Caduceus Dennis Bardens

Dennis Bardens was a prolific journalist, author and broadcaster. He was founder of the BBC current affairs television progamme Panorama. He wrote books about politics, law and also the supernatural. He was particularly interested in precognition, E.S.P. (especially in animals) and hauntings. He was a good friend of Austin Osman Spare. He died in February aged 92.

for latest editions to the Caduceus catalougue and artwork from Michael Berteaux visit Webpages http://www.caduceusbooks.com http://www.occultartgallery.com

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Journal for the Academic Study of Magic
Issue 2

19.99 ISBN 1869928-725 ISSN 1479-0750 392pp

General editor: Dave Evans plus various

A multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed print publication, covering all areas of magic, witchcraft, paganism etc; all geographical regions and all historical periods.

Contents
Alien Selves: Modernity and the Social Diagnostics of the Demonic in ‘Lovecraftian Magick’: Woodman/
Wishful Thinking Notes towards a psychoanalytic sociology of Pagan magic: Green/
A Shell with my Name on it: The Reliance on the Supernatural During the First World War. Chambers/
The Metaphysical Relationship between Magic and Miracles: Morgan Luck/
Demonic Possession, and Spiritual Healing in Nineteenth-Century Devon: Semmens/
Human Body in Southern Slavic Folk Sorcery: Filipovic Rader/
Four Glasses Of Water: Snell/
The Land Near the Dark Cornish Sea:. Hale/
Kenneth Grant and the Magickal revival: Evans/
Magic through the Linguistic Lenses of Greek mágos, Indo-European *mag(h)-, Sanskrit màyà and Pharaonic Egyptian heka: Cheak/
The symbolism of the pierced heart: Froome/Nicholas Roerich: McCannon/
Book Review, etc.

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 Many of their stars have since faded, to be superceded by younger voices, but even so there are much essential and well written material to be found in occultism's back list.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.

Triumph of the Moon

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.

Crowley and the cult of Pan

Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan by Paul Newman (Greenwich Exchange £12.99)

Few more nightmarish figures stalk through the pages of English literature than Aleister Crowley (1875 - 1947), poet, magician, mountaineer, drug-taker and agent provocateur. Born at Leamington Spa, son of strict Plymouth Brethren, he attended Cambridge University where he acquired a reputation as a poet and dabbler in the occult. Leaving university, he joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, explored China and India, organised mountaineering expeditions, wove spells and scandals. When he died, he left behind a mass of poems, essays, lyrics, meditations and narratives that few scholars have ever bothered to assess. In this present study, Paul Newman dives into the occult mire of Crowley's works and fishes out gems and grotesqueries that are by turns ethereal, sublime, pornographic and horrifying in their bitterness and revulsion. Showing how Crowley, like Wilde before him, stood in 'symbolic relationship to his age', this groundbreaking study relates him to contemporaries like Rupert Brooke, G.K. Chesterton and the Portuguese modernist, Fernando Pessoa. It depicts him as an influential exponent of the cult of the Great God Pan, affecting both major European writers and English novelists like E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence and Arthur Machen.

Paul Newman lives in Cornwall. Editor of the literary magazine Abraxas, he has written over ten books. Recent titles include Lost Gods of Albion and A History of Terror: Fear and Dread Down the Ages. He was among the international scholars asked to contribute to Scribner's Dictionary of Ideas and recently his Arthurian novel 'Galahad' was awarded the Peninsula Prize.

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