189. Goose of Hermogenes reviewed by Snoo Wilson

Goose of Hermogenes By Ithell Colquhoun Published by Peter Owen (1961,) 2003, £9.95

The Goose of Hermogenes is an extraordinary book whose nameless and bejewelled narrator undergoes adventures on her alchemical uncle’s island, where in defiance of her uncle’s unlovely assistant, The Anchorite, she tries to discover the parameters of her uncle’s world, while hanging onto her jewellery collection. During this quest she experiences a number of bizarre visions and is involved in a drugged, erotically charged incident with an armless naked statue of a faun; or possibly, her uncle. However the ill effects of this encounter leave no mark, and she regains the mainland, where her father’s ghost appears to her, both naked and dead.

The story has been composed (the author helpfully points out) using the objects and spatial vocabulary of Hieronymous Bosch as well as being inspired by the woodcuts of numerous ancient magical grimoires which illustrate searches for the Philosopher’s Stone. The chapters are divided into the recognised alchemical stages of transformation, from Calcination on. When we get to Libation, Colquhoun opens the chapter with a terse, challenging quote from the alchemist Erineus Philalethes, ( known commonly as Eugenius, and studied by Newton) ‘In the wood of wonder her fountain sings’. Opaque, in this context, to the point of obscenity, but perhaps that’s the point; your imagination needs to bring on the Annie Sprinkle Sisterhood to animate the stiff, awkward transitions in the woodcuts. However, some of the descriptions have a gripping hallucogenic clarity;

“ Further away I noticed a goddess sitting cross-legged with her back to a cliff, the water at its base circling her loins. A passing giant smudged away half her clavicles; her right breast detached itself, slithered down her torso, its tubular nipple pointing towards the lake, flopped in and melted. In its place appeared a great eye, lustrous as an owl’s but clear-coloured like a bubble, surrounded with a foamy-white cornea. Her left breast remained some time, clinging to the surface of her ribs and shrinking gradually. It was finally washed away by a brief storm of thundery rain-drops; and the eye was put out by a flash of summer-lightning as if it had been pricked by a pin.”

Reading the above, I had the same feeling of queasy recognition as the opening chapters of Georges Bataille’s repellent but compelling surreal narrative, Story of The Eye.

A painter of distinction whose galleries are listed in the reprint, Ithell Colquhoun was a woman of private means, and the earlier writer of a fey travel book on Ireland, also published by Peter Owen. She had married a suspect art-historian Italian and was banished from the infant British surrealist movement in 1941. She was the subject of an unsuccessful seduction by Aleister Crowley, the egg-bald and sharp-fanged dragueur of Fitzrovia. Crowley, a fellow- asthmatic was invariably, seemingly, smitten with love regarding lady painters in touch with Other Worlds. The Tarot (or, Taro, as Colquhoun calls it) would also have made a fascinating subject for her talents.

Part gothic fantasy, part emblematic progress through a dream world where we are never sure we have a complete key to the meaning, we see the workings of a perceptive and curious painterly eye exploring elegantly and participating in a formal experiment, where goddesses deconstruct themselves in streams and where menacing vampiric uncles obtain the surrender of the family jewels, only to inexplicably give them up again.

The reissue is prefaced by an introduction where the publisher confesses to his anxieties about first bringing out the book in the sixties.

“It was short, which at the time was problematic as bookshops did not like books of only a hundred pages or so.” The Goose of Hermogenes is one name for the elixir that produces the fabled Philosopher’s Stone at the end of the Great Work. Even at the modern golden-goose price of £9.95, my new copy of the book has already lost a number of pages from the hundred or so in its spine. As Philalethes must have taught, any small carelessness can wreck a hermetic spell. And I now do see that the White Feathers do not cleave to the Bird but Disperse, irritatingly, all over the untidy study that is my very own Alchemic Laboratory. All is Flux.

188. Gamaliel, Diary of a Vampire

The launch event for Kenneth Grant’s new novel featured a talk by Mark Valentine, who writes:

My talk was about how certain themes in the classic supernatural fiction of the last century are being elaborated and synthesised in the fiction of Kenneth Grant. Late 19th and early 20th century writers in this field were not just deploying literary devices - they meant what they said. The most interesting and enduring writers of supernatural fiction - including Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, Dion Fortune, Mary Butts, David Lindsay, Algernon Blackwood and others - wrote what they did because they had a vision they wanted to convey, a vision worked out in ardent struggle with their art.

