I wasn’t sure if I was going to do anymore of this substack or just delete it, fold-up and put away “Anthony Nine” like a crap boardgame on Boxing Day, and make the quiet exit. Substack’s ongoing position on platforming Nazis is a factor here, but I also increasingly find that I don’t like participating in the “online occult world” as it has further taken shape over the past decade or so. My practice is not an app, I don’t wish to be any edgy chat show host, and I’m old enough to remember when “occult influencer” meant I had your personal concerns in a jar. Got rid of my twitter account a few months back and have zombified all of my other social media. The least online I’ve ever been since there’s been an online.
I do still look at Threads and Bluesky every so often but have not been feeling any compulsion to actively post on any social media or do anything with any sort of visibility. I have mostly been playing Fallout 4, which with some imagination and persistence can be turned into a game of something like “Steed & Mrs Peel conquer the post-nuclear radioactive wasteland with mid-century modern decor, sci-fi weapons and killer robots”. An endeavor that might have been painstakingly designed as a spirit trap for diverting my attention away from anything outward facing for a period.
I look at Facebook even less often, but I do check it sometimes to see what is going on with my friends that are only on Facebook. I clicked on the “Memories” bit the other day and it had some things I had written around this time of year, where I was talking about my experience of Christmas in another country at various points in time since I emigrated ten years ago, as well as some reflections on the various mysteries that are embedded in the iterations of the season as I experience them. Rereading these little memories of past Christmases hit a little close to the bone for me, not least because of how many dead friends there were populating the comments section, who have died since I’ve been living over here, and who I never got to say goodbye to or attend their funerals.
Christmas is considered a hot Petro mystery in Haitian Vodou, because of the implicit “heat” of the presence of the Divine incarnating in matter at the moment of the Nativity. There’s a funny mystical bit in the otherwise quite surreal Sun Ra Christmas record (which you will find in the festive playlist at the end of this newsletter) where the lyrics are “the whole wide world should all give praise to their God, because he is so near” — and if we sidestep a reading of these lines where it appears to be imposing Christianity and Christmas on the world in some sense — the lyrics always make me think of this Petro Vodou notion of Christmas. It does specifically say “their” God after all, and I like to hear that line as being a non-denominational sense of the Divine somehow more present and immanent around this time of year.
My understanding of magic is something like a means to fathom objective processes of nature and being, using the instruments of narrative and our sensory organs, in order to comprehend something otherwise invisible, but which we are nonetheless subject to the dynamic fluctuations of on an everyday basis. In these terms, our subtle and not-so-subtle living experience of the seasons is the important component of this, more so than the various narratives we weave around this experience to try and communicate something of the ineffable.
The popular neopagan idea of a “thinning of the veil” that occurs around Halloween, which supposedly enables communication with the dead, seems a very strange belief from the perspective of traditions that interact continually with the dead on various levels. Developing mediums in Espiritismo would have their work cut out for them if they could only do the practice for a couple of weeks at the end of October. I think there’s a grain of meaning often lost in hyperbole around this idea, however.
My thoughts on the seasons and the dead are influenced by the idea of the four moments of the Sun as expressed in the Dikenga or Congo cosmogram, and present in some form or other in traditions that have a strong Congo influence. Here midnight for the living is midday for the dead, and vice versa, which presents some rationale for a sense of the dead being more active at night and less so during daylight hours. We could then perhaps extrapolate that idea of the dead being either more or less active in accordance with the movement of the Sun, and consider it in relation to a yearly cycle.
Late October to the end of December might be considered in its entirety as a period where the dead are more vivid due to this increase in activity, with the Winter Solstice being the high point or Noon of this movement of the dead, and the weeks on either side of that constituting a time where the presence of spirit is almost inescapable. The Victorian notion of Christmas ghost stories — gaining popularity in parallel with the heyday of Spiritualism — echoes this idea. Halloween to Christmas Eve is a time when the dead draw near, and it’s not a one time thing, as the dead are always present, but here it is unavoidable from the first blood spill of Lamas night to the Epiphany of Three Kings. John Barleycorn is dead. Three Magi are guided by the Star.
