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

Talking Stick Lectures

Wednesday 6th October – Nigel Bourne and Seldiy Bate “Pagan Roots”
Nigel and Seldiy, Wiccans and musicians/singers since the heady days of free love and Alex Sanders in the 1970’s, will explore the folk roots of Paganism and the pagan roots of Folk Music in a medley of history, music, folklore and song.

Wednesday 20th October – Rick Gibson
“”Erotic Images In Ancient Greece, And Rome”
Rick, co-founder of the Companions of Horus and veteran traveler in many antique lands, will guide us (with slides) through a large gallery of erotic and bawdy images from Rome, Athens, Pompeii and many other cities and sites of the Classical world

The Secret Chiefs meet fortnightly on Wednesday evenings (occasionally Thursdays or Fridays)upstairs at the Devereux public house (20 Devereux Court, off Essex Street, London WC2). Nearest tube is Temple. Meet from 7pm and the talk starts at 8.30pm. Admission is £2 (£1 concs). All are welcome.

Voodoo Queen

The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau

'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]

Merlin's Mound
Nigel Bryant

6.99 ISBN 1869928768 188pp

“a wonderful book...in the same category as Alan Garner and Susan Cooper” . . . Professor Ronald Hutton

Young adult fiction

"This boy's stupendous! He can see the past and see the gods. He's seen the Lady of the Lake!"

A colossal Stone Age mound in Wiltshire is the legendary burial place of Merlin. When Jo's father begins to excavate, Jo himself is drawn into an extraordinary adventure that unearths the mound's true secret. It's up to him to reveal it before it's destroyed. And time is short.

"A week ago he'd have laughed at this. Now he's on the edge of a whole new world."

This is a story for everyone with a taste for myth, visions and another reality…

About the book: The Stone Age monuments at Avebury in Wiltshire are world-famous, attracting thousands of visitors each year. Two of the most dramatic are the enormous burial chamber known as the West Kennet Long Barrow, and Silbury Hill, the largest man-made mound in Europe. Less well known is Silbury's "sister" mound at Marlborough a few miles due east, but this is nothing less than the legendary burial place of Merlin. These extraordinary sites are the key locations of the novel Merlin's Mound, in which an adolescent is awakened in startling fashion to their meaning and original purpose. It will appeal to everyone from the protagonist's age upward with a taste for myth, legend and visions.

[Marlborough is surely the only town in Britain with an Arthurian motto - WHERE NOW ARE THE BONES OF WISE MERLIN - and Merlin's Mound will appropriately be published on June 20th 2004, the 800th anniversary of the granting of Marlborough's charter by King John who, as it happens, makes a crucial appearance in the novel...]

Return of 'the old gits

In the 1970s occult publishing was dominated by writers such as Stephen Skinner, Francis King, Neville Drury et al. It was their books that first introduced many contemporary magicians to magical history and the basic skills. Many of their stars have since faded, to be superceded by younger voices, but even so there are much essential and well written material to be found in occultism's back list.

These books often rise again, as in a recent batch of broadsheet publicity for a 'new biog' of Aleister Crowley from 'Left field' Creation press. Actually its a reissue of the late Francis King's lively study 'The Magickal World of Aleister Crowley' which first saw the light of day in 1977 but is here given the makeover as 'Megatherion'. Perhaps not the most uptodate material - what with the current glut of Crowley studies which actually have added very little to the debate and whose major functions appears to be prop up the imprimatur of a bunch of impostors.

Feral House have picked up another Francis King classic - 'Sexuality, Magick and Perversion', which is a title that ought to fire the imagination. Francis intended to give the title a full revision but died before he could complete the task. Even so it remains a classic insight into the magick of the 1970s, there ain't too many contemporary authors with the bottle for a chapter title 'A Dildo for A Witch' or 'A Whip for Aradia' ??

'Feral House has quite a challenging list of titles including the classic biog of 'kitch' film maker Ed Wood - author/director of cult classic 'Plan Nine From Outer Space' - recently filmed with Jonny Depp in the leading role. Check out the original book, now published in UK by Faber Faber.

