On the Shelf Review – Diabolical, Part 3

Today we’ll continue our review of Scarlet Imprint’s new grimoire anthology Diabolical, looking at more articles from the book.

“The Testament of Solomon:  The Lost Key,” Paul Hughes-Barlow – Following some discussion of the author’s view of evocation and an analysis of the Hebrew word for “garden,” the author proceeds with a four-page analysis of “The Testament of Solomon.”  As best I can tell, the “Lost Key” is found by ignoring most of what’s actually stated in the Testament in favor of a non-ritualized partnership with the spirits.  Given that Solomon’s interactions with the demons eventually led to his disfavor and fall, it’s difficult to reconcile the Testament with such an approach.

“Faces of a King,” Mark Smith – An in-depth discussion of the magician’s interactions with the spirit of Belial, as conceptualized in the Goetia, over the course of a few years.    As with Jake Stratton-Kent’s piece, it shows how Judaeo-Christian grimoire magic is being appropriated and remodeled by pagan practitioners.  It’s a solid piece all around.

“Nightside Tarot,” Stafford Stone – Stone had a piece in Howlings, and here he goes into further depth regarding his explorations of the Qlipoth (the shattered realms of previous creations, according to Jewish mysticism) via the works of Kenneth Grant and his expression of them in a Tarot deck.  There’s not much to say about this, but the images are truly striking, and I can only hope we see this deck in a completed form in the near future.

“Black Saturnian Magick”, Thomas Karlsson – The founder of the Dragon Rouge magical order provides a discussion of planetary magic, following the model of the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino.   Though accepting Ficino’s framework, Karlsson eschews his approach of performing rituals to minimize Saturn’s influence, instead drawing upon its potential for workings involving old age, the intellect, and the Qlipoth.  This article is brief but impressive, showing an engagement with academic literature on the topic while orienting that material toward the practitioner.

On the Shelf Review – Diabolical, Part 2

Having started my review of Diabolical, I wanted to dip into the individual essays and discuss them as I’ve examined them.

“The Conjuration of Nebiros,” Jake Stratton-Kent – The author of one of the new Grimorium Verums provides his own ceremony for working with one of the spirits of the book.   The author does not give the complete ceremony but gives us considerable information about the ritual, including ritual substitutions and the incorporation of Thelemic and Pagan elements into the book’s framework.  This is a fascinating piece that complements the True Grimoire well.

“Hidden Treasure:  Taufer Books of Old Europe,” Eric de Pauw – This was the piece I was most hopeful about reading, as hearing more about the grimoires that are not as well-known on this side of the Atlantic is always a thrill.  De Pauw does have some interesting insights, but the piece is unfocused and seems to wander about looking for a focus.  Some of the material within is simply inaccurate – for example, Johann Scheible did not publish in the 18th century, and he did not publish the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses in the sixth volume of Das Kloster.  The author does state that he is starting a program of publishing translations of some of these books, and we will hopefully learn more when these start to appear.

“The Spirit Magick of Abramelin,” Aaron Leitch – Based on my readings so far of Leitch’s Secrets of the Magickal Grimoires (see here, here, and here), I wasn’t too optimistic about this section.  Lo and behold, this was actually a lucid view of the summoning of demons and use of magic squares in Abramelin magic, as discussed here.   Leitch provides a framework for considering the Abramelin demons, using the magic squares, creating new squares, and other aspects of the system that are usually glossed over, likely because of the difficulty of accomplishing the six/eighteen month period of solitude.  Excellent stuff here.

More later.

On the Shelf Review – Diabolical, Part 1

One of the many small projects I’ve assigned myself recently has been reading the new Scarlet Imprint book Diabolical, an anthology of works on various grimoires.  This is the sequel to Howlings, which I reviewed previously.

I haven’t finished Diabolical, but so far, I’ve been impressed with it.  It’s certainly superior to Howlings, in my mind.   First, it’s over 150 pages longer than its predecessor.  Second, its coverage is more comprehensive with regard to the older grimoires, which breaks with the “Goetia and a bunch of modern works” slant that I found bothersome in Howlings.  Third, the rhetoric regarding how edgy grimoire practitioners are and how academics can’t possibly grasp their brilliance has been toned down. It’s not gone, but it’s not as prevalent.  Overall, if I may use the word, Diabolical is a more mature book than Howlings.

