Storytelling is one of our oldest and most enduring arts. It pervades all cultures and experiences, and it unites and marshals our deepest emotions. Storytellers, somewhat like the weather-making Tempestarii of legend, modulate the soul’s atmosphere; their words electrify and vivify, frighten and amaze. “Legend-makers” are, as J.R.R. Tolkien maintained, “blessed.” Their tales cast audiences…
“I do not profess myself to be any great Statesman, or exactly to know what ever is secretly transacted among us: But this I can say…I have for many years last past been as curious an observer of all the great transactions of Affairs in Church or State, and of the instruments and means by…
ODD TRUTHS: JOHN EVANS, THE SINISTER ASTROLOGER OF FETTER-LANE “He was the most saturnine person my eyes ever beheld…” -from History of His Life and Times by William Lilly (1715) There is a guilty pleasure in picturing the early modern era as a time of taboo-defying dynamos and charismatics. Personalities like Giovanni Pico, Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, and John Dee…
ODD TRUTHS: THOMAS TRYON, THE PYTHAGORAS OF LONDON “Cast thy Eyes round about thee, and enter into the inside of Things, and with a silent distinguishing Thought, and earnest sedate Meditation, and Contemplation, behold the wonderful Operations of the serene silent magick Powers of the Coelestials, and also of the Terrestials…” -from The Knowledge of a…
“You will remember that Albertus Magnus…adds emphatically, that the process will instruct and avail only to the few— that a man must be born a magician!” -from The Haunters and the Haunted by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859). In 1870, Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton hosted a quirky American man of letters named Charles Godfrey Leland at his manor house in Knebworth, Hertfordshire. The two thinkers were…
THEATRE REVIEW: AWAKE AND ASLEEP The Magic, Language, and Society initiative is a new collaboration between The University of Surrey and Treadwell’s Bookshop. In a bid to make certain esoteric aspects of the humanities more accessible to wider audiences, the programme will run events at Treadwell’s, a nucleus of London’s contemporary magical scene. The inaugural…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: MIKE JAY Mike Jay is a cultural historian who hounds the maddening stories of the people who ventured to bizarre borderlands of consciousness. Praised by the Guardian, The Independent, and the New Statesmen, Mike has written about nineteenth-century drug culture, the Illuminati, and the earliest claims of machine-based brainwashing. Mike currently curates…
ODD TRUTHS: ROBBING THE SPIRITS OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY Not every magician was fortunate enough to get on the royal payroll in Stuart England. The unlucky ones often had to resort to subtle hustling to make a living; drifting from job to job, trading their magic for power and influence. A few of these spellcasters used the “Solomonic arts”…