Man Myth Magic – { feuilleton }

The most unusual magazine ever published: Man, Myth and Magic

Collect the set!

I don’t really need a digital copy of Man, Myth and Magic—I’ve been the fortunate owner for many years of the bound set of original magazines you see above—but I imagine a few readers of this post will welcome a download of all 3144 pages of the 1995 edition. For the impatient I’ll put the link up front: go thou here.

The world goes Spare: A US copy of issue no. 1 and the first volume of the 24-volume set. Austin Spare’s cover art is known either as The Elemental or The Vampires are Coming.

Man, Myth and Magic exists in several different versions along with a number of spin-off books which mined its texts for information and reused its picture archive. The first edition was the “Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural” which appeared in the UK each week from 1970 to 1971 as 112 magazine-sized issues, a series that built eventually into a collection of seven volumes. The first issue famously used a detail of a picture by Austin Osman Spare on its cover, giving Spare and his art a prominence unlike anything he received during his lifetime. The same part-work was published a couple of years later in the USA with an accompanying TV ad. Magic and the supernatural was the selling point but the encyclopedia was as much about religion and general anthropology as the occult, with the editorial stance being unsensational, factual and neutral. The seven-volume set was later republished in book form as 24 hardcover volumes, then revised in 1995 as a new set of 21 volumes with a different subtitle, “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion and the Unknown”. In the early 1970s you could also find a hardback collection of the first six issues bearing the subtitle “The most unusual book ever published”, a rather unrealistic claim. My mother bought one of these, giving me my first encounter with the encyclopedia itself and many other things besides, not least the Austin Spare drawings in Kenneth Grant’s piece of borderline cosmic horror about Spare and “resurgent atavisms”.

Richard Cavendish was Editor-in-Chief of all the editions of Man, Myth and Magic, with Brian Innes acting as picture editor and subsequently co-editor for the 1995 edition. Cavendish had been the author of The Black Arts in 1967, a book which I still rate as one of the best general introductions to Western occultism. The Black Arts may have a title designed to grab the attention of Dennis Wheatley readers but it was a serious study that set the tone for the encyclopedia. The editorial board of Man, Myth and Magic was composed of heavyweight academics, together with John Symonds (Aleister Crowley’s literary executor and biographer), while the group of special consultants included Katharine Briggs (folklore), William Gaunt (art) and Francis Huxley (anthropology). Symonds brought Kenneth Grant on board. Grant at this time was the official head of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, and his presence gave the editorial team access to his large collection of Austin Spare artwork.

“From Adam and Eve to LSD, from lucky numbers to human sacrifice…” International Times, Jan 28, 1970.

Among the never-to-be-repeated list of contributors were Geoffrey Ashe, Robert Baldick, Robert Graves, Celia Green, Douglas Hill, Christina Hole, Christopher Isherwood, Patrick Moore, Kathleen Raine and JB Rhine. Kenneth Grant and John Symonds weren’t the only contributors who’d known Aleister Crowley, there was also Tom Driberg MP, a man whose promiscuous homosexuality and alleged treachery made him one of the more notorious members of Parliament. The other British politician among the contributors was the comparatively prosaic John Selwyn Gummer, a future government minister and current member of the House of Lords. (I wish I could tell you which article was Gummer’s but he’s listed in the contributor section without a credit. I’d have to hunt through the volumes to find out.) Elsewhere you’ll find entries by both Francis Kings—confusingly listed without their identifying initials—in what may be the only time the pair appeared together in the same publication. Francis H. King, writing here about Japan, was a well-regarded author whose novels included a number of gay romances; Francis X. King was an occultist and author of non-fiction books whose research was packaged under lurid titles such as Sexuality, Magic and Perversion, and Satan and Swastika. The contents of Man, Myth and Magic have long been rendered superfluous by the internet but the contributor list gives the encyclopedia a curiosity value if nothing else. All of the entries are unique pieces of writing which are unavailable outside these pages.

I confess that I hadn’t known that Man, Myth and Magic had been revised and reprinted until I discovered this scanned edition, I’d always thought the encyclopedia was too much of its time to be republished. Richard Cavendish in the editorial preface for the 1995 edition says that some of the articles were amended or expanded to take account of new researches and developments. So they have been, although at first glance the page layout looks very much as it did in the original printing. Closer examination reveals that some of the more dated pictures have been replaced, like the photo of a typical hippy girl in the entry about bells. Dated pictures aside, what you see here is still 95% the original “illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural”.

