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• • • Being a journal by artist and designer John Coulthart, cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms.

Archive for the {occult} category

 

A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!

It’s become a tradition here to post a playlist for Halloween so here’s the one for this year, a collection of favourite “voodoo” music. Most are these pieces have as much to do with real voodoo as Bewitched does with real witchcraft but I like the atmospheres of Voodoo Exotica they evoke.
Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi [...]

Posted in {books}, {film}, {horror}, {music}, {occult} | 5 comments »

 


The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art

Skull Vision by Michael Ayrton (1943).
The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art: great title for an exhibition, a shame that it’s all the way down in Cornwall at Tate St Ives.
This group exhibition takes its title from the infamous 1962 book by St Ives artist Sven Berlin. It will explore the influence of [...]

Posted in {art}, {occult}, {painting}, {sculpture} | No comments »

 


The Red Book by Carl Jung

This month is a major one in book publishing as Carl Jung’s magnum opus The Red Book, or Liber Novus, which has remained unpublished for 80 years, is issued in a facsimile edition. Selections of pages have been turning up in reviews and online previews which easily whet the appetite.
In his late 30s, Jung started [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {design}, {occult} | 6 comments »

 


L’Androgyne

L’Androgyne by Alexandre Séon (1890).
Related to yesterday’s post, I’ve been re-reading various books this week for details of the most curious character associated with the French Symbolist movement, novelist and occultist Joséphin Péladan (1859–1918), also known as Sâr Peladan, a Babylonian title he bestowed upon himself as more befitting his adopted role as Rosicrucian mystic. [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {eye candy}, {fashion}, {gay}, {occult}, {painting}, {symbolists} | No comments »

 


Delville, Scriabin and Prometheus

Another striking design found by chance. Symbolist artist Jean Delville (1867–1953) created this sheet music title page for Promethée by Scriabin in 1912, and the pair are well-matched given their shared predilection for mysticism (Theosophy in Delville’s case). Delville had also dealt with Prometheus in a typically dramatic, if sexless, picture a few years earlier [...]

Posted in {art}, {illustrators}, {music}, {occult}, {painting}, {symbolists} | 5 comments »

 


The art of Julien Champagne, 1877–1932

An obscure occult artist even among catalogues of obscure occult artists, Julien Champagne (also listed as Jean-Julian) is known principally for his associations with the persistently elusive 20th century alchemist Fulcanelli. Champagne provided a frontispiece (below) for Fulcanelli’s examination of architectural symbolism, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926), and is continually rumoured to have been Fulcanelli [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {art}, {books}, {occult}, {painting}, {symbolists} | 2 comments »

 


Digital alchemy

Methodus scientiarum by Girolamo Brisiani (1588).
A work-related search for lettering designs by calligrapher Johann Neudörffer led me to the Munich Digitisation Centre, a site dealing with the digitisation and online publication of the holdings of the Bavarian State Library. The catalogue there holds a wealth of very old books and manuscripts which you can either [...]

Posted in {books}, {design}, {occult} | No comments »

 


Andy Paiko’s glass art

The Glass Chair.
Today’s glass artists continue to astonish. Andy Paiko’s one-off creation above is a chair whose vitrines contain a rhesus monkey skull, a piece of octopus coral, a murex spiny trumpet shell, the skeleton of a rat, and a mountain lion skull. The piece below contains a 24 carat gold-plated coyote skull with the [...]

Posted in {art}, {occult}, {sculpture} | 5 comments »

 


The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951

Following yesterday’s post about Frieda Harris’s Tarot designs, it only seems right to acknowledge the other major Tarot artist of the 20th century. Pamela Colman Smith has been overshadowed by her male mentor, Golden Dawn scholar AE Waite, even more than Frieda Harris whose name at least gets mentioned as much as Crowley’s in discussion [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {illustrators}, {music}, {occult} | 6 comments »

 


Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot

left: The Magus from the Thoth Tarot by Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley (1938–1940?); right: The Magus from The Major Arcana by John Coulthart (2006).
Phantasmaphile presents another magickal art event in NYC next week. Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot is described as “a personal narrative by Jesse Bransford”, an artist with a [...]

