Mandrake Speaks Newsletter

Heka:

The Practices of Ancient Egyptian Ritual & Magic

£15. isbn 1905297076. 198pp

There seems to be a bit of a revival in the practice of Egyptian magick fueled I think in the main by offerings from the more left-field commentators such as the author of Heka. Heka is an Egyptian term signifying the the power of magick, its divine personification or emanation and indeed the human practitioners, male and female, of the art. Although there is a difference between what we might call temple and folk magick in Egypt, there is no really real distinction to be made between religion and magic in the way that has distracted western theorists for so long. A study of Heka is an essential corrective to many a misconception about what magick actually was and indeed might become again.

David Rankine is familiar to many as a regular fixture of the UK occult scene, an officianado of the Children of Artemis; as well as an expert of the less familar byways of occultism - for which he has published, along with Stephen Skinner several substantial volumes on Enochia and the magick of the grimoires. So with a foot in both camps as it were, he has provided here a very useful pemican of the magical arts of Ancient Egypt. Writing as a Sethian, I might not share David's emphasis on the mysteries of the 'goddess' Maat, who seems more of a philosophical abstraction than a real flesh and blood goddess. But even so this is an indispensable addition to an occult library and therefore highly recommended.

Mogg Morgan

author: The Bull of Ombos

Details of location below

Venues & Organisers:

John Symonds

John Symonds lived a very long life despite authoring a controversial biography of Aleister Crowley that made him the target of hatemail. He died, aged 92 on October 21 2006. 'The Great Beast: the life of Aleister Crowley’ (also published by Rider) first appeared on 20 November 1951 just a few months after the repeal of the UK's notorious Witchcraft Act. This was probably the most radical book of the times. It was a time bomb that finally blew in the sixties.

‘The head of the OTO at the time, Karl Germer was shocked when he read ‘The Great Beast’. The Order of Oriental Templars (or Order of the Templars of the East) is a small international body of adepts who practice sexual magic. Germer said that the book would set the Order back a thousand years. He was mistaken. There is no doubt that the widespread interest today (1973) in Aleister Crowley stems from ‘The Great Beast.’ (Preface to 1979 edition of The Great Beast)’

Symonds is certainly right that it did no such thing, the very opposite in truth. It's interesting that the book has gone through many incarnations and rewrites and is in the words of Colin Wilson ‘a kind of appalling classic’ (on the back cover of 1989 reprint as ‘The King of the Shadow Realm: Aleister Crowley: his life and magic’). Did the 1951 act have any effect on the publication of this book? Yes I think it did, notice that there is no mention of magick on the cover of the first edition. Symonds says in another edition that at the time this sort of things couldn’t be too obviously cited on the cover and that in later works he was able to add more of the sexual magick stuff. Indeed the more magical material was not published until 1958 and then by another publisher called Mullers, whose output also included the books of Crowley’s disciple Kenneth Grant. It was not until 1973 that a complete revised edition of the Great Beast appeared in various cheap paperback editions licensed by Duckworth.

Symonds biography ‘The Great Beast’ has never been loved by occultists although its impact on popular culture has been, imo, immense. I remember reading one of the shlock horror editions given to me by a climbing friend. I must say I found the book a revelation, as did countless others. Since then other more ‘sympathetic’ writers have tried their hand at writing a more ‘balanced’ biography but few have really matched Symond’s panache. When Cecil Williamson, the owner of the witchcraft museum read it, it was a revelation and he immediately decided he needed to know more about the subject. So I say RIP John Symonds. [Mogg]

Here is a selections of other reviews this week - most, as my muse opines, a bit disrespectful:

From the Daily Telegraph

' a prolific author of imaginative, quirky fantasies, though he was better known
as the literary executor and biographer of the voluptuary, occultist
and megalomaniac Aleister Crowley (1875-1947).

Symonds met Crowley a year before his death, at a Hastings boarding
house where the self-styled "Beast 666" was eking out his squalid
final months as a spent mage on a diet of gin and heroin. Crowley's
will, which he apparently concocted himself, vested the copyright of
his works in Symonds and made him his literary executor.