The Season is marked by a procession of Saint’s Days reflecting winter mysteries. St Barbara’s Day on December 4th, syncretised with Shango. Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Day on December 12th, representing both Our Lady in the broadest sense as well as a specific permutation of embedded Mesoamerican mysteries. St Lazarus’s Day on December 17th, syncretised with Babalu Aye. Observing these marker days in some form, and meeting certain frequencies of spirit on the road at these moments of the year, help you to move in step and in time with the dead that walk, and move to the same tides and currents.
Put more prosaically, Christmas is also a time for the dead because annual celebratory festivals such as this are so deeply ingrained that their rhythm persists after death like a drumbeat that the dead march to. We think about our loved ones that are no longer with us, and remember our Christmases past with them. We quietly lament and raise a glass of something to lost grandparents, lost friends and lost selves. An illuminated evergreen tree brought inside and decorated with ancestral memories, surmounted by a representation of a Star or celestial being, and raised as a beacon for celebration, feasting and gift giving every year is an implicit and consistent magnet for familial dead. The turn of the year forces a reckoning with where we have come from and where we are going.
These ideas are all very present in the writing that follows, expressed in different ways in the week before Christmas at various points over the past decade. From my first Christmas away from home navigating homesickness and adapting to the very unfamiliar landscape of Miami in 2013, to the slightly unhinged 2017 entry where I’m trying to curse despised political figures using only Christmas decorations and festive novelty glam rock 45s.
Also included below is a playlist that collects together some of my favourite Christmas records from the many mixes like this that I did over the years, with technical help from Seth Cooke who originally hosted them on his Bang the Bore website that is no longer active. I thought these were also no longer online but they can still be found on mixcloud so I’ve included links to the original mixes as well as the new playlist. Festive songs within the genres of soul, R&B, doo wop, disco, Brazilian, Cuban and Jamaican music that, importantly, slap like a truck full of tinsel.
I think people often miss the point of Christmas music, which I like exactly because it is subject to the same movements of the dead that I wrote of above. Christmas music is haunted like all folk songs are haunted, and can function as a repository of spirit or an anchor or magnet for the dead drawn to its winter story. We can live in these songs and see reflections of ourselves in them, and they give voice to little human moments that we may share or can easily contemplate at this time of year. All of life is contained in Christmas songs, and our remembrance of the dead is embedded deep in them, more so than in most secular ritual. Does your Granny always tell you that the Old Ones are the best and such like.
Anyway, in the words of another recently made Christmas ghost, “Goodnight and Godbless and now fuck off to bed.”
Christmas 2013
Christmas in America. I thought I'd miss the cold weather more, but I don't mind so much. Christmas for me is the fucking hard winter. It's an arctic wind off the North Sea biting through me. It's dark nights and icicles hanging off the roofs of terraced houses.
Sometimes it's snow drifts and not being able to get a train from London Bridge. Having to take refuge in the George on Borough High Street or the Royal Oak on Tabard Street until the trains start running again. Pints of Guinness and pub food and that feeling when you finally get into a warm bar after standing pointlessly on a freezing train platform for an hour.
But more than that, it's finishing work for the year and making the annual pilgrimage up to Tynemouth where I grew up. The sea. Long walks on the desolate beach after dark, too cold for anyone else but the occasional intrepid dog walker or masochistic jogger. Magic at the tide. Salt water wind cleansing and purifying the last of the year. Ghost lights out in the mist. Deep Ones only a cold glimmer of the imagination away.
Oddly, I don't actually mind it not being cold. I quite like being able to sit out on my balcony with a Red Stripe in December. It's alright. There's still the sea here. It's not my sea, but it's a sea. You can swim in it without limbs freezing off, so that's something.
The weirdest thing is the cultural differences surrounding Christmas. The things that they don't have here. Mince pies, Xmas crackers, stupid paper hats. I never thought I'd ever miss Slade and Wizzard, for instance, but it's the conspicuous absence of kind-of-annoying things like that which provoke the biggest sense of homesickness and loss.
