Bibliotheca Obscura

I thought I was sure to love this book, but it didn't live up to my expectations. The title offers "hell-fire clubs" as an organizational genre, but the study never does a very good job of delimiting what they were. Author Lord basically seems willing to give consideration to any membership society that fostered street violence, blasphemy, or clandestine sex, within the historical span of her study, which covers the entire 17th through 18th centuries, in the Anglophone world generally. She repeatedly invokes a hypothesis regarding "outlets for masculine energy" as though it were self-explanatory and evidently credible.

On p. 94, she writes: "The reason for painting Dashwood as a friar will never be known...." It seems to me rather that there are a variety of perfectly obvious motives: the pun on his given name, the reputation of friars for sexual misconduct, Dashwood's role as the founding "Saint" of the Medmenham "Order," and so on. She often seems to pose as a skeptic when she's merely suffering from a lack of contextual information or insight. In general, I found her treatment of the Medmenham Friars--a necessary central feature of any book on this topic--to be less thorough and less perceptive than that of Geoffery Ashe, whose work she often cites.

She mentions Freemasonry in passing a few times, suggesting that one or another of the clubs that serve as the object of her study were aping or mocking it; but if she actually knows anything about the workings of Masonry, she doesn't bother to explain how or why this verdict would be of interest.

The prose style is pleasant enough, and the photographic plates are excellent. The book is shorter than it seems: its 214 pages are in a generous font on heavy stock. A real strength of the book is the chapter on Scottish hell-fire groups, focused on the sex society of the Beggar's Benison. The ending is abrupt and rather inconclusive. All in all, it's not a waste of time for anyone genuinely interested in the topic, but it's far from everything I'd hoped it would be.

This 1921 novel begins by making some startling claims for the reality of its clearly mythical protagonist Christopher Dovecote. The tale alternates among biographical narrative, visionary episodes, and didactic explication of the latter. It offers little in the way of resolution, but rather ends with the intensification of and insistence on its central enigmas.

There's no physical adventure: everything (material) takes place in a small Bavarian town. A form of occultism is taken as the necessary complement of Christian religion, with allusive Freemasonry as the most exoteric reflection of the occult, and a nebulous (Taoist? the cover blurb thinks so) form of Asian adeptship as its origin. The account reviles Spiritualism as a deception by malign powers, and Charismatic Catholicism as no better.

Science fiction author John Clute introduces the Daedalus/Ariadne Press edition, with some fascinating information about Meyrink, and the situation of The White Dominican in the author's total ouvre. Clute does provide some "spoilers," and can be skipped at the first pass for those who fear such things. He also spends a little too much attention on the fact that Meyrink's tale doesn't fit neatly into Clute's ethics of gender.

This brief novel is sure to be savored by serious occultists in general. The fact that it was not available in English until 1994 may account for its not being as well-known among contemporary magicians as it deserves to be. As a Thelemite, I found it intriguing with respect to possible interpretations of Liber Legis I:30 and II:44.

Even the clumsy style and sloppy research of this book is overshadowed by the typos, misspellings and bad grammar. The author is a Texas Mason and pious Christian, and I can only hope that this book has been little improved over its original composition as a Ph.D. dissertation--or else Baylor University is dispensing its degrees quite cheaply.

The topic is certainly interesting, and the overall structure of the study is reasonable. Uzzel attempts to trace Levi's influence on American metaphysical religion (or as he puts it without clarification, "the American Mystery Tradition"), with a biography of Levi, an examination of Levi's legacy in Europe, a consideration of Levi's influence on Albert Pike, and an inventory of Levi's legacy among American sects and initiatory orders.

