Exorcism! C4 (25.2.5)

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 interesting.

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)

On 8th March 2005 "A sense of place: Chaos Magic meets psychogeography"
an evening with Julian Vayne

Venue address:

London Earth Mysteries Circle

7:00pm Tuesdays (2nd and 4th in month)
Diorama Centre (or Diorama II is that one full)
34 Osnaburgh Street
London NW1
Tubes: Warren Street Regents Park

Treadwells Lectures

MICHAEL STALEY SPEAKS: THINGS TYPHONIAN Wednesday, 2 March. 7.30-9.30. £5.00 Long-term member of the Typhonian OTO Michael Staley this evening talks us through his current thoughts on Crowley, Thelema, Grant and Spare: in particular he explores a thesis that there is a cyclically-recurring 'inner tradition' of which these figures are a relatively recent manifestation.

OMPHALOS MAGICKAL FAIR

Creative Magickal Expression
In Bath from April 25th to May 1st.
OPENING RITUAL
MOGG MORGAN

WORKSHOPS
JULIAN VAYNE AND GREG HUMPHRIES
MISHLEN LINDEN

PERFORMANCE
ANTON CHANNING
GAVIN SEMPLE
ORRYELLE DEFENESTRATE / METAMORPHIC RITUAL THEATRE

TALKS
LEVANNAH MORGAN
"MOVIES AND MAGIC"

PAINTING / SCULPTURE / TATTOO / ASTROLOGY / PHOTOGRAPHY / COSTUME.

ASTRID BAUER …....GREG HUMPHRIES……DAVE EVANS…….CHRiSTINA RICHARDSON...
ANN BRYN-EVANS….GERARD HUTTON……ROBERTO MIGLIUSSI ….JASMINE DEVILLE... ANTON CHANNING ….. MARK HURST…….. NATHANIEL HARRIS…….MISHLEN LINDEN.... CHRIS CHIBNALL……HAZEL MACLEAN……ORRYELLE DEFENESTRATE…..IAN SELBIE
MUSIC CHARLOTTE PUGH SULIS
FILM 'EARTH INFERNO'

CLOSING RITUAL MISHLEN LINDEN
For further information e-mail charlottejane@...
Or subscribe to the newsletter at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/omphalosmagickalfair
Sponsored by 'The Annual Witchcraft Seminar'

Becoming Magick
David Rankine

Becoming Magick: New Revised Magicks for the New Aeon

Drawing on over twenty years of magickal work in a variety of systems, this book is a forward-looking manual full of new material and techniques created to push the boundaries of contemporary magick. Inspired by the great magickal traditions of past millennia, Becoming Magick presents new techniques of sigilisation and gematria, as well as a new system of energy magick based on the Kalas, and Prime Qabalah, a new system of English Gematria. This volume also explores the practical benefits of less explored magickal techniques such as magickal ingestion and working magick during illness.

Biography
David Rankine is an author who has been practicing magick for 25 years, and is best known for his lively lectures and workshops. He has been involved with a wide variety of magickal groups and traditions, and draws on his extensive experience to convey the essence of magick in simple terms.

Conroy Maddox, the last British surrealist

Conroy Maddox, the last-surviving British surrealist painter from the original pre-war movement, died on January 14th 2005. He had just turned 92 years old. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on Friday 21st and George Melly, a long-time friend, delivered the eulogy.

From about 1995, he had paid regular visits to the Talking Stick (later Secret Chiefs) talks forum in London, always accompanied by his improbably young companion of 25 years, Des Mogg. In the early days, Des was doing a PhD in Roman Mosaics and it was her interest in mythology and the Roman Gods which first brought Conroy onto the London pagan scene. In the last years of both their lives, Conroy and the late Gerald Suster were to become especially good friends. Over the succeeding years, Des gave one Talking Stick talk and Conroy gave two but it is from the yearly Saturnalias that Conroy is most remembered because it was said (vile calumny!) that Conroy told the same two jokes each time. In fact, he told many jokes but it amused people to pretend to remember only the 'flea' joke and the 'onion' joke...

Conroy's passion for Surrealism had begun in 1935. Silvano Levy, in 'Surreal Enigmas' (essays and writings about and by Conroy) tells how, after the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, the young 24 year old untrained Birmingham painter headed to France:

"In the hot summer of 1937 he gathered sufficient money (the return fare was then £2 10s) and set off for Paris to meet the French Surrealists. On the day he had planned to meet Georges Hugnet, the owner of his hotel advised his client that rain was likely and that he should take an umbrella. As he reached the Rue de Seine, where Hugnet lived, Maddox saw a man coming towards him, wearing a toga and carrying an umbrella. As the two met, they immediately started fencing. After a little party in the street, the stranger introduced himself as Raymond Duncan, the brother of Isadora Duncan...."

Because of techniques like automatism and interest in dreams, surrealists and occultists usually found much common ground and, in France, there had been close contact between the painters and the French hermeticists and alchemists. But, even though Conroy's works included pieces called 'Hermetic Symbols' (1942) and 'The Alchemist' (1988), he could never bring himself to love the more formalised versions of the esoteric arts:

"The seed of religion has never failed to produce its own varieties of rotting fruit: the mystic symbols 3, 5 and 7 of Rosicrucian philosophy, the cheesecloth apparitions of Spiritualism and more recently the Mandalas made by the admiring old ladies of the priest-doctor Jung."

