Our forty-fourth spirit governing from today through the first of November is a grand marquis ruling over thirty legion of mounted subordinates and presents as a stork or stock dove. A notorious liar, unless compelled by his summoner with the sign of his sigil to be called to the floor within a magic triangle, Shax’ powers including depriving the senses and understanding of any person upon the request of the exorcist as well as liberating loot not under the charm of another evil spirit. An avowed horse thief as well, Shax is countered by the guardian angel called Yelahiah.
Thursday 28 October 2021
Friday 15 October 2021
8x8
day-walker: monster lore invented by Hollywood—via Miss Cellania’s links
tastes like pencil-shavings and heartbreak: niche Chicago liquor Jeppson’s Malรถrt
vermithrax pejorative: dress up as Galen (Peter McNicol) from Dragonslayer plus other obscure, vintage costumes—via Super Punchmodelleisenbahn: real-time model railroading with Hamburg’s transit system—via Maps Mania
hedge rider: an etymological celebration of wizards, witches, warlocks and more
๐: chanting, harmonised breathing and parasyphonic sounds
mundane outfits: revisiting a tradition of dressing as highly specific yet relatable, everyday, social faux pas—an unfancy dress ball held in Japan and Taiwan
the calls are coming from inside the building: a lampoon of the haunted house film trope
Wednesday 13 October 2021
your daily demon: focalor
Our forty-first spirit, governing from today through 17 October is an infernal grand duke presenting as a human with griffon wings. Though consenting and docile under the command of a skilled exorcist and can be bid to do no harm, Focalor has violent tendencies and will overturn ships at sea and drown those aboard. The demon commanding three legion has influence over the wind and waves and is countered by the guardian angel Hahael. His name an anagram of the Lucifuge Rofocale suggests an intellectual affinity with the archdemon, and is among those holding to the deluded belief that they will retake the kingdom of Heaven after a thousand years’ exile.
Friday 8 October 2021
your daily demon: raum
Governing from today through 12 October, this fortieth spirit and infernal earl presents at first as another familiar with corvid-like characteristics. True to the German sense of his name, rรคumen—to empty, evacuate—he pilfers the houses of the rich and powerful with prejudice for dignities as well as engendering love and reconciliation. Others trace his origins to the identification with the Egyptian deity Khnum, the ram-headed god who crafts the bodies of people out of Nile clay before they’re born. Also known as Raim or Raym, he controls thirty legion and is opposed by the guardian angel Yaytzael.
Thursday 23 September 2021
your daily demon: phenex
Our thirty-seventh spirit who governs the first degrees of the House of Libra, from today through 27 September, presents just as the mythological raptor that symbolises the cycle of rebirth and renewal but is deluded in the belief as shared by a few of his compatriots that they will be restored to the throne of Heaven in twelve-hundred years. Obedient to the exorcist who bears his sigil, this grand marquis will faithfully dispense knowledge relating to the sciences and excels at poetry. Controlling twenty legions, Phexen is opposed by the guardian angel Aniel, one of the seventy-two corresponding supernatural beings encrypted in the Sigillum Dei, a sixteenth century magical diagram by occultist and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I John Dee that gave the initiated and enlightened influence of divine creatures—at least the godly kind that is.
Wednesday 22 September 2021
7x7
ppe: an enigmatic update to COVID guidelines
i don’t want to live on this planet anymore: a supercut of Futurama gags that have endured
norm macdonald has a show: an appreciation of the comedian’s (†) early standup
ernie and the emperors: a Giant Crab discography (1969)
grandmaster: the mental and physical tolls of chess
appareil: gorgeous French brick patterns from a 1878 catalogue
tireless research: Ruben Bolling showcases great scientists of the twenty-first century
Thursday 2 September 2021
your daily demon: gaap
Our thirty-third spirit is an infernal prince who governs from today through 7 September and controls sixty-six legions. Gaap’s office is to teach philosophy and the liberal arts, can engender romance, transport people around the world on his back, steal away familiars from competing exorcists and impart knowledge regarding medical care. Formerly of the angelic order post postestates, Potentates, Gaap is the cardinal spirit of the south and opposed by the ShemHamphorash guardian angel Ieuiah.
Sunday 22 August 2021
easy-bake coven
Via the Awesomer, we learn that the gag children’s book cover parody has been expanded into a whole series of retro-inspired educational texts for precocious young witches and warlocks and other delinquents—see also. Be sure to Steven Rhodes’ complete Sinister Seventies line and My Little Occult Book Club collection at the links above.
