O I’ll be sure to burn their fucking offices down when I get out of here. Where do they get off selling me my death. If I want gift-wrapping for my imminent non-existence I’ll be sure and fucking seek it out.
Gary J Shipley, Theoretical Animals [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews As the Green Star Rises [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Lin Carter, DAW cover and illo by Roy Krenkel, illo Michael Kaluta, part of the Green Star series.
The fourth Green Star book was much like the third, continuing the plots begun in the sky city and the forest floor in the new environment of an inland sea and its jungle islands. It was perhaps a tad “spicier” than earlier arcs of the series, although largely through threat and peril, leaving it relatively tame compared to the larger sword-and-planet field. There is also an unwitting and highly ironic non-consummation of the love-quest central to the series. (Other reviewers have called that part of the story “contrived,” but in this sort of exoplanetary fantasy what isn’t?)
The most notable feature of the story was its blind narrator. The boy Karn had been blinded at the end of the previous volume, and while parts of the book held out some hope for recovery of his sight, he spent this entire segment unable to see. But despite the fast pace and surfeit of action, the story isn’t told as an immediate reportage. It instead recounts multiple threads of plot as companions and allies are separated and adventure in parallel. Karn is supposed to have learned later what had happened to his friends, but his telling interweaves the various developments along a synchronized timeline.
The illustrations in this book are collaborations between Roy Krenkel (whose pictures were in the previous one) and notable comics artist Michael Kaluta. None of them particularly thrilled me, though. Krenkel’s cover art is an adequate representation of the moment on page 60, when the women escape an island by means of a great hawk-steed. The rider is thus Arjala, while Niamh the Fair is hanging from the stirrup.
Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Anima [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by M John Harrison.
This volume is two novels under a single cover. They have similar scales and some thematic common ground, but no narrative coordination. The jacket copy calls them “love stories,” which is not completely off the mark, but probably fails to do justice to them. Publisher Gollancz has classed them as “Science Fiction/Fantasy,” which is again fair, but the subtlety of the fantasy (in the first) and the science fiction (in the second) is profound.
The first is The Course of the Heart. It has a vivid sense of place in its English settings, reminding me in some ways of a very adult version of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. The novel impressed me with both its ability to be dreamy and icky by turns, and its verisimilitude in representing postmodern occultism. It’s not about occultism really, but it traces the troubled paths of three characters (one of whom is the narrator) in the decades following their initiation into “the Pleroma” by Yaxley, a loathsome magician who lives above the Atlantis bookshop in London. The closest comparison I could make for this book would be to the “Aegypt Cycle” of John Crowley, but boiled down from those practically Wagnerian proportions to a comparatively Beckettian economy, and with a distinctly different metaphysical verdict.
I found The Course of the Heart enjoyable and enigmatic enough for me to track down and read Harrison’s short story that it had elaborated: “The Great God Pan” (1988). Reflecting on the novel through the lens of Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1890) is certainly interesting. It places all three of the central characters in the position of Mary, the experimental subject who had her brain altered to expose her to the “real world” in Machen’s story. Harrison uses Gnostic language to figure this exposure as contact with the “Pleroma.” And he supplies each of them with different outcomes. But in an author’s note to “The Great God Pan” in the collection Things That Never Happen (2003), Harrison notes that the story owes more to Charles Williams than to Machen. And indeed, if John Banville were to write a Charles Williams novel, I would expect it to turn out pretty much just like The Course of the Heart, which tips its hat to Williams with a mention of War in Heaven on the final page.
As long as I’m making comparisons (still trying to take a measure of Harrison, who is a new author for me), I would note that the second novel, Signs of Life, reminded me of the work of Chuck Palahniuk — but less funny and consequently more disturbing. It partakes of typical Palahniuk tropes regarding vehicular speed and medical gore, along with laconic characters of inscrutable moral sense. I’m glad to have read this story, although I’m not sure I can quite say I enjoyed most of it, and there are certainly fewer people to whom I would recommend it than The Course of the Heart.
