An exclusive report on the graffiti and what it might mean has been posted at Fortean Times. My favorite of the carvings made by the incarcerated is the picture of Pope Clement V (as a snake) getting speared by a vengeful archangel. Take that, you bastard Pope!

Lost Graffiti of the Templars (text and photos by Jerry Glover)

I recently acquired a copy of Blair MacKenzie Blake’s The Wickedest Books in the World (Confesssions of an Aleister Crowley Bibliophile), and while I don’t suffer from the same desire to aquire first editions like Blake does, I found the book to an engaging and entertaining read. Especially the section near the end where he described his vision of turning Boleskine House into “Crowleyland.”

(Blake, as he notes more than once in the book, is still under the influence of his desire, needing on a copy of The Book of Thoth, one of 200 copies produced in 1944, right at the height of British wartime restrictions on making such extravagances. It’s printed on Arnold unbleached handmade paper (from the Chiswick Press), bound in half-russet morocco leather, raised bands and gold-blocking on the spine, Egyptian-themed boards, and illustrated throughout with both colored and black and white images of the tarot deck as designed by Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris. In case you have a copy lying around, and are wondering what to do with it.)

The Wickedest Books in the World is an oversized volume filled with gorgeous pictures of the first editions (photographed by Duncan Blake), and Blake’s fervent enthusiasm for his bibliophilic condition becomes infectious. By the end of his confessions, I was looking dismissively at the two shelves of Crowley books I have. All reprints. Nothing remotely close to a first edition up there. I was such a dilletante.

Blake clearly recognizes the allure that collecting something that is quantifiable rare, and he doesn’t dwell overmuch on the psychology of the collector. Though he does touch on the myth that Crowley firsts—because of the exacting publication specifications on some of them—still bear an imprint of the Great Beast himself on them, making them more like talismans than bunch of pages stuck together with glue and possibly more unsavory things. Blake’s focus is more on the linguistic fever and mania that comes over those who obsess over Crowley’s output. It becomes so easy to slip into a world populated by esoteric symbols.

Although the proprieter didn’t wear a Phrygian cap, Sanka, and a tourmaline ring seemed promising. Let’s have a look at those worm-eaten grimoires and dusty alchemical tracts—their moldering pages copiously illustrated with a mythic zoology, abtruse glyphs, and occult heraldry. Where were the peacock tails, emblematic paintings of the mystic marriage/conjunctio, and resplendent phoenixes? Further exploration of the place revealed no alchemical menagerie. Not even a tiny back room containing the revolving wheel of the zodiac, celestial-astral liquid in copper vessles, flaming athanors, curcurbites, or the prism of sorcerer’s bottles filled with the frozen flow of silver. Our pockets were filled with francs and bezants, and we damn near had the effluvium of Babalon tucked in our wallets. If nothing else, that ought to put us in a priveleged position in the multiverse.
    —(Blake, reminiscing about Parisian bookstores, p. 42)

I wish my local bookstores were more like this.

They’re also a nexus point for a number of personal sites about the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O, Dr. John Dee, Enochian matters, Chaos Magick, Qabalah, the Tarot, Thelema (and the list goes on).

I hadn’t realized they’ve got all of Crowley’s Equinox material up there (wherein I finally found the picture of the Silent Watcher I’ve been looking for for the last six months). If you’re not obsessed about finding first editions, you can’t go wrong with online versions. (The link there goes to Blair MacKenzie Blake’s book on being a Crowley bibliophile, which I’m currently reading and enjoying quite a bit.)

You may also follow Hermetic.com updates on twitter and Facebook.

It’s one of those systems that takes about three minutes to explain, and over a lifetime, you’ll probably not work through every thread possible with the cards. Mainly, it starts with a single event and/or individual, and each player proceeds to lay down a card, adding to the “and this happened next!” scenario generation. Each tarot suit is mapped to a specific facet of world-building, and each card has its only spin on that facet based on the card’s own meaning. About the use of the Crowley deck, Anders says: “[The game] can be run using other decks of course, but often the images are less helpful and the meanings more psychological. Knowing the symbolism and meanings of the cards makes the game far more entertaining and flexible, but just looking at the images can give inspiration.”

It’s all about making the world based on autonomic suggestions from the cards.

Anders’ site has a lengthy walkthrough of game play, which demonstrates evocatively the wealth of possibilities available to febrile imaginations.

The Dodal deck (c. 1701) is one of the few complete examples of the Tarot of Marseille that is still extant, and time has not been kind to the colors of the cards. The Marseille design has been traumatized severly over the years (including versions that invert the color schemes and reduce the palette to a few tones). Florney’s passion over the last decade plus has been to recreate these decks in their original glory and to make them available for the tarot enthusiast.

The interview contains some fascinating discussions about the variances between cards in the existing Dodal decks that Florney had access to during his restoration process.

I’m partial to the Noblet myself, but it might be fun to have a copy of the Dodal on hand as well.

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.

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]

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

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 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.