The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography by Andy Sharp

Author:Andy Sharp
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913462109
Publisher: Repeater
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Forward and up. You are going towards Maria’s love with my love. You are going towards a greater love than you have ever known. You are going towards the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully.

Contrast the beatific and communal trip of Laura and Aldous Huxley, with the revved-up blood bath of Jackie and John Kennedy. Rifle for syringe, mind expanded all over Elm Street. One all gore, libido, racy and forever seeking criminal closure, the other mystical, drunk with agape and spiritually resolved.

If these deaths could be considered musically, Huxley’s would be Pierre Henry’s Le Voyage: a masterpiece of musique concrète, composed in 1962, an electronic interpretation of the Bardo Thodol. Kennedy’s would be George Crumb’s scratching mass Black Angels, the neurotic buzz of a violent Sixties; violins like Vietnam helicopters.

In Hebrew Qabalah, the number sixty-six means an experiment, it is also the mystic number of the qliphoth — the 1960s as an experiment in opening the gates to a delirious oil projection evil. That most accomplished swimmer in the swinging grimoires, Kenneth Grant perhaps best summarises the syncretic and occult tones of that age, “as a decade characterised by a craze for ethnological studies… Europeans were taken up with Indian music, Mongolians were studying electronics and stranger miscegenations were unfolding in spheres considered less reputable, involving, drugs, sex and ‘black’ magic”.

Oh, for a Tardis that I could return to that space and time.

The choked vomit whir of the Tardis must have sounded like an electronic death rattle when it was first broadcast following extended news coverage of the Kennedy assassination.

From the futo flyover of Dallas to the clunking misery of England. All fog and cheap Formica prefab, ineffectual police boxes — replace the spectres on the grassy knoll with the sinister king and peroxide witch of Saddleworth Moor. The winter in the UK preceding the Kennedy assassination was one of the coldest on record. In January 1963, the sea in Kent froze for a mile, stalactites hung from the gutterings, a metre long. The ice over the Thames was so thick at Oxford that a car was able to drive across the river.

The miracle of Christ in the automobile age.

C.S. Lewis, chronicler of Narnia, fell gravely ill during the summer of 1963: his kidneys failed, and he fell into a coma, unexpectedly waking the following day. Forced to retire his post at Cambridge, Lewis returned to his home in Oxford, The Kilns, where he had written the entire Chronicles of Narnia. The big freeze of ‘63 must have felt like an evocation of Lewis’ Narnia, a region held captive to an eternal winter, governed by a witch queen, Jadis.

Lewis’ mythic landscape was derived from Norse lore; that of the fimbulwinter — a harsh winter that precedes the end of the world, during which time there will be innumerable wars and bloodspilling. Perhaps Lewis’ fantasy terrains became a geographic prophecy for the author’s final year; ice over the Thames at Oxford.

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