Mini-Review: Hellebore Harvest

It’s been a while since I last dipped into Hellebore, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo’s folk horror occulture periodical. Rather than exhaustively going through everything in the most recent five issues, I’m instead going to do a rapid tour and note which articles I thought were particularly worthwhile.

Each issue of Hellebore is themed, and issue 6 is the Summoning Issue, with a big emphasis on occult subjects. This included some really eye-opening material, introducing me to subjects I hadn’t heard of previously – a good sign that the magazine isn’t just steering to the fairly well-travelled routes of folk horror and high weirdness but getting deep into the weeds. Per Faxneld’s Spinster Satanism offered an absolutely fascinating look at Lolly Willowes, a novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner which mashed up Satanic themes with feminist anger; Victoria Anne Pearson examines the strand of Irish folklore which based on the idea of the deck of playing cards as being “the Devil’s prayer book”; Verity Holloway offers an interesting biography of eccentric farm labourer George Pickingill, who ended up at the centre of a storm of claims that he was the last of a long line of “cunning men” representing an ancient pagan magical tradition.

Issue 7 was the Ritual issue, and coming out around Beltane 2022 it had a big emphasis on rituals to greet the summer. Pérez Cuervo herself offered an analysis of the imagery used in the May Day parade in The Wicker Man, whilst Hannah Armstrong offers an overview of the career of Jane Ellen Harrison, a classical scholar who beat the gender barriers imposed by Victorian society between her and her intended profession and who scandalised the field by focusing on subject matter considered unfashionably grim.

Issue 8 was dedicated to Unveiling, and its best articles were probably an article by Pérez Cuervo about the Lobsang Rampa hoax and the man behind it and an extended look by James Machin at Penda’s Fen. The Old Ways-themed issue 9 includes an interesting pair of articles about the development of particular New Age theories – Katy Soar and Niall Finneran offer interesting insights into how the concept of ley lines turned from a fringe archaeological theory into the underpinnings of the sort of “Earth mysteries” stuff which underpinned the psychic questing movement, whilst Kenneth Brophy discusses the weird mid-1970s trope of stone circles having alien connections, as seen in Children of the Stones, The Stones of Blood, and the fourth Quatermass series. The Darkness issue, number 10, felt to me a little light, but I did enjoy Chris Esson’s look at the alchemical imagery in A Field In England.

Once again, there’s a few too many articles which simply take too shallow a look at their subject matter – issue 8 has a look at psychedelic folk by Rob Young which doesn’t offer much of interest at all, merely outlining an idea about how the British landscape is inherently a psychedelic place without really digging deep enough to illuminate many of its assertions. Hellebore always seems to include a bunch of articles I enjoy but which could do with more meat on their bones, and others which feel like somewhat shallow treatment of their subject matter, and I think the periodical would be a much stronger offering if the latter were trimmed out right to make room to expand the former.

Still, it is heartening to see that the Hellebore team is branching out into chunkier works: Pérez Cuervo has also recently issued The Hellebore Guide To Occult Britain, a nice pocket-sized tour guide of sites of occultural interest across the UK. Here, the somewhat terse summaries of the places in question are beneficial – they leave space for stuffing more material into the book and, in keeping with more conventional guidebooks, are to be expected to provide only a quick introduction to the site in question, not an in-depth discussion.

Pickin’ Up Truth Vibrations, Part 9: David Icke Fumbles In the Dark

Another year, another book has come out from David Icke – The Dream. As with his preceding book, The Trap, I had no intention of actually paying anyone any money to look at it, but I had an opportunity to have a skim anyway, so I may as well continue this occasional series keeping track of one of our era’s more damaging demagogues just for the sake of taking note of his latest gambits.

Once again, Icke recycles vast amounts of material here; he seems to operate on a business model these days which calls for one book per year which he dutifully churns out, regardless of whether he has much of anything to say this time. That said, his particular emphasis has been known to shift back and forth; for instance, there was a while when he went really hard after particular Jewish sects, an aspect of his work he has dialled back on recently (though in this book he believes that Jewish religion regards Leviathan as a “Holy Serpent” and that “El”, one of the names of God in Hebrew, refers to Saturn, and suggests that the Star of David is related to Saturn worship).