The Beast & The Scarlet Woman are the sole authorized exponents of this doctrine.
Aleister Crowley, The Comment K on Liber Legis, The Book of the Law, I.17
The poor devils are too rich to work. Cruelly denied the opportunity to accumulate capital, what else is there for the benighted savages to do but create, converse, dance, sing, feast and fuck?
Bob Black, Primitive Affluence
Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Invention of Morel [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Adolfo Bioy Casares, trans Ruth L C Simms, preface Jorge Luis Borges, introduction Suzanne Jill Levine, part of the New York Review Books Classics series.
Although this novel is very short, it feels increasingly slow and frustrating toward the midpoint. Rather than a fault, this mood shows its success at getting the reader to identify with its stranded fugitive speaker, who is significantly the aspiring author of two books other than the journal which forms the principal text of The Invention of Morel. The later part of the book involves a crucial anagnorisis and the working out of its consequences.
I was more than a little reminded of The Island of the Day Before, and I feel certain Eco must have read Morel. Although in his praise for it Borges called this book an “adventure story,” I am compelled to view it as a parable.
The moral of Morel: . . (hover over for spoiler) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Psychology of Ritual [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Murry Hope; there is also a newer edition [Amazon, Abebooks, Publisher].
This book was an impulse buy for me. It was a cheap secondhand copy in decent condition, and I wasn’t familiar with the author. It didn’t look exploitative or too primerish, so I was intrigued.
The author is not a psychologist, but an occultist. In this book she repeatedly insists that she is a member of no particular sect or school, but according to Wikipedia (consulted 2012.11.05), she cofounded the Atlanteans Society (1957) and later the Institute of Transpersonal Sensitivity (1988). Based on the contents of the book, one can infer a vague Neopagan identity for her, incorporating a discriminating eclecticism. Without explicitly acknowledging the Thesophical Society, she draws on New Age doctrines about “cycles of evolution” that have distinctly Theosophical provenance. Other doctrines of popular esotericism that she promotes include a variety of alternative archaeologies (Atlantis, Ancient Astronauts, etc.) as well as New Age mystical interpretations of quantum physics.
In my attempts to grasp Hope’s context, I thought back to a another book I had read by an English occultist from about the same date: Adrian Savage’s Introduction to Chaos Magick. As I recollect, Savage anatomized the English occult scene into three factions: simpering anti-intellectual Witches, authoritarian toadying Ceremonialists, and daring experimental Chaos Magicians. Hope defines her position relative to the first two, both of which she praises, while seeming to identify a little more strongly with the neopagan witch than the ceremonial magician. And then in a sole hilarious mention, she refers to “chaos magic … as an excuse for hedonistic license. Legitimate mystical sciences are perverted in the name of experiment, and discipline has become a dirty word” (209).
The Psychology of Ritual is divided into three main sections plus a fat set of appendices. The first section provides history (often quite speculative or even obviously fallacious) and some general theory about the importance of ritual in general, or “the Rite,” as she terms it. She deliberately mixes magical and esoteric ceremonies with the rites of exoteric religious traditions in order to assert shared principles across a wide spectrum of ritual. A taxonomy of five ritual “codes” offered in the first chapter appears to be original in this work. Rather than psychology, the emphasis in the first section is more anthropological.
The second section starts with a unique chapter in which Hope goes into a variety of conventional 20th-century psychological theories, with emphasis on neurochemistry and the physiology of emotional states. The exposition is, let’s say, not authoritative. For example, Hope confuses melatonin and melanin. The next five chapters give contemporary occult rituals as case studies for the sort of “psychological” approach Hope applies, which usually has more to do with Jungian theory. (She refers to Jung as “the master” on p. 48, but most of her Jung citations are to the somewhat fictionalized memoir Memories, Dreams and Reflections.) For each of these five chapters, there are one or two full ritual texts among the appendices. Hope herself contributes a neo-Egyptian ceremony and a Celtic healing ritual, while others are from Ashcroft-Nowicki, the Farrars, Thorsson (Flowers), Schueler, and an anonymous Jesuit. She then finishes the section with a “Ritual World Tour” or ethnographic survey, a chapter on traditions of initiation, and a chapter on women’s rites.
