In Eustance Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard's tightly written 1959 classic The Elizabethan World Picture, the master scholar lays out three visions of the English Renaissance world, as experienced in the time of Shakespeare, Dee, Donne and Milton.

These visions, in short: the Chain of Being, the distributed-but-mediated correspondences, and the Cosmic Dance. I find the Dance the most useful.

The idea of creation as a dance implies “degree,” but degree in motion. The Static battalions of the earthly, celestial, and divine hierarchies are sped on a varied but controlled peregrination to the accompaniment of music. The paths of each is different, yet all paths together make up a perfect whole.

– EMW Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture

The more experience and experiments I pursue following paths back into the past, the more apparent the process of de-alienation from a profoundly living Cosmos – and my unique place within it. There is joyful work to be done.

Dance instruction from the Black Dragon

When examining the Sigil of Solomon from the mighty grimoire, Black Dragon (published in Crossed Keys, this almost could be read as a top-down view of dance steps.

This is also one of the infrequently expressed benefits of actually reproducing these, with one’s own hand; the act of trying to replicate the figures, letters and line, spending precious time and focus, this opens the floor for all sorts of oblique insight.

In particular, I really got the sense of the three worlds – the natural, the celestial, and the philosophical – as well as a fourth. To me – this is where the Operator stands. At once, the Operation, the identification with the virtue of the Creator, and the realisation that, in the words of Sassy the Sasquatch, the Universe begins with You.

All points in delicately balance and utterly polarised, across each circle – with the three outer circles revolving around the centre, the hexagram, the union of opposite.

In my reading, to my current understanding, the Event, and its two composite parts – the endlessly repeating schema of how things are, and the Potential for anything, something, everything, to change.

If the world is some sort of Gurjieffian pain machine, or the perpetual path of atonement for some fundamental failing of first forebears, this limits the possibilities to a certain range of usually dour outcomes.

But – when the world is a giant, beautiful, baffling and wild dance, and you’re at the centre, the interactions that happen between dancers in the eternal night become something quite different indeed.

#grimoires #theory

This charming, oblique little text contains a range of challenges to the human security system – physical, social and philosophical.

It takes the operator outside, in many ways.

My own recollections and thoughts, from this very strange time

When actually trying to do this stuff, it has a way of really reminding you how these texts can make you seem really mad, bad and dangerous to know.

This is the work of warriors, and requires a level of physicality, fearlessness, skill, cunning, and perhaps a bit of wilful stupidity and stubbornness.

Climb a tree, they said

The nearest trees to me what the time were, actually, really tall; pines, probably 80 or 100 years old. To climb these things needs some practice, skill and also the stones, man. Astaroth doesn't want any dropnuts in her crew.

To climb them to the top – where the branches are flimsy enough to actually be cut with a single blow – means getting quite high. If the operator falls, they will probably not experience a good outcome.

In the southern hemisphere, following this as written means trekking around in the woods in the winter, which was bracing.

The South winds blast straight up from Antarctica, and the trees move, too. Trees move a lot, in the wind. You really notice this when you're in them. They also grow in spirals, which is a completely different insight. I developed a whole new appreciation for trees.

I tested this in mid-Summer too, as perhaps the author intended. This work led to spending a lot of time in the woods – and at the peak of Summer provided completely different experience.

Wandering around, chanting the extremely powerful Orison of the Salamanders, I experienced the sense of every living thing rejoicing in it's elemental empire, and burning with aspiration towards the Sun itself.

Backdoor low-Platonism, church skulking, priestcraft

This engagement with this process allowed me to get what JSK called the “low Platonism” of the grimoires, and set up the ground plan of an experimental and experiential world system – that, most importantly – is grounded in my insight.

Also, modern churches in my town don't have places to stash an ash-stained, poorly varnished wooden box. I did get to visit a lot of churches, though – so there is an element of comparative theological instruction here too.

This inability necessitated becoming a priest myself, learning Pyramidos and doing my own damn mass, but this is another story, with its own ludicrous tangents.

Grimoires have a range of challenges, and when approached directly, as a set of direct instructions, trigger insights in completely unexpected ways.

They're much more than a way to call spirits – they can make the operator into someone who spirits will respond to when called.

#grimoires #spirits

So: we’re looking for the palace of the Doge, to prepare for a trip the next day.

Venice is a disorienting braid of fascinating streets packed with fascinating distractions; when moving down lanes running between medieval buildings. This is a subtle city, and it’s easy to get lost.

Most of the places that are open in the off-season sell near-identical items – touristic brick-a-brac for livelaughlovers hunting souvenirs: carnival masks, the same Murano glass objects, teeshirts with the city's winged lion on it. Also many types of feather quills and engravable stamps for sealing letters, for some reason. I’m not sure anyone ever needed these things in the available quantities.

Occasionally though – there is a really unique store or exhibit that leaves a mark.

We find the Doge's Palace just after dusk. My wife is not overly impressed. I think it's OK, though more for the momentous conversations that took place inside it, then its architectural grandeur. Beside it, an advertising pull-up, with words that trigger imagination – malefica, inquisition, stregheria, torture. The vibe intensifies; it is so immaculate, it almost has its own ominous theme music.

We go inside.

On the second floor of this ancient building, we find the former facilities that housed the Night Lords of Venice – the secret court that prosecuted witches, apostates, heretics and atheists. The museum oddly focuses on torturing witches.

The first thing I notice is some of the gear from this supposedly historic and educational exhibition is still used today, in some of the spicier BDSM scenes. The exhibits say they’re replicas of the originals.

Secrets of Solomon: A Witch’s Handbook

The day before finding this place, I’d been rereading Secrets of Solomon or The Art Rabidmadar (Clavicula Salomonis de Secretis), Joseph H. Peterson’s excellent critical edition of this curious grimoire. Allegedly belonging to Leonardo Longo and Francesco Viola, and discussed during their interrogation in these same rooms, it features the spirit families of the mighty Grimorium Verum, and detailed guidance on talisman production. It also features a series of experiments of cosmic scope: the means of contacting the star demons known as the Almathai.

It’s a powerful work, and one worth exploring in detail – a thought shared by Witchfather Gerald Gardner, whose library provided one of the manuscripts that went into Peterson’s edition.

Back in Venice, in the rooms that Longo and Violo may have appealed, argued and pleaded for their freedom and lives. The meeting hall is on the second floor. Upstairs, on the third floor, there are dungeons. Curious to find upstairs dungeons – though I guess the Night Lords were old boys, who perhaps didn't like climbing the stairs when they didn't have to.

We're pushing on closing time, so move perhaps too quickly; it feels damp, dark and tortured here. We burst into a cell with a bed in it, and little else but the plastinated body of a woman, with a short summary “Female witch awaiting sentencing” (or something to this effect).

Plastination is a process of using resins to preserve corpses. The room has a cloying cold feeling, and both of us feel sick almost immediately, and don't linger.

This one seemed incongruous – like it was included purely to display the broken body of a tortured witch awaiting capital punishment.

She was quite an attractive woman, too, from the brief glimpse I stole, before realising what was before me, and the visceral reaction to the spectacle taking hold.

I left that room rapidly. Everyone who could left rapidly. It was a bit to take in, and the walls seemed stained with the residue left by the drama of the interrogations.

Not a great time, but a remarkable one, and one worth remembering. Made more so by the serendipitous stumbling across the actual site where these men, Longo and Violo, and many others, were investigated and tried.

It is their path, and in their footsteps, we tread, in a tricksy half-light – the hero’s path, of curiosity, adventure, unsanctioned spiritual inquiries and the burning desire to learn and know more, whatever the cost.

#travel #witchcraft #grimoires