Having a book published I wasn't prepared for the fact that people actually read it!!
If you have, I'd be really grateful for a quick review on Am*z*n or Goodreads.
Book very much available from publisher's website
@brokensleep
Magic . Poetry . Spirits . South Downs
First edition of Dracula signed by Bram Stoker, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and numerous others related to Dracula story... from the collection of Richard Ackerman
A few more pages of my Book of Transformations.
On course to finish this within a year of starting it!
Magical operation . Asemic writing . Hypersigil . Art project . Meditation
A selection of the British Museum's display of amulets and talismans. I am always surprised not surprised about how little of this stuff survives. I mean, I know there are reasons why it doesn't but still!
Glass bowl engraved with the Erinyes (The Furies) by Elly Stai-Eliades.
The Furies: Alekto ("endless anger"), Megaera ("jealous rage"), and Tisiphone or Tilphousia ("vengeful destruction")
Can't help feeling they are back in the world.
When my husband started metal detecting there was just one thing I really wanted him to bring home.
And by Jove, I think he may have done it!
Yet to be confirmed but this is almost certainly a Roman defixio, a curse tablet, a rolled piece of lead with the curse written inside!
The extraordinary 3,000 year old statue of Sekhmet in the British Museum is one of the most 'alive' statues I've ever encountered. She might stand and sweep you aside with fire at any moment.
"I'm here for the meeting downstairs" I say as I step into an occult bookshop in London at night, and the bookseller bids me through with a discreet nod of the head ... and 15-year-old me squeals with joy!
If I find a pebble that is close to a perfect sphere and good colouration then it gets considered for this stone orrery.
They are not very common, at least on the shoreline local to me, so this 5 planey system has taken years to collate.
The Book of Transformations continues.
Here are some fairly Saturnian-looking words.
Asemic writing . Meditation . Art project . Magical operation . Hypersigil
"The Magical Calendar of Tycho Brahe" a vanishingly scarce broadsheet printed c.1618 in Frankfurt. Only 12 other copies known.
Full of hermetic symbols and associations.
Lord Strathloch was an anglican vicar until he realised God was a woman, and his sister Olivia Robertson had a mystical revelation on a train to Bolton, and as a result of all this they set up this temple of Isis at the family home in Clonegal Castle.
The connection between ink and blood has been done to death, but still...
Another page of my Book of Transformations.
Meditation . Hypersigil . Magical operation . Art project . Asemic writing
It's done. 120 pages and 9 months later...
A Book of Transformations.
There are plenty of pages I haven't shared and plenty of work for me to do to process the work, but it is written.
This is the landscape art of Richard Long. These are from a group of works collected into a book called "Walking in Circles."
Creating circles in the wilderness or, as I like to call is, spirit magic!
Lots of Pelican books have a slightly Hookland vibe about them but this 1969 Derelict Britain feels pretty on the money. Even the contents read like headings for a folk horror movie.
Leonora Carrington. Artist, surrealist, novelist, occultist... Sometimes I go hunting for images of her artwork that I haven't seen before just because...
A glass float from a submarine fishing net collected on Iona in 1922. The "peasant" from whom it was acquired said it should be lain on a bed of heather and gazed into to see visions.
Derek Jarman's photobooks from the early 90s on display at the William Morris Museum in the "Radical Landscape" exhibition, placed beneath a screen playing Jarman's movie, The Garden.
11,000 years old. Found at the mesolithic site of Star Carr, a pendant with what appear to be 'artistic' markings, or a map, or a form of writing? No one knows, but still...! 🤯
Sigmund Freud's study and consulting room was full of dieties, characters and creatures from antiquity.
He refered to them as 'his friends' and would touch the ones on his desk occasionally whilst talking.
NEWS: my story of walking the South Downs Way this last year, in all its painful, magical, death-infused and spirit-haunted glory is going to be published by
@brokensleep
books.
It's a way off yet but I am understandably excited and you will all be hearing a lot more about it!
Only now discovering 'ostracon'. That is, pot sherds and other bits of broken ceramic used as writing, drawing and sketching surfaces in antiquity. Everything from prayers and spells to satirical cartoons and ...the rest.
"There is no God but the Forest..."
Found this astonishing account today of a fever hallucination in the jungles of what is now Laos. This is from "King Cobra" by Harry Hervey: this was published in 1927!
"The prehistoric gods sprang from my phallus. My womb is a temple..."
From the 1930s a fab "Occult Periodical" that reads more like a Parish Magazine. It even has a 'Childrens Corner'.
The Mystic Brotherhood in Tampa FL split from the Rosicrucians in the 1920s and started handing out Doctor of Divinity Degrees until the FTC told them to stop!
Is it a Good Friday? Another page of my Book of Transformations.
Asemic writing . Meditation . Polyphony . Hypersigil . Magical operation . Art project
Another page of this transformational grammar. This time in some way, that I could not hope to describe, coming from my encounter with burnt driftwood.
My Book of Transformations is drawing to a close. When finished there will be about one hundred and twenty pages like this in wyrd grammar, unspoken tongues, daemonic voices...
Yes, my Book of Transformations is still going.
Reading asemic writing is, it seems to me, as important as writing it. In the same way that it is important a hypersigil is in some way seen by people other than its creator.
Sara Maitland's Gossip from the Forest is about forests and fairy tales and their interrelation. It is as enchanting as it sounds. A perfect autumn read.
I have a bit of a thing for this. Staples left in wayside fingerpost signs from posters that have been stuck to them over the years. Not only do they have something of the aesthetic of writing about them, they actually speak directly of a lack or a loss of information.
Junk shop find. A small brass dish titled "Pixie Land" with a Pixie riding a horse in a field of mushrooms. And I am here for that. Feels straight out of the Picatrix!
Just found a book by Susan Cooper that I didn't know about in a charity shop.
Cover and illustrations by Margery Gill.
The thing I love about mid 20th cent book illustration is the way it looks splattered onto the page in five minutes but has such brilliant composition
Reading Seneca's Oedipus "adapted" by Ted Hughes was an unexpectedly intense experience. If you want to be heard in this universe you could do worse than incant Oedipus's invocation of the gods... "you who made this whole universe and the laws we have to live and die in...
Set myself quite a challenge with almost an entire page of asemic writing this evening but it is one of those things you sink into, even if it comes with a certain amount of physical pain in the hand for those of us no longer used to longhand writing.
The rarest Yeats item?
Signed D.E.D.I for "Deus est Daemon Inversus", the magical title of W. B. Yeats.
R.R.&A.C. being the inner order of the Golden Dawn this essay was circulated by Yeats after the resignation of MacGregor Mathers arguing that the order was losing its way.
The pages of my Book of Transformation, which is an early 20th century sketchbook rebound in Florence between ornate full leather boards, have always had a little foxing on them but it becoming more pronounced towards the centre of the book.
Always amazed at how much mood and mental state contribute to each page of my Book of Transformation. Especially to the amount of control exercised.
Hypersigil . Magical operation . Art project . Asemic writing
In the curation of an exhibition at the British Library, someone, I can't remember who, was quoted to the effect, 'every line represents a moment through which the artist has lived.'
And there is the heart of magic somwhere in that idea.