Ghosts of Christmas Past that normally come rattling their chains every year. Shells of memory that reiterate and recapitulate lost Christmases and imaginary Christmases that never were. An ancestral performance play re-enacted to keep alive some half-remembered flame of familial warmth, light and life in the darkness of winter. Distorted phantoms of memory reflected back at you in a mirrored top hat poised jubilantly above absurd sideburns. Torn wrapping paper of lost days erased like the whisky cheer of grandparents long dead.
So you import all of it. You order in the Christmas crackers from Ebay, you play the stupid songs on Spotify to bemused terrified in-laws, you learn how to make the mince pies from scratch. A good old fashioned shit English Christmas superimposed over glitzy mall nativities and miracles on 34th street. Arcane rituals that you dig out of a tattered carrier bag like tawdry baubles from the 70s that have seen better days. Adding your own old ornaments to this weird and unfamiliar tree. Tropical branches and unfamiliar fruit, but still within the vast verdant body of Gran Bwa and surmounted by the same inextinguishable star. Taping your own postcards of history onto the cut-up collage of American Christmas, an exquisite corpse of Feliz Navidad and Buon Natale.
They probably think Noddy Holder is some sort of festive cocktail here, like eggnog. Whatever eggnog is.
Christmas 2016
Seasons in Miami are performative. There are subtle fluctuations through the changing year, but it's always Florida out there. There's a strange negotiation that people seem to do here, where they mediate the existential vacuum of there being no convincing autumn and winter by pretending that plausible seasons are happening outside when they are not.
People suddenly start wearing hoodies and scarves for no reason as they move between air-conditioned buildings and vehicles, when it's still very much 90 degrees plus outside. You even hear people complaining about how cold it is — when they are inside an office — and you could just turn the AC down any time you want.
Mostly seasons are represented by different sorts of decorative tat from Target though. October brings out the autumnal door wreaths, cheerful scarecrows, and colourful gourds. You get a midnight orange and black flare-up of witchcraft and devilry around Halloween, then it eases back to harvest in the run up to Thanksgiving. All bets are off after that though, when all the plastic Christmas shit comes out.
People go *fucking crazy* with outside Christmas decorations in America — even by Newcastle standards. Inflatable Snowmen as big as the house itself. Entire life size Santa sleighs with mechanized moving reindeer on top of people's roofs. Lights draped around palm trees, where people really do inexplicably put red lights around the bulbous top part of the tree with white lights below, so at night it looks like a row of giant illuminated penises outside their house.
I like American Christmas though. Much like American Halloween, it's both completely alien and weirdly familiar to me from growing up with festive American films and television. In some ways it's like American Christmas is the pure uncut version. What it's supposed to be like from the films. Peppermint candy canes and eggnog (or more frequently in Hialeah, someone’s homemade cochito surreptitiously brought into the office and passed around the desks).
I quietly carry around a tawdry British working class Christmas inside. Limp tinsel and decorations from the 80s that have seen better days. Noddy Holder announcing the season like some harbinger of over-cooked vegetables and terrible office parties. Six pints of lager and two whiskies on top of last night's hangover, drank up before midday in the working mens’ club with my Dad on Christmas Day. Missing my Grandparents who aren't around anymore.
Christmas has always been important to me. I am not without the gift of cynicism, but I put that aside in December. Nothing has become “too commercialized” unless you let it be. I love giving and receiving presents, but that's an adjunct to the ancestral festival that's hard-wired into me. It is what you make it, and I've always treat Christmas as a spell that you cast. I have long been an adept at nicing up the winter.
Take it back to the essentials and it's just about keeping a little flickering light of warmth going in the hardest, coldest part of the year. Our ancestors wouldn't always survive the winter, even just a few generations ago, in a way that we're (for the moment…) insulated from. But that prayer for light in the darkness is old and endures. You are taught it. What other magic gets driven into you as a child, if you're lucky, with the force and fire of Christmas. It's a lovely inherited ritual, but Christmas is about life and death. It's about hope and survival.
Bringing a living tree inside and dressing it in symbolic ornament, lighting a Christmas candle, and getting shitfaced on mulled wine and whatever else is going may wire back to the arguable pagan roots of the festival, but the mysteries that matter will always reinvent and update.
