Ruling the twentieth to twenty-fourth degrees of Scorpio—corresponding from today until the seventeenth of November, we make the acquaintance of the infernal grand duke Vual that presents according to the Ars Goetia et al. as a great and terrible dromedary.
This camel demon controls thirty-seven legions of spirits and is a master negotiator, both politically and in romance. Their sigil looks a bit like a single-humped desert wanderer.
Ruling the tenth to fourteenth degrees of Scorpio—corresponding with today until the sixth of November is the infernal potentate called Vine, according to the Ars Goetia after Johann Weyer’s late sixteenth century hierarchy and expanded, elaborated by Aleister Crowley and illustrated by Jacques Collin de Plancy. 
Generally depicted as a noble lion on a black steed and holding a viper as a staff, the demon king can be compelled to assume human form and will give counsel on all the secrets of the past, present and future (quite the thorough opposition-researcher) and is invoked to reveal the presence of other spirits or practitioners of the diabolical arts and is attributed with the power of troubling the waters and tearing down walls.
Venerating Saint Michael and companions, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel in honour of their victory of Lucifer and the rebel angels in the angelomachy, Michaelmas (previously) is observed on the penultimate day of September—in some traditions, the feast extending into the next day—and has also come to one of the four quarter dates of the financial year, kept since at least medieval times to mark when school and court terms were to commence and the accounting was due to ensure that debts and unresolved cases didn’t linger (see also) into the next season.
Rather more exhausted than intrigued and knowing full well that the credentials of Trump’s latest favoured Leibartz(in) lie not only in the realm of possibilities but nay in that of inevitabilities, I still wanted to see if I could gather more background on this individual who trafficks in incubi and has truck with alien DNA and believe that Washington, DC is formulating a vaccine turn people agnostic.
Delightfully the first alternate news source I was presented with was this report from BBC’s Pidgin language service (Why you fit trust BBC News—I like this inclusivity in journalism and forget these other perspectives avail themselves to us sometimes), which informs that the good doctor has further invited on herself the ire of social media who have deplatformed her seminars in the name of preventing the spread of medical disinformation. Facebook is promised divine retribution unless Dr Immanuel’s profile is restored. That vaccine however sounds very promising and hope that we can establish herd immunity.
Via Weird Universe we are acquainted with the portfolio and curriculum vitรฆ thus far of underground filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger (*1923) whose anthology of short works explore Thelema and its adherents through his eponymous 1954 (remastered in 1966 for 1978 for wider audiences as Anger’s original concept included projecting the action on three screens simultaneously) through the cinematic filters of surrealism, the occult and homoeroticism.
Playing the goddess of magic Hecate himself, the short also stars Anaรฏs Nin as Astarte (Ishtar) and fellow director and pioneer of New Queer Cinema Curtis Harrington (*1926 – †2007, whose credits include numerous television series—Baretta, Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels and also Orson Welles’ unfinished The Other Side of the Wind) was in the role of Cesare, the somnambulist from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and was inspired by the ritual fancy-dress parties that founder Aleister Crowley would host that invited guests to come as their madness and a recitation of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s atmospheric poem. More to explore at the links above.
First dispatched to Emperor Friedrich II and his son King Heinrich of Germany on this day in 1233, with many other furnished courtesy-copies later, the papal decretal, A Voice in Ramah (a village in Palestine with several Biblical citations), issued by Gregory IX established an inquisition commission to combat heresy and Gnosticism (which the Church defined as devil worship), eventually precipitating the Bosnian Crusade.
The letters patent which carried the legal force of a bull, a public decree, included detailed descriptions of initiation rites and the satanic familiars enlisted to do their dark master’s bidding and increase the numbers of the congregation—specifically shape-shifting toads and black cats. Not only did the directive sew distrust among neighbours and led to violence and plunder, the zealous prejudice against felines is strongly believed to be amongst the chief driving forces of the spread of the plague throughout Europe, with no cats to keep the rodent population under control, the fleas they bore were more readily able to infect human populations.
Founded on the principle of religious scepticism and gravitating towards the devil in the sense of adversary and ideological foil to theism, the Church of Satan was constituted in the Black House of California Street, San Francisco on this day, Walpurgisnacht, by musician, actor and occultist Anton Szandor LaVey (*1930 – †1997) in 1966.
Explicitly not espousing a belief in the Christian characterisation of the Great Dissembler or in fact any other deity for that matter, the orientation’s high priest saw the value in and reduplicated the organisation and the hierarchy, though as a counterpoint to the control and validation that the Abrahamic faiths demanded and by extension the share of evangelical prosperity that they tout. The Church also recognised the intrinsic value and co-opted some symbolism and ritualistic elements as cathartic and therapeutic—so called lesser magic with the possibility of greater, supernatural magic that was outside the limits of human comprehension yet only ahead of scientific understanding. Learn more about the Church’s history and tenants at the link to their website above.