Symonds was initially fascinated by Crowley, but as time went on and
his own political outlook moved from Left to Right, he became
increasingly critical of the occultist's lifestyle and ideas,
particularly his advocacy of drugs and unrestricted sex. Although he
edited and published (with Kenneth Grant) Crowley's Autohagiography,
and other books by Crowley, he provided an antidote to Crowley's
swashbuckling swankiness in his own four lively books on him: The
Great Beast (1952), The Magic of Aleister Crowley (1958), The King
of the Shadow Realm (1989) and Beast 666 (1997).

Although it did little damage to sales of his books,
Symonds tended to deplore the recent public fascination with
Crowley: "It's strange that this wicked chap — and he was an evil
fellow — should become, with the breakdown of society, a cult hero,"
he said. "Crowley would have been shocked — he was a Victorian — by
the extent to which the world has taken up his doctrine and rites.
The lack of magic propriety would have shocked him."

While he made no secret of his own disapproval, he enlivened his
accounts of Crowley's life with humorous anecdotes, recalling, for
example, how, after his move to Boleskine House overlooking Loch
Ness, Crowley had written to the local Vigilance Society complaining
that "prostitution is most unpleasantly conspicuous" in the area.
The society sent round an observer who found no evidence. Crowley
wrote back: "Conspicuous by its absence, you fools!"

Why "the wickedest man in the world" entrusted Symonds with his
literary legacy and reputation was a little puzzling, though it is
possible that Symonds was the only sane and reliable person whom
Crowley would have known. Possibly, too, Crowley sensed something
sympathetic in Symonds's unconventional and sometimes disconcerting
imagination, which he expressed in a series of novels, plays and
children's books published after the war.

John Symonds was born on March 12 1914. His father, Robert Wemyss
Symonds, was an eminent architect and an expert on antique furniture
and clocks. His mother was a woman of Lithuanian origin with whom
his father had had an affair. Because of his illegitimacy, John had
a difficult childhood. His father, who later married "respectably",
refused to acknowledge him as his son and he was raised by his
mother, who kept a boarding house in Margate.

Aged 16 John moved to London, where he set about educating himself
at the British Museum Library. He then became a journalist working
for Hulton Press on the Picture Post, writing reviews, poetry and
short stories, and working as an editor on Hulton's literary
magazine Lilliput. He got to know George Orwell, Dylan Thomas,
Stephen Spender and Bill Naughton, and became the confidant of Peggy
Ramsay, Joe Orton's literary agent. He also re-established some sort
of relationship with his father, who made use of him to research his
books on antiques — research that provided Symonds with the
background for some of his subsequent novels.

Exempted from military service, Symonds established his reputation
as a biographer with The Great Beast, though fiction became his main
genre. His first novel, William Waste (1947), a gothic fantasy, was
followed by The Lady in the Tower (1955), a macabre love story set
among antiques, clocks and curio collections. Another love story, A
Girl Among Poets (1957), set in bohemian London, won praise from
John Betjeman, who noted its author's "gift for describing farcical
situations".

Among several children's books, The Magic Currant Bun (1953, with
illustrations by André François) concerns a boy chasing a magic bun
through the streets of Paris. Isle of Cats (1955, with illustrations
by Gerard Hoffnung) was a magic fantasy about felines; Lottie
(1957), the story of a foundling dog and a speaking doll, was
illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Ardizzone also provided the
illustrations for Elfrida and the Pig (1959), about a clever little
girl who is not allowed dolls.

Symonds returned to biography in 1959 with Madame Blavatsky, Medium
and Magician, an entertaining account of the life of the founder of
Theosophy, a sharp-tongued medium who is said to have levitated her
17-stone self to a chandelier to light her cigarette. Thomas Brown
and the Angels (1961) concerned a Methodist who, in 1798, was
attracted to the Shakers, a prophetic celibate sect, hovering on
their edge and making converts while never quite managing to
convince himself.

Bezill (1962), a gothic fantasy, was followed by Light Over Water
(1963), about a young journalist who delves into the world of magic
and the occult. In With a View on the Palace (1966), a Russian
highbrow film director suffering from basilicomania (fascination
with the Royal Family) rents a flat overlooking Buckingham Palace,
from where he can observe King George V from the window of his
lavatory.