But, oh! Why an explanatory footnote for the word zeitgeist? Why did Uzzel--who actually bothered to correspond with OTO Treasurer General Bill Hedrick on the topic of Levi's influence on Aleister Crowley--use Colin Wilson's Mammoth Book of the Supernatural as his chief reference on Crowley? Isn't there a better source than Holy Blood, Holy Grail to cite regarding Levi's relationship to Charles Nodier? I see that Uzzel raised Carl Raschke's claims about Levi in Painted Black in order to take issue with them, but shouldn't they be beneath the contempt of actual scholarship?

The meatiest part of the book is the chapter about Albert Pike. But in the final analysis, Uzzel contributes little to an understanding of Levi's influence on Pike besides a digest of choice selections from Rex Hutchens' Glossary to Morals and Dogma.

Uzzel's syntheses and conclusions are less than gripping. He gives Levi credit for the prominence, or perhaps even the presence, of Templarism and Rosicrucianism in Masonic high degrees. (I don't think the facts are with him, here.) He compares Levi's aspirations for universal religious synthesis to the project of the World's Parliament of Religions, but the comparison is vague and unproductive. He also offers some entirely unpersuasive, Newagey reflections on the mystical and holistic implications of quantum physics.

It's obvious that a lot of labor went into this text, and its positive potentials make it a more frustrating read than it would otherwise be, given its glaring deficiencies.

A - I'm researching the novel I keep insisting I am writing, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary :p

Could any of you guys recommend good history texts dealing with the following?

1. The Prussians
2. Fin-de-Siecle Vienna
3. British Raj in Burma
4. Weimar Republic
5. The Japanese Black Dragon Society

B - If you want to recommend any obscure pulp novels I may not have read, now is the time to do so. I am feeling very pulpy.

Months before Rowling's fans were able to blog their disappointment or outrage over the terminal Harry Potter book, my wife was expressing some rue and quiet lamentation over Endless Things, the fourth and final volume of John Crowley's Aegypt. These books have been published over a twenty-year period, and I read the first volume myself in the late 1980s, taking in the second and third each within a year of their issuance. In light of my intelligent wife's evident dissatisfaction, it was with some trepidation that I finally embarked upon the last of them.

Crowley's prose is gorgeous as always, and littered with wonderful observations. The scholars of esotericism who have so informed the writing of the three previous books actually begin to intrude as characters in this one; the brief narrative presences of Frances Yates and Gilles Quispel were special treats for those who are familiar with the academic underpinnings of Aegypt. And protagonist Pierce's gnostic attainment in the antepenultimate chapter is a very wise and beautiful passage.

But it's not a happy ending--not as I reckon them anyhow. How can you expect a happy ending from a work with an explicit structure that works its way through the astrological houses from Birth to the Prison? Crowley metafictionally tips his hand in describing a manuscript within the novel that does not provide linear or cyclic resolution, nor even the sense of a completed part of an adumbrated whole: "It was without end but it was finished." Finishing Aegypt involves a great deal of calculated disenchantment that can feel like betrayal to those of us who have been so under the spell of the earlier volumes. Once or twice too often for my taste, the numinous is reduced to the neurotic.

At a couple of points in Endless Things, Crowley seems to intimate that genuine, world-transforming magic was only possible during the 1970s. Perhaps that was really true for him, although it would be a genuine shame if so. After reading the exercise in disenchantment of Endless Things, on behalf of 21st-century magicians, conventicled and unconventicled, I feel I may--in all readerly friendliness--rebuke him as a splitter.

This 1995 monograph is by Denys Turner, then on the faculty of the University of Bristol, now holding an endowed chair for Historical Theology at Yale. He characterizes it as “An essay in the philosophical history of some theological metaphors ... of ‘interiority’, of ‘ascent’, of ‘light and darkness’ and of ‘oneness with God,'” and his primary materials range from Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius to Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross.