Posted in {art}, {design}, {occult}, {painting}, {work} | 6 comments »

 


In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman

Extending the recent pagan theme, Ubuweb posts Derek Jarman’s determinedly occult and oneiric film, In the Shadow of the Sun (1980), notable for its soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle. This was the longest of Jarman’s films derived from Super-8 which he made throughout the 1970s between work as a production designer and his feature films. He [...]

Posted in {abstract cinema}, {electronica}, {film}, {gay}, {music}, {occult} | 2 comments »

 


Born again pagans

Ave Pan by the amazing J Allen St John. Via.
In the spirit of basic human generosity I try not to be too anti-Christian here, especially when so many churchgoers these days feel themselves rather beleaguered; after centuries persecuting much of the world, the world has finally pushed them back and it hurts the poor things. [...]

Posted in {architecture}, {gay}, {occult}, {politics}, {religion} | 11 comments »

 


The Great God Pan

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He [...]

Posted in {art nouveau}, {art}, {beardsley}, {books}, {burroughs}, {design}, {film}, {gay}, {horror}, {illustrators}, {magazines}, {music}, {occult}, {religion}, {sculpture}, {symbolists} | 5 comments »

 


Hard Times Give New Life to Prague’s Golem

Hard Times Give New Life to Prague’s Golem

Posted in {noted}, {occult} | No comments »

 


Kenneth Anger on DVD again

Nearly two years after their American release, and not a moment too soon, the films which comprise Kenneth Anger’s superb Magick Lantern Cycle turn up at last in the UK. Good to see these being produced by the BFI, their previous collections of shorts by the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer are distinguished by quality [...]

Posted in {film}, {gay}, {occult} | 5 comments »

 


Passage 11

Ed Jansen writes to let me know that the latest edition of his web magazine, Passage, is now online. Once again, most of the features listed below are in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. David Britton has been recommending Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones to me so I guess I’ll be reading [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {burroughs}, {magazines}, {occult}, {painting}, {politics}, {sculpture} | 1 comment »

 


Top 10 grimoires

Top 10 grimoires | The Necronomicon at #9. Hail Yog-Sothoth!

Posted in {books}, {lovecraft}, {noted}, {occult} | No comments »

 


Arthur Tress’s Hermaphrodite

Hermaphrodite behind Venus and Mercury (1973).
We had Austin Spare and absinthe yesterday. Looking at some of Arthur Tress’s photographs today I was reminded me of one of Spare’s hermaphrodite studies (below). The photo is from a series, Theater of the Mind, which Tress created during the 1970s.
• Arthur Tress at GLBTQ

Gynander: Mutation by Besz-Mass (1955).
Previously [...]

Posted in {art}, {gay}, {occult}, {photography}, {surrealism} | 1 comment »

 


Austin Spare absinthe

An Austin Spare pastel (?), Astral Body and Ghost, from the collection of Cyclobe’s Ossian Brown adorns the label of this edition of Absinthe Brevans. Would the artist approve? Do we have to ask? He spent much of his life haunting pubs and I’d be very surprised if he hadn’t tried absinthe when he was [...]

Posted in {art}, {decadence}, {occult} | No comments »

 


Hip Gnostics and more Moore

Coincidence abounds: on Wednesday I was following a few referral URLs to see who’d been linking here and was led to a Lexic.us page about hermaphrodites which in turn had me looking again at the wonderful Borghese Hermaphroditus in the Louvre. Thursday’s postal delivery brought issue 1 of The Gnostic which prominently features the Louvre [...]

Posted in {art}, {books}, {burroughs}, {comics}, {occult}, {religion}, {science}, {sculpture}, {work} | 6 comments »

 


 





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