I would identify 3 (of a number) of key recurring themes in this fiction:

an attempt to describe a sudden heightened state in which everyday events, encounters and objects have an intensified significance (such as in Machen’s "The Holy Things", set in Holborn);

the concept that ideas and images can themselves be living entities, with an independent physical existence in various forms (such as in Blackwood’s The Centaur, the fiction of Austrian fantasist Gustav Meyrink, and in Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion)

the suggestion that there are gateways and thresholds between this world and another order of reality (as in Machen’s "Opening the Door", Mary Butts’ "Mappa Mundi" and David Lindsay’s The Witch)

We have to ask whether these themes are simply random plot mechanisms plucked from the furrowed brows of these authors spasmodically and without any other significance: or are they all insights into the same underlying order ?

It seems to me that Kenneth Grant’s work implies that these may all be aspects of the workings of the same current or force.

In Outer Gateways (p. 16) he says: "There is a certain state of consciousness characterised by a strange perichoresis in which the mundane senses, exalted and infused by the magically charged will, attract mysterious influences from Outside". That is an absolutely crystalline statement of what so many classic writers of supernatural fiction have tried to convey: and it is possible to argue that the process of writing such fiction can be akin to the use of "the magically charged will". Grant’s fiction also contains striking examples of the idea as living reality, and the possibility of gateways to the Outer order.

It seems to me that Arthur Machen’s work had been moving in a similar direction in his last stories, often under-regarded. His novel The Green Round, written to order as "a shilling shocker", can be seen as a diffuse presentation of supernatural incidents that never quite cohere. But on closer reading we note that his protagonist, Lawrence Hillyer, is a student of a certain "secret science" which, though it is un-named, is almost certainly cabbalistic: and the cabbalistic theme continues in Machen’s final collection of stories, The Children of the Pool, especially in that odd story "The Tree of Life", or in "Out of the Picture", with its Austin Osman Spare-like magical artist. Machen’s work had encompassed many themes before - faery lore, primeval and classical paganism, alchemy, the Mysteries, the Grail - but in his last years, it looks as though Machen was brooding upon the nature of the ultimate reality underlying all these systems and symbols.

Machen’s work ended here: but the fiction of Kenneth Grant is, in one of its dimensions, extending, enriching and elaborating the trajectory Machen had set. It restores to us the sense that supernatural fiction can be used to express deeply-meditated and darkly profound insights, that it can be rooted in real encounters with the Other, either in soul or in body, and that all such encounters may be facets, glimpses of a single stratum. Most of all, his and these earlier authors’ work reminds us that they believed such things do not just happen in books: a sudden flickering of a form or shape, the smile of a stranger, an overheard word, a freshet of the spirit that touches our flesh, all these may be the talisman and the key to our own encounters.

This and all other Kenneth Grant books in print available from Mandrake@..., including the splendid new facsimili edition of Images and oracle of Austin Osman Spare at 40UK pounds plus postage - a crucial AOS tome.

188. JSM: Call For Papers

The Journal for the Academic Study of Magic (JSM), a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed print publication, is seeking submissions for its second annual edition, to be published in Spring 2004. Scholarly articles of up to 8000 words, written in English, plus shorter book reviews (up to 800 words) and the like are welcomed. We aim to cover all areas of magic, witchcraft, paganism etc; all geographical regions and all historical periods, and we encourage articles from postgraduates, tenured academics and freelance writers alike, using an academic style.

Submissions should be prepared according to the MHRA style guide (5th edition). Please see their printed style guide (available in libraries and bookshops) or their website http://www.mhra.org.uk/index.html, plus our own guideline pages at http://www.sasm.co.uk/journal.html and http://www.sasm.co.uk/chklist.html for style and content details. In light of the breadth of submissions we received for Issue 1, we welcome early and brief correspondence with authors to discuss intended articles and their potential suitability for our journal- the above links also give guidelines for subject areas, including some areas that we do not cover, so please consult these first.

Submissions should be sent electronically to Dave Evans at socacademicstudymagic@... as Rich Text Format email attachments, including your name and brief title in the file name (for example "JSmithModernFrenchWitchcraft.rtf") . If you are unable to send by email please use regular mail to: Dave Evans, Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol, 13 Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol, UK BS8 1AD. Please enclose an SAE or IRC if you require postal acknowledgement of receipt, and if sending by regular mail please include one copy of your article on disk (PC formatted only, and virus-checked please!) and one print copy, with a covering letter.

