Mojubá Elegbá Elegbá agó!
Baralayiki, Eshú odara
Mojubá Eshú lona
M’ore nla
Kosí ikú, kosí arun
Kosí ofo, kosí arayé
Fun mi iré owó, iré omó
Iré omá, iré arikú babawá
Blazing Fire
Welcome to Blazing Fire – a newsletter by Anthony Nine containing new writing, extracts from works in progress and unpublished material. This edition contains an unpublished extract from an article on witchcraft and its slippery, permeable meaning; as well as a newly edited mix of Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo-related music from my vinyl collection that I put together years ago but which has never been online until now.
Skip Witches, Hop Toads began life as an essay in Abraxas issue one, an anthology of occult writing published by Fulgur and Treadwells around the mid-00s. There was a point during the most apocalyptic days of 2020 when I had the idea of putting some of my out-of-print articles into a collection and making them available again. Sadly, however, the computer I was working on failed and I lost all the rewrites I had done, which contributed to the project losing steam.
I’ve kept returning to some of these essays here and there, however - but since I frequently no longer agree with things that I wrote more than ten years ago, all the original essays end up being more like writing prompts for my updated perspectives. Almost none of the extract below was actually in the previously published Abraxas version, for instance, as the rise of popular witchcraft over the past decade left much of it sorely in need of an update. I thought it would make a good candidate for the newsletter as it’s the most recent substantive thing I’ve worked on, and its overarching themes are probably more relevant now than they were at the time.
Haunted Soundsystem was a series of mix CDs that I put together around 2009 or so that attempted to map some of the influence of African Diaspora Traditions such as Haitian Vodou, New Orleans Voodoo, Cuban Regla de Ocha, and Brazilian Umbanda on popular music. I made three of these mix CDs, and the first one (presented here) Haunted Soundsystem 1: Eh La Bas, focuses mostly on Haitian drums and New Orleans tunes. There was a period when I was buying a lot of records like this, so all of these tracks were ripped from various LPs and 45s that I had found on this general theme. I played these records out a couple of times at events in London, and also wrote an article trying to trace the same lines for Strange Attractor Journal 4, which later had an extract published in The Wire.
I had found it frustrating that so many conversations about “occult music” always centered these themes in the music of artists like David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Psychic TV, Coil, etc. The influence of African Diaspora Traditions underpins popular music and weaves through New Orleans jazz and brass band, 1950s big band exotica, delta blues, Afro-Cuban jazz, Brazilian bossa nova, Jamaican ska and dancehall, and more - and I wanted to make those lines of transmission more apparent by putting these records together in a way that would also slap. Soul Jazz Records were talking about releasing one of these mixes at one point, but I left the country around then so it never went any further. I found one of the CDs recently, and realized that this predated Mixcloud and similar, so had never been put online before - so here it is now.
I hope you will find something of value in the various twists and turns of this newsletter. Future substack activity might be less content heavy, but I wanted to start off with something substantial. Further down the line I’m thinking about introducing a paid subscription tier that unlocks a quarterly newsletter that carries more depth of content, if there is sufficient interest in such a thing, and keep the free tier for more ephemeral dispatches. Not gonna paywall anything until I get into my stride with the format though.
Skip Witches, Hop Toads (extract)
With the repeal of the witchcraft laws in England in 1951, it hardly took a moment before the assortment of things we file under the term witchcraft began to reassert themselves openly in England. It is easy to sneer at the false claims that swarm around Wicca, the notion of an English witchcraft, the Margaret Murray hypothesis, never again the burning times, and all. Yet this sudden uprising of witchcraft in the mid-1950s is perhaps best understood in the context of post-war Britain at that moment in time. Into the grim austerity of bomb damage and rationing, after Europe ran red with blood, and with half of London in ruins, came an upsurge of witchcraft to administer to the abscess. Someone followed a will-o-the-wisp in the night and the land and dead began to stir.
There was no Old Religion of Witchcraft that looked like Neopaganism. Historically, the term witch tended to be employed as a pejorative, as it still is elsewhere in the world. Yet the notion of the witch was also slippery, and could sometimes bleed into something closer to other primal monster movie villains such as the vampire and the werewolf. The ravenous shapeshifter of the night that kisses the devil’s behind and turns babies into ointment. Every culture has one. A witch could be this non-human or not-quite-human creature of tatters and blood that haunted wild spaces after dark, or else an otherwise human-presenting individual who secretly trafficked with such malefic powers and called upon them for nefarious purpose.
The rural and urban cunning folk who told fortunes and administered folk magic remedies did not identify as witches. More commonly, they were called upon to apprehend witches or overcome their malefic influence on behalf of their community. Cunning folk were more likely to be the witchfinders, not the witches, and the label “witch” was not really an identity to be claimed so much as an accusation to avoid. Over the course of time, this sense of the malefic witch drifted and became entangled with other ideas.
For decades during the 20th century, witchcraft was uncritically depicted as the survival of an ancient nature religion indigenous to the British Isles, and this idea permanently lodged itself into the popular imagination despite the shaky scholarship it was built upon having been debunked. Academic work on the historical basis for magic has well established that there was never any organised or disorganised religion of witchcraft in the British Isles, and neither did witchcraft exist as any sort of secret society or underground cult that you could point to clear evidence of. Witchcraft, as it exists as an avenue of contemporary Neopaganism, does not have any historical continuity that goes back further than the Gardnerian Wicca of the 1950s – itself significantly influenced by late 19th century ceremonial magic, span through a pastoral filter, more than by an intact survival of pagan folk tradition.
British witches themselves have played a prominent role in the debunking of their own false history, and perhaps having absorbed an influence of chaos magic by osmosis, had few problems separating out the methods they employed and the results they derived, from the spurious stories that had accrued around them. British witchcraft has always known what it is about and quietly got on with it. The haunt of the land, the green that speaks, reading the remnants in china tea cups. As embedded in the folk culture of the island as beans on toast or complaining about the weather.
Contemporary witchcraft is contradictory. It can be all the terrible things at the same time. Dollarstore Gandalfs setting themselves up as self-proclaimed elders. Fingers-in-the-ears to anything that threatens their sense of authenticity, unwilling to accept that supposed ancient rituals are decidedly modern. Trad witches on the grift. Marketing goatskin talismanic books that claim to unveil true and hidden hereditary traditions of witchcraft, but nevertheless still read like every other book on the shelf. Witchcraft constructed as an aesthetic assembled out of tarot cards and crystals, soap and bathbombs. Blurring into self-care and novelty toiletry side-hustles to the point where we almost forget that witchcraft ever meant anything else.
Sorting through the maelstrom of deluxe editions, glamour selfies and dodgy taxidermy, nobody could be blamed for assuming that the whole endeavour of European witchcraft is a colonial sickness. Concocting an ancient tradition that never existed by stitching together disparate components to fill an insatiable vacuum. Fabricating a lost wisdom and pushing it to compete with the surviving remnants of other cultures it has kneeled upon and choked.
Yet somewhere below the melee of artisan stangs and hand-crafted besoms, the vision of the witch is still hardwired into us and will not go away or ebb from memory. Witchcraft is a night flower. It doesn’t come out in the Sun. Turn a spotlight on it and it slips into flickering shadow, but cats and dogs and foxes know a witch when they meet one in the night.
Witchcraft should never be a tool of the colonizer, but it will always be one while fancy and falsehood determine its expression. Witchcraft is not pretending that you have a different history from the one that you have, and presenting yourselves as the priests and priestesses of an ancient European tradition of magic, when it is not true by any reasonable metric.
A thin line of transmission for European magic may be traced from the strategies and dynamics of sorcery reflected in the Greek Magical Papyri, a disparate collection of spells and formulas from Greco-Roman Egypt dating from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century BC, but unpublished until 1986; and the earliest tomes of the grimoire tradition of magic, such as the Hygromanteia, which can be dated to the 14th century. And then onwards into the later grimoires and comparable texts, which set the tone for European magic through the Late Medieval to Early Modern period. And even here we must be careful not to presume that what has been written down portrays a complete picture, let alone signifies an intact tradition to be inherited.