Frontiers of Belief.

The most substantial change in the later reprintings was the absence of the “Frontiers of Belief” section, a series of mostly topical essays which ran each week across the inside back cover and the back of the magazine. Collectors of the volume binders could also purchase an additional binder to store the issue covers and the FoB supplements. Whoever compiled my own volumes failed to do this, but I did once own a partial set of the magazine as separate issues, and still have the FoB articles from those issues. Two of these pieces—a profile of artist Wilfried Sätty and Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft—have appeared here in the past. As far as I know none of the FoB pieces have ever been officially reprinted. The very last piece was “Occultism—The Future”, in which a number of writers were asked for their prognostications. The ubiquitous Dennis Wheatley—who, for once, didn’t contribute to the previous pages— delivered a typically ominous warning against involvement in the Black Arts. A more sober final word was provided by Colin Wilson:

In science a new cycle has begun, a revolt against the old rigid reductionism, a recognition that ‘materialism’ leaves half the universe unexplained. Biologists, psychologists, even physicists, are cautiously trying to feel their way into new worlds. They are acknowledging at last that they are dealing with a living universe, a universe full of strange forces. The magic of the past was an intuitive attempt to understand and control these forces: the science of the future will be a fully conscious attempt. Magic will be the science of the future, or should we say that science will be the magic of the future?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jan Parker’s witches
• Typefaces of the occult revival
• Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft
• MMM in IT
• The Occult Explosion
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Owen Wood’s Zodiac

Jan Parker’s witches

Also witch-finders, demons, magi, and a skeletal Adolf Hitler clutching a glowing crystal ball… Jan Parker is a British artist who was working as an illustrator in the early 1970s, during which time he produced a small number of covers for SF and fantasy titles. One of these, The Worlds of Frank Herbert, is a book I used to see a lot on the secondhand shelves although I never owned a copy. As with Victor Valla’s cover art, the 70s was a decade when idiosyncratic imagery of the type created by Parker and co. was a more common sight on genre covers than it is today. Witchcraft and Black Magic, published by Hamlyn in 1971, brought Parker’s brand of naïve weirdness to a Peter Haining history of the more lurid forms of occultism. This is a book that I did own for a while until someone borrowed it and never returned it, a persistent hazard for the books in my not-very-extensive occult library. Haining’s study is the kind of thing that publishers often call a pocket guide, although this suggests something you’d carry around to be used as an identification tool during chance encounters; you wouldn’t want to encounter most of the people (never mind the creatures) in these paintings.

A handful of Parker’s illustrations turned up some years ago at the now-defunct Front Free Endpaper, then were reblogged at Monster Brains and elsewhere. The copies here are from another recent upload at the Internet Archive where the book is part of a sub-archive of titles scanned from Indian libraries. The very tight binding evidently presented difficulties for the scanner, hence the appearance of fingers holding open most of the pages. It’s good to see this one again; I always valued the book more for the artwork than the text which isn’t bad but was simply another commission for the very prolific Haining, a writer who was a better anthologist than a historian. If you want a general history of the occult there are more authoritative options elsewhere.

As for the artwork, I wonder now how long it took Parker to paint all these pictures. There are about 80 original illustrations plus a number of others taken from antique books or from artists such as Frans Hals and Goya; that’s a lot of original art for a book of only 160 pages. Many of Parker’s pieces are copies of pre-existing portraits or of familiar illustrations like the perennially popular demons from de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal. This makes me wonder why Hamlyn commissioned copies from Parker rather than simply paying a picture library for the original images as Marshall Cavendish were doing in 1971 with their multi-part encyclopedia, Man, Myth and Magic. Whatever the reason I’m pleased they gave Parker so much free reign. His depictions of historical figures wouldn’t be out of place in the portrait gallery in Dance of the Vampires, while some of his other pieces stray into outright Surrealism; the picture of people being menaced by flying eyeballs was used for the cover art of the US reprint from Bantam.

