|
|
|
Ashé Journal, Vol 7, Issue 2, 242-250, Fall 2008.  Reviews
The Red Goddess, Peter Grey This is a beautiful, provocative, thought-provoking book, one man’s journey in search of the obscure object of his desire—full of odd typography, robust, sometimes rough language and a £37 price tag. Using the latest research from books such as Strange Angel, Love and Rockets and The Unknown God the author blends his own narrative around that which he sees as the three pillars of the Babalonian mythos—Enochian Magick, Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons. Thus one reads:
Eunuchs have been used traditionally to serve the Goddess, often as sodomitic dog priests. That name is not a slur but most likely comes from their dog position sex. These were important priests who served the ancient Love Goddess by sacrificing their reproductive power. They are no longer men. They cannot penetrate the mystery. I will not advocate the joys of self-castration or the smooth root of the Skopsie, but it is certainly one way to serve Our Lady. I prefer Magick with the balls to push shaft deep into the crimson petals of the Goddess. Babalon is modern goddess, one of the most recent to emerge from the cauldron of serendipity. Even so, some, Peter Grey amongst them, would claim she has antique roots. She reemerged in the modern world via the writings of Aleister Crowley, who is also responsible for renovating the old English spelling as Babalon, which has a significant numerology of 156 as opposed to 165. For Babylon, is an ancient Mesopotamian city, the Bête Noire of the ancient Hebrews, and therefore a natural cipher for corruption and hubris in the strange apocalyptic end game of the Biblical New Testament. I’m talking of the Book of Revelation, a book that exerted a powerful influence on Crowley’s imagination and one way or another figured large in his new Thelemic mythos. The Book of Revelation is widely believed to contain much hidden and indeed Kabbalistic symbolism. So no surprise that the “anti-gods” of that book turn out to be, according to Thelemites, the true corrective of the modern age. The goddesses of ancient Babylon were Innana, Ishtar and Astarte. These are “Red Goddesses” in more ways than one—and possible role models for the modern woman who is powerful, self sufficient and above all sexual. Whether modern “scarlet woman” is, as Herodotus suggested, willing to give herself to any man for any small coin, seems unlikely these days somehow. So in as much as the author of Revelation was saying that it’s the goddesses that really bring society down, Crowley and the Thelemites say the opposite. Few would argue that Grey’s Red Goddess is a Mesopotamian creation. Most of us accept Mesopotamia, as the “cradle of civilization” and the dispersal hub for many important things: writing, astrology, technology, religion, etc etc. I must admit my own dealings with “The Red Goddess” are in her Egyptian territory (see The Bull of Ombos). Grey devotes a short chapter to the exploration of her possible Egyptian roots, although this is maybe a clear example of where the works of the Victorian Egyptophile Gerald Massey provide an inadequate guide to the material. As far as I know, Egypt did indeed benefit from early contacts with Mesopotamia before the rise of the Pharaohs (i.e. 4000bce), but its main development was independent. So for example although writing may have been invented in Mesopotamia, it was also invented quite independently in Egypt, presumably for the same imperative. The earliest reference in Egypt to the Semitic goddesses Astarte and Anat belongs to the reign of Thutmoses c. 1500bce, both love goddesses were married to ultimate “Red Bull” Seth. But my Egyptian “Red Goddess” has to be Hathor, a goddess as old as time, goddess of the cattle cult (hence the horns) she is indeed sensual, sexual and intoxicated. (See Hathor’s Secrets) When old man Ra is down in the dumps she lifts her skirts and gives him a laugh. Having said something of the mythology of Innana et. al, Grey soon leaves behind the ancient world. I definitely wanted more info on Mesopotamian religion, as his analysis is consistently interesting and engaging. He then follows the tracks of the Belle Dame Sans Merci, through the writings of her numerous modern devotees, including John Dee, Marquis de Sade, Jack Parsons and indeed many a modern mage, including his own dealing with she who must be obeyed, which brings to mind the lines of the song “my knuckles are bleeding and my knees are raw.” This reworking of the Crowleyian material on the nature of the scarlet women is seen largely through his poetry and forms The Red Goddess’ vibrant core. Grey has no time for the post modern obsession with transgender and reclaiming the “blossoms of bone.” “Eunuchs” he tells us, “cannot penetrate the mystery.” But there again for me, Babalon might be like “post porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle—the love of whose life is famously the tortured Les, a female to male transsexual. So all in all an interesting and provocative monograph; worthy I would think of some wider circulation. It might be that this first edition which is perhaps aimed at the “collector” for whom “the medium is the message.” Its white wibeline cover with red embossing is very striking; there are tipped in illustrations, one in color. And indeed interior text is black and occasional red. Even so I’d be happy to read it in a standard hardback “Starfire” mode or even a good trade paperback. But whatever way you read it, it’s definitely worth a spin. Available from: http://www.scarletimprint.com From Mandrake Speaks (mandrake-subscribe@yahoogroups.com).
