Archive for February, 2010

Not Entirely About Baphomet

BY: admin

There used to be a show called Creature Features. My memory of it was that it ran on Saturday afternoons, and I’m not sure why this sort of thing was on during the day as the content seemed inappropriate for young impressionable minds (read mine). I would swear that my memory is faulty, but Wikipedia reports that it did run on Saturdays, alternating with Kung Fu Theater, so there you go. Saturdays, after cartoons, the kids get a dose of old school horror. (Though, I wonder if it was Creature Double Feature.)

Anyway, the only episode I have any real recollection of involved a mad scientist and a head in a jar. An evil head, badly burned, with its jaw wired shut, complete with a malevolent stare and an ominous soundtrack. All it could do was stare, but it did so with such malice and evil intent that, well, thirty-years plus later I still remember it. (And the head got out, it seems, or it influenced the mad scientist’s assistant enough that he burned the lab down. And there’s something about the monster, with its head attached, attacking people on a boat, and I don’t recall if this is pre- or post- jar time.)

It’s funny how these things stick in your head and then percolate up the surface later and you may not consciously realize where they came from. Witness “The Reading” dream from The Potemkin Mosaic where Harry is nothing more than a head and a spine in a jar.

So, yes, floating heads. Heads in jars. Apparitions.

Gustave Moreau’s picture of Salomé encountering the floating head of John the Baptist is another one of those images burned in my head. After he died in the late 19th century, his Parisian apartment was turned into a museum. They’ve kept a few of the room as they were, artfully and artificially arranged so as to provide educational opportunities for modern visitors as they file through. The real treasures are in the back where you can paw through rack after rack of Moreau’s art. Moreau liked to paint mythological scenes in fairly classical style, but then he came back and layered on the ornamentation. Layers and layers of it. In the case of John’s floating head, it’s a layer of pale line art. A ghost map of etheric symbolism.

Trust me. When you see the physical painting, you’re going to start trying to get a better angle on it to see the other layer.

Another hop. Grant Morrison, in the first volume of The Invisibles, posits that the Templar treasure was the head of John the Baptist. It spewed an unending stream of glossalalia, and as Robin pointed out to the agents of the Adversary, what the head was saying was nonsense because it meant everything to anyone. Whatever you thought it was saying was true, because the sounds coming from its lips had no meaning until they reached your ear.

When you look at the lines on Moreau’s painting, what you see may be nothing like what I see.

Hop again. Tim Powers, in Three Days to Never, has a magic bus that is guided by the prophetic head of Baphomet. Powers is one of our secret historians, a writer who adheres to the known facts as much as possible and who discovers all manner of strange and wondrous ways to link the underlying inconsistencies together. Three Days to Never concerns Charlie Chaplain, Albert Einstein, time travel, and a precognitive head on a bus. Plus other things, as all Powers novels do.

In fact, I think I’ve distracted myself by realizing I need to re-read The Invisibles and Three Days to Never that I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say about Baphomet in the first place.

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?