Haining’s book had at least one reprint in the UK before going out of print. The early 1970s saw the peak of the occult revival which had begun in the previous decade, and which made room in publishers’ lists for odd little books like this one. Secondhand copies are still floating around although they’re seldom cheap. If you do find one just be careful who you lend it to.

Continue reading “Jan Parker’s witches”

In the Mind’s Eye

One of the posts last December concerned a short TV film by Alan Garner, To Kill a King, the final entry in the Leap in the Dark series which the BBC ran from 1973 to 1980. Each half-hour episode concerned the supernatural, presented in either drama or documentary form, which for me would have meant prime viewing but I don’t recall ever seeing the series. The Garner film was a strange piece of drama whereas In the Mind’s Eye (1977) is a documentary about ghosts presented by writer Colin Wilson. The film is almost more interesting for its production details than its subject, the Phantom Vicar of Ratcliffe Wharf, an alleged spectre whose murderous life is shown in a piece of unconvincing dramatisation. The Phantom Vicar was the invention of writer Frank Smyth who needed a supernatural story for the Frontiers of Belief section of Man, Myth and Magic during its publication as a part-work in the early 1970s. Smyth and friend describe hatching the tale then we hear a number of subsequent reports which show the story quickly became an East End legend. Between the interviews you get to see bits of the docklands area before the spirits of old London had been exorcised by redevelopment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• To Kill a King by Alan Garner
• Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft
• MMM in IT
• Terror and Magnificence

Spare things

Cthulhu Cultus: The Sun is Sick (no date) by Austin Osman Spare.

I’ve been telling people about this drawing for years but I’ve not posted it here before. Spare produced this piece after Kenneth Grant gave him some of HP Lovecraft’s stories to read. I’ve never seen it dated but it’s probably from the mid-50s when Kenneth and Steffi Grant were corresponding with Spare and commissioning new artworks. What’s notable for me is that this is probably the first Lovecraft-derived drawing that wasn’t either a magazine or book illustration, or something done for one of the horror fanzines.

The Call of Cthulhu (1987) by John Coulthart.

Lovecraft aficionados have never seemed aware of Spare’s drawing since Lovecraft studies tended until very recently to remain fixed on popular media and the often parochial world of genre fandom. When I came to draw the swamp scene for The Call of Cthulhu in 1987 I borrowed the faces from Spare’s pillar for the column in the centre of the picture.

Bulldog Breed.

While we’re on the subject, and in the spirit of showing how all the obsessions here connect in one way or another, Phil Baker’s excellent biography of Austin Spare notes a surprising reference to the artist that predates Man, Myth and Magic via the psychedelic music scene. Bulldog Breed were a short-lived London group, one of many being promoted by the Deram label in the late 1960s. The group’s one-and-only album, Made In England, was released in 1969. The cover art is dreadful but the final song is a number entitled Austin Osmanspare [sic], a paean to the artist that turns AOS into a typical character from British psychedelia: an eccentric, oddly named, Victorian type with a sinister and mysterious glamour. According to Baker one of the band members had an aunt who knew Spare. It’s not a bad song, and the choice of magus gave them an edge over the Beatles who went for the more obvious Aleister Crowley. “They said he was before his time…”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft
• MMM in IT
• Intertextuality
• Abrahadabra
• The Occult Explosion
• Murmur Become Ceaseless and Myriad
• Kenneth Grant, 1924–2011
• New Austin Spare grimoires
• Austin Spare absinthe
• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil
• Austin Osman Spare

Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft

Going through some of my loose copies of Man, Myth and Magic recently turned up this article by Kenneth Grant that I’d forgotten about. I have two separate sets of Man, Myth and Magic: a complete edition in binders, and a partial collection of loose copies of the weekly “illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural”. The partial collection is worth keeping for the unique articles that ran across the last two pages of every issue, all of which are absent (along with the magazine covers) from the bound edition. These articles formed the Frontiers of Belief series, a collection of essays of the kind one might find in magazines today such as Fate or Fortean Times. An earlier essay about Wilfried Sätty, Artist of the Occult, was reproduced here a few years ago; none of these pieces have ever been reprinted so it seems worthwhile putting another of the more interesting pieces online.

