Erik Davis and Rider-Waite-Smith

BY: Mark

We have much love for Erik Davis around here, and not just because he introduced us to the idea of being an “occulture critic” (in his 33 1/3 monograph on Led Zeppelin IV). You can look at his work and what Mark Pilkington is doing with Strange Attractor, and pretty much see the model we’re working from.

However, the reason we dig Erik Davis today is the revelation of his new column at Hilobrow.com called “Pop Arcana.” The first entry details the contributions of Pamela Colman Smith to that most iconic of tarot decks, the Rider-Waite. Go, and read about “The Comic Book of Thoth.”

[via our tarot-lovin' pal, El Dragón, who wages the good fight for organics at Fair Food Fight]

Toward a Definition of Purpose

BY: Mark

I’ve had this domain for more than a decade, and have never really found a suitable use for it. Finally, it seemed like I should either use it or let it go, and that started a lengthy process of trying to find something that would appropriate for the moniker of “darkline.” This search coincided with two other things: (a) a desire to get back to some semblance of blogging, and (b), a realization that investigating the occult was going to be an ongoing theme in my work, CODEX books aside.

I’ve been writing books fairly seriously for a few years now, and as it’s a fairly solitary process, I’ve begun to miss the elements of both a forum and a community. Instead of trying to find one (see OPi8.com and the culture logs we tried to build back in the day) or show up on the doorstep of another, I mulled over what it was that I really wanted. As much as some of the other occult and esoteric communities interest me, they seem to be too focused in their efforts (and the materials they cover). As anyone who has read Lightbreaker can attest, my issue isn’t one of specialization.

Plus when you get right down to it, I’m a better writer than I am a magician. And there’s your focus: this’ll be a writer talking about magic and the occult. Perhaps, a few years down the road, we’ll all discover we’ve become magicians. At least, that’s the idea.

There will be no set publication periodicity here. Not in the beginning, at least. The idea is to put up material as I find time. I do hope to add some more contributors so it won’t be a solitary voice blathering about the shiny things. Throw this site into your RSS reader, and we’ll all be pleasantly surprised when the content starts flowing regularly.

The intent is collate and discuss, and with that in mind, “reviews” per se will be one-sided. I’m not really keen in getting back into the reviewing business, but I am interested in what’s being done in the field. A book (or CD or film or magick ritual) may be the topic of post, but it’ll be more of a starting point for conversation. That’s more of a caveat to people who would like to send stuff. Yes, I’m happy to accept material, but realize that a traditional review probably won’t be in the offing.

Beyond that, let me leave you with the little piece that used to be the entirety of content at DARKLINE.COM. I was happy to discover I still had it, as it says everything that needs to be said.

Sigil

-m

The Chinon Parchment

BY: Mark

Central to Barbara Frale’s recent book, The Templars: The Secret History Revealed (which, I have to admit, I have not read yet), is the discovery of the Chinon Parchment, which contains a transcript of the last interrogation of Templar leaders by Church interrogators.

By the 14th century, the Templars had were no longer a “blunt instrument” used by the Church to drive Muslims out of the Holy Land, they had become an institution unto themselves, both militarily and financially. It was the financial bit that got under the King of France’s nose. As Philip IV had the current Pope, Clement V, under his thumb, an order was sent out to imprison the Templars and seize all their assets. On Friday, October 13, 1307, the Templar Grandmaster Jacques de Molay and nearly every other Templar in France was arrested. Clement V waited until November to issue Pastoralis Praeeminentiae, the papal bull that instructed every Christian monarch in Europe to follow Philip’s lead and to sweep up the Templars.

The Templars were then subjected to all the fun bits of the Inquisition, most confessed, and then later recanted, which set up an awkward situation of them all being considered as lapsed heretics (forced confessions notwithstanding). Philip, not finding all the cash and trinkets that he had been led to believe that the Templars held, continued to press Clement V, and in 1312, the Pope issued Vox in excelso, abolishing the Order. Con norma irreformabile e perpetual, the 14th century version of “with extreme prejudice.” DeMolay and a few other leaders were burned at the stake on March 18, 1314.

The legends started almost immediately. De Molay was said to have cursed both King Philip and Pope Clement V as he was being burned, saying that they would meet him before God by the end of the year. Both men may have laughed it off at the time, but Clement V died a month later and Philip had an “accident” while hunting during the fall.

“Accident.” I’m just perpetuating the mythology, aren’t I?

Anyway, a few years ago (our time, now), Barbara Frale, a Vatican historian, stumbled across the Chinon Parchment in the bowels of the Secret Archives of the Vatican (read the room in back where all the uncatalogued paperwork has been stacked for the last eight hundred years). It contains a transcript of the visit several Cardinals made to the castle of Chinon where a number of Templar leaders were being held. In 1308. If you read the transcript, you’ll notice that, in addition to confessing, the Templar leadership were all absolved of the crimes they were accused of.

Now, if you’re absolved of your crimes, then doesn’t it seem somewhat unfair that you’re later hauled out of bed and burned at the stake for those same crimes?

The remnants of the Templar Order certainly thought so. Shortly after the publication of Frale’s book, they sued the Vatican.

The bit in the Chinon Parchment that really piqued the conspiracy theorist in me was that of all the Templars at Chinon only Hugo de Pérraud admitted to seeing the ‘head of an idol’ (one of the purported Templar treasures) while in Montpellier, in the possession of Brother Peter Alemandin, Preceptor of Montpellier. The others were not asked this question, nor did they admit to it. Why was Hugo singled out for this question, and why was it not asked of the others?

