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A welcome arrival in the post recently was two issues of Abraxas, the book-format journal of esoteric studies from Fulgur Esoterica. I’ve always observed the contemporary occult scene from a distance, being more interested in cultural spin-offs whether those happen to be music-oriented—as was the late, lamented Coil—or art-oriented. Something I always enjoyed about Kenneth [...]

El Trigono de las lesiones (2010) by Cristina Francov. I:MAGE is an exhibition of occult-inspired art which opens a week on Sunday, 19th May at the Store Street Gallery, Bloomsbury, London. As exhibitions go it’s modest in scale but with an impressive roster of contributors old and new: Agostino Arrivabene, Ithell Colquhoun, Denis Forkas Kostromitin, [...]

Pan II (2012) by Fredrik Söderberg. • “Aubade was a surprise success, selling some 5000 copies and going into a second printing and an edition published in America.  Martin was immediately a minor celebrity, being interviewed for articles that couldn’t mention what his book was actually about.” Rediscovering the works of Kenneth Martin. • “I [...]

Philippe Lemaire is French, and another engraving collage artist who I’d have to include in the list of post-Ernst practitioners if I ever get round to updating my Strange Attractor essay about Wilfried Sätty. Like Ernst and Sätty, Lemaire seems to use paper-and-scissors techniques, although Sätty also made use of print processes in order to [...]

The street is upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco, seven minutes of local colour captured on silent 16mm film by Edward Silverstone Taylor: This edited Ektachrome home movie with professional titles documents a 1959 street fair, upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco—the center of Beat culture. The film includes shots of filmmaker Dion Vigne and his wife [...]

Collage by Chloé Poizat. • Xenis Emputae Travelling Band plays the Music of John Dee, and free at Bandcamp: Victorian Machine Music by Plinth, the “creaking, winding, piping, chiming and wood-knocking of Victorian parlour music machines”. • Jeremy Willard on Mikhail Kuzmin, “the Oscar Wilde of Russia”. Related: Conner Habib on the Disinfo podcast discussing [...]

Illustration by Frank Utpatel from the 1947 Arkham House edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. “Presently I got hold of myself a bit, and marked out a pentacle hurriedly with chalk on the polished floor; and there I sat in it almost until dawn. And all the time, away up the corridor, the door of the [...]

Rites (2012). I’ve no idea what’s being represented in David Lemm’s esoteric plans and diagrams, and I’m quite happy for their mysteries to remain intact. Lemm is a Scottish artist whose other screenprints can be seen at his website. New Land (2012). Previously on { feuilleton } • Sigils & Signs

Scarfolk, as was noted here last month, is a home from home, especially if you grew up in the 1970s. The mayor of the rabies-afflicted town, Richard Littler, talked to Creative Review about his unheimlich design project. • Ensemble Pearl, an album stream of “cosmic psychedelic space-doom minimal drone soundscapes” by Atsuo, William Herzog, Eyvind [...]

Gille Lettmann pictured in 1973 flourishing some of Fergus Hall’s Tarot cards. At the time Ms Lettmann was helping run partner Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s Kosmische Musik, Pilz and Ohr record labels, and thus oversaw the release of many fine albums—and a few dubious ones—before Kaiser’s empire imploded amid much bad feeling. It’s a fascinating saga, detailed [...]

Christ Church, Spitalfields, London, in 2001. A photo I took with a disposable film camera. And so let us beginne; and, as the Fabrick takes its Shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure intirely in Mind as you inscribe it. First, you must measure out or cast the Area in as exact a [...]

01 First (1985). I’ve linked to so many publications at the Internet Archive I’m a little surprised it’s taken me this long to find something featuring my own work. Abrahadabra was a Dutch periodical covering subjects familiar to readers of the esoteric magazines of the 1980s (RE/Search, Rapid Eye, etc): Industrial music of the TG/Psychic [...]

Another recent piece of Angeriana, and another short video sketch, Brush of Baphomet (2009) is a kind of addendum to Anger’s The Man We Want to Hang (2002), being a further look at Aleister Crowley’s paintings. The title refers to one of Crowley’s many occult names. As a painter Crowley’s technical ability was almost nil [...]

A video sketch from 2004 in which Kenneth Anger manages to give us in four minutes some familiar preoccupations: Rudolph Valentino, occult symbolism, and a hunky guy in the form of the sunbathing gentleman named Red who provides the focus of the piece. The copy on YouTube is labelled “restricted work print” so this may [...]

One of A Pair of Peacocks (2012) by Feanne. • Jonathan Barnbrook reveals his package design for the new David Bowie CD. The Barnbrook studio has also designed the catalogue for the forthcoming V&A Bowie exhibition. And there’s more (don’t worry, it’ll be over soon): Jon Savage on When Bowie met Burroughs. • “Witches have [...]

Post number three thousand, and searching the memory for anything which might be filed under MMM led to more occult art. Moina MacGregor Mathers (1865–1928) was the wife of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s. Moina was the sister of the French [...]

This was a surprise. My first thought on seeing the cover for Ethel Archer’s “book of verse”, The Whirlpool, was that its swirling waters were borrowed from Harry Clarke’s typically astonishing illustration for A Descent into the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe. The problem there is that the Ethel Archer book was published in 1911 [...]

Current reading is Alembic (1992), a curious novel by Timothy d’Arch Smith whose publishings prior to this were all non-fiction, among them a study of the Uranian poets, a bibliography of Montague Summers, and The Books of the Beast, one of the many books about Aleister Crowley. Alembic reflects some of these interests and blends [...]

Bestia Apocalypsi (2000) by Konstantin Kalynovych. • A funding page for Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Maria Paz Cabardo’s documentary film about the late comic artist and illustrator. • Phantasmaphile’s Pam Grossman has declared 2013 to be the Year of the Witch. • At WFMU: The Space Ghost Coast To [...]

Nigel Finch was a key member of the team of producers and directors working on the BBC’s Arena arts documentaries throughout their golden run during the 1980s and 1990s. The films he directed himself—among them studies of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, and a history of the Chelsea Hotel in New York—gave him an opportunity to push [...]