Welcome to Unfoldings. My blog enfolding is my main vehicle for writing now, but I thought a newsletter would be ideal for writing about things that interest me that don’t make it onto my blog. Works in progress, passing fancies, digressions and enthusiasms, observations, reflections, and so forth. Also to keep readers updated with my current projects – books, upcoming lectures, whatever’s grabbing my attention at that particular moment.
Upcoming Lectures
I’m pleased to announce that Patricia MacCormack and I are doing our presentation: Queer(y)ing Chaos Magic: adventures in queer weird chaos ritual and beyond at Helgi’s Bar on 20th February. The Bar opens at 6pm and the presentation begins at 8 pm. More details and booking for the event here.
Book Projects
Queerying Occultures
My new book, Queering Occultures, will be published in the not-too-distant future by Original Falcon Press. This is a collection of essays, mostly written over the last decade or so, dealing with varying facets of Queer(y)ing Occultural concepts, practices, and tropes. The essays range from questioning queer relations with deities to examinations of Theosophical theories of reincarnation and gender. From questioning what a “Queer Pagan Mystery” might look like, to unruly masquerades in 18th-century London.
Patricia MacCormack has kindly written the Foreword and there is a memoir of the UK’s Queer Pagan Camp by one of the founders, Lou Hart. The book is divided into three sections - Queerying Paganisms, Queerying Tantras, and Queerying Histories. The cover painting - “Snails in Love” is by Maria Strutz.
Delinquent Elementals
Delinquent Elementals - the Pagan News anthology I have co-edited with Rodney Orpheus is now set to be published in May 2023 by Strange Attractor.
Twisted Trunk Publishing
Mike Magee’s Yakṣiṇī Magic and Kālī Magic are now available from Amazon as print paperbacks or kindle ebooks. Mike is currently working on his next book, Lalita Magic, which he tells me will primarily be concerned with Tantric sorcery. We are also discussing a new edition of his classic work, Tantrik Astrology.
More details about Mike’s Yakṣiṇī Magic and Kālī Magic here
Lecture Notes: Dion Fortune
#1 Queer Vampires
Since my deep Twitter dive in 2021 into the murky depths of Dion Fortune’s “classic” work, Psychic Self-Defence (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) I’ve been gathering more notes on Dion Fortune for a forthcoming lecture on the origins of the Left-Hand Path, about which Fortune has a lot to say. The other day, Christina Harrington sent me a link to Talia Schaffer's "A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula (you’ll need a JSTOR account to access it). It’s a fascinating read about Bram Stoker’s relationship with Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Schaffer builds a case for finding the presence of Wilde – in various guises – throughout Dracula.
Schaffer writes: “It was probably inevitable that Stoker would rejuvenate Wilde in the specific form of a vampire. Turn-of-the-century 'inversion' theory considered homosexuals neither male nor female, but in Edward Carpenter's phrase, the "intermediate sex," inhabiting a no-mans land like the Undead who were neither dead nor alive. Furthermore, the associations between homosexuality and anality led many writers to connect homosexuality with defecation, dirt and decay. As Ellis Hanson argues, "To comprehend the vampire is to recognize that abjected space that gay men are obliged to inhabit; that space unspeakable or unnameable, itself defined as orifice, as a 'dark continent' men dare not penetrate."
This passage immediately brought to mind Dion Fortune’s treatment of Vampires in both Psychic Self-Defence (PSD) and its fictional version “Blood Lust” in The Secrets of Dr. Taverner. In PSD, Fortune makes an explicit link between homoeroticism, vampirism, and class. In “Blood Lust” however, the vampiric relationship is made heterosexual. In both treatments, however, the undead impulse is provided by what Taverner refers to in “Blood Lust” as “a corpse who was insufficiently dead”. In both treatments, she connects the spread of vampirism to necrophilia in the trenches in World War One (something she avers was not uncommon) and to the prevalence of ‘black magic’ in Eastern Europe. In “Blood Lust”, Fortune points vaguely in the direction of Eastern Europe as the source of this blight, but in PSD she is much more specific, identifying the vampiric entity as the “earth-bound soul of some Magyar magician”.
