It’s Monday — and normally I would aim to send these newsletters out on a Friday to capture the not-doing-anymore-work-this-afternoon contingent, but I’m here nonetheless to interrupt your Monday.
I had planned to post Blazing Fire 2 a few weeks back, but various factors intervened that took away any chance of writing time. Also, in the course of working on an illustration of Abney Park Cemetery to accompany the section about Stoke Newington as landscape of magic, I began to see that there was a better, deeper piece of writing in there trying to get out. Writing and drawing about a specific place is a form of mediumship, and I realised that there were things that wanted to be given shape and form, and I wasn’t adequately doing it. So I’m going to work some more on that and see where it takes me. If there's any point to my writing at all, then it's an attempt to give form and voice to unheard ghosts and the dread whispers of landscape dead heard on the waters, not just for the sake of it.
So in the interim, another Rude Interruption, consisting of various bits and pieces hastily assembled together.
Stealing a Mass in not in fact about the act of stealing a mass, which is when you take a talisman or other sorcerous intention with you to church so that it can be consecrated by its presence at the mass. It seemed like an appropriate title for this piece of writing though, which was originally my response to some occult twitter discourse about whether “Catholic Witches” and “Folk Catholics” were terrible or not. I was trying to describe the vectors of the landscape-based, ATR-adjacent, grimoire-adjacent version of Christianity that exists in my practice, as occultists steeped in modern tropes of neopaganism often seem to struggle with it.
Bedsit Criminals was originally written as some short fiction for an anthology of stories set in David Southwell’s Hookland, but I ended up writing way too much at 18,000 words. It follows the story of aging, former-mod cunning men Tony Wren and Reg Mulgrave as they try to investigate the decades-old disappearance of their friend Anna Pickford. I had the idea of extending this to a novel-length thing that revisits the same group of characters at different points in their lives, like Our Friends in Hookland or something. I haven’t worked on it for ages though, so I thought posting some extracts here might encourage me to write some more of their misadventures.
Also included here is a playlist of recent dancehall and reggaeton tunes I’ve been listening to lately called Mercury is in Reggaeton 9, as well as a review of The Aleister Crowley Manual: Thelemic Magick for Modern Times by Marco Visconti.
Stealing a Mass
There are many well-established loopholes for accessing the magic embedded into Christianity without bolstering the Catholic Church or any other church as an organisation.
Catholicism weaves through traditions such as Vodou and Espiritismo — it's not a mask — but a genuine component. The Kingdom of Kongo converted to Catholicism in 1491, and this Kongo version of Christianity is a real presence in many traditions that have that component.
The Grimoires also obviously have Catholicism as an intrinsic part of their operating system, employing Psalms, consecrations and bindings in the name of God. There is old magic in it, which is not beholden to the worldly church and its works.
Saints and Archangels can be readily worked without any allegiance to the Vatican. Versions of Mary like the Mater Dolorosa in Haiti and Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico or Our Lady of Caridad del Cobre in Cuba take on new meaning while still inhabiting Christianity.
While you can point to evidence of Christian churches being built over older pagan sites in Europe, such as St Brides Church in London, that's not really the point. There are centuries of this magic between ancient paganism and the mid-1950s, and ignoring it is weird.
Texts like the Cyprianic Black Books and texts on Trolldom from Scandinavia show a folk magic that occupies Christianity, folk belief involving trolls and landscape, and the broader influence of the grimoires. This is real magic, but it's often obscured by newer neopagan ideas.
I interact with Christianity in various different ways across multiple traditions, and each with a different feel, Catholic, Protestant, Spiritualist iterations, etc. I got quite into attending Church of England services in various churches located at important magical spots.
Churches that were built on more ancient sites, churches at the top of fairy hills, churches located at crossroads where I did other magic. Stealing a mass is old magic. Gathering holy water and walking circuits of a church is a way of engaging with landscape.
Local saints have power in an area, regardless of whether they are based on any older half-remembered spirit or not. Receiving communion at a site of significance in the landscape is an act of communion with that landscape, as is interacting with the community that worships there
I wasn’t brought up Catholic myself. I used to go to Anglo-Catholic C of E services in London sometimes but I haven't been inside a church in years. My Catholic prayers in Espiritismo are real though, my Catholic prayers in Vodou are real, my Psalms are real. I've seen them be real.