It has brought up one question in the Harms household, though.  The book contains, as an added favor, what appears to be a Communion wafer.  As a man who wants to display ecumenical sensibility but has no idea where such an item comes from or what holy/unholy rites it’s undergone, I have absolutely no idea what to do with this.  For now, it remains in the book.

At any rate, I’ll be posting more on this book shortly, as I think each of the essays within deserves a sentence or two.   More later.

English Travelogue, Part 8

I had one more of these, that I’d almost forgotten!

Wednesday – Another big trip day, as we returned to Westminster Abbey, to find it open this time.  No pictures, but I was disappointed.  When I’d thought of Westminster Abbey, I’d envisioned a classic European cathedral with vast open spaces.  What I found instead was a jumble of monuments, statues, and other items filling every square foot of space.  That’s not to say that Poet’s Corner and Isaac Newton’s monuments weren’t a thrill, but in retrospect, I’d have liked to see a more impressive cathedral.

After that, we headed over to the Wellcome Trust.  I’d already gone to the library, but today we visited the exhibition halls, where we viewed anti-masturbation devices, a Peruvian mummy, and various amulets and talismans.  We stopped by Senate House to pick up some copies, quickly browsed through the gift shop at the British Museum, did some shopping, and ended up at Treadwell’s once again, for Owen Davies’ excellent lecture on grimoires.  I even got a few spare minutes to chat with him beforehand. Having said goodbye to our friends there, we came back to the hotel and crashed.

Thursday – Got to the airport, flew across the ocean, came back home.

So, I realize we missed quite a bit – it’d have been nice to spend more time in Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Cornwall.  M. wants to see Scotland, and,d despite walking past it two or three times, I could never find the time to get into the British Library.  I suppose that means we’ll need to go back sometime, no?

On the Shelf Review – Our Ladies of Sorrow

Back in my early days of playing Call of Cthulhu, I would generally shun any non-Mythos contributions, out of the perspective that much of it was antithetical to Lovecraft’s vision and not very good in quality.  This is true, of course, but it’s equally true of much Mythos-based material for the game as well.  It took some time to get over this impression, with Pagan’s Coming Full Circle doing much to aid in my rehabilitation.

At the time, then, I would have steadfastly avoided a non-Mythos Call of Cthulhu campaign like Our Ladies of Sorrow from Miskatonic River Press, even if it was the work of veteran CoC author Kevin Ross.  If I had, I would have been truly missing out on a great campaign.

Our Ladies of Sorrow draws upon De Quincy’s short story, “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow” (truncated in the book by accident), as its prime source of inspiration.  It has further literary roots in the works of Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, and Carlos Castaneda, and the movies of Dario Argento and Hideo Nakata are also clear sources of inspiration.  Ross blends together these sources into a mix that is unique and undeniably creepy.

Ross provides us with three scenarios set in modern times and built around a dark trinity of female figures – the Lady of Darkness, the Lady of Sighs, and the Lady of Tears.  The first scenario, “House of Shadows,” brings the investigators through a mysterious suicide to an apartment building in which dark forces are at work.  The second, “Desert of Sighs”, involves a manhunt for missing hikers in the deserts of the Southwest.  A small Midwestern town threatened by floodwaters and tormented by a mysterious apparition is the focus of “River of Tears.”  The book wraps up with “The Final Cut,” an epilogue drawing the themes of the other three adventures together, allowing investigators to meet or avoid their fates.

Everything here is top-notch – the writing, the situations, the plot, the villains, and the atmosphere.  My only concern was the organization – at times, it’s hard to tell what’s supposed to happen when in an adventure, and a timeline might have benefited.  Nonetheless, this is a definite pick-me-up for those who like to run or read Call of Cthulhu products.

On the Shelf Review – The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy by Pseudo-Agrippa

The latest offering from Llewellyn is Donald Tyson’s The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, which I picked up a few weeks ago.  A companion volume to his popular annotated version of The Three Books of Occult Philosophy, this work reprints the six treatises translated into English and published by Robert Turner in 1655, including the Fourth Book itself, the Heptameron, and the Arbatel.

As there is already a modern printing of these works edited by Stephen Skinner, readers might ask what this edition brings to the table.  Tyson provides a great deal of information for the reader, including annotations of the more uncommon phrases, individuals, and concepts from the book, along with a section of analyses (which, in most cases, are actually summaries and explanations) for each of the sections.   These appear to be intended for a broad audience unfamiliar with the topics yet eager to find away to practice them.  Tyson largely succeeds in this goal, though some of the sections on geomancy and creation of sigils could have benefited from more examples.