This time he seems to be dialling up his focus on his metaphysical outlook. That isn’t to say that the book does not also include an awful lot of conspiracy theories, bigotry, and general nastiness towards the usual targets of his ire – but these all arise as tangents coming off his long, rambling, and repetitive restatement of his modern-day update of Gnosticism. Then again, there’s a lot of these tangents, and he lashes out at a bunch of folk; he even suggests that Putin might be a bit of a tyrant, though he still doesn’t accuse Putin of being an agent of the Conspiracy, despite the fact that he’s happy to accuse more or less every other world leader, and in general Russia comes off much lighter than Ukraine in here.

Strange Attractor’s Strange Revival

Way back when I started on this wild blogging journey, when I was just starting out writing stuff for Ferretbrain, I mentioned my enjoyment of Strange Attractor, Mark Pilkington’s journal focusing on erudite articles about off-beat subjects, with the centre of gravity being equally shared between the arts and esoterica. For a good long while, the series has been dormant, with Pilkington concentrating on making a success of its publishing arm, Strange Attractor Press, which would put out books largely within the same general spheres as Strange Attractor explored – just on here I’ve covered releases like England’s Hidden Reverse, Of Kings and Things, Days of the Underground, The Moons At Your Door, There Is A Graveyard That Dwells In Man, and Gef!, and all of those have been enjoyable and enriching in their own way.

After a long absence, though, a fifth Strange Attractor Journal has emerged from the darkness. The new Strange Attractor is edited by Mark Pilkington and Jamie Sutcliffe, whereas the previous issues were edited by Pilkington solo (note that I’ve not read Journal 4, so Sutcliffe may have been involved there). Pilkington and Sutcliffe are coy about why there’s been this long gap between issues, but to be honest it’s completely understandable: Strange Attractor Press has been undertaking ambitious projects in the intervening years and after the journal put them on the map initially, it had arguably already served its purpose. Still, it’s nice to see the old project back on track, and if Sutcliffe’s assistance can get things back on track that will be all to the good.

So, what do we get in this issue? First off is William Fowler’s Fact Or Crucifixion, a look at the infamous Hampstead Heath consensual crucifixion of the late 1960s, the legal storm and brief media flutter it inspired, and the occult and performance art motivations behind it. It’s a deep dive into an otherwise forgotten pop culture incident, and sits squarely in the Strange Attractor wheelhouse as a result. Just as appropriate is E.H. Wormwood’s The Green Crucible, offering an overview of claims of psychoactive substances being derivable from toads, and speculating about the use of toads in folk magic and alchemy.

In Tree Spirits & Celestial Brothers, Phil Legard offers a glimpse of the work of “Charubel”, an obscure working-class Welsh mystic and occult author of the 19th Century whose eccentric philosophy offered a distinctly different flavour of magic and esotericism than that propagated by the middle and upper-class Masons, Theosophists, and Golden Dawn types of the era. Humans With Animal Faces finds Jeremy Harte exploring British folklore surrounding shapeshifting ghosts and spirits, particularly spirits of humans who end up in animal form after death.

Bite-Sized Book Thoughts (The Fall of Númenor, Back Book 3, and Masks of the Illuminati)

Sometimes I’ll read a book and have a thing or two to say about it on here, but not enough that I think it merits a full article, so here’s the first entrance in my Bite-Sized Book Thoughts – a book-themed update of the old Ferretnibbles concept from the Ferretbrain days.

This time around, I’m going to look at three pieces which are either direct sequels to stuff or further entries in their overall settings – where, as such, I don’t have loads to say about them which wouldn’t be redundant with what I said about related works in their respective series.

The Fall of Númenor (J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Brian Sibley)

This is essentially doing for the Second Age of Middle-Earth what The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin did for the major legends of the First Age – bringing together as much as possible of the material Tolkien cooked up on the subject, arranging it in a sensible order, and releasing it as a “new” Tolkien book. With Christopher Tolkien having sailed to Valinor, for this volume the editorial burden is taken up by Brian Sibley, who was responsible for the 1981 BBC Radio dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings – for my money the best adaptation of the story extant.