Monday 16 August 2021
wormwood star
We very much appreciated the introduction to actress, artist, poet and occultist Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel—known by the professional mononym Cameron by way of the short film by friend Curtis Harrington, the eponymous piece featuring Cameron’s paintings and recitations and the sole documentary source for much of her work as much of her fame came posthumously. The title is also in reference to the name she choose for her first child, the first of many moonchildren devoted to the veneration of Horus, Cameron being adherent of Thelema and becoming a convert from her first husband, rocketry pioneer Jack Parsons having also worked at the Joint Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) during World War II, to be breed according to magick sex rituals called “Babalon Working” that Cameron herself oversaw, like a Bene Gesserit mother superior. Instead, Cameron’s surviving child, born on 24 December 1955, from a subsequent marriage though paternity is uncertain was named Crystal Eve. Cameron was also in the film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
Sunday 8 August 2021
your daily demon: berith
Hebrew for covenant and sometimes associated with the Canaanite deity Ba’al for the devotion shown to him by the keeping of graven images, this twenty-eighth spirit is an infernal duke who presents as a soldier clothed in red and riding a red steed and governs from today through 12 August. His office is to impart the art of divination and alchemy when compelled by his sigil and a magic ring, Bolfry as he is also know controls twenty-six legion and is opposed by the guardian angel Shaahiah.
Saturday 7 August 2021
inosculation
These gemels (from the Latin for pair, like Gemini) marked by foresters to not chop down (there’s some light logging in our woods but done fairly surgically with deference to unusual or aged trees though I wish we could protect them all with apotropaic magic) results from the above natural phenomenon (Anastomose) in which the roots, branches or trunks grow together. Conjoined specimens are colloquially called “husband and wife” or “marriage trees” and were possibly the sites of nuptial ceremonies.
Sunday 25 April 2021
robigalia
One of a number of Roman celebrated during this time of year to ensure a good growing season and bountiful harvest, the feast of the for the god Robigus was held on this day in the agricultural outskirts of the city.
The god, which was designated as the divine representation of fungal blight or rust needed to be propitiated in order to ensure that the crops wouldn’t spoil in the fields. Understood as a separate, corrupt manifestation of the same infestation that could be harnessed for fermentation, the games held at this time with their attendant feasts (see also) were also marked by rather dark sacrifices that expressed their anxieties over crop failure—especially for one this late in the growing seasons that wouldn’t be easy to recover from. Whereas animal sacrifice generally was reserved for livestock that was part of the Roman diet and was shared in a communal meal, Robigalia rather gruesomely demanded a dog with a red coat—that matched the rust disease—as form of homeopathic magic.
Other observations included a celebration of—for whatever reason—of male sex-workers, professional female prostitution having had their own honours in the previous days, specifically on Vinalia urbana, the grape harvest on 23 April. Though without the cruel bits, thankfully—or the fun bits either, I suppose, the holiday is preserved in Western Christianity with the same day of prayer and fasting known as Rogation (from the Latin to beseech—to ask God for protection from calamity) and was done to cleanse the body and mind in anticipation of the Ascension and farmers often had priests bless their crops, often holding mass and processionals in the fields.
Saturday 10 April 2021
liber legis
Though with the arrival of the รon of Horus humanity is supposed to have spiritually evolved to the phase where the precept and obligation to oneself and others was to “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” Aleister Crowley (previously) in 1904 along with his new bride, Rose Edith Kelly, was accountable for a bit more clarification and codification as mediums for a supernatural visitor—a disembodied voice—called Aiwass whom dictated to the newly married couple on their honeymoon in Cairo the three chapters of The Book of the Law of Thelema. Thankfully, each day from the eighth through the tenth of April, sessions only lasted an hour from noon, concluding the with the final volume published five years later, with the couple able to resume their vacation once Crowley emerged from his trance in the part of the hotel suite designated as the “temple,” though it seems that they had already done quite a bit of sight-seeing at this point, with a night spent in the Royal Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza two weeks earlier having the spirits in the first place. While the messenger for the whole of the transcript was Aiwass, each separate character was the first person narrative of the avatars represented by the Egyptian goddess and gods Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khnuit and despite the title contain more revelations and prophesies rather than anything proscriptive, with Crowley claiming to disavow the magical document and only having it published to exorcise the weight it held over him.
Tuesday 16 March 2021
your daily demon: andromalius
Friday 12 March 2021
the anathema of zos
Among the youngest artists to exhibit at the Royal Academy and securing an art scholarship and associated with occult figures like Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare (*1886 – †1956) is virtually unknown despite his contemporary presence—possibly for his departure from other esoterics by turning inward to uncover hidden knowledge by engaging his atavistic subconscious psyche. Accessing his portfolio full of Art Nouveau grotesques and echoing the style of artwork of Aubrey Beardsley through his self-published grimoire Earth Inferno, inspired by Dante’s epic trilogy. Eventually accusing other magicians as only concerned with self-aggrandisement and harshly critical of Nazism’s flirtation with the occult, Spare’s subsequent works articulated the process of automatic writing and mediumistic sketching, a method to produce the sigils that summon spirits, and analysing the output. Modified by later adherents and evangelisers, Spare’s techiques and theories were transferred to a movement broadly called chaos magick. More to explore at the link up top with the content warning that some of the imagery verges on the sexually domineering and violent.
Saturday 6 February 2021
zardoz
The 1974 Irish post-apocalyptic fantasy film starring Sean Connery (*1930 - †2020), Charlotte Rampling and Sara Kestelman premiering on this day in Los Angeles and New York takes its title, the eponymous stone talisman and cornucopia, from a damaged copy of the L. Frank Baum book Wizard of Oz that survived the end of the world and the bibliocaust and supplant older gospels and introduces us to a highly gentrified and segregated society that consists of a ruling class of ageless Eternals and mortal, enslaved Brutals who eke out a subsistence in the nuclear wilderness after satisfying the needs of the aristocrats—with a clan of assassins charged with keeping the exploited under subjugation by following orders issued by Zardoz in exchange for weapons.