AMOOKOS Lectures - London

Treadwell's Lecture-Seminar Series
Updated Programme Autumn 2004
34 Tavistock Street, Covent Garden
To reserve seats for any lecture-seminar email us on info@...
Web Address http://www.treadwells-london.com

Tantra 1: TANTRA IN HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
28 September (Monday)
By Phil Hine, The London Tantra Study Group 7.15 for 7.30 pm - £5.00
Tantra has long intrigued westerners, and the term has now even joined New Age vocabulary. The London Tantra Group are serious long-term students of tantra in its South Asian sense-namely, the occult strand within Hinduism, a transformative, transgressive form in a religious milieu. Phil Hine says of his talk, 'I'll be looking at the early origins of tantra in terms of its precursors, the development of various lineages, and having a quick romp through Indian religious and philosophical history, from the pre-Vedic era onwards.' This talk is ideal for anyone who wants to learn what tantra is, how it started, how it came to the West, and how it ended up being mainly associated with manuals on orgasm. Phil Hine has been working with tantra for twenty years, and his extensive website is
http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/index_tantra.html

HOODOO - PUTTING A HEX ON YOU
4 October (Monday)
Steve Grasso, Practitioner
7.15 for 7.30 pm - £5.00 'Hoodoo' is the name of the syncretic folk magic of the American south. At its most visible, it is the realm of 'money attracting' aerosols, of 'come here boy' love oils, and of 'happy husband' floor washes. The speaker, himself a practitioner in the tradition says of his work, 'it's speaking with spirits, walking between worlds, making fetish items and weird potions, and getting things done practically and physically within the world.' The talk will be useful to those researching black American culture, voudon, Santería and condomblé. But it will also help researchers to better understand European folk magic and spellcasting. The cosmology of a society's magical practitioners - their paradigm - determines the 'rules of engagement' with which they interact with the unseen forces. As Grasso unpacks hoodoo, he highlights the paradigm underlying European superstitions, country lore and ceremonial magic - and indeed many tacit assumptions underlying Wicca and paganism. The paper is followed by questions and discussion, with a drinks party afterward on the shop floor.

Tantra 2: DATTATREYA - Working with a Tantric Guru-Deity
11 October (Monday)
By Daniel Lowe, The London Tantra Study Group
7.15 for 7.30 pm - £5.00
The second in the series of four seminars by members of the London Tantra Study Group, tonight's lecture seminar examines Dattatreya, a Hindu deity who is also a guru figure to followers. The speaker says of his paper, 'I aim to give a short examination of his history, and using this as a jumping-off point for other Tantric themes, including a look at my own practice; I hope to provide a case study of how study and personal experience might combine in modern tantra.' The lecture is followed by questions and round-table discussions, with contributions welcome from all attending.

Tantra 3: THE SYMBOL OF THE SRI YANTRA
25 October (Monday)
Tracey Edwards and Maria Strutz, The London Tantra Study Group
7.15 for 7.30 pm - £5.00


Tantra 4: ORIGINS OF THE CHAKRAS
8 November (Monday)
Phil Hine, The London Tantra Study Group 7.15 for 7.30 - £5.00

Andrew Chumbley Celebrates his 'Greater Feast'

As you may already have heard, Andrew died last Tuesday 15th September due to complications following an ashma attack. By way of an obituary i'm reprinting Jan Fries' review of Andrew's groundbreaking first book, with which he burst onto the magical scene at the Thelemic Symposium back in the 1980s. A respected wiccan friend, who met him at that event, responded that 'he really was a genius, particularly as he seemed . . . to single handedly drag "trad" craft out of pointless retrospective w**king over folk history and fake cunningmen and give it a real contacted, magical spooky starlight ethos all of its own, single handedly plugged it in again, springboard for the 'Witchas' of this world, and a creative genius who carried on the work of Spare.