Turner proposes an understanding of mysticism at odds with 20th-century formulations, and founded in the etic sense of late antique and medieval Christian usage, in which (he maintains) the mystical per se was directly opposed to the reduction of God to “experiences.” He designates as “experientialism” the positivist, psychologizing approach to religious experience characteristic of (and limited to) modern thought, that results from (or corresponds to) the fragmentation of religious knowledge in the later middle ages. The Darkness of God suggests a greater kinship between the old mystical theology and desconstructivist philosophy, than between the former and its experientialist—-and all too often anti-intellectual—-progeny in modern "mysticism."

I really enjoyed the book because of Turner's challenge to commonplace formulations in the field of the history of mysticism, and because of his impressive job in making sense out of some extremely challenging primary materials. However, I'm not entirely sold on his meta-narrative of the ruination of mystical philosophy. His desire to make "experientialism" into a (relatively) late development leads him to neglect the medieval affective tradition that is exemplified in the work of Bernard of Clairvaux. It may be that Turner could argue that such works are not really "mystical," but he doesn't even make the effort, and leaves a wide and important hole in his historical treatment.

To be fair, Turner is more of a philosopher than an historian. Contemporary mystics and magicians willing to give serious intellectual consideration to the limits of rationality, the nature of experience, and the ultimate goals of mystical understanding should be able to benefit from this difficult but engaging book.

You seem to take a sadistic delight in any apocryphal version of my conduct that makes me out a monster.

--Robert Williams Wood to his biographer, William Seabrook
(Doctor Wood, pgs. 302-303)

( Doctor Wood: Modern Wizard of the Laboratory )

Alright, so I borrowed this book from a friend last night. It's called "Tempus Interludium: Interdemensional Solar Mechanics(Of Atoms and Astronauts)". Written by Ernest L. Norman, who founded the Unarius Academy of Science(UNARIUS: UNiversal ARticulate Interdemensional Understanding of Science).

Hoo boy. Think Bucky Fuller meets the Timecube.

First off, the preface is written by none other than the archangel Uriel himself. Chapter names include:

- "Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain"
- "Atomic Science from Eros"
- "Do Saucers Fly in Our Gravitational Field?"
- "What is the Sun?"
- "The Brain - an Electronic Computer(Expert Blames Strife on 'Seeing Eye to Ear')"
- "The Laser Beam and the Asininity of the Bible"

Also, a chapter called "On Lesbianism, Homosexuality, etc" in which Mr. Norman explains that homosexuality stems from particle wave forms being sent from other dimensions, into our electromagnetic field. And that this is a good thing.


Here's a video of a speech in which Norman describes meeting Nikola Tesla on the planet Eros:



And another, showing his crazy wife Ruth, who apparently was a guest on Letterman more than once. I would kill to see those:

The two parts of this delightful book are each a suite of short stories centered on one of Moore's characters in a different fictional world: the swords and sorcery of Jirel of Joiry (Black Gods) and the space opera of Northwest Smith (Scarlet Dreams). The entire book is full of evocatively hallucinatory fantasy and outre eroticism.

Jirel of Joiry is interesting as being a scarlet-haired "woman girt with a sword," formulated independently from Howard's Red Sonya (let alone the Red Sonja later created by Roy Thomas). It is almost as if the fictioneers of the pulp era--that is, the period of Crowley's late maturity as a magus--were tuning in to some Platonic Idea of the Scarlet Woman. In this connection, see also the April Bell of Williamson's Darker Than You Think.

The edition I have is an attractive but cheaply-bound trade paperback issued in 2002 by Gollancz under their "Fantasy Masterworks" imprint. I have repeatedly seen used copies offered for sale online for under $5.

Trevor Blake, creator of Ovo Magazine(where a number of Hakim Bey's writing appeared for the first time) is about to release his next issue, and it's a doozy.

From Trevor:

The Dreadlock Recollections by Kerry Wendell Thornley. OVO 17 is a 240-page, never-before-published book by Kerry Thornley. Public domain, available both as a free download (OpenOffice and PDF) and print-on-demand document. Details at ...

http://ovo127.com/zines/ovo017.html

... please spread the word.

[x-posted like a mother]