Starless and Bible Black Widow (3.5)

Actually, there is a third version of the "Sacrifice" album available, and a number of the Youtube links on my earlier post were taken from it. In 2007 Demons of the Night Gather to see Black Widow Live (or more simply, "Black Widow: Live") was released on the Mystic Records label as a two-disc (CD + DVD) set. While marketed as a live album, regardless of the presence of any "demons of the night" the only human audience at that performance was a German TV crew. Black Widow were performing for a pop-music show called Beat Club, and prior to the studio audience turning up recorded the entire 55-minute "Sacrifice" stage set complete with "Black Magic ritual" sequences (said to have been based in part on advice from self-styled "King of the Witches" Alec Sanders; certainly the ritual "opening" during the introduction of "In Ancient Days" uses similar phraseology to early Wiccan rituals).

This was apparently the last time Black Widow performed this set; according to later recollections by band member Clive Jones, about this time (apparently late in 1970) there were disagreements within the band over continuing with the trademark "Black Magic" theme which while gaining much publicity had led to a planned US tour being cancelled and the band's songs being refused airplay by the BBC. Two members of the band left and the second album, titled simply "Black Widow" consisted of more mainstream commercial prog-rock numbers.

Starless and Bible Black Widow (3)

A remark on the album "Sacrifice." There exist effectively two versions of this album; between the original demo recordings made in 1969 and the recording of the final version as released in 1970, Kay Garrett who sang the main vocal part on "Way to Power" and "Seduction" and duetted with Kip Trevor on "Come to the Sabbat," "Attack of the Demon" and "Sacrifice" left the band after getting married; these songs were reworked with Kip Trevor on main vocals throughout, and in the case of "Seduction" and "Attack of the Demon" the lyrics changed. The demo recordings were eventually released in 2000 as "Return to the Sabbat" and remastered and slightly cleaned-up versions appeared on the 2002 compilation "Come to the Sabbath -- Anthology." The song that suffered most from the changes was "Seduction." The opening lines:

"You asked me to come to you Prayed to have me here Here I am in human form Throw away your fear."

coming just after "Conjuration" (more or less the same on both versions) in which the magician declares:

"To make my dream come true I call the lady Astaroth, come join me here."

makes far more sense spoken by the demon summoned (when one recalls the common demand in Solomonic-stylee Grimoires for the spirit to appear "in fair human form") to the magician rather than vice versa. Astaroth, of course, while in the Grimoires and later demonologists a male arch-demon, is patently a corruption (possibly via the Hebrew plural form) of Ashtoreth, a Caananite goddess called Astarte by the Greeks (Milton at least realised this). Like almost every other major Caananite deity except Yahweh, she suffered demonisation in later Judæo-Christian thought.

Starless and Bible Black Widow (2)

Help me in my search for knowledge

I must learn the secret art

Who dares to help me raise the one

Whose very name near stills my heart . . .

Black Widow, "Come to the Sabbat"

A sacrifice, a sacrifice

You say you want a sacrifice

You say the words too easily

To know just what you mean.

Black Widow, "Sacrifice"

In case anyone cares, or is even reading this, the title of this series of posts was suggested by a string of tenously connected and comparatively obscure pop-culture references. Black Widow was a British prog-rock back of the late 1960s / early 1970s which was briefly notorious for a "Black Magic" (yes, with the capital letters) pose, including a highly theatrical stage show involving a mock human sacrifice, which earned them some sensational press coverage and was occasionally referenced in coffee-table books on "occult" subjects. Their album "Sacrifice" tells a Dennis Wheatley stylee story of a nameless magician, who boasts of wielding great power in previous lives ("In Ancient Days"), and attempts to regain these powers by the study of ancient magical books ("Way to Power") and hanging out at the Witches' Sabbat ("Come to the Sabbat"); he summons the demon Astaroth with the intent of helping the current incarnation of his lover from a previous life ("Conjuration"). She turns up, as the Grimoires put it, "in a fair human form, without deformity or tortuosity" and he promptly forgets why he was conjuring her in the first place, is overcome by the demon's "stinking breath" as the Goëtia cryptically puts it ("Seduction"), is mocked by the demon and learns that all his sins have damned his soul in hell ("Attack of the Demon") and ends up, as far as I can tell, repeating the crime / tragedy of a previous life by killing his lover as a sacrifice to the demon ("Sacrifice").

"starless and bible-black" was a coinage of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, used in his famous radio play Under Milk Wood to describe a heavily overcast night in an era and place when this would not have meant the sky being dull orange from light pollution. It was later (1974) used as the title of an album by King Crimson, another British prog-rock band. Starless and Bible Black Sabbath was the title of a 2006 album by Japanese band Acid Temple Mothers conceived as a tribute to King Crimson and early Black Sabbath.  (Black Sabbath really didn't like being confused with Black Widow.)

Finally, Bible Black (バイブルブラック) was in the first instance a Japanese computer game (of the "