In the third section she opines on the contemporary conditions for and uses of magical ritual. The section is wide-ranging, and often consists of passionate but unsupported assertions. Still, as much as she might buy into many of the flaky doctrines current in late 20th-century popular esotericism, I consistently got the impression that Hope had a genuinely broad base of personal experience in occultism, and that she is a basically considerate and practical lady.
The book assumes a fairly informed reader, but the tone is very much that of a lecture. Hope has some idiosyncratic diction beyond “the Rite” mentioned above. In particular, she pretty consistently uses “ever” for “always,” which is a little grandiose for my taste. Although this is more of an “intermediate” book than an introduction for the unlettered aspirant, it really didn’t have any new ideas for me. It was a mostly-pleasant read chiefly distinguished by its author’s voice.
Ἑρμης mente figuratus. Manibus: sedens.
Ἑρμης per anum manibus.
(Hermes formed in the mind. Hands, sitting.
Hermes [imagined] in the anus [using] hands.)
Aleister Crowley, Rex de Arte Regia, diary entries December 22, 1914 and January 14, 1915
Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Giorgio Agamben, trans Adam Kotsko, part of the Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series.
This slim volume is reliant on the lines of thought explored previously by Agamben in The Sacrament of Language and The Kingdom and the Glory, although it might be approachable on its own by a generally well-read and determined reader. I found it slow going, requiring as much as five minutes per page.
The first chapter is on “Liturgy and Politics,” but mostly liturgy. It focuses on the emergence and development of a distinction between opus operans and opus operatum in sacramental activity. Only at the very end does Agamben remark that he considers this instrument for the “effectiveness of the cult” to be a “theological model … which has made a lasting mark on praxis in the Marxist tradition” (26).
The first part of Chapter 2 “From Mystery to Effect” should be read in dialogue with Drudgery Divine by Jonathan Z. Smith. It is somewhat amusing that Agamben should take the side of the (anti-pagan) Protestants in the relevant questions about Christian liturgical origins, while Smith assails it. “Effect” is concerned with the “transformation of being into operativity” that results from the “ontological-practical paradigm … of effectiveness” (63) which Agamben identifies with sacerdotal mystery.
The third chapter offers “A Genealogy of Office,” which begins to focus on the historically articulated nature of ministry as a duty and a function. This interesting study culminates in a declaration that “[T]he priesthood, of which the character is the cipher, is not a real predicate but a pure signature, which manifests only the constitutive excess of effectiveness over being” (87). (There is also an interesting mention of Varro’s three modalities agere, facere, and gerere, which seem to correspond to the offices of Cancellarius, Praemonstrator, and Imperator, respectively. 82)
“The Two Ontologies” of the fourth chapter are the philosophical-scientific and the religious-juridical. The former is characterized by the indicative mood and the latter by the imperative. Agamben illustrates various ways in which these two oppose one another and yet have become intertwined and reliant upon one another, with the tendency to privilege the religious-juridical under the cover of the philosophical-scientific reaching an acme in the 18th century. His account here makes solid sense out of Kant, and it almost re-interested me in Heidegger. The alignment of liturgy and ethics is witnessed through the concept of pious “devotion.” Agamben writes, “Theologians never lost awareness of the pagan origin of devotio, with which the commander consecrated his own life to the infernal gods in order to obtain victory in a battle” (103).
The very end of the book offers a discussion of the metaphysics of will, which arrives at remarks perfectly congruent with Beyond Good and Evil section 19, although Agamben never cites Nietzsche in the whole book. And then I was perplexed to read the final sentence, for which he never seemed to have supplied the motivation: “The problem of the coming philosophy is that of thinking an ontology beyond operativity and command and an ethics and a politics entirely liberated from the concepts of duty and will.” As usual, Agamben gives me useful insights and leaves me scratching my head.
It’s weird how things make so much sense at first and seem so fucked up later on.
Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Hex [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