The Stuffed Dog (1967) concerns two girls who discover, in an attic,
a life-like doll which has a man's voice, stolen from her former
ventriloquist. In Prophesy and the Parasites (1973), a wealthy and
still-attractive widow waits for prospective suitors to come and tap
her wealth. The Shaven Head (1974) concerns a dysfunctional
household riddled with Freudian complexes. In Letters from England
(1975) a humble German veteran of Stalingrad answers an
advertisement to work as an au pair for a London doctor — who turns
out to be female and a sado-masochist. In The Child (1976) a young
girl founds her own religion.

Symonds also became friend and literary executor to Gerald Hamilton,
an adventurer and reprobate whom Christopher Isherwood used as his
model for Mr Norris in Mr Norris Changes Trains, the classic novel
of Berlin in the Weimar era. In 1974 Symonds published Conversations
with Gerald, an entertaining account of Hamilton's scandalous
adventures.

Symonds could be an intellectually aggressive man, and he was
fiercely protective of his status as Aleister Crowley's literary
executor and copyright owner. This led to problems when publishers
or film directors sought to ride the wave of Crowley's notoriety,
and led to a number of actual or threatened lawsuits. It was
rumoured that Symonds once threatened to turn an eminent publisher
into a frog, though he claimed, when asked, that the threat had been
issued "in the friendliest possible way".

Symonds was more successful as a novelist and biographer than as a
playwright, and although he wrote a total of 26 volumes of plays
published by Pindar Press, very few were ever performed. In 1961 he
won critical praise for I, Having Dreamt, Awake, a play for ITV
about a prodigal son and con-man who dreams up a fortune in America
and returns home to dazzle the rest of his down-at-heel family in
the London suburbs. His last play, The Poison Maker, about incest
and occultism, was performed at the Old Red Lion Theatre, Islington,
earlier this year and produced by his son Tom.

After a brief marriage to Hedwig Feuerstein, Symonds married, in
1945, Renata Israel, who survives him with their two sons.

From the Guardian:

'Teller of charming children's tales who made a devilish friend'

Christopher Hawtree
Wednesday November 22, 2006
The Guardian

The death at 92 of idiosyncratic man of letters John Symonds might vindicate the twin virtues of a teetotal jogger; this moral overlooks subsidy from the grave of that most louche of men, Aleister Crowley, described by Cyril Connolly as "the Picasso of the Occult. He bridges the gap between Oscar Wilde and Hitler."

Crowley and Symonds' postwar acquaintance lasted 18 months until the death of that free spirit whose worldwide womanising and ritualistic practices landed him in a Hastings residential hotel, where he excused himself from lunch with Symonds and went to his room for a customary repast of heroin and double-gin chaser. Their rapport was such that Crowley made him literary executor. Over six decades, royalties from those satanistic volumes fuelled Symonds's dozen novels, many children's stories and a score of plays; several of his biographies unflinchingly chronicle his unlikely benefactor.

Symonds was born in Battersea, London, and brought up in the Margate boarding-house run by his mother Lily Sapzells, a Lithuanian Jew. He had been sired by Robert Wemyss Symonds. An architect with a deep knowledge of furniture and clocks, he would not marry Lily, and ignored them for some while.

At 16, Symonds chose a literary life. The British Museum reading room made good Kent's shortfalls. It recurs in such novels as With a View of the Palace (1966): "before the war, the design of the reading room of the British Museum was still intact, and the harsh fluorescent lighting hadn't made its apperance; its Victorian architecture was bathed in a restful Victorian atmosphere, that is to say in an equal mixture of light and shade."

Part funded by research work for his reconciled father, Symonds enjoyed a Fitzrovian life with Orwell and Dylan Thomas. For a short while he was close to Peggy Ramsay, the future dramatic agent. Picture Post and Lilliput provided regular work. He edited the latter for a while during the war when, exempt from military service, he briefly married Hedwig Feuerstein.

In 1945 he married again, to Renata Israel, and in 1947 published a children's book, William Waste. Meanwhile, he had met Crowley whose "head, in spite of tufts of hair on the sides, seemed no more than a skull... the wickedest man in the world looked rather exhausted - whether from wickedness or from old age I did not then know". After his 1947 funeral at a Brighton crematorium, the town council was outraged to discover pagan texts were recited on its premises.

