covers it, but doesn't dwell on it as especially pivotal. I think most climbers will be shocked by Crowley's climbing skills, but equally shocked by the other, other side of him. The occult is still quite frightening for most people. With your knowledge, you will probably think the article is a cursory treatment, and that it presents nothing new, but for our small climbing audience who knows little if anything about Crowley, it will be a wealth of information and I'm sure, very well read.

* * *

Carlos Atanes is working for his feature “FAQ” and the continuation of “Perdurabo”, his movie about Aleister Crowley, now you can see the Perdurabo First Part TRAILER at http://www.carlosatanes.com

In the spirit of 100 Years of Thelema and upon this Equinox of the Gods, the first issue of SILVER STAR, a new, free, on-line and extremely eclectic magickal journal at: http://www.horusmaat.com/silverstar

211 Featured Website

Pinki and the Druids @ Stonehenge 1984

Twenty years ago this June the last Stonehenge Free Festival was held. Amongst the 40 000 [or whatever] folk who were there was Pinki.

She had been a punk in London, then a Greenham Woman. Later she would be a road protestor, a student of international law, a mother [four kids] and if she had lived, a grandmother. She died in 1996.

She was also a magickian called Tanith Ma’at, High Priestess of the Temple of the Black Flame and Silver Star. The magick she worked was Ma’at Magick. Unlike other forms of magick, Ma’at magick is future magick.

The Odin Brotherhood/Mark Mirabello

isbn 1869928717, £10.99

Just like the Cannibal Within, a chance encounter, although this time in the famous Atlantis bookshop, blossomed into a dialogue between the author and the anonymous adept of Odin.

'When the world is pregnant with lies, a secret long hidden will be revealed.'
An Odinist Prophecy

Called an “occult religion” for adepts, a “creed of iron” for warriors, and a “secret society” for higher men and women who value “knowledge, freedom and power,” the Odin Brotherhood honors the gods and goddesses of the Norse pantheon. This non-fiction book details the legends, the rituals, and the mysteries of an ancient and enigmatic movement.

About the Author:
The author of The Cannibal Within and The Crimes of Jehovah," Professor Mark L. Mirabello lectures on Intellectual History, the History of Medicine, and Alternative Religions and Cults at Shawnee State University in the USA. Formerly a visiting Professor at Nizhni Novgorod State University in Russia, he has a Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow.

• Contents
• Introduction
• Introduction to the Mandrake Edition
• The Dialogue
• Odinism and the Mysteries of the Past
• The Odin Brotherhood Today and the Heroic Ideal
• On Polytheism and the Nature of the Gods
• The Eddaic Verses and the Three Ages of Man
• Why Venerate the Odinist Gods?
• The Contacts between Men and Gods
• The God Odin and His Mysteries
• The Goddess Frigg and the Rite of Marriage
• The God Thor, the Nemesis of Titans
• The Goddess Sif, the Mischief of Loki, and the Skill of the Rock Dwarfs
• The God Heimdall and “The-Sojourn-of-the-Brave”
• The God Bragi, the Holy Words, and the Seasonal Rites
• The Fair Goddess Idun and Her Enchanted Fruit
• Brave Tyr, the Warrior God
• The God Njord, Magic, and the Vanir Gods
• The God Frey and the Elves
• The Goddess Freyja, the Lovely Patroness of Birth
• The God Balder and the Adventure of Death
• The Goddess Nanna and the Odinist Death Rite
• The Legend of “The-Mountain-of-Promise”
• Destiny, Ragnarok, and the Mysteries of the Future
• Epilogue -
• Eddaic Sources
• Works on Modern Odinism
• Reviews of Earlier Editions of
• The Odin Brotherhood

Coolton Ascent: Rebecca Cunningham (Review)

ISBN 0954261623: 380 pages blujahbooks@...

The Sethian,

By Billie Walker John
Ignotus Press, 2003 (£9.99)

Thats a welcome reprint with additional material of Walker-John's monograph on the Egyptian god of confusion and demonic initiation - Seth. Its one that as a publisher I would very much have liked to done myself. In fact I wrote to Billie Walker-John when i first read the material in a little known occult magazine called Twenty-two. What I didn't know was that Billie was dying and would not live to finish off the project - that was left to the hands of Melusine Draco, who added an introduction by Alan Richardson, Walker-John's co-author on an earlier project The Inner Guide to Egypt. Draco has done a fine job although its a shame some of the pictures were omited and there is no bibliography. The book has more to say on egyptian history than it does on Sethian magick, for example some of the correspondences seem wrong to me - ie surely, despite Kenneth Grant's theorising, everyone now knows that Sothis is associated with Isis rather than Seth, whose star, if any, is Mercury, his constellation Ursa Major? The associations with S.O.L. will probably not impress many. But these quibbles aside, i'd say, for anyone interested in a subject largely dealt with in expensive academic tomes, this is a handy introduction to some of the main aspects of the cult.

[Mogg]

206. The Erotic Verses

David W. Parry

Publishers, rather like ordinary mortals, are occasionally plagued by the necessity of making executive decisions. This distasteful intrusion into the peace of their professional lives may take many forms and whether to add poetry to their invariably conservative catalogues appears to be one of the most irksome for them. Yet even this baleful choice pales into commercial insignificance, if the manuscript in question is a collection of erotic verses. Political satire or new age mysticism are usually considered more suitable subjects for a quick return. To be fair, this is not entirely the fault of an industry which has obviously lost its cognitive grasp of poetry as a product. After all, poets themselves rarely seem to realize that the poetic act raises language to its most sophisticated and sensual level. Indeed, almost by definition poetry deepens human communication and is by no means merely the pastime of a few angst adolescents.

It is therefore, quite strange that an intelligent celebration of the flesh still makes so many people uneasy. This is partly due to the fact that an untamed eroticism evokes semi-conscious folk memories surrounding poets as members of the 'devils crew'. A title fully deserved when one considers that for centuries there was a clear distinction between mere entertainers and those elite souls who strove to articulate the spirituality of desire. As William Blake muses when reflecting upon the vocation of a poet:

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom".

Curiously, both cleric and cartesian had a vested interest in ignoring the evidence that poetic lore was grounded in erotic principles, the rudiments of which formed closely guarded religious secrets in ancient times. Moreover, the occult power of image and symbol gave some commentators an unpleasant feeling that they were playing with imaginal fire even in our post modem period.

Lingering legends concerning the Marquis de Sade are largely responsible for this intuitive caution. His debauched life and sexually experimental works deliberately juxtaposed poetry, prose and the esoteric arts. Assuredly, as an author, de Sade single-handedly establishes the ebony aspirations of literature noire. Moreover, his genius developed simultaneously with a vigourous cultivation of ever new erotic pleasures in his private life.

An example of this comes to the light of history in 1772 when de Sade was accused of attempting to murder Marguerite Coste. Now it is true, according to the testimonies of the time, that she was taken severely sick, although madame Coste was not diagnosed as being under any serious medical threat.

The true inheritors of this sulphurous tradition in recent times were, of course, the decadents. As a 'movement' it was anarchic and the lifestyle of individual members frequently haunted by the spectre of scandal or public censure. However, some of the decadents attempted to turn their social misdemeanours into rebellious virtues, presenting themselves as explorers on the edge of forbidden pleasures. Now and again they would even draw on orthodox literary sources to show that the Prince of Darkness had always been a dedicated patron of the arts. Consequently, it was far trom unusual to find John Milton's portrayal of Satan hailed as a brilliant depiction of the ultimate seducer. Perhaps more understandably Baudelaire's explicit litanies in praise of the evil one as well as Carducci's sinister nocturnal hymns were presented as a defence of the tree imagination by the decadents to their opponents. What is more, certain leading decadent theorists pointed to the inspiration granted by Mephistophilis to the hell-raising Christopher Marlowe and the visionary Goethe. Even Shakespeare, they contended had written phrases such as :

"the devil hath power t'assume a pleasing shape"

to widen the intellectual horizons of his audience. In which case, the Bard himself was guilty of blurring the boundaries between decadence anddecency. Contemporary critics tend to agree that the greatest decadent and occult poet was the notorious Aleister Crowley. As a youth he seems to have modelled his poetic career on that of the remarkable Algenon Swinburne, whose sado-masochistic verse outraged the hypocritical sensibilities of his Victorian peers. Certainly, Crowley's early poems may be seen as a tribute to his mentor, especially when we read stanzas such as:

'all degradation, all sheer infamy,
thou shalt endure, thy head beneath the mire,
and dung of worthless women shall desire'

Yet the Edwardian luxuriance of Crowley's early style never really evolved into a much more spiritually significant or lascivious form of versification. Sadly, as his sorcerous persona developed Crowley's cavalier use of narcotics, alcohol and copulation were used to enhance his failing attempts to wrestle with the theoleptic process of poetic union with the absolute. This becomes increasingly evident when examining one of his more successful poems dedicated to the Great God Pan:

'Come, 0 come
I am numb
With the lonely lust of devildom
Thrust the sword through galling fetter
All devourer, all begetter ;
Give me the Sign of the Open Eye
And the token erect of the thorny thigh
And the word of maddness and mystery,
O Pan, I0 Pan!'

The sensual imagery of this verse is effective even though it is hardly a subtle song of evocation in the manner of previous decadent poets. However, it is one of the few Pagan Hymns to have deeply offended Brighton town councellers when it was chanted at Crowley's Cremation in 1947. On that concluding note, all one can add is that hardly any higher praise may be given to a man than he lived with humour and died with panache.

Publishers, rather like ordinary mortals, must bear some of the blame for the unfortunate fact that the full power of erotic poetry is both suppressed and virtually invisible in our highly sexed society. This is ironic as well as a continual commentary on the dumbing down of liberal western values. The obvious contribution to the second great tradition made by poets such as Baudelair, Swinbume, and Paul Verlaine is beyond doubt, but the absence of published poets following this path can only be lamented by a readership starved of spiritual sustenance. In the final analysis, desire is not simply a physical need satiated through living well and loving skillfully. The highest form of desire is a search for transcendence discovered through erotic expression.

David Parry's collection Caliban's Redemption, isbn 186992875x, is published by this month by mandrake

Groups

Bath Omphalos, a Moot for LHP magicos in Bath area. For more details contact omphalospaganmoot@.... Essentially a discussion group at the moment, open to all. The first speaker meeting is

Conferences

Tesseract: The Side Unseen

A conference for magical practitioners.

An altered space created as a forum to stimulate and share ideas, perspectives and techniques, from traditional to postmodern magic.

September 4 5, 2004. Lancaster University Conference Centre

Like the Hydra, the Occult Underground is a many-headed beast. The Tesseract Projekt plans to present a conference that will allow practitioners from a wide array of traditions, schools, paths and approaches to benefit from a mature sharing of experiences. Based in Lancaster a small northern city with a pleasantly surprising amount of history and culture, the weekend will consist of a day of talks, lectures and workshops on the Saturday, followed by an evening of relaxed socialising and insidious plotting. On the Sunday there will be a chance to spend time at some noted, mysterious and hidden sacred sites in the area, guided by local folk.

All are welcome. At this first event we can guarantee something of interest for magicians (of chaos and hermetic persuasions!), witches, Thelemites Setians...and all those with a passion for magical places and landscape, be they druids, heathens or modern antiquarians.

Confirmed speakers so far:
Rufus Harrington
Nathaniel Harris
Jaq D. Hawkins
Ian McNicol
Mogg Morgan

Tickets - £15 (£20 on door) Send cheque payable to 'Tesseract Projekt' and an SAE to: Tesseract Projekt 61 Park Road Lancaster LA1 3EJ

For further information visit our web site: www.tesseract.org.uk Or contact us: gimp@... and ask to sign up to our information list.

Illuminates of Thanateros
CHAOS CONTINUUM SEMINARS 2004

Moulton College Northamptonshire

Seminar leaders include:
Susan Leybourne
Ramsey Dukes / Lionel Snell
Ian Read
Ingrid Fischer
Dave Lee
Julian Vayne
Stuart Verity
Frater Alloy (IOTA)

PRICES Prices are in Pounds. (Euro at €1.5: £1 - this is a guide, get your own exchange rate) Seminars: Two nights full board double/single room £111/€170 (until 10/06/04), £ 141/€212 (until 10/07/04) Day ticket (no meals included) £23.00 Booking is now open: Send cheques made out to P.R. Mastin If transferring money from abroad please contact us by e-mail via the website for bank details. Contact via website at: www.illuminates.org/iot-uk Send us an e-mail - we get them!

Spirit of Peace

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spiritofpeace2k/

"How wonderful! a garden in the fire.
My heart transmutes itself to all forms;
A meadow for wild gazelles,
a monastery for Christian monks,
a temple for Pagan gods,
the kabba for Muslim pilgrims
Tablets for the Jewish Law,
and pages for the Quran.
I proclaim the religion of Love,
and wherever it carries me,
this is my creed and faith".
-by Ibn Arabi, (Sufi poet: 1165-1240).

Spirit of Peace conference IV Saturday 18th September, 2004, 10:30am-10pm. Friends Meetings House, St. Giles, Oxford. The 4rd Spirit of Peace conference is on 18th September to mark the United Nations Global Cease-Fire Day. This one-day charity event consists of talks and workshops form mystical and esoteric traditions from around the world. FFI email Payam: nabarz@...

Provisional Programme:
SPEAKERS:
Jane Clark on "Following the Religion of Love: The tradition of Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi".
Caitlin Matthews on "Ancestral Healing".
Shahin Bekhradnia on "Zoroastrianism".
+more speakers to follow.
WORKSHOP:
Lesley Harris "Finding the divine within".
WORLD MUSIC:
Andy Gilpin "French bagpipes".
Skeleton Crew: European Medival Folk Music.
Latif Bolat (back from US by popluar demand) Turkish Sufi music.
Finale with "Oxford Drum Troupe" West African polyrthmic rhytms at its finest.
Ticket price £10 advance, £12 on door. contact Mike: mikehuds@...
Tel: 01865 863340.

Witchcraft Conference

The conference is at Ludlow, south Shropshire, on sat 18th sept 2004 from 11am (sharp) until 5pm. The speakers who have confirmed so far are, Philip Heselton on Gerald Gardner and the Witchcraft Revival, Mark Olly on Knights Templar and Gnosticism, Andrew Chumbley (Magister of the Cultus Sabbati) speaking on Chaldean Theurgy, Paul Deveraux on Earth Mysteries, and Steve Pollington on Leechcraft (early English plant-lore and charms). There will be several secondhand occult book stalls there. The price of a ticket is £8 and stalls are £15. This is the first conference here and hopefully it will be repeated next year. Tickets from Verdelet, PO Box 58, Craven Arms, SY7 8WG. Cheques/po pay Verdelet. The advertising for this event is still going out and so far demand has been encouraging, as there is limited seating for this conference those who are interested are advised to buy their tickets sooner rather than later to avoid dissapointment. http://www.paganfed.demon.co.uk