The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected
Queer Poems, Jeffery Beam
The lover does not come to their campfire In both the quiet and more vatic registers Beam’s poems seem to work towards an openness, a kind of ecstasy—in the original sense of that word, a transport out of the body, here to a hypothetical space beyond the confines of ordinary language itself, since we dealing with writing. In their best moments, these poems do somehow or other manage to press against such limits, of sound, sense, imagination and when they do, sex and soul, landscape and language manage to come together with a kind of glittering joy. In other cases they almost do, and just once in while they fold into a sort of soft abstractness that is unfortunate as in, for example, “A Welcome to the Black Sun” and “His Penis” with its slipping sequence of flower and color references that faintly recall the most exasperating weaknesses, both sentimental and intellectual, of the “New Age.” Of course, it may be the fate of every ecstasy to be followed by a comedown. However, great sections of the collection soar above such problems of focus by anchoring the surging rhetoric to concrete reference points. The sequence of poems on Von Gloeden’s famous photographs comes to mind, which with its specificity, descriptive economy and deep, pervasive sense of longing, is one of The Beautiful Tendons’ strongest moments. Indeed, these pieces suggest, given Beam’s ability to tease fresh “information” from such familiar images, that he is particularly able as a poet of sensibility and visual response. Work like the Von Gloedon sequence, and the more successful poems of pleasure and ecstasy are what one takes away from the pages of The Beautiful Tendons, and one remembers them for their energy and their audacity. Beam is poet of evident large ambitions and, to a significant extent he succeeds in achieving them.
Rapture for Big Sinners: 66+6 Things
to Do Before and After the Righteous Lift Off, Ian Phillips Feliz Rumpus, Rapture’s satyr cum narrator, explains the Rapture to those who really need to understand it: “those left behind or those who just plain damned plan to stay behind.” I very much enjoyed Phillips earlier collection of literotica Satyriasis, and this work manifests the same devilish streak of humor. Here, however, it is craftily illustrated to create a visual piece that is far more entertaining than the simple sum of its extraordinary parts. Rapture is an intelligent satyrical send-up of the end of days disguised as a children’s storybook. A great Yule gift for the friends you know that will be left behind when the big day comes.
The Complete Magician’s Tables, Stephen
Skinner Correspondences have always been a key component of magical practice. Aleister Crowley’s 777 has long been the standard tabular reference for these occult affinities. Now Stephan Skinner has produced a compendium that goes many steps further, containing four times more tables than Crowley’s seminal work. Skinner draws on classic grimoires as well as the work of Peter de Abano, Abbott Trithemium, Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. John Dee, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, Thomas Rudd and others. The cover’s claim to be “the most complete tabular set of Magic, Kabbalistic, Angelic, Astrologic, Alchemic, Demonic, Geomantic, Grimoire, Gematria, I Ching, Tarot, Pagan Pantheon, Plant, Perfume and Character Correspondences,” though sounding of hyperbole may not be far off the mark. This is a truly remarkable reference book that, I suspect, will prove as indispensable for many magicians as Crowley’s. Well worth the ticket price!
The Horn of Evenwood, Robin
Artisson
The Study of Witchcraft: A Guidebook
to Advanced Wicca, Deborah Lipp
Introduction to Emptiness As Taught In
Tsong-kha-pa’s Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path, Guy Newland
God In Your Body: Kabbalah,
Mindfulness and Embodied Spiritual Practice, Jay Michaelson
|
|
|||||||
|
|
The Beautiful Tendons brings
together over three and half decades of Jeffery Beam’s queer-centered and
homoerotic verse. Not surprisingly, therefore, it offers a view into a poetic
universe that feels simultaneously intimate and far ranging. Happily, it
is a universe that, in this poet’s hands, is well worth getting to know.