Conroy was deeply anti-militaristic and hated organized religion, both traits having been inherited from his father who had been wounded in the First World War. His anti-religious attitude (and his delightful cheekiness) might be seen in his continual mocking use of the image of nuns. There is a series of photographs, taken in 1946, called 'Entertaining A Nun', which include the scenes 'Conroy Maddox strangling a nun' and 'Conroy Maddox stabbing a nun' and 'Conroy Maddox about to strike a supine nun'. In one of his writings, he says: "The history of Christianity is the history of a creeping sickness: for submission and obedience before the fear imagery of priestcraft, humanity is offered the dubious honour of being clasped to its filthy bosom." And then the nuns again... "I am waiting outside a restaurant in Greek Street. Two Sisters of Mercy pass quarrelling. I watch them to the end of the street and saw one of them push the other into the gutter."

But, while religion could only ever be a source of vitriol or mockery from him, magic had its allure, especially his later years, and showed itself in works called 'The Necromancer' (1961), 'The Sorceress' (1991) and 'The Black Arts' (1993).

The last time I saw Conroy was on 24th June last year in a nursing home in Belsize Park. That day, he was deep in Alzheimer abstraction and the man I talked to for 40 minutes was just the shell of the beautiful, twinkling person I had known. During the whole monologue, the only flicker of interest was when I told him of the thousands of pagans who had gathered at Stonehenge a few days earlier for the Solstice. Des told me that he had many lucid days after that, after he moved to the Royal Free Hospital. She visited him almost every day and it is fitting that Conroy's last words were for her. He said to her: "Come back. Wait for you". He died soon after.

And the final words are, again, George Melly's: "It is easy to visualize him, Harpo Marx-like, in pursuit of a nun, through the leafy streets of Belsize Village, and he in turn pursued by Ms Mogg, his androgynous companion, the 'cabin-boy' of Lambolle Road, whose treasures are horror videos and whose parents are half Conroy's age." Caroline

Note: Des will be organizing a celebration of Conroy's life at Secret Chiefs, sometime in the late Spring

The Song of Set: A Poem by Judith Page
special 61pp hardback limited to 149 copies
with tipped-in colour image of Set.
£28

These days there aren't too many people who choose to express themselves in narrative poetry. Perhaps there are even fewer who dedicate their art to the ancient Typhonian deity Seth. Even fewer who can bring it off.

The highly talented visionary artist Judith Page seems to have done all three. Judith is perhaps better known as a creator of a series of very painterly studies of Egyptian and Greek Gods. She is perhaps less well known as a devotee of Set.

The Persian scholar R C Zaehner wrote that poetry was not always the most direct means of describing a piece of religious mythology - admittedly an odd view for someone with a Sufi background.

Actually a well constructed narrative poem can be quite a useful and memorable way in which to lay out the story of an extremely archaic archetype such as Set. In the poem we learn how Set became a casualty of the so-called 'Neolithic revolution' , overwhelmed by the migrants of the 'dynastic race'. Then how he is fated to be the exemplar of that old maxim 'gods of one generation are the demons of the next'.

Receding into the shadows Set becomes the 'hidden god' whose ' servants be few secret: they shall rule the many the known.' (ALI.10) but re-emerge with particular poignancy in time for the new age currently struggling to arrive.

I really recommend this book. For copies, visit Judith's webpage www.judith-page.com and indeed for some of the enigmatic power objects of the great and hidden god.
Mogg

'Occult' Crime

As I write this a self-styled ‘satanist’ 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 (TheGuardian 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 ‘black and white minstrel’ 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 ‘occult’ images with violent crimes. But shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, that’s another story ain’t 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 we’ve had the way of restriction for a long while now and the results are every where to be seen. So called ‘occult’ crime has its own causes one of them being ignorance. That’s why I’m 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 sacrements is freely given and does not involve harm to the donor. - mogg

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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

Next Witchcraft seminar 23rd October 2005 - review of 2004

Gale force winds whipped around the battlements, rain lashed the windows. Marion Green was heard to say, 'if you really want to understand the elements go into the carpark.' Well that didn't really come out right but we knew what she meant.

Many were there to hear what turned out to be Maxine Sanders engaging description of the genesis of the Alexandrian movement. But first - in heavy chiaroscuro, choking clouds of incense rose from half a dozen censors, then Ralph Harvey's voice cut through the gloom - a voice straight from the hammer house of horror and long john silver - WITCHCRAFT!!!!! - the OOOOOLLLLLLLLDDDDDD religion.

Lots of hocum and wiccan foundation myth, of course, but all done with great panache and a final crescendo of passion that had many, myself included, in tears.

Was it that or Diane Firmin's earlier amazing talk about the magick of cats, where the speaker conjured a pathetic image of the witches on the gibbet, the family pet hanging and sharing their fate to the last. Its a very sad image that - and in the news this week it was confirmed -

LONDON, England (AP) -- A Scottish township plans to mark Halloween by officially pardoning 81 people -- and their cats -- executed centuries ago for being witches.

Well what a wonderful conference - perhaps the last to be held at that spooky venue - above is just a smattering of the many excellent speakers - some maybe a bit worse for wear from the demon drink on the evening before but otherwise as good as . . .

Star of the show i'd say the very understated but thought provoking piece from JSM editor Dave Evans which can be viewed at:

Well done Adrian and everyone involved

Omphalos

Bath is to play host to a Magickal Fair from the 25th of April to the 1st of May, 2005. This event is basically about having a platform to express magickal creativity. Part of this involves the creation of a magickal picture book. A key word is being sent to magicians from diverse cultural, geograpical and philosophical perspectives... This word will be interpreted and illustrated in either one image or a triptych. These examples of a linking of a collective magickal unconscious will then be assembled (in a simplistic format) and sold at the fair.

We cannot give any financial recompense for this, just a chance to be involved in something interesting and a copy of the resultant magazine. The deadline for submissions is the end of January. We'll need your name, the name you use to sign your work ,and a contact address...

The key word is Omphalos.

If you are interested in contributing and want further details please contact me at charlottejane2002@... Many thanks, and look forward to hearing from you! Charlotte