Deadline: October 31st, 2003

187. Dagobert's Revenge review of
Mark Mirabello/The Cannibal Within

A work of erotic horror fiction filled with “sacrilege, blasphemy, and crime” —written in a style that is part H. P. Lovecraft, part Marquis de Sade, and part Octave Mirbeau—The Cannibal Within is literally “wet with sin, slippery with blood, and slimy with fornication.”

Review by, Tyler Ferguson Dagobert's Revenge

While at face value the horror fiction genre may seem to be the right label to list this book under, we may find more than fiction lying under the surface. The author, a History professor at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, OH, has created a work that can be described as terrifying, revolting, sadistic and even fascinating. I prefer to describe it as fascinatingly terrifying, revolting, sadistic and somewhat familiar in an archetypal sense. The book makes the reader want to gasp and turn away, but it appeals to one's morbid curiosity so well that you cannot but read on, because waiting for you is a horrific reality that you pray is only fiction. And in this (hopefully) fictitious reality you will find truth and secrets you are not ready for.

On the surface the book relates an encounter between the author and a strange women who wants to tell her story. The woman, obviously disturbed, begins to recount to the author a story involving her and her friend Maddalena. The story takes place on October 13, 1972 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Readers might recognize this as a setting of other notorious paranormal occurrences. Quite literally, the woman tells of the time she met God - or gods in this case. However, these gods do not follow our common idea of what a god should be. These gods are the gods of old; the jealous, lustful rulers of a forgotten past. Maybe they are the "watchers" or the reptilian deities so many pages have been devoted to. The author doesn’t clarify this point but tells us that they are the "Master Species", a race driven by lust and hunger. And to them, humans satisfy both desires. These monsters seduce our main character and her friend by appearing in a form that they would assuredly trust, gaining that trust until they show their true nature. This is when the horror begins.

The author spares no detail in relating what the woman told him. The monsters tortured and ate her friend while she was being raped. The author goes on to recount the years our main character spent in captivity living in a subterranean world with the beasts. He describes the society and habitat of these creatures and their true intentions. Reader beware: we are spared no savage detail. As the book ends, the author tells of his last encounter with the woman and finally we realize our own horrifying destiny.

Now we must examine what hides in the dark corners of this book. The author himelf commented that, “This book is about violation in every form. In an occult context - in a style that is part H.P. Lovecraft, part Octave Mirbeau, and part Marquis De Sade, it explores crime, depravity, and madness. Some who penetrate the darkness will find illumination; others will simply despise and judge.” Read this book for only the superficial story and you have missed it entirely. The author has hidden in the text occult philosophies that many have spent lifetimes trying to understand. I tell you to read this book with your eyes open to the mysteries that are hidden on every page. I will not spoil the quest that I am sure the author hopes we undertake, but I can tell you that in this book are hidden the secrets of some of the world's greatest societies, ideas and truths of a forgotten time, tenets of religions long believed dead, and observations of our world many know but are afraid to face. A poet once wrote:

“ I used to see forever.
My future was mine.
My ideas were powerful.
Fear and hatred changes all.
I gave a body to them
Their return was a corpse.
Promises that never spoke.
But give more, they ask.
More of my death, which they began.
Do they always empty your head?
What gods that came for love
Then killed for selfish lust.
Lust, that is what they had.
Humans, the food that satisfies the thankless gods.”

The third occulture festival, Brighton, 19th July 03.
Tickets are going well for whats looking like quite a party.

A couple of years back at the Ananke fest, there was an impromptu banner competition - folk made occult banners, which were hung around the room as decoration. So i'd like to make the same request now for anyone coming who'd like to make such a banner to bring it along. Your banner needs to be easy to fix to the sides of the marquee - max six about 6 x 6 foot, with some fixings. I still have some left from last time, including the muladhara chakra and Seth Horus. Previous exhibits welcome.

An Anagram of the Ideas of Filmmaker Maya Deren. It integrates the threads of her work, using her definition of a conceptual anagram: the poetic, the political and the ethnographic. Website on Maya Deren is : http://www.mayaderen.org A forum for ideas based on Deren's anagram concept: Nomad Université http://www.angelfire.com/nomadi/dragon

190: Threskia: traditions of the Greek mysteries

Evangelos Rigakis
1869928 660
250pp, £13.99

Contents:

Mystery tradition of the ancient Greeks / Introduction to Threskia; The Rising of the Ancients; The Mysterious Kabiri; Roots of the Ancient Greek Mystery Tradition; The Legendary Orpheus; The Bacchic Mysteries; The Sacred Rites of Eleusis; Threskia; Divine Beings of the Ancients; Rites Mysteria; Greek Magick; Orphic Hymns; KYLIX