The Enochian Manuscripts

BY: Mark

The Magickal Review has put up digital copies of Dr. John Dee’s original journals. During the 16th century, Dr. Dee and his scryer, Edward Kelley, attempted to contact angelic beings, and the results of their efforts have passed the library of esoterica as the Enochian Calls.

The above link takes you to the introduction of the material, which includes MS.Sloane 3188, MS.Sloane 3189, MS.Sloane 3191, and MS.Cotton Appendix XLVI Part I and MS.Cotton Appendix XLVI Part II.

The Magical Review is currently preparing a complete edition of the Spirit Actions to be entitled The Angelic Conferences of Dr. John Dee & Sir Edward Kelley. Publication is not yet set, but this page will allow you to sign up for notification when the book is released.

Wandering the stacks at the Munich Digitisation Centre

BY: Mark

We’re giving this link its own post because there’s much to love here. The Munich Digitisation Centre at the Bavarian State College has an extensive collection of digitized books, including a number of medieval alchemy treatises. One of my favorite links is their tag cloud page. Talk about visual browsing. Each book has been carefully digitized, and each one is the sort of archaic manuscript that makes the book lover salivate.

Books on Alchemy .. Books on Magic .. Exegeses of the Bible ..

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

BY: Mark

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian philosopher and scholar who lived from 1463 until 1494. During his short life, he studied theology and philosophy, dabbled in the Cabala, wrote an extensive series of treaties on all possible subjects (900 in all, collected as Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalasticae et theologicae in Rome). While some were vaguely heretical, they realistically just pointed out the lack of theological enlightenment of the era. He sought a synthesis of religion and philosophy, attempting to counter the spread of pure humanism with a bit of critical thinking. He saw Hebrew and Talmudic sources as viable texts and generally got into trouble over his eagerness and willingess to be a free thinker. His piece, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” is one of the landmark pieces of the Italian Renaissance (some go so far as to call it a “manifesto”).

Parts of his Oration can be found here in Latin, Italian, and English. A complete translation can be found here.

Walter Pater’s history of Pico in context of the Renaissance can be found here.

The Book of Soyga

BY: Mark

The Book of Soyga is an anonymous 16th century magical treatise that is first mentioned by Dr. John Dee during one of his initial encounters with the angels of the skrying stones. “Oh, my great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those tables of Soyga,” Dee said to Uriel. “Et haec revelantur in virtute et veritate non vi,” Uriel replied, deferring any further conversation about the Book of Soyga to the archangel Michael who “est Angelus, qui illuminat gressus tuos.”

When Dee flees to Europe in the last few years of the 16th century, he is forced to leave behind his immense library which is pillaged. Presumably Dee took the Book of Soyga with him (records indicate that there were a number of crates shipped along his route to Eastern Europe and back) which meant that the manuscript wasn’t necessarily one of the ones that was surreptitiously purloined. Though, between 1583 and 1595, Dee had misplaced his copy of the Book of Soyga. There are two copies of the manuscript in existance now: one in the Bodleian collection at the University of Oxford (Bodleian 308) and one in the Sloane collection at the British Museum (Sloane 8). Jim Reed, in his discussion of the Soyga manuscript, argues that Sloane 8 is Dee’s personal copy.

How the manuscript hid in plain view for nearly four hundred years is a simple matter of the title page which bore the inscription “Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor” (the manuscript was catalogued as being the Book of “Aldaraia” and, well, there are lots of books catalogued out there). While portion of the Book of Soyga deals with the fairly standard fare of the era (tables of names of angels and demons, astrological charts, conjurations and invocations), a good portion of its emphasis is on the permutations and combinations of letter values, including the heretofore undeciphered tables in the back. (It is Reed who cracks the code by which these tables are generated, though no one has been able to explain the use of these tables. Reed connects them with the spreading fascination in that era with Cabala — the Catholic version of Kabalah.) Eight of these tables show up in Dee’s Book of Enoch (Sloane 3189), a clear demonstration of the Book of Soyga’s influence on Dee’s Enochian system.

One of Reed’s arguments is that, due to the transcription errors which appear in Sloane 8 and Bodleian 308, the existent copies of the Book of Soyga are generation “C” removed from an original “A.” Reed’s formula for the tables — X = N + f(W) where f(W) is taken modulo 23 — demonstrates errors in the existing tables and his comparison reveals enough common errors to argue that both versions were copied from the same “B” iteration (with the divergent errors in Sloane 8 and Bodleian 308 arising from their transcription).

So, we’ve got an anonymous 16th century manuscript that appears without any antecedents and with no authorial attribution and which concerns itself with the essential combination and re-combination of language and which is based on an even more mysterious manuscript that is still unknown. Most of the commentary I’ve been able to find on the Book of Soyga concerns itself with the contents of the manuscript and not its history. Or its use.

Well, gee, I’ve got a few ideas.

In the Beginning. . .

BY: Mark

In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae super faciem abyssi, et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Dixitque Deus: “Fiat lux”. Et facta est lux. Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona et divisit Deus lucem ac tenebras.
    —Genesis 1:1-4

It’s the “et divisit Deus lucem ac tenebras”–”and God separated light from dark”–part that concerns us here. That line that separates the light from the dark.