Literally seasonal division and more properly denoted as Risshun, today marks the festival of Setsubun (็ฏๅ) the eve of the beginning of Spring in Japan and a signal to perform ritual cleaning of one’s household to drive out the misfortune of the past year and welcome in good luck for the year to come.
Originally associated with the Lunar New Year, its date has now been fixed and the chief ceremony involves the scattering of the titular luck beans called makemaki (่ฑๆใ) where a family member born in the corresponding zodiacal year is charged with roasting soybeans and tossing them out of the threshold of the home (a variation includes another family member discharging the duties of a loitering demon and being pelted with the beans)—shouting “Demons out—luck in!” Like the New Year’s custom of eating black-eyed peas, people will also eat a number of soybeans for each year that they have been alive plus one extra for good luck.
the voyage home: studying whale communication for its own sake and as a gateway to talk to alien life
new car smell: the odour that’s a premium for American customers does not enjoy universal appeal
the midnight parasites: a surreal 1972 animated short by Yลji Kuri set in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (previously)—an alternate source
notes on a place: visual artist Kimmo Metsaranta helps us appreciate architecture’s unnoticed corners and angles
casting out demons: US priests find themselves fielding more and more requests for exorcisms
๐: a Swedish word with a quite broad regional variation
I can’t exactly pin-point the appeal of this vintage audio grimoire—released by Capitol Records in 1969 as a double eight-track tape—except to say that people respond to stories and can’t exactly vouch for the accuracy of the history and witch culture presented, but this recording from Vincent Price, “Witchcraft-Magic: An Adventure in Demonology” is incredibly soothing and somehow enchanting. With interstitials by the witches’ chorus from Hamlet, Price masterfully delivers anecdotes and instructional lessons of how to summon the unseen, as well as the antithetical, graphic explanation for witch-hunts over the fragility of the male ego and challenging the hierarchy.
By way of Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Day, we’re drawn to perhaps summon a demon or two. The first exorcise is in deference to a maleficent entity, who is either facing redundancy owing to the eternal, infernal memory of the internet or is now finding himself racing to beat the devil for a backlog of old business, by the name of Tutivillius, the Worthless One.
Tutivillius is charged with maintaining one’s permanent record, as it were, recording one’s misdeeds—specifically the sack of syllables that represent the mumblings, grumblings, gossips and complaints dropped unwitnessed—like so many crumbled cookies of one’s digital footprint—during church service, when one’s thoughts were supposed to be at their most refined and rarified. This recorded testimony is used against an individual on Judgement Day. A second—related or conflated demon and the creation of his own handywork—is called Titivillus, whose duty which he gladly discharges on behalf of Lucifer is to introduce errata into copy and text that escapes the keen eyes of scribes and editors and is the bane of proofreaders: namely in infamous publications like the 1631 edition known as the Wicked Bible since some of the Commandments omitted the not part from thou shalt. The two are probably one and the same—owing to a typo which the demon trafficks in. Titvillus is also blamed for mispronunciation and other slips of the tongue. The superstition that the latter possessed orators and haunted the presses is the reason a printer’s apprentice is referred to a printer’s devil, charged with the most onerous of tasks and was the brunt of blame (perhaps nowadays a jamming, problematic laser-printer) when an error popped up.
Though occultist Aleister Crowley first suggested that the ability to speak backwards might be a useful skill to hone back in 1913, it was not really until the 1980s that the moral panic of subliminal Satanic instruction really took hold—and if some accounts are to be believed, solely at the behest of the future Second Lady of the United States, after witnessing in horror her young daughter innocently repeat some rather explicit song lyrics.
Backmasking as the technique is known and as presented by the Daily Grail, palindromically since one spells the title the same forwards and backwards though not itself some encoded diabolical commandment, seems nowadays perfectly simple to debunk and explain away as an acoustic example of pareidolia (quite a few to be found at the Daily Grail), though I suppose that once something’s heard, it cannot be unheard. The highest profile cases dragged on through the courts as suggestions below the threshold of conscious perception were adjudicated not to be protected as free speech, especially when those orders are masked by a form of expression that ostensibly is protected.
Though perhaps better known for their compendia of infernal characters, the Lesser Key of Solomon (definitively edited by Aleister Crowley) and the Pseudo- momarchia Dรฆmonum (the False Hierarchy of Demons) that inspired the former, the grimoires also contain a range of mandalas—magic circles for summoning and casting-out above referenced malevolent forces, but naturally (although unlike the cleromancy of I-Ching divination or Tarot whose permutations are mathematically defined and all possible oracles are set forth) not all variants, whose compliment of iconography includes fimbriation suggestive of the works of Piet Mondrian and bar-codes and all sorts of symbols, could be contained in a single tome, no matter how big. The Lesser Bot, however, could—in theory—generate every possible spell. This achievement sounds quite dangerous but without an incanter, I wonder if it counts.
The Times of London reports that the Holy See's equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security, the chief exorcist, is attributing the perennial spate of scandals to demonic possession in the Vatican and suggests a purging is in order.