The dynamic of this for me is not very complicated. My sense of "God" is an abstract Divine Source that we come to know primarily through its emanations — which are Spirits, Archangels, Saints, but also literally everything that exists, as well as the dead that once existed.
Plants and trees, seaweed and driftwood, dirts and waters, are all emanations of this abstract Divine source pulsing through everything, and all material components of magic are empowered by essentially being God in a more condensed material form and with a specific aspect.
There's a crossroads where that sort of sense of "God" can intersect with Christianity, and that's really enough to access centuries of workable magic that has lived and breathed through this structure. As long as the reaching towards the Divine is real and genuine, it's enough.
I can't speak for whatever "Catholic Witches" and "Folk Catholics" are, or whether any of these things are fads. I have reason to see things through a Catholic lens because I participate in traditions that have it as an intrinsic component.
Further to that, I found that having had these experiences of genuinely — and with the fullness of my heart — accessing the mysteries that are embedded in Christianity, it offered a solid foundation for various other Christian and Christian-adjacent sorcery that exists.
You will have a much easier time speaking to the dead in Christian cemeteries if you speak the language of the magic that is there and know how to knock on the doors correctly. Christianity, in various forms, is an unavoidable terrain of magic on both sides of the pond.
Bible as magical object. Psalms as spells. Rosaries and Novenas. Holy Water and church dirt. There are a stack of things that can be drawn upon. Even the LBRP started jumping more for me when I became less squeamish around concepts of God and Archangels, and had more of a way to meet it.
I think magic is really more about the person than the style of magic that they do though. People can do magic through some weird lenses, and it doesn't matter, it is still alive. Some people can spend years going through the motions of a system but it still falls flat.
Bandwagon trends in magic can be annoying, but there's always going to be people doing solid magic that will either intentionally or unintentionally fall under the umbrella of any given trend. Every trend that exists is also always going to have wankers in it.
So I think it's more constructive to try and address specific problematic ideas and practices that might exist within a current magical trend or a particular tradition, rather than the broad umbrella itself, as you can't possibly know what people may be doing under that umbrella.
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People started forwarding this thread on twitter referring to me as a "Christian magician" of all things, so I had to add an addendum that was like, don't get me wrong, my magic has just as much to do with the Devil at the Crossroads sunshine.
Bedsit Criminals
1. The Thing on the Pylon
Tony Wren reached once more into the splayed-open rib-cage of the policeman who wasn't a policeman, and inserted the ticking iron heart. Red-soaked up to his wrists, he fished around in his pocket for a box of Benson and Hedges.
Wriggling, trussed up like a scarecrow under the shadow of the pylon, the head of the imposter lolled around beneath the weight of the adorned police helmet. Thick with tar and pitch, stuck with crow feathers and apple-seeds. Copper wire inserted with toad bone and broken mirror wound about the helmet circumference like a mock crown. Tony wasn't taking any chances.
A low gurgle you could feel in your bowels came from the thing on the pylon. Unintelligible at first, and then erupting into hoarse voice. "It will do no good. The salt book is burned. She is already woven in. In ten years, cold towers will be raised over this island."
"In fifty years the stories will be taken from you. It's happened before. Without them, your children will have empty bellies. They will come to us to be worked to pulp because there is nothing else. Streets drained of warmth. Pubs closed. Roads closed. Only spoiled rancid milk to be sucked from our teat in meager gulps."
Tony lit his cigarette. Caught a glimpse of his reflection in one of the jagged mirrors tucked into the captive police constable's helmet. Took out a comb and drew his neat greased side-parting back into position. Irregular teeth like chipped headstones made an inscrutable grin below his thin lip-warmer mustache.
"Is that so?" said Tony.
"Nothing can be done. The ship has already sailed. The three captains failed. We are well fed over the centuries."
Tony placed a shiny red apple in the mouth of the false policeman as an offering for Old Clip, bringing his diatribe to an abrupt halt. He wound up the clockwork gears of the iron heart thirteen times and muttered words long committed to memory from the Red Book of Bishop Oreleton.