This is an apt choice; between his hand in the radio drama and his authoring the official making-of books for Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies, Sibley has a wealth of experience in the problem of adapting Tolkien, which inherently involves a certain amount of editing Tolkien, which is the task he is faced with here. He wisely decides to follow the chronology in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings; the book is essentially a massively adapted version of that, with additional information from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-Earth, The Nature of Middle-Earth, and Tolkien’s letters and whatnot parachuted in to expand on the entries there.

Whereas I didn’t like The History of Middle-Earth and The Nature of Middle-Earth, because to an extent they’re as much a compilation of ideas that Tolkien toyed with and then rejected as it is a collection of ideas he added to his worldbuilding but never saw light of day in his published work, I did like Christopher Tolkien’s various expansions on the First Age legends, because they saw him doing the additional legwork of taking all that material and presenting it in a much more focused fashion. This does more or less the same trick, and is able to cover a much greater span of time than any of those volumes because the Second Age is the one that Tolkien developed the least.

As a consequence of Tolkien not really writing any stories set in that time (there’s one fairly developed story of the tempestuous marriage of a Númenorean prince and a woman who does not understand his urge for exploration), this is more backstory than it is a satisfying story in its own right. This will mostly be of interest for use as a worldbuilding reference, looking up Second Age-relevant information – say, if you’re writing fanfic, running a Middle-Earth-based RPG like The One Ring, or are trying to figure out where Amazon have deviated from canon in The Rings of Power. (Answer: everywhere.)

Back Book 3 (K.C. Green and Andrew Clark)

I covered the first two volumes of this graphic novel back when I wrote about the Kickstarter for Book 2. This volume is about as long as both the previous ones put together, but the plot here has become sufficiently un-episodic that it makes sense to burn through it all in one go. The most interesting thing I have to note here is that the production of the book wasn’t crowded through Kickstarter but TopatoGO! – the TopatoCo own-brand crowdfunding platform. This is an interesting development and might make sense for projects likely to use the TopatoCo umbrella for distribution and the like, and may also be a symptom of growing mistrust of Kickstarter due to stuff like their investment in blockchain technologies of dubious utility.

In terms of the action here, this rounds out the series, sees the final revelation of the nature of the strange world that Abigail the gunslinger and Daniel the druid live on, exposes the plans of the witches manipulating King Dang, and brings everything to a satisfying resolution. This whole arc dragged a little bit when I read it on release, because it suffered from the curse of webcomic pacing where you don’t really get much more than a few pages a week, and that’s if you’re very lucky and the artist can work very quickly and update very reliably; it works substantially better read all at once, so I’m glad to get the collection. (The whole sequence is online, but it’s nice to have insurance against it disappearing in the future.)

Masks of the Illuminati (Robert Anton Wilson)

In the days immediately prior to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicking off World War I, Sir John Babcock comes to Zürich in a state of high agitation, believing himself to be hounded across Europe by a diabolical conspiracy. Through sheer coincidence, he encounters Albert Einstein and James Joyce – two notable thinkers of their age who happen to both be in town – and regales them with his story. Is he merely highly paranoid, or could it be that he has stumbled across a vast occult conspiracy directed by none less than the wickedest man in the world, one Aleister Crowley?

Published in 1981, Robert Anton Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati came out hot on the heels of his Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy, in which Wilson dialled the most irritating aspects of his writing up to 11 in order to make much the same points as he did in the Illuminatus! trilogy, only in a more meandering structure with more filler which has dated worse. Since the Illuminatus! trilogy has a highly meandering structure, perhaps a bit of filler, and hasn’t dated brilliantly, that’s saying a lot.

Nonetheless, I actually think Masks of the Illuminati is pretty good. Sure, Wilson’s usual writing quirks are still there, but unexpectedly, out of nowhere, he suddenly learns something resembling narrative discipline, and he ensures his use of his various recurring schticks are actually appropriate to the job at had. For instance, yet again he’s back to mimicing James Joyce at points, but this is generally pulled out for sections written from Joyce’s point of view, so the Joyce-isms are justified by the premise.

(One might argue that that’s also true in Schrödinger’s Cat, since that’s a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot which is consciously borrowing from Ulysses, famously a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot, but in that context it doesn’t stick the landing because it’s also trying to do a dozen other things in a fairly disorganised fashion.)