The Azoetia by Andrew Chumbley

The Azoetia is a work of rare originality. Opening its pages, the reader encounters pictures and prose of truly draconian darkness, elaborate sigils, spells, sorcery and oracles, giving the ‘sacred alignments’ of a unique magical system. How can we approach a book of such virtues? The Azoetia is not a compendium of household sorceries. Each book being a spirit, the Azoetia spirit is of the dramatic and refined sort that invites the reader to enter a bizarre magical thought and belief system. As the cover of the work informs us the Azoetia is a grimoire, which means, in the original sense of the word, a grammar. A grammar is a structure that organises language. Grammars don’t tell you what to say - the words you speak are a matter of your will - but it tells you how to say it. In the same sense, the Azoetia offers you workable formulas, evokes atavistic obsessions and makes the mind’s cauldron bubble merrily. What use you make of these is your own affair.

As a ‘grimoire’ the Azoetia gives a unique, efficient and congruent system of Magick. Like the Goetia, the Book of Pleasure and Liber Al vel Legis, the Azoetia weaves a fabric of thought, belief and creative inspiration that can be understood, applied and experienced in many ways. Each of these grimoires is a highly original example of what used to be called ‘inspired writing’, meaning that the material they offer is recognised by the author as coming from beyond the realms of ordinary consciousness. This sort of thing has quite a long tradition - think of Myrrdin or Taliesin, who used to prophesy in ecstatic trance states.

Where in other cultures a medium, shaman or priest is obsessed by some spiritual agency and proceeds to divine, exorcise, heal or bless, Andrew Chumbley sets out to draw and write the visions that come through. On close examination, the drawings which grace the Azoetia, are the work of an artist with little formal art training. No matter, these images were produced without conscious intent and the material pulses with rich and eldritch life. The influence of Spare, Lovecraft and Grant can be detected - yet Chumbley’s work goes beyond this and explores cells of dreams and instinct that have yet to be discovered. It is this original quality which upsets many casual readers, lacking the guts to try out what us suggested, they try to compare the work with other traditions and run into trouble as so much of the Azoetia stuff is new and unique. It is, indeed the sort of source text that may one day become the basis for an entirely new tradition.

iDscussing the Azoetia with friends, I was surprised at the unease which many magicians expressed concerning ‘inspired writings’. Where a dozen years ago these were met with interest, today’s occult book market is flooded with vapid ‘pure white lights’ literature. Given the quality of ‘channelled messages’, it seems rather natural that more serious magicians shy away from them. When they receive ‘inspired texts’ today, many are reluctant to say so let alone ready to publish the stuff. Yet the reason for so many forgeries is that the genuine phenomena exists. Imagine how Crowley’s Liber Al would be received today or Spare’s Focus of Life? It hardly seems surprising that many good mages hide their ‘inspired writings’ in the wardrobe and leave the field of ‘channelled literature’ to hare-brained morons who think too positively to evaluate their output, Who knows how much good material is never published! When Chumbley collected materials of his Azoetia and set out to earth the work in published form, he had to save up and to publish it at his own expense, which gave you an idea of his sense of commitment and dedication. As a result, the Azoetia is exactly as the author and his spirits willed it. Conceived in dreams and trance visions, perhaps the book is most easily discovered by dreaming into it. You may be surprised to know that passages which made little sense the other day sparkle with meaning to you today. What comes out of the Azoetia for you depends on what you put into its discovery. Like many of the grimoires, Chumbley’s book requires a measure of empathy. Its value depends on your involvement with the work and can be judged by the insights, dreams inspirations and the changes you experience.

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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

Witchcraft Seminar (Cornwall)

Annual Witchcraft Seminar at Camelot Castle, Tintagel. Friday 22nd-Sunday 24th October 2004 Spend an exciting informative weekend in the romantic baronial surroundings of Camelot Castle. Speakers from the pagan community will cover a variety of subjects include Pete Jennings, Dianne Firmin, Jan Brodie, Maxine Sanders, Dave Evans, Mogg Morgan, Levannah Morgan, Marian Green, Ralph Harvey Nathaniel J. Harris. Visit our web site at www.witchcraftseminar.com or ‘phone Adrian on 01749 674712 but as the number of places are limited, we advise you to book early to avoid disappointment.

Gnosis, a festival of light, life, love liberty