Yet much of what poses as contemporary witchcraft is only tangentially drawn from this deep, shadowy well itself. Popular western magic in its current form, almost all of it, proceeds from the more recent constructs of the 19th century Magical Revival in Europe. Popular magic of the past hundred or so years owes its debt to Victorian and Edwardian scholars piecing together clues from a relatively small selection of historic texts available to peruse in the reading room of the British Museum. And like proto-chaos magicians, remixing and reversioning grimoire echoes with concepts from Jewish tradition, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry in order to complete its narrative.
The colonial gaze further spliced this 19th century reimagining of magic with influences from Eastern thought and practice, drenched in Orientalism, and imported like tea leaves on the engines of Empire. Flawed translations and unreliable narrators brought notions of yoga, chakras and meditation to merge with initiatory theatre and Solomonic stylings. And from this fertile soil sprang imagined reconstructions of witch cults and pagan rites, which repurposed many of the same moves and structures of the Magical Revival, as a methodology for relating to the distant mythospheres of ancient Greece, Rome, Scandinavia and other romantic bastions of European antiquity.
Refracted a thousand-fold through the kaleidoscope lens of the internet, and untethered from any responsibility to objectivity by new age relativism and post-modern deconstruction, a new sense of witchcraft emerges. The feral, vampiric, anti-social night hag is forgotten, and the witch becomes a catch-all term for anyone mildly interested in tarot cards, astrology, crystals, and similar menu items that have populated mind-body-spirit self-help books for half-a-century.
Words can drift and take on new meaning, and there is magic in reclaiming a historically pejorative word as an act of resistance against a cultural hegemony that outlaws and ostracizes. Often the image of the witch is wrapped up with everything the broader culture has neglected and mistreated. There is fear of the other in the witch. The night hag, cruel and barren. The unsettled dead coming back to haunt you. The wronged landscape finding voice. The well that you have poisoned. The way that you have treat nature. The way that you have treat women. The consequences of everything you have done knocking on your door at midnight.
There is no blame for anyone finding solace and empowerment in this vilified figure that stands outside and points its accusing finger at corrupt systems and entrenched power imbalances. The unprecedented adoption of manifold witch identities at this point in time speaks to something, no matter the specifics of its expression. Witchcraft is as much a way of seeing, as it is anything else. Not a set of mythic stories or a world view, not a set of rituals handed down in a lineage, but a way of considering nature and being.
The lycanthropy of the witch points to a fluidity with animal consciousness. Witches get the moon and the crossroads like a stray dog does. Every component and process of nature has a virtue that can be held. Wing of bat and tail of newt. The turn of the earth and the mansions of the moon. Ghost wood and powdered bone. The shapeshifting and hedge-sitting quality of the witch points to a remembrance of faculties eroded and stifled. Nature as a pulsating, participatory mystery with which we are intimately and irrevocably entwined, versus nature as a static resource to be pillaged and plundered.
Considered in this way, through the broadest possible lens, simply as an arrow pointing towards a suppressed visionary sense of the living magic of immersive, all-encompassing nature and its celestial rhythms, even the tackiest, most cash-in book on popular witchcraft can function as a revolutionary tract for someone.
If a seismic shift in how we relate to nature is required to avert the worst of climate catastrophe, then it's counterproductive to sneer and disparage when some of its unfolding and expression is cringe. It misses the point to focus on the aspect that is crass, or poorly informed, or trying to fleece people of their coin, and overlook how these are symptoms of a tangible compulsion erupting and seeding itself through the host culture in myriad forms, not all of them ideal.
A preponderance of remixed versions of the witch rising up out of the blood tracks of the past and asserting connections with the dead and with nature, the passage of stars, the medicine and poison of the Green. It doesn't matter if some of it is wrong or misses the point. There are always going to be jokers and charlatans. If we can identify value in this process happening at scale, and generating greater numbers of spirit mediums, astrologers, diviners, mystics and magicians, then one person accessing the real gear for every fifty or a hundred aesthetic dabblers following exposure to the same trite retelling is still significant.
If you believe that the various practices that sit under the umbrella of magic have meaning, offer medicine and fortitude, serve a purpose, administer to a sickness, reveal mystery, elevate the spirit – then resenting the use of historically inaccurate nomenclature to describe the process of those ideas attaining greater momentum is not a hill to die on.