More broadly, the whole arc of the novel is about an initiatory experience in which Babcock’s worldview is forcibly leapfrogged from a somewhat stuffy and old-fashioned Victorian mindset into a more postmodern outlook – so Wilson’s occasional drifts into experimentalism, his comedic asides, the sections of the book written as scripts (some including cinematic-style notes on shots), the obligatory hallucinatory trip at the end (likely induced by mescaline rather than LSD, but other than that a good old-fashioned Wilson standby), and all the rest are kind of apt in that sense.

In particular, such anachronistically experimental notes end up being a neat device for nudging the reader and reminding them that, despite appearances to the contrary, this is not a straight-up horror novel in the style of Arthur Machen, Robert Chambers, or Lovecraft (not credited in the text, obviously, but an entire strand of the story is a nicely-done riff on The Whisperer In Darkness) with a plot from straight out of Dennis Wheatley; that’s merely the subjective experience of Sir John, who has a worldview which reverts to that sort of thing when under stress.

In addition, whereas Schrödinger’s Cat had Wilson attempt address a large number of subjects in a fairly disorganised way, with the result that he touches on a lot of them in a fairly oversimplified manner, Masks sees him be a bit more careful about setting the boundaries of his narrative. Sure, there’s all sorts of nods to Schrödinger’s Cat and Illuminatus! scattered through the thing, with various characters here conceivably being ancestors or alternate versions of characters from those series, and there’s implications about deeper linkages and the possibility that World War I might have been the result of Illuminati machinations, but those are sideshows, and Wilson makes sure not to get bogged down in them. His story here is the psychological liberation of Sir John Babcock, and he focuses on that.

Wilson actually focusing on something is a novelty, but in this instance it pans out surprisingly well. The entire story spins a yarn about Crowley which, though fictional in its particulars, shows a fairly deep knowledge of Crowley’s life and philosophy and a fair amount of research; Wilson’s erudition on the subject is especially impressive when you remember he was writing at a time before some of the better biographies of Crowley were extant.

Indeed, it is possible to interpret the novel in an entirely sceptical manner – regarding any claims about the Golden Dawn (and therefore Crowley’s A.’.A.’., his Golden Dawn splinter group) having a sort of apostolic succession dating back to the Knights Templar and beyond as spurious and regarding the entire thrust of the novel as psychological, and not magical, and for the book to still tell a story with a satisfying narrative arc. Equally, you can read all sorts of additional stuff into it should you wish. Squaring that particular circle is difficult, and it’s impressive how well Wilson does it. Although Illuminatus! would forever be Wilson’s major claim to fame, Masks of the Illuminati is possibly a better novel if you are after something that resembles an actual novel, rather than a bullshit session between two stoned philosophical autodidacts.

Ready Illuminatus One

It’s a busy April somewhere in the 1970s. Just off the coast of west Africa, a coup sees the island of Fernando Poo become the biggest Cold War flashpoint since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Las Vegas, a biowarfare scientist’s erratic behaviour might compromise the security of the supervirus Anthrax Leprosy Pi. In Ingolstadt, a music festival that would make Woodstock look like a church picnic is set to raise the psychic energy necessary to enact a monstrous plan. In Atlantis, Howard the dolphin has spotted nefarious activities he’ll need his human allies to deal with. In the face of both the overt international crisis and the more esoteric matters bubbling under the surface, the bombing of the New York offices of Confrontation, a radical left-wing journal, and the disappearance of its editor Joe Malik would seem to be a minor matter. But hardened detectives Saul Goodman and Barney Muldoon discover in the wreckage a stash of memos on Malik’s “Illuminati project” – the product of research into the legendary global conspiracy of the same name.

It sounds too weird to be true – but Confrontation journalist George Dorn has been busted in Mad Dog, Texas by a sheriff who seems to have some decidedly Illuminated decorations in a back room at the local jailhouse, and then sprung from jail by a cadre of free market radicals. Whisked away to a golden submarine and introduced to international seafarer, ace attorney, and mystical leader Hagbard Celine, Dorn is about to discover that the Illuminati are all too real, and that their hidden hand is behind all of the above cosmological crises and more as they seek to Immanentize the Eschaton – or, to get away from the theological language, bring about the end of the world as we know it…

The Illuminatus! Trilogy was originally published in three volumes – The Eye In the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan – but was conceived by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea as a single book, and indeed is more generally available these days in omnibus editions collecting all three books than as separate volumes. Between this and the fairly extensive appendices, there’s a certain conscious riffing on the structure of The Lord of the Rings going on – along with innumerable other nods to other pop culture and counterculture touchstones. In constructing the novel Shea and Wilson touch on music, numerous strands of occultism and New Age thinking (with major doses of Crowley and Discordianism a key part of the curriculum), flavours of libertarianism ranging from Objectivism to Michael Moorcock-esque left-libertarianism, pulp sword and sorcery versions of the history of humanity, horny on main sexual fantasies, references to literary inspirations ranging from William Burroughs to James Joyce, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

All this is to add window dressing to what is ultimately a fairly thin main plot which, without the conspiracy theorising and the mysticism and the libertarian politics, could have been happily addressed in some 300 pages or so, rather than the cumbersome 800+ pages the trilogy actually weighs in at. However, a tight conspiracy thriller this is not: it’s more of a stoned countercultural morass of parodies which are slightly too on the nose, in-jokes which are milked entirely too often to stay funny, rambling conversations which come across as little more than student common room bullshit sessions given some conspiratorial bling, and a dense thicket of references.

Phantom Recollections of a Profane Youth

Some conspiracy theorists are merely remixers and collage artists, grabbing scraps of other people’s fringe research and assembling them into their own larger pattern. Alex Jones, Bill Cooper, David Icke, and Jim Keith all fit into this category. Other works of conspiracy literature, however, are more original. In some cases, like Martin Cannon’s essay The Controllers or William Bramley’s The Gods of Eden, they look over the existing literature, do a bit of their own legwork and hypothesising, and propose a genuinely new – albeit spurious – concept. In other cases, like the original Alternative 3, the conspiracy theory is constructed out of whole cloth as a deliberate hoax. Then there are those rarer cases, where a novel conspiracy theory appears a priori – constructed not from an eccentric interpretation of existing research and evidence, and not from a deliberate joke, but as an expression of the writer’s idiosyncratic worldview.

And surely, in the modern history of the world, few worldviews have been quite as eccentric as James Shelby Downard’s.

Downard was never exactly famous in his lifetime. Born in 1913 and dying in 1998, he seems to have toiled away in obscurity for much of his mortal span. In the 1970s he appeared on Sirius Rising, an audio lecture in which he assisted Jim Brandon in laying out a theory that secret societies on Earth were trying to contact extraterrestrial intelligences from Sirius – an idea reported by Robert Anton Wilson in his Cosmic Trigger as “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all” (and as the author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, he’d have heard a fair few of those theories).

A little later, Downard would show up in the company of Michael Hoffman, infamous Holocaust denier and antisemite (Downard, alas, would have few qualms about expressing his own racist views from time to time in his writing), who would produce an edited version of one of Downard’s essays, King-Kill/33°; Adam Parfrey, founder of Feral House, would include the essay in his first edition of Apocalypse Culture (in the revised version it’s switched out for another Downard essay, The Call to Chaos), and an unexpurgated version of it – the “pure Downard” rendition, if you will – appeared in Secret & Suppressed as Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism.

Downard’s theory, as outlined in King-Kill/33° and The Call to Chaos, was that major world events – the Trinity nuclear weapons test, the Moon landing, the Kennedy Assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and so on – were all orchestrated by the Freemasons not necessarily because they valued the direct cause-and-effect results of those events, but because they played a crucial role in vast symbolic rituals intended to shape the psyche of humanity as a whole. Perhaps only Alan Moore’s dizzying (and specifically fictional) theory of the Ripper murders being committed to resonate with London’s sacred architecture, as outlined in From Hell, would ever come close to Downardian territory back in the 1990s when these essays first hit the scene.

Pickin’ Up Truth Vibrations, Part 8: David Icke, Second-Rate Dick

David Icke has a new book out – The Trap – and though it should be pretty evident at this point that I think the man’s an especially nasty and hateful piece of work, I feel like looking away from what he’s doing is dangerous – he’s got too much influence on the hardcore fringe to be dismissed as an utter irrelevancy. I had no intention of paying money for the book, but I had an opportunity to look over a copy, and for the most part I thought that I wouldn’t need to cover it in detail after all – for there’s really very little in it which is actually new.

That said, what is new is absolutely risible.

Recycling material from book to book to book has been an Icke calling card for ages at this point, but The Trap is especially self-indulgent. With his previous book, Perceptions of a Renegade Mind, having released last year, there simply isn’t that much in the way of new developments for him to address. Oh, sure, stuff’s been happening and he does touch on stuff like Elon Musk’s abortive attempt to buy Twitter or other things which have outraged him, but in terms of major social trends there’s not much new under the sun compared to his previous book, other than COVID lockdowns have eased and so the backlash he was riding has died down.

In general, the overall tone of the book is somewhat similar to that one; lots of griping about the “woke”, lots of transphobia which, as I have explained over and over again in this series of articles, makes no sense in the context of Icke’s own cosmology, lots of conspiracism. There’s more autobiography – yet again combing his school days and picking out any minor lucky event as a cosmic sign he had a destiny of multiversal importance. The antisemitism is dialled back on somewhat – it’s still present, but the overt shouting about Sabbatean-Frankists has almost entirely disappeared bar from a brief reference to The Trigger.

Iff, You Can Keep Your Head When All Around You Are Losing Theirs…

As I’ve previously discussed on here, Wordsworth Editions’ Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural range includes a couple of volumes by Aleister Crowley. At the time they were published, these were departures from Wordsworth’s usual practice of concentrating on public domain material. (In the UK, as in much of the rest of the world, works published by Crowley in his lifetime entered the public domain after 2017.) Instead, they were the result of a deal reached between Wordsworth and one of Crowley’s magical orders, the Ordo Templi Orientis – specifically, the Caliphate faction which claims apostolic succession from Crowley via Karl Germer through Grady McMurty (AKA Hymenaeus Alpha) and which is currently led by William Breeze (AKA Hymenaeus Beta) – since they regard making Crowley’s texts available part of their sacred duties.

The first of these two volumes, which I reviewed previously, was The Drug and Other Stories, edited by David Tibet of Current 93 fame. The stories there in were by and large unrelated to one another – a lot of them had strands in common, largely based either on Crowley’s Thelemic philosophy or other pet themes of his, but they weren’t part of any sort of overarching continuity or closely thematically linked story-cycle. For this article, I’m going to cover The Simon Iff Stories & Other Works, which collect those ofCrowley’s short stories which were genuinely meant to go together, either via the use of recurring characters in an ongoing fictional series or because they were developed as a group to address different perspectives on the same central theme.

These come in two chunks. The last fifth or so of the volume collects Golden Twigs, a series of short stories inspired by The Golden Bough by James Frazer, but by far the bulk of the collection consists of the Simon Iff stories, Crowley’s detective series. (Not collected here is the sole full-length novel featuring Iff, Moonchild.) A caveat should be borne in mind, which is that both of these were largely written whilst Crowley was living in the US, and first appeared when he was working as editor of The International, a literary magazine put out by the pro-German propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, whose Fatherland newspaper advocated for the US to, if not intervening on the side of Germany in WWI, at least remain neutral.

Writing for both The International and The Fatherland, Crowley claims to have been acting on behalf of the British secret service, with the idea being that he’d make Viereck’s propaganda sufficiently hyperbolic in tone as to discredit it and ruin its power as propaganda. Crowley may well be lying about doing this on behalf of British intelligence, but one would think that if this were not true he’d have received some level of hassle from the authorities over it after the War; so far as anyone can tell he never did, even when he was coming under scrutiny for all sorts of other reasons.

Nonetheless, in my review of The Drug and Other Stories I noted that Crowley’s already rather variable quality dipped during the International years. (If you remember, I thought that of all the stories in that book only The Testament of Magdalen Blair was really a keeper.) Perhaps this was a factor of him deliberately dragging his feet as part of the mission to sabotage Viereck, or maybe he was just cranking out crap to pay the bills – for his International job came hot on the heels of him almost running out of money.