Beam, the author of several other print collections as well as an audio/spoken
word work, clearly wants to claim his place in the lineage of Whitman with
this collection. The work rings with the same vitality and enlarged vision
of the possibilities of the body, of the erotic. It is marked by the same
cult of the “wild” mystic and the same generous pantheism. Many of the poems
crackle with fire: “DickEssence,” for example, whose celebrational catalogue
of images circling around (as you might imagine from the title) the penis,
has great strengths of metaphor managing to startle, charm and stir at the
same time. In these lines, the cock becomes “a thousand million angels” and
a “side-winder hissing at jubilant bladed cowboys” in turn. Moreover, if
the mythological and religious invocations at the end of the poem feel a
little too familiar, they close off the spiraling language of earlier lines
with great economy. In other cases, the poems are smaller, quieter without
losing power. In "Where Runs the Sap" the verse takes on stillness and surface
tension that suggest both the limits of narrative and of feeling in its depiction
of love’s anticipation: 
I appreciated Artisson’s earlier book, The Witching Way of Hollow Hill. Though at times rambling,
his debut possessed a raw intensity and effectively conveyed a wide swath of
material. The Horn of Evenwood, subtitled “A
Grimoire of Sorcerous Operations, Charms and Devices of Witchery” and also
called “The Master’s Book of Conjury” or “The Witchfather’s Bloodless Bones,”
is not as far-ranging as its predecessor. It is, however, a much tighter work
for being more focused. Drawing on the meme of British traditional Craft,
Artisson has produced a truly unique and exciting modern grimoire. His writing
style continues to be evocative and poetic without falling off the precipice of
medieval recreationist flourish. Artisson covers everything from the inner
mysteries to wortcunning (herb lore) and includes several original (and highly practical)
ritual workings including ones entitled: “Biting the Tongues of Serpents,”
“Summoning the Witch-Dream by Moth Flight,” “Binding the Lovers One to the
Other,” “The Fruitful Working of the Womb-Seed” and “A Pavis from Foul
Imprecations.” I know that at times Artisson’s persona has caused no small
amount of controversy online, but his books are first-rate and novel editions
to the milieu of Craft literature.
Longtime practitioner Deborah Lipp’s Study of Witchcraft offers more than the standard Wicca
101 course. Though maybe not a complete Master’s degree, as the backcover
claims, the book certainly constitutes a complete graduate level course in the
roots and development of modern Witchcraft. Lipp presents a sound history of
the Craft with original insight into the diverse threads of modern Wicca
(traditional, eclectic, radical, solitary). Her analysis of the influences that
assisted in the development of each is worth the read alone. The annotated
reading lists included with each chapter are particularly helpful in assisting
(and encouraging) further exploration. Also included are practical exercises
for spur the reader on to deepening their practice. 
The concept of Emptiness, the heart of Mahayana
Buddhist teaching, is one of the most difficult to grasp. Fathoming the notion
of the two truths, relative truth and the ultimate truth of the emptiness of
all things, is vital to understanding the theoretical underpinnings of Buddhist
practice. Guy Newland edited Snow Lions three-volume translation of
Tsong-kha-pa’s classic work The Great Treatise on the
Stages of the Path. In his discussion of the nature of emptiness, he
often goes back to Tsong-kha-pa’s work for elucidation. In addition to the
classic Tibetan text, Newland ties in many contemporary examples that assist in
his task of making emptiness comprehensible. A definite book
for anyone interested in understanding Buddhism to add to his or her library.
Jay Michaelson is the editor of the Jewish thought and
culture journal Zeek. I’ve long been an admirer of
Michaelson’s work, since it first appeared in Ashé
with “The Erotic Mikvah.” We also worked closely together when he guest edited
issue #5.4. God In Your Body is a provocative work
within which Michaelson argues for the mystical union of the spirit and the
body. Michaelson writes in his introduction: “The body, independent of the
heart’s stirring and the misgivings of the intellect, is the site of holiness;
even if there is no apparent change in the mind, and no softening of the heart,
transformation takes place within the field of the body. This is not
consolation; it is liberation.” This book presents an analysis of the body in
Jewish spiritual practice drawing on traditional texts and rituals, as well as
bringing in meditation and mindfulness practices. He blends his grounding in traditional Jewish material with
frequent references and exercises drawn from other contemplative traditions,
such as Buddhism and Sufism. Michaelson’s work also effectively draws in strong
influences from contemporary culture. Any book that mentions both Michel
Foucault and William S. Burroughs within paragraphs of each other is destined
to make my short-list of must reads.