But neither should this more macro view of the rise of popular witchcraft deter pushback in the spaces where such slippage of meaning causes something essential to be lost or diluted. There's a pendulum swing between the value of increased transmission, and an outcome where the original global and historical sense of the witch is co-opted, neutered and defanged by assimilation into a safe popular culture iteration.
While the genie can't perhaps be put back into the bottle, and people are not going to stop reframing what a witch is at this juncture, it is worth considering who exactly it serves to have such night terrors recast in a tamer, anodyne and more palatable form. The slyest magic diverts and misdirects rather than opposing directly. An enemy can be neutralised by tying them up repeatedly in the wrong thing, or causing them to put all of their energy into a fruitless labour, or introducing a fatal error that leads them down a blind alley for decades at a time.
Haunted Soundsystem 1: Eh La Bas
The cover art that I used for this when it was a mix CD was a photo that I took of a venerable live oak that stands at the crossroads of North Rampart Street and St Peters, at the corner of Congo Square and just up from Preservation Hall. I would always go to this tree to make service for Papa Legba when I visited New Orleans as it seemed like an important gateway to these mysteries. Audio embedded below but it’s also on mixcloud here if that works better for anyone.
1. Papa Legba - Maya Deren
This is on the 'Divine Horsemen' vinyl LP of Haitian Vodou field recordings that Maya Deren made to accompany her book of the same name. There was a 1950s original pressing that goes for money, but I have the later 70s pressing. I actually got my copy of this via Treadwells in London who had got it from the estate sale of an occultist. Maya Deren made these recordings on equipment powered by her car battery, but it really is one of my favourite LPs in the field recording of Vodou songs genre of record.
2. Voodoo Drum - Ti Roro
I became obsessed with this period in the 1950s when the Exotica records of composers such as Martin Denny, along with the beginnings of modern tourism, opened up a market for "songs from the islands" - which frequently ended up being recordings related to African Diaspora Traditions such as Vodou. Ti Roro was a master Vodou drummer who performed in the upmarket hotels of Port-au-Prince when Haiti was a popular tourist destination. Jazz drummer Max Roach studied with Ti Roro in Haiti in the late 1940s, and the Haitian drummer made several records during his career including the fantastic 'Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi', which I have on vinyl as well, but this particular recording is from another LP called 'Songs, Dances & Drums of Haiti'. I love the introduction given to Ti Roro "and his famous Voodoo Drum" on this one, which "exerts a hypnotic influence over the listener".
3. Rhythm Pum Te Dum - Duke Ellington & his Orchestra
This is such an odd piece of music - it doesn't really sound like anything else I can think of. Late career Duke Ellington where he's making all these idiosyncratic records because he can. This is from a 1956 concept album called "A Drum is a Woman" where Ellington is tracing the journey of jazz rhythms from their origins in Africa to the Caribbean and New Orleans and then to New York, through the characters of "Madame Zajj" and "Carribee Joe".
4: Eh, La Bas - Jelly Roll Morton
Papa La Bas is the New Orleans version of Papa Legba, and "Eh, La Bas" is a traditional Creole song that ostensibly means "Hey, you over there", and whether or not there is any relationship between these two pieces of information is something that I will leave to the listener. This version was recorded in 1938 by folklorist Alan Lomax as part of his extensive Library of Congress interviews with the pianist where he talked at length about his background as a barrelhouse professor playing piano in the "sporting houses" of the Storyville red light district in the formative years of New Orleans jazz (which Jelly Roll hyperbolically claimed to have invented himself).
5. Somebody Done Hoodood the Hoodoo Man - Louis Jordan
Louis Jordan was a big star in the late 30s through to the 50s, duetting with Ella Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby and appearing in several movies. While he is less well known today, his series of "jump blues" 78s with his Tympany Five on Decca Records heavily shaped R&B and are clear precursors of rock & roll. Jordan was known for his comedic, narrative-based songs such as 'Saturday Night Fish Fry' that often included lyrics in African-American vernacular. 'Somebody Done Hoodoo'd the Hoodoo Man' is another example in this vein, and I put it here because it's great and because I like the matter-of-fact everydayness of its conjure narrative. I also love the line “ain’t nothing goes over the Devil’s back, that don’t buckle under his chin” as it makes me think of the various cape-wearing Exu statues in Brazilian Quimbanda.