It is revealed that Zardoz is an extension of the omnipotent artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle that maintains the precarity of this social order by boundless insight that no human, immortal or otherwise, can comprehend. John Boorman, the writer, director and producer had hoped to create an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (see also) for a film studio at the time but Boorman’s offer was turned down, fearing it was too ambitious and would run-over budget, instead turned his sights to creating this world, which was philosophically challenging with good elements of storytelling and very much ahead of its time but had not played well to audiences by dint of that same complexity, costuming and lack of special effects.
Friday 30 October 2020
necromantic tripos
Buried in a 1925 newsletter from Trinity College, Cambridge we are treated to a fanciful syllabus from analytic realist Charles Dunbar Broad, whom like his contemporary colleagues Bertrand Russell (previously here and here) and G. E. Moore, would have rejected as quickly and wholly as the Platonic forms, that was surely contributed to amuse his students and reads very much like a modern wizarding 101 with courses in magic, alchemy and astrology—with practica dedicated to scrying, rhabdomancy and the interpretation of entrails—to name a few.
A special disclaimer section follows of prohibitions that enrolees are to adhere to, for instance on the Evocation of Elementals: Owing to the terms of the fire-insurance on the College buildings it is necessary to prohibit absolutely the evocation of Salamanders in rooms in College. It is an immemorial rule of the College that the baths are “places for ablution and not for the evocation of Undines.” “No member of the college may make, have in his possession, melt, or transfix a mommet [poppet, a voodoo doll] of the Master or of any of the Fellows, Chaplains, Librarian, or Organist. Bedmakers have instructions to report immediately to the Dean of College the presence of any mommet that they find.” And on Levitation and Bilocation, they are “strictly forbidden in Hall, Chapel, the Library, and during lectures.” All in all, this seems like a pretty fun, charming curriculum and Broad’s pupils must have gotten a kick out of it.Sunday 18 October 2020
the pharmacological merits of apotropaic magic
Just as drills for a zombie apocalypse is a useful heuristic for disaster-preparedness in general, so too are models of the inevitable vampiric saturation of run-away predation verses a more managed approach a tool for understanding contagion and immunity. Deferring to science, Dracula will always best our superstitions and folk-interventions.
catagories: ๐, ๐ง, ๐งฎ, ๐งฟ, myth and monsters
Tuesday 13 October 2020
hocus potus
Just as the Twitterati has formed broad cliques reflective of larger social orders, WitchTok—the portmanteau of TikTok for practitioners of hexes and witchcraft—is a real and popular phenomenon reportedly and is being credited by some with infecting Trump with COVID-19.
While we don’t think that’s how magic works, we’ll certainly let them cast their spell and encourage more, seeing that that coven that claimed to curse Trump the night of the inauguration might need to check their work. Oh yes, and please vote—unless you want more of over-reliance on homeopathy essential oils and accusing ones neighbour of suffering a witch to live out of deep desperation as ones healthcare and jobs disappear.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐️, ๐งฟ, labour, myth and monsters, networking and blogging
Monday 5 October 2020
ius canonicum
This date, marking the occasion of his death in 1926 (*1841), is the veneration of the Blessed Bartolo “Rosario” Longo, a lapsed Catholic and former satanic priest, who returned to the Church and championed praying the Rosary—for which he was awarded a papal knighting and beatification posthumously. Against the wishes of his family who wanted Longo to pursue a career in teaching, as a young man he went to Naples to study law and came under the influence of the occult and spiritualism trend that was very much en vogue at the time, the Catholic Church seen as less effective in terms of seeking favour or mediumship than witchcraft or other practitioners of the dark arts and universities were the sites of rallying against the pope who was regarded as antithetical to the Italian unification efforts of General Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Longo grew more and more rebellious and joined a satanic cult and eventually was ordained as the priest of one chapter. Growing despondent and anxious by turns, Longo turned to a boyhood companion who convinced him to leave the city and return home to Pompeii and convinced him to return to the Church finding that the rosary calmed his anxieties. Maintaining his law firm, Longo had had been retained as an estate agent by a wealthy countess who became his patron and together founded a confraternity dedicated to the Rosary and acquired a derelict church to reconsecrate as a shrine. A nun from another convent that championed the rosary (there was already an established network) donated a painting of Saint Dominic and Catherine of Siena communing with Mary in prayer. From a junk store and without artistic merit, Longo secretly disliked the painting but hung it in the church so as not to insult. Reports of miracles were attributed to the painting and brought in pilgrims, eventually enlarging it to a basilica, Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary of Pompeii. On the advice of the pope, Longo and the countess were married—though remained chaste for the rest of their lives together, fostering children and dedicating themselves to charitable causes.What sort of twist ending would you give this couple? I suspect they, along with that cursed picture, were recusant devil-worshippers all along, in fear of being persecuted for believing in the wrong magic.