The scholarship, in some places, isn’t quite up to what I’d like to see, especially in areas in which more recent work has been done – such as the new edition of Abramelin, or Carlos Gilly’s background work on the Arbatel.  For the most part, though, Tyson covers the bases.

If you’re already familiar with the Fourth Book, or the topic of Renaissance magic in general, or if you’re interested in it from a scholarly and not a practitioner’s perspective, this book might not be worth quite as much to you.  Those who fall outside that category will likely find this a valuable work.

Thoughts on the Liber Spirituum

While reading Tyson’s new edition of the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy of pseudo-Agrippa, I was reminded of the Liber Spirituum, or Book of Spirits. Such a work is not a grimoire in the strict sense, but rather a tool that a magician might use to quickly call upon particular spirits without the rigamarole of fasting, prayer, and elaborate conjurations typical of the grimoires.  The book itself needed to be consecrated and, in some cases, signed by each spirit mentioned therein.

The Fourth Book contains the following passage, quoted from Joe Peterson’s e-text:

And this book must be inscribed after this maner: that is to say, Let there be placed on the left side the image of the spirit, and on the right side his character, with the Oasth above it, containing the name of the spirit, and his dignity and place, with his office and power. Yet very many do compose this book otherwise, omitting the characters or image: but it is more efficacious not to neglect any thing which conduceth to it.

Some have insisted that the Liber Spirituum practice originated in the Fourth Book, but what that work actually states is that this is a pre-existing tradition, with enough variation to cause arguments about how it should be properly done.

If this is the case, then, why have we found so few of these books?  I’ve been trying to come up with an example of an honest-to-goodness Liber Spirituum, and I can’t recall one that was ever reported.  Of course, this would have been a magician’s most treasured work, and many would have been quickly consigned to the flames if found, but the lack of these works baffles me.  Any thoughts?

 

 

Fury of Yig Playtest Update

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

The group has made it through the terrors of the Ozarks, encountering a snake handling church and a beast Lovecraft did no more than hint at.  I’ll gloss over this, as this is a fun scenario that I want people to enjoy.

Later, one of the characters went mad while reading a book woke up near the murdered body of a local Yig cultist (who seemed relatively harmless).  The rest of the group discovered they were being monitored with a camera from a nearby hotel room.  Upon breaking in, they found nothing but a scrubbed laptop and a sacred serpent of Yig.

They then followed their next lead to Oklahoma, where they hoped to uncover another trace of the mysterious cult they were chasing.  They found it – and much more than they hoped.  This was the deadliest encounter of the whole campaign.  They all made it out alive, due to one lucky skill check and a quick-thinking player.  He often surfs for clues on his PDA (as his character would do), so he suddenly made a connection between a hint from a few sessions before and the present situation.  He quickly alerted the group, and everyone headed out.  One player will start the next session in the hospital, but they were a very fortunate group all told.

Happy Halloween

Greetings to one and all!

Last night, we had a very small Halloween party at the Undisclosed Location (in keeping with its size).  M. did a great job with festooning the place with black and red, along with pumpkin lights and a curious beetle sculpture we found in the brightly-lit corner of a chain home goods store.  M. was a witch, and I went as Sherlock Holmes (sans pipe, I’m afraid).  Little Yig came out for a brief while, under the overprotective guardianship of her dad.  The hippo, now freed from his imprisonment, swathed himself in a couple socks and appeared as a ninja.

Some wanted to play The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but we never got to it.  Instead, I decided to maintain the holiday spirit with some classic black and white films – White Zombie, Last Man on Earth, and Nosferatu.  (By the way, if anyone knows of a good still of that contract perused by Renfield in the latter, please let me know.)

You can also check out my Halloween party iMix.  As with most mixes, it omits a great deal that iTunes does not have in its library, but it seems the essentials are present.

My Interview with Warlock Asylum on the Necronomicon

My interview with Warlock Asylum about the Necronomicon – unedited and complete, just as he promised, can be found at his site.  Frequent visitors here have likely heard much of it before, but it’s a good introduction to my perspectives on a number of topics related to Lovecraftian spirituality.