#2 The Chelsea Black Lodges
Another of Fortune’s tales in Taverner is “The Return of the Ritual” which, you won’t be surprised to hear, is about a ritual going missing from the Great Order to which Dr. Taverner belongs. Throughout the tale, there are several references to the “Chelsea Black Lodges”. This intrigued me. It seemed very specific to single out Chelsea as a hotbed of Left-Hand Pathery. Was there anything to it? The answer is yes. In the 1930s, Chelsea had a reputation for being a bohemian enclave, its inhabitants given to experimentation with sex and drugs. One of the area’s most famous inhabitants was the British actress and socialite, Brenda Dean Paul (1907-1959), a glamorous member of the group who, in the 1920s, was known as the “Bright Young Things”. Paul was arrested several times in the 1930s for drug-related offenses. Other members of the bohemian Chelsea scene included Olivia Wyndham, the lover of the American actress Edna Thomas, and Nelly Wilde, the niece of Oscar. It is small wonder then, that Dion Fortune, given her views on drugs and sexual experimentation, chose Chelsea as an area riddled with black magical depravity.
Reviews: Supposedly Lovecraftian
I’ve been watching some films & television recently that purports, to varying degrees, to be Lovecraftian in tone or affect. Firstly, William Eubanks’ 2020 film Underwater, which, according to some reviews I read, was ‘Lovecraftian’ – presumably due to the appearance of a huge, leviathan-like entity at the end. Lovecraftian though? Not really. From the opening shots to the ending, Underwater is basically a homage to Ridley Scott’s Alien, but without the depth – if you’ll pardon the pun, of the latter. There’s no real attempt to develop the characters or provide much of a background context, and certainly no sense of a confrontation with something alien, yet at the same time, revelatory that is for me an essential aspect of Lovecraft.
Next up are the 2 “Lovecraftian” episodes of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities – Pickman’s Model and the Dreams in the Witch-House. At first, I thought Keith Thomas’ rendering of Pickman’s Model was okay-ish. He’d worked hard to represent a descent into delirium occasioned by exposure to Pickman’s paintings. But on reflection, I realized that Thomas had departed in significant ways from the original tale in ways that shifted the focus considerably. I am no Lovecraft purist, but the departures are significant. Firstly, the narrator, unnamed in the original tale, is given a wife and child as opposed to the homosocial bromance between the narrator and Pickman in the original. Perhaps this was done to make the plot more acceptable to a mainstream audience. Also, Pickman’s Model is notable for not having a monster in it – but of course – this being horror, there is a monster in this version. The focus here is not so much on Pickman himself as a degenerate being, but on his ancestral link with witchcraft.
Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Dreams in the Witch-House is based on the Lovecraft story insofar as there is an evil witch in it, and her familiar, Brown Jenkin. However, protagonist Walter Gilman is no longer a student of advanced physics. Instead, he is an investigator of Spiritualist phenomena, haunted by the death of his twin sister and her doom to wander a forest of lost souls. Imbibing a drug – ‘Liquid Gold’ – that made me smile, as it was the name of a brand of amyl nitrate popular in the 1980s; he manages to make contact with his sister and bring back a piece of her dress into the waking world. He moves into the house of Keziah Mason and encounters the witch in the forest. She follows him into the waking world, and there is a somewhat farcical fight between the witch and some nuns in a church. But gone are the references to advanced physics and hypergeometry in the original. Nor is there the tension between scientific detachment and religious superstition that is so present in Lovecraft’s original. This Spiritualist version of Gilman is a believer in the supernatural from the beginning.
There’s a better adaptation of Dreams in the Witch-House by Stuart Gordon in the first season (2005) of Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror series for the Showtime cable network. Definitely worth checking out if you can find it.
One of my favourite attempts to bring Lovecraft to the small screen is The Rough Magik Initiative, a 2008 pilot for a BBC TV series – alas never taken up, starring Paul Darrow (Avon in Blakes’ Seven) as the enigmatic Mr. Moon.
Check it out on youtube.
Newsletters of Note
First off, Hookland County Chronicle, without which I probably wouldn’t have started this.
Secondly, Angelo Nasios’ Hearth of Hellenism. Angelo is doing some in-depth critiques of how contemporary Pagan authors are presenting a rather skewed perspective on Ancient Greece. It’s this kind of critical scholarship that gives me hope.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.