6. Eh, La Bas (live) – Kid Ory & His Creole Jazzband
Another version of 'Eh, La Bas' this time by Kid Ory & His Creole Jazzband. Ory was an early New Orleans jazz trombone player and band leader, who claimed to have played with semi-mythic jazz originator Buddy Bolden, and had a band in the 1910s that included Joe 'King' Oliver and Louis Armstrong. I included this version because it's a good example of 'Eh, La Bas' as a New Orleans brass standard, compared to Jelly Roll Morton's sparse vocal take on the Creole tune recorded by Lomax.
7. Drum Improvisation No.1 - Baby Dodds Trio
Baby Dodds was one of the most important drummers in early New Orleans jazz, his grandfather had been a drummer in Congo Square, and he participated in the New Orleans jazz funeral and Second Line traditions. Dodds was the drummer for King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and then for Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven groups, and he was one of the first artists to record improvised drumming. I think this improvisation from the LP 'Jazz a la Creole' blurs the lines between improvised jazz drumming and other instances of drumming for spirits included on this mix, so you can easily forget what you're listening to.
8. Rasbodail Rhythm - Emy de Pradines
This is from a 1953 LP called 'Voodoo - Authentic Music and Rhythms of Haiti' by Emy de Pradines and the Haitian Danse Chorus and Orchestra, and is another instance of Haitian Vodou music being recorded and marketed as a weird version of island Exotica. Emy de Pradines, later Emerante de Pradines Morse, was the daughter of Haitian musician Auguste Linstant de Pradines, known as Ti Candio or Kandjo, whose songs and performances were popular on the island from the 1890s to the 1930s. Emy de Pradines sang Vodou songs in Creole on the radio when it was dangerous to do so, and she was the first Haitian singer to sign a recording contract with a record company. Her son is Richard Morse, founder of the Haitian roots band RAM, and proprietor of the Olafson Hotel in Port-au-Prince. The liner notes to this record say the drums on this song are influenced by Taino and Arawak rhythms.
9. Danse Kalinda Ba Doom - Dr John
The drum rhythms of Congo Square were said to include the Kalinda and Bamboula - mentioned in many New Orleans songs. The Kalinda, or Calinda, is also the name of an African folk music and stick fighting tradition practiced in Trinidad and other islands in the Caribbean; while the Bamboula is said to have influenced the New Orleans Second Line style of music. This recording is from Dr. John's 1968 LP 'Gris-Gris', the record where Mac Rebennack first took on the name of Dr. John, the early 19th century New Orleans root doctor and Congo Square drummer.
10. Voodoo - Dirty Dozen Brass Band
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band is part of a tradition of New Orleans marching brass band music, closely associated with funerary marches and Second Line, as well as the confluence of Congo Square drums and early jazz rhythms. Early New Orleans brass bands date to the late 19th century and include the Eureka Brass Band, Olympia Brass Band and Tuxedo Brass Band. Formed in 1977, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band were among the first to incorporate funk and bebop elements into the traditional brass band style, which has since become an established part of the form.
11. Two-Way-Pocky-Way - The Golden Eagles
New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians are likely one of the most direct descendants of Congo Square traditions, and the influence of Mardi Gras Indian music weaves through the history of New Orleans music from jazz to brass band to funk. With a history dating to the 1880s or earlier, the Mardi Gras Indian gangs originally used the cover of Mardi Gras masking to violently settle scores with rival masked gangs from other areas in New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton talks about having been a Spy Boy in a Mardi Gras Indian gang in his Library of Congress interviews with Alan Lomax. Since the 1960s, Mardi Gras Indians have turned their rivalry to the sphere of costume making, music and performance. 'Two-Way-Pocky-Way' means something like "Get out of the way or I'll kill you." There are many versions of this standard, but I like this one as it's like a Mardi Gras Indian practice session with just the call-and-response vocals and the percussion. This is from an LP called 'Lightning & Thunder' by the Golden Eagles, featuring Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, who was also in the Wild Magnolias who made an amazing Mardi Gras Indian funk 7" called 'Handa Wanda' in 1970. 'Haunted Soundsystem 3: Two-Way-Pocky-Way' was another mix CD that I made in this series that had a lot of this stuff on it. Not sure if that one still exists anywhere.