Kenneth Grant was the only active occultist among Man, Myth and Magic‘s roster of very serious and well-regarded writers and experts. Grant wrote several of the encyclopedia entries although not the one about Aleister Crowley, as you might expect, that entry going to Crowley’s executor and biographer, John Symonds. Grant was also a lifelong champion of HP Lovecraft’s fiction which explains this article; many of Grant’s later occult texts have a distinctly Lovecraftian flavour, and they often refer to Lovecraft and Arthur Machen as being the unconscious recipients of actual occult emanations or presences. Grant’s belief that the authors channelled these emanations into their fiction is central to this piece, a belief that Lovecraft would have dismissed even though several of his stories (not least The Call of Cthulhu) concern exactly this process. Grant connects Lovecraft with another artist whose work he championed throughout his life, Austin Osman Spare. It was Grant’s involvement with Man, Myth and Magic that put one of Spare’s drawings on the cover of the first issue, and further drawings inside the magazine, introducing the artist’s work to a new, highly receptive audience. The drawing below (Were-Lynx) appears in the magazine behind Grant’s text so I’ve scanned a text-free copy from Grant’s Cults of the Shadow (1975).

•

DREAMING OUT OF SPACE by Kenneth Grant

Malevolent powers are lurking in wait to project themselves into the sleeping minds of men: this terrifying idea is a recurring theme in the stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who claimed that they came to him in nightmares. But were they simply bad dreams, or was he in fact receiving communications from an unknown source, as Kenneth Grant here suggests?

“I have watched for dryads and satyrs in the woods and fields at dusk”; illustration by Austin Osman Spare, who sensed the forces looming behind Lovecraft’s work, and was inspired to illustrate these presences.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft died in 1937; but the myth-cycle which he initiated in unrivalled tales of cosmic horror now raises the question whether it was a mere fiction engendered in the haunted mind of an obscure New England writer, or whether it foreshadowed a particularly sinister kind of occult invasion.

According to a well-known occult tradition, when Atlantis was submerged, not all perished. Some took refuge on other worlds, in other dimensions; others “slept” a willed and unnatural sleep through untold aeons of time. These awakened; they lurk now in unknown gulfs of space, the physical mechanism of human consciousness being unable to pick up their infinitely subtle vibrations. They lurk, waiting to return and rule the whole earth, as was their aim before the catastrophe that destroyed their corrupt civilization.

This tradition was a major theme in Lovecraft’s work. Until quite recently people read his stories and shuddered (if sufficiently honest and sensitive enough to admit their uncanny impact), not suspecting for a moment that such things could be.

Few know that Lovecraft dreamed most of his tales. And he sometimes thought that these dreams, or rather, nightmares, were caused by misdeeds in remotely distant incarnations when, perhaps, he had aimed at acquiring magical powers. These dreams were memories of the past and prophecies of the future, for he said that “nightmares are the punishment meted out to the soul for sins committed in previous incarnations—perhaps millions of years ago!”

In his life as Howard Phillips Lovecraft he tried again and again to bring himself to face squarely the ordeal through which he knew he would have to pass, if he were finally to resolve his spiritual difficulties. The issue is brought to the surface perhaps more clearly and urgently in his poems than in his stories. He is on the brink of making the critical discovery, of surprising the secret of his inner life, and he is forced back repeatedly by the dread, the stark soul-searing fear which he bottles up in his work and which he communicates so successfully—in neat doses—to his readers.

One of Lovecraft’s most vivid creations is the ancient book of hideous spells composed to facilitate traffic with creatures of unseen worlds. He ascribed its authorship to Abdul Alhazred, a mad Arab who flourished in Damascus about 700 AD. This grimoire, during the course of its mysterious career, is supposed to have been translated by the Elizabethan scholar Dr John Dee, into Greek, under the title of Necronomicon. It contains the Keys or Calls that unseal forbidden spaces of cosmic sleep, inhabited by elder forces that once infested the earth. The Keys are in a wild, unearthly tongue reminiscent of the Calls of Chanokh, or Enoch, which Dr Dee actually obtained through contact with non-terrestrial entities during his work with the magician, Sir Edward Kelley, whom Aleister Crowley claimed to have been in a previous life. It is possible that the “evil and abhorred Necronomicon” was suggested by the clavicles or Keys of Enoch, which Dee and Kelley discovered, and which Crowley later used to gain access to unknown dimensions.

Continue reading “Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft”