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

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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“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”.

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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

Typefaces of the occult revival

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Man, Myth & Magic #1, January 1970; McCall’s, March 1970.

The announcement last week of the death of British character actor Geoffrey Bayldon prompted some discussion here about the typeface used for the titles of Bayldon’s TV series from the early 1970s, Catweazle. This was a humorous drama in which the actor portrayed a warlock transplanted by a time portal from the Norman era to the present day, a comic counterpart to another occult-themed series, Ace of Wands (1970–72). Being aimed at children, both Catweazle and Ace of Wands are at the lighter end of the great flourishing of occult-related media that runs in parallel with the rise and fall of psychedelic culture, a period roughly spanning the years 1965 to 1975. The two trends reflected and fed off each other; the hippie movement stimulated interest in the occult (Aleister Crowley is on the cover of Sgt Pepper) while giving to the commercial propagators of the supernatural a range of aesthetics lifted from the 19th century.

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Muller, 1972; TIME, June 1972.

Among the graphic signifiers is a small collection of typefaces from the Victorian or Edwardian eras, designs which vanished from sight after 1920 only to surface 50 years later in very different settings to their previous deployment. I’m always fascinated by the way context changes the perception of a typeface; the repurposing of Art Nouveau fonts—which hadn’t previously been associated with diabolism—to signify witchcraft or sorcery is a good example of this. In the case of the occult revival this was partly opportunism: the commercial application of post-psychedelic style made the previously untouchable trendy again, decoration and elaborate stylisation was no longer taboo. But it was also a solution to the problem of signifying the sorcerous with typography when there were no off-the-peg solutions as there were for, say, Westerns or stories about the Space Race. As well as carrying with them a flavour of old books, some of the more curious letterforms were reminiscent of the glyphs of magical alphabets which no doubt explains their popularity.

What follows is a chronological selection of the more striking examples (or my favourites…) which conveniently begins with Ringlet, the Catweazle font. With the trend being towards Art Nouveau you find popular Nouveau styles such as Arnold Bocklin also being used in the 1970s but I’ve avoided these in favour of the less common choices.


Ringlet (1882) by Hermann Ihlenburg

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Pall Mall, 1971.

Jullian’s landmark study of the Symbolist movement isn’t an occult text but it is a great favourite of mine whose original title—Esthètes et Magiciens—puts it in the right sphere. Inside, the author touches on the spiritual concerns of many of the artists which included Theosophy and fashionable Satanism.

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Duckworth, 1973.

Aleister Crowley is represented here with the first reprinting of his erotic poetry, produced in a limited run by the venerable London house of Duckworth.

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Rise Above Records, 2016.

Blood Ceremony are Canadians devoted to the occult rock of previous decades. Their presentation matches songs with titles like The Great God Pan and Morning Of The Magicians.


Rubens (1884) by John K. Rogers

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Rubens has long been a favourite of mine even though it gets used a great deal on horror novels and the like. Many Americans also regard it as “the Haunted Mansion font” owing to its use in Disney theme parks.

Peter Haining’s collection combined supernatural fiction with short non-fiction accounts of magical operations. The cover art is the full version of the drawing by Austin Osman Spare—The Elemental aka The Vampires are Coming—seen in detail on the cover of the first issue of Man, Myth & Magic.

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Coronet Books, 1972.


Eckmann (1900) by Otto Eckmann

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Pan Books, 1969.

Many of the examples in this post tend towards the exploitational (see below…) but Cavendish’s overview of occult theory and history is a serious study, even if the cover does beckon to the Dennis Wheatley readership. My mother was among the latter which no doubt explains why she had a copy of this paperback; in due course it found its way into my hands. Richard Cavendish was enough of an authority to be hired by Purnell as editor-in-chief of Man, Myth & Magic.


Siegfried (c. 1900) by Wilhelm Woellmer

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And speaking of which…Purnell offered their readership a sidereal start to 1971.

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Man, Myth and Magic, 1970.

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Heinemann, 1977.


Pretorian (c. 1900) by PM Shanks & Sons

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NEL, 1971.

This is where things shift from anthropology, history and children’s television to Satanic exploitation and hardcore porn. “Black magic” ceremonies in previous centuries were often a kind of orgiastic cosplay so it’s no surprise to find the same thing happening in the 20th century. New English Library dominated the British book world of the 1970s with a wide range of genre novels, as well as salaciously-packaged reprints of serious occult studies by Francis King and this volume by June Johns.

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Undated.

Sexual Witchcraft and The Devil Made Me Do It are two works whose pornographic nature means their origin remains obscure; nobody seems to have any information about the latter title.

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Undated.

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Penguin, 1975.

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Symbiosis by Demdike Stare. Modern Love, 2009.

Mancunian duo Demdike Stare hark back to the heyday of Ouija boards and witchcraft with sinister electronics and the monochrome art and design of Andy Votel. Pretorian is used on all their early releases.


De Vinne Ornamental (1900) by Nicholas J. Werner

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Dell, 1978.

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Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.


Marschall (1905) by Wilhelm Woellmer

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Witchcraft magazine was a UK publication (dates unknown) whose revelatory stories ran alongside many photographs of naked ladies. There was a brief fad for this kind of thing, a diabolic counterpart to all those beefcake mags pretending to be devoted to body-building. Witchcraft did at least manage more than a single issue.

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Roberta (1962) by Robert Trogman

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Trogman’s type was based on a Belgian restaurant sign so this may be another Art Nouveau derivation. Not so the use to which it was put, however. Flaubert’s novel doesn’t feature any overt occultism (although there is a whole chapter of human sacrifice) but the cover is one of the first to establish Roberta as a signifier of the exotic/erotic .

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Berkley Medallion, 1966.

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The film equivalent of Witchcraft magazine from 1970. According to this review, Sex Rituals of the Occult also features some gay sex from the male performers, a rare thing in these boob-fests.

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Amicus Productions, 1971.


Davida (1965) by Louis Minott

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Davida is one of those typefaces from the 60s that was very popular in the following decade so it’s no surprise to find one or two occult titles using it. I’ve included it here for the way its style refers back to Ringlet, and for Abragail and Valaria’s book of recipes.

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Mattel, 1969.

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Coronet Communications, 1971.

Previously on { feuilleton }
MMM in IT
The Book of the Lost
The Occult Explosion
Forbidden volumes
The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism
Occultism for kids