"Well, we'll see about that, my old china. If you're so great and powerful, how come there's a paper bag full of woodlice and mullein stuffed down your trousers?" said Tony.
Undulating skin rippled and hair bristled. A thin film was already starting to form over the wound. It looked less like a person now. That made it easier. Tony flicked the end of his cigarette into the thing's face, turned his back on the scene, and began whistling the tune of 'The Cat and the Cradle' as he continued down the hill.
He was right though. Tony had already scried exactly that in the Wren family mirror and confirmed it with the Moluccan Tarot and other sources. It was the same thing from every angle. The end of the 1970s ushers it in. Within fifty years, the whole world is transfigured — stripped of its hope, purged of the tangled narratives that support it.
Maybe there was something though. Some overlooked corner. A loose thread that could be unravelled. It's always worth having a good rummage to see if there's anything that moves. A Wren doesn't accept a plate of hog pudding if it's turned rotten. Even if it means the unthinkable.
Fuck. There was no avoiding it was there. Tony's whole body gave a slump of defeat as the No. 34 bus trundled up the country lane towards him.
Mercury is in Reggaeton 9
Yes, Nine. I make this playlist every so often of things that I’ve been listening to that are mostly current dancehall and reggaeton tunes, but sometimes some UK grime and drill things here and there. There are another eight of them going back to whenever I started doing that. When there are enough of them I post the link and get maybe three likes from the small subsection of people that care about both objectionable occult takes and perreo tunes.
One of the things I loved about living in Miami is how you would constantly hear the biggest reggaeton tunes of the moment everywhere as the ambient background sound of the town. It was like how dancehall is in south London where you automatically know what the big sounds from Jamaica are because they are everywhere as the texture of the city. I miss that, but still try to keep up on what’s new within these often interrelated and overlapping genres when I can. The last time I made one of these playlists was before the pandemic, as all my windows for listening to music disappeared for some time, but I’m attempting to resume this spiritual practice.
Book Review
The Aleister Crowley Manual: Thelemic Magick for Modern Times — Marco Visconti
I’m not generally known for being the biggest fan of 19th century-style ceremonial magic, so if I’m saying that a book on the subject is good, then that should probably hold some water. The underlying curriculum of material here will be familiar to anyone versed in the milieu of the Golden Dawn and Thelema, but what I think Marco’s presentation of it does really well is add a humanising quality often missing from takes on this magic.
"What does this do and why should I fuck with it?" is a pretty reasonable response to a lot of primary occult texts, and Marco really does address this at every turn, in a way a lot of authors writing about the same material will tend to skip over or divert away from.
I've always got more insight into magic out of candid pub conversations with friends who are experienced practitioners of this or that, where they share their experiences and how those experiences have shaped their understanding, than I have from instructional texts alone. There’s an aspect of that here, where you’re not just getting the method presented from an aloof position, but some active and informative commentary on the experiential nature of this magic and what it is like to bring it into your life.
And perhaps because much of the book is directly based on the author’s online teaching materials assembled to make these practices accessible and workable to people during the urgency and uncertainty of the early pandemic lockdowns, it cuts to the chase of how to meaningfully access this magic.
I'm often critical of the way 19th century occultism has exerted a disproportionate influence over the trajectories of popular magic, and while I veer towards other modes of practice personally, that doesn't mean we should throw the whole Babe of the Abyss out with the bathwater.
Marco positions this book as a manual for beginners, but that sells it short a little, because while I may already be familiar with a lot of the material covered, it has inspired me to revisit many of these practices again by putting the living magic of it front and centre.
So while the crux of the book does walk you through the various anticipated components of a post-Golden Dawn, Thelemic system of magic, what makes it engaging is how it lets you perceive those building blocks through the lens of someone who has made that magic come alive tangibly and experientially.
It's written as an accessible intro text for beginners, but if you already have some familiarity with the material, it also has the side effect of helping you to look at these practices again with a fresh pair of eyes. It reminds you where the magic is and what the point is.
Tune: ABRACADABRA
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