The Christian overlay upon Yuletide reflects the same mystery. The miracle birth of a redeeming light in the darkest of times. A tiny, fragile hope for the future nurtured against the odds. Blood of the Holy Innocents spilled at Herod’s command. Take the long way around on the rough slouch to Bethlehem. No sanctuary at the inn or crib for a bed. The descent of the Divine into matter playing out in the wild barn. Holy Spirit immanent in nature. Shepherds hear the sound of drums. The ox and ram keep time. Wreck a pum pum.
Learned Magi break out the Picatrix and consult their Djinn. Like St Cyprian, wicked necromancer at the top of his game, willingly humbling himself after having encountered the ineffable light, these Three Kings of Orient Are confronted by the grace from which all else proceeds. The Star they follow, predicted in their charts, signals the Great Work. The unveiling of the Divine in a lowly cattle shed. Spirit is immanent in nature. A lamp still burns in the cold, dark night.
This fucking year though. I don't care about the dead rock stars. I watched my country led down the garden path by a flashy spiv selling lies printed on the side of a bus, peddling some fanciful return to a selective vision of the 1950s that even Mad Men was more honest about. I saw actual Nazis holding ‘Hitler was Right’ signs and seig hieling outside Monument Metro in my home town. I'm glad my grandparents weren't still alive to see that. I heard about friends and friends-of-friends abused in the local shops where they live because they looked “foreign”, regardless of whether they were British born or not. A Polish father and son beaten and bloodied in the streets. A mother shot dead by a coward with “Britain First” on his lips.
Then I watched the whole thing happen again in my adopted home. The same thing but amplified in the way that America always is. I don't even want to write about it, but we're through the rabbit hole and there's no script for what this is. I dread what's to come and how it's going to hurt people. And all the while, I can hear the impotent howling rage of ancestors who bled out in Europe to protect their children from this. To safeguard us from a world wracked by that which we are willingly inviting in.
Real time updates of the world’s atrocities fed to us on a flickering strobe at a rate never before experienced by any generation en masse. Small bodies washed up on the beach at Calais or pulled from the wreckage of bombed out hospitals in Aleppo, interspersed with funny cat videos and ‘which desensitized low level trauma sufferer are you?’ quizzes designed to mine your responses for ad targeting.
And interspersed with increasingly harrowing updates from the lives of your friends. Starts slow at first but it seems like there's too much of it this year, and you can't tell if that's really happening, or if you're just hearing about more of it on a continual feed from all over the world. People you haven't even been in the same room with, but who you interact with all the time, so it feels like you know them. Repeatedly crushed under the wheels of the year in one way or another, some terribly.
You might also have been out there broken and distraught on the park bench at some point as well, but didn't talk about it because you keep these things private or you just couldn't type out the words. Not even knowing how you got there, but begging anything that would listen that everything you love would not be torn away. Staring down the cold barrel of something that you knew you simply would not come back from, and that you wouldn't want to if you could. So close to the sulfurous claw of the year that everything else recedes but an acrid, metallic taste and the tangible, physical pressure of its cruel severity bearing down.
By the end of the year, the dead rock stars are besides the point, even though you seem to remember it all being better when David Bowie was still alive. Even though your heroes really are increasingly dead, and your enemies are very definitely in power.
The Christmas lights sit there unopened for a couple of days after you dig them out of the cupboard, because you can't quite bring yourself to go there. This year it all feels as artificial and as contrived as the ridiculous inflatable Snowmen and plastic winter scenes that sit outside in front yards under 80 degree sunshine and cloying humidity. Empty ornaments to give an unconvincing simulation of something that clearly isn't happening.
You get up and you set the fucking light anyway though, even if you might not be able to see it properly through the tears and the numbness. The little flame of it was important enough to be passed along from grandparent to grandparent, and it's what we have. Your ancestors kept it going from year to year, and you're going to damned well make sure to keep it trimmed and burning when it falls to you. In the darkness of life, we keep the lamp lit. Spirit is immanent in nature.