Either way, I wasn’t sure about the stories from this period of his work when I read the other volume, and a clear majority of the material here comes from that period. Seven of the eight Golden Twigs stories made it into The International, as did the first sequence of Simon Iff tales (later dubbed by Crowley The Scrutinies of Simon Iff). Crowley had knocked out by far the longest of the Simon Iff sequences, Simon Iff In America, with the intention of running it in The International, but was fired before he had the chance; the remaining stories consist of fairly brief little collections, Simon Iff Abroad and Simon Iff, Psychoanalyst, both of which seem to be the skeletons of longer sequences left either unwritten or lost. Let’s see how much of this I can stomach before I toss the book away like I did The Drug…

Behold! The Proto-Q

The Malleus Maleficarum is a textbook on witchcraft attributed to Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, two Dominican friars who, like many of that order, served as Inquisitors for the Catholic Church. How much of the blame actually resides with them is debatable; Sprenger’s only name was only associated with it decades after its original publication in 1486, and whilst he and Kramer were undeniably associated in some respect it’s suggested that his name was attached to the book to benefit from his somewhat better reputation.

You see, Kramer wrote the book whilst under a cloud: after trying to kick off some witch-hunts in Innsbruck, he had been turfed out of the city by the local bishop, who denounced him as being mentally unsound. The bishop may have had good reason to do so: Kramer’s own behaviour had been deeply questionable, including getting so fixated on the sexual habits of one of the women he’d accused of witchcraft (his grounds for suspicion being that she wasn’t coming to his sermons) that the rest of the tribunal stopped the trial. The theory goes that Kramer was so annoyed by this, he wrote a massive tome about witchcraft essentially as a Renaissance-era equivalent of posting an angry manifesto on an incel forum.

The Malleus has subsequently become infamous for its role in the witchcraft persecutions which became all the more fashionable in subsequent centuries. It should be recalled that in the era that Kramer was working in, the Inquisition wasn’t making witches the main focus of its work. The business of the Inquisition was going after heretics and apostates; even the persecution of Jews by the Inquisition was justified under this umbrella. (Specifically, the Spanish Inquisition was going after Jewish people who had converted to Christianity, or whose ancestors had converted, but were accused of continuing to hold their old beliefs anyway.)

Burroughs’ Nightmare Geography

Though the autobiographical Junky and Queer were written before it (and Junky was published substantially prior to it and made a small splash), there’s no question that Naked Lunch and the Nova Trilogy were the works which made William Burroughs truly infamous, particularly since they involved the debut of his bizarre form of prose surrealism. Likewise, though he’d put out a few pieces after it, a case can be made that the Red Night Trilogy is Burroughs’ final work of significant substance. Released over the course of the 1980s, as the HIV epidemic impacted multiple subcultures that Burroughs had long had a foot in (most particularly the gay community and the world of intravenous drug users), it’s not really about AIDS (even though a plague is featured in Cities of the Red Night) so much as it’s setting a capstone on his experimental fiction.

As much progress had been made in the intervening decades, society was still relentlessly unsympathetic towards drug users and homosexuals alike (let alone homosexual drug users); Burroughs, for his part, remained unwilling to compromise. Merely rehashing the tools and techniques developed in his glory days would just be going over old ground; for this last charge, Burroughs changed his angle of attack, bringing back more stretches of comparatively straightforward and intelligible narrative whilst reserving his more bizarre tools for when they would be most effective.

Cities of the Red Night

Burroughs introduces this opening novel of the trilogy by explaining his inspiration: reading about the pirate republics of the 17th and 18th Centuries, particularly the “Libertatia” colony supposedly founded by Captain Mission (though this one may be apocryphal), as examples of communities working on a voluntarist philosophy in stark contrast to the hierarchical societies of the time.

This prompts Burroughs to speculate as to what could have been had the pirate republics made common cause with the colonised peoples in the regions they established themselves (rather than acting as, in effect, unlicensed colonisers) as well as each other, so as to provide a disparate source of resistance against the authoritarian powers of the time. Burroughs posits that the US defeat in Vietnam indicates that the empires of the age would not have been able to root out such an insurgency any more than the US was able to defeat the Viet Cong – especially when by Burroughs’ estimate the technological gap between the pirate republics and the Spanish or British would have been significantly less than that between the US and the Vietnamese insurgents.

What unfolds after this statement of intent is, in its own way, just as bizarre as anything from the Nova Trilogy, but the methodology taken is rather different. Burroughs’ arsenal of occult obsessions (improvised chaos magic proliferates), sexual fetishes (boners and jizz everywhere), and surreal/morbid imagery (many, many nooses and hangings) is still very much in place, but this time he doesn’t turn all the dials up to 11 and deploy everything at once.