12. Ibo - Katherine Dunham
Katherine Dunham was a dancer, choreographer, anthropologist and activist from Chicago, whose proteges included Eartha Kitt and Maya Deren. She made Ocha in Cuban Lukumi and initiated as a Mambo in Haitian Vodou, after doing ethnographic fieldwork on the islands. The 1957 LP 'The Singing Gods' is a collection of recordings of ritual music she made in Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. At the age of 83 she went on a 49-day hunger strike to protest the discriminatory U.S. foreign policy against Haitian refugees, saying "My job is to create a useful legacy". The track title 'Ibo' refers to a Nation of Lwa called in the Reglemen of Haitian Vodou.
13. Papaloko - Toto Bissainthe
Toto Bissainthe was a Haitian actress and singer known for her blend of Vodou themes and contemporary arrangements. She was a founding member of the theatre company Les Griots in 1956, which was the first Black theatre company in France. She made several albums with Vodou themes, and this is from the 1977 LP 'Chante Haiti'. Papa Loko is a Lwa in the Rada Nation, considered to have been the first Houngan. I don't know why I put this cooling Rada section *after* the earlier frenetic drumming section, as that should be the other way around. Not going to mess with the order of tracks though, and it functions as a nice calming reprieve after the preceding brass band frenzy.
14. Erzulie - Emy de Pradines
This is another track from the LP 'Voodoo - Authentic Music and Rhythms of Haiti' by Emy de Pradines and the Haitian Danse Chorus and Orchestra. This song for the Lwa Erzulie Freda Dahomey has an interesting history as it was written by Emy de Pradines' father, the Haitian entertainer known as Kandjo. He had been diagnosed with polio when he was 9, and by the age of 12 had lost control over the left side of his body. Kandjo was carried on his back to a Vodou ceremony, where a celebrant possessed by Erzulie Freda performed a healing that increased his mobility with the aid of a cane. He composed the song 'Erzulie nennen o', here called simply 'Erzulie', when he was 14 as a tribute to the Lwa that had helped him, and it became one of his most popular and best-known songs.
15. Damballa - Choral Group
This is another from the LP 'Songs, Dances & Drums of Haiti'. The male choir doing almost barbershop quartet-style vocal harmonies for the Lwa is a pretty unusual style to find among these recordings. Damballa is the serpent Lwa of Vodou, associated with peace, healing, wisdom and vitality.
16. Dambala - Exuma
Another song for Dambala, this time by Bahamain musician, artist and playwright Tony McKay, who adopted the stage persona Exuma the Obeah Man. After moving to New York at the age of 17, he performed around the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s, and later made several records as Exuma in the 1970s, which dealt in themes of Caribbean spirits and magic. McKay himself was a practitioner of Bahamian bush medicine.
17. Obeah Woman - Nina Simone
Nina Simone covering an Exuma song. She also did a cover of his 'Dambala', so this live recording - possibly with Exuma in the audience as she calls out to him - seemed like an obvious segue from that song. This is often mistaken for a gender flipped version of McKay's 'Exuma the Obeah Man' but it's a different song. More about that below.
18. Voodoo Juju Obsession - K. Pythacunthapuserectus
Yeah. No idea. This is a psych 7" that would always show up in searches for these sorts of records, so I bought it and it's great. It has the musician and composer Janko Nilovik playing on it, but that's all I know about it. Sort of worked here so I put it here.
19. Obeah Woman - Patricia Rollins
This 7" seems to be what Nina Simone was covering. It was written and produced by Exuma with a vocal by Patricia Rollins, and released in 1973 on the Roulette label, a year prior to the Nina Simone live recording. It's probably Exuma speaking in tongues at the beginning and on backing vocals. Nina Simone's version doesn't mention Shango but this one does.
Still have my Haunted Soundsystem cds somewhere! Looking forward to your writing here