Crowley books apart, Symonds found his widest audience among children. These books' enduring charm is independent of illustrations by (among others) Ardizzone and Hoffnung. Dolls' houses and cats with telescopes recur; felines wrestle in ring beneath the sign "definitely no scratching" while a pig "looked in the moonlight even paler than he was: the moonlight has that effect on people, pigs, and things". The Magic Currant Bun (1952) is wonderful. A boy is chased through Paris after taking from a shop window a bun whose wish-granting currants bring forth 27 and a half policemen. Very short, the half one stands on a chair to arrest people but - after the Bastille becomes a huge, rat-delighting cheese - the final currant buys off that policeman, who promptly towers over the others.

A dwarf animates one of Symonds' arcane adult novels, The Hurt Runner (1968): he "spent a great deal of his time reading books on magic, phallic and snake worship, and torture, sexual perversities". There are also echoes of great Russians devoured in the reading room, which reappears in Letters from England (1973). Symonds could contrive brilliant images, such as "she was tall and nicely proportioned, except that her breasts were inconspicuous, probably as tiny as the nests of house martins" (Light Over Water, 1963), but can be hobbled by his ambition. Symonds' father inspired the rival loves of The Lady in the Tower (1955): neither woman is a match for antiques; fancifully, a film of that novel animates With a View of the Palace.

That novel's obscure word "basilicomania" - excessive love of royalty - reappears in Conversations with Gerald (1974): another reprobate, Gerald Hamilton, inspired Christopher Isherwood's Mr Norris. These entries might herald a fascinating unpublished diary, its chronicle including his difficulty in having plays performed. These were, however, issued by Symonds' son in hardback.

Television should have recognised the possibilities in a man whose characters declare "from what I've read about Sweden in the newspapers and seen of Swedish films, it's a land of mystery where everything goes wrong" and "you're thinking of becoming a politiician? What sort of politician? I wouldn't waste myself in politics. It's too much of a scramble. How can one be a politician and retain one's dignity?"

Seidr & Seething - the saga continues

UK's Pentacle magazine issue 19 has a response to the updated chapter of Seidr from the new edition of Jan Fries, Helrunar: a manual of rune magick. An extract from the said chapter was reproduced in the Beltain edition of the same magazine. At the moment the pagan scene is gripped by 'academeitis' - that's when someone attempts to end an awkward argument by invoking some supposed academic authority. I say 'supposed' because those cited are often no more of an authority on the matter than us regular mortals. I've heard it several times now - 'academics say that whatever else seidr might be - it can't posssibly be seething'. Given the supposed impossibility of proving a negative - that seems a rather reckless statement from a supposed cooled headed scholar.

I'm still not quite sure why some people get so hot under the collar about Jan's interpretation of the mysterious seidr practice. Surely there is room for more than one view on what it might have been. Jan attempts through various arguments to link it to the universal phenonemon of the shaking trance. But some heathens will have none of it - pamphlets have been published in the vain attempt to repudiate Jan's view; he is accused of an unspecified eastern influence; speakers have been known to digress from their scripts in order to warn their audience of the dangers of following Jan's lead.

Jan's seething hypothesis is hardly that threatening. Afterall it's not as if Jan isn't also sympathetic to the new American style seidr. He may point out the uncertainty of its theoretical basis but recognises that authors such as Diana Paxson have developed a nice syncretistic divination ritual which works well and to which they have appended the classy, ancient name seidr. All Jan does it point out that this same title is also associated with lots of things they don't like. Perhaps this explains why they loathe his theories and try to argue Nordic literature away?

Jan Fries is very much in favour of people making up new things. Afterall there is no necessity for all good things to be ancient in order to be genuine. I'm sure he would want them to be proud of their new interpretation of seidr which now has an ethical frame it probably lacked in its historic version.

Alan Nash is the latest to enter the fray. The intentions of Alan's letter in Pentacle may have got a bit lost in 'translation' but I suspect his interest is to provoke discussion and see the arguments rehearsed. Alan questions why Jan's appears to deny that that the lady in Erik's Saga was doing seidr. Erik's Saga is one of the prime sources of information on Seidr, and in it there are details of a supposed seidr rite (see Jan Fries Seidways: shaking, swaying and serpent mysteries, for the full text). I'd say that Jan merely asks why, if this really is an account of Seidr, the priestess isn't referred to as a seidkona as one would expect, but is instead almost invariably called a spakona (seeress)?