And there's an old magic to that which it's easy to forget about from year to year. Somewhere amid the tinsel, stupid songs and turkey dinners, there's something vital and human to be celebrated. An invincible fire that burns through the years whatever the blizzard, and it’s kindled in the fragile moments when we share a drink or a meal or a gift. Light and warmth enough to make you think that there's still some hope, and there’s still a chance. Fear and uncertainty walk tall alongside us, but there's still enough cheer to raise a glass of whatever you have and say “Merry fucking Christmas you fucking bastards!”
Cursing with Christmas Decorations 2017
I invite you all to join me during this festive season in cursing certain personages using only easily sourced household ingredients, shitty seasonal decorations that have seen better days, and your choice of Christmas Elf.
For this work, you could perhaps use the Keebler Elf to represent Jeff Sessions, or the Elf on the Shelf to represent Jared Kushner. The work will take place during the 12 Days of Christmas under the auspices of the Three Magi or Three Kings, patrons of magicians.
During the run up to Christmas you will prepare a jar of Festive Despair. This will need to be large enough to contain your Elf and the other ingredients. Into this jar you will place shards of cracked and broken Christmas ornaments — ideally fragments of shiny mirrored baubles; broken fairy lights; chili peppers, raw onion, dead insects, and the pages from Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ that describe the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, set on fire and reduced to ash.
Every time you experience some Christmas stress or have a Christmas argument, you will open this jar and breathe this accumulated stress and frustration into it, then put the lid back on and give it a shake.
On Christmas Eve you will attend a church for Midnight Mass, preferably a church at a crossroads. Here you will silently pray to the Three Magi, explaining the reasons for your curse and the swift justice that is required. You will then steal the mass on behalf of your Elf and surreptitiously baptize it in the font with the name of your target.
At midnight on Christmas Day you will place the Elf inside the jar, along with some bones from the turkey you ate earlier in the day, close the lid and light a black candle on top of it dressed in a cursing oil. Pray to the Three Magi and then recite Psalm 109. As the candle burns down, you will play ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ by Wizzard on repeat until the wax is spent.
You will then take your Elf out of the jar and move it to a different location around the house. Make sure you put the Elf in the nastiest places you can think of. Stuffed behind the toilet, inside the cistern, next to the bins, strung up by the neck with threadbare tinsel in a filthy shed, etc.
Repeat this process every night during the Twelve Days of Christmas, with black candle, cursing oil, petitions to Magi, psalm 109, filthy location, and Roy Wood with Wizzard.
On the final day, Three Kings night itself, do not take the Elf out of the jar this time, but fill up the jar with a mixture of vinegar and eggnog, then take it to the cemetery and bury it at a location that you are drawn to - making sure to leave appropriate offerings for the dead and any boneyard ruler you have dealings with.
Close the work by drinking a Manhattan.
Ghosts of Christmas
So between the years 2011 and 2017 I made this series of Christmas mixes across the various genres of music that I like. I called the first one “A Voodoo Christmas in South Norwood” as an obscure pun on the chapter of Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen entitled “A Vodou Christmas in Haiti”. I lived in South Norwood within the London Borough of Croydon at the time, while quietly serving my Lwa and buying a lot of records, so it seemed to make some sense as a title for these festive mixes. I wanted to continue making these Christmas mixes after I moved to Miami, so I just updated the title to reflect the bit of South Florida where I now lived.
The original mixes are all still on mixcloud here:
A Voodoo Christmas in South Norwood 1
A Voodoo Christmas in South Norwood 2
A Voodoo Christmas in Hialeah 1
A Voodoo Christmas in Hialeah 2
A Sweet Christmas Morning in Hialeah
A Dutty Christmas Night in Hialeah
And below is a new playlist that I put together this week containing some of my favourite Christmas tunes from all of the above and a few that aren’t on any of them.
I'd be sad if you dropped off completely- I have missed getting to converse with you on Twitter- your perspectives and experiences are very interesting and always challeng my thought status quo.
Thank you for the lovely music mixes- they livened things up while I cooked on Christmas.
Just when I’m wondering wtf is up with 💀 you write this and answer my question with the cosmogram. Like the other guy said, please keep writing these.