Alan Nash also questions Jan's apparent characterisation of seidr as 'evil' - now things are really getting serious as that could be seen as an insult to the whole heathen tradition! What Jan says is that historically seidr did have such a reputation in Nordic literature. Like it or not - there is apparently not a single text in Nordic literature that says anything kind about the practice.

Finally - as has been common on this debate - which has rumbled on for a while now - Alan evokes the shade of Edred Thorson, who apparently has strong views on this issue. The great man may have spoken but whether what he says stands up is another matter: "One thing I must vigorously insist on is that the word seidr can in no way beconnected to the English word 'seethe'."(Witchdom Of The True: A Study of The Vana-Troth and the Practice Of Seidr, Runa-Raven Press, 1999).

As any student of logic knows, definition is supposed to explain what a term means, not what it does not mean. Irvin Copi once wrote: "to define the word 'couch' as meaning not a bed and not a chair is to fail miserably to explain the meaning of a word." But to be fair I've not been able to see the article and perhaps it has some stronger arguments. I'm told Edred is an expert on etymology - so presumably he meant to say "Old English word 'seethe' ", occuring as it does in citations before 1100 AD. According to the lexicographers at the Oxford University Press it is in fact an Old Teutonic word - infinative seothan* - with an obsolete form sod.

There is a related word in Gothic sauth* which brings out its ritual connotations - as a sacrifice - which as Jan says in Helrunar - has the literally meaning of 'boiled meat' - the sine qua non for a Nordic sacrifice. The Oxford Lexicographers explain the limits of the OED's remit in their introduction, thus it is true that they do not mention Seidr as one of its cognates. The connection between the two is thus still, AFAIK, an open question. They do however say that seething had certain figurative uses not found in later texts - meanings such as 'to try someone by fire' or 'to afflict with cares'.

I suppose I ask myself does the word seidr survive in any form in the languages of Europe. If it does, then Old English or Modern English Seething, being very similar in sound to Seidr, would be a far from ridiculous suggestion that might yet be proved correct. The connection between Seidr and Sauthr is not something Jan made up. It has been argued before in many academic tomes, including Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie in the 1830s.

But as it happens, Jan's characterisation of Nordic Seidr as 'seething' was probably never really based on linguistics - his arguments are more about the nature of magick and trance activity. The English word he choose turned out to have a fortuitous and evocative history all its own. Seething takes us right back to the appropriate time and to the rich sacrifices that go into the steaming cauldron of magick.

Check it out for yourself. By all means let's debate the issues but let's also stick to the facts rather than spurious appeals to authority.

The Hidden Masters & The Unspeakable Evil by Jack Barrow

isbn 095153291x Winged Feet Productions, 9.99

This is a good time for occult story telling with a growing band of occultural novelists - including I should add - yours truly (See Pan's Road). 'Jack Barrow' is a pseudonym, the man behind the project is a perennial feature of the occult scene, who often describing himself as a magician who doesn't believe in magick. He does the occasional occult fanzine called Philosophers Stone which actually had some real jokes in it. If I tell you that 'Jack Barrow's' heroes are Terry Pratchet and Douglas Adams, you'll maybe know what to expect. Writing black comedy is an under-estimated skill and the author has made a fair fist of it - well worth checking out.

The novel's central characters are three 'master' magicians of the chaos magick variety. 'They discover a conspiracy to build casinos in Blackpool, thus making it the Las Vegas of the North, turning the resort into a seedy, tacky and depraved town.' To those not so familiar with Blackpool, it is a real town on UK's north western coast, and indeed often called the 'Las Vegas of the North'. (Apparently Hitler had plans to invade via its beaches). If you're ever trying to drive down the M6 from Scotland, you'll maybe have some clue as to why the road suddenly becomes completely gridlocked by the Blackpool Turnoff - it's all the punters going home for the night.

Actually Blackpool used to have a fascinating Anatomical Museum, full of sexual freakery - sadly now all gone. For a quick whiff of what you missed see the first issue of Mark Pilkington's excellent Strange Attractor Journal. The second edition is just off the press so I hear.

Anyways - I haven't finished my copy of The Hidden Masters, which despite the tiny print - is looking good. So next time you're looking for some holiday reading why not try something from the occult's new wave - you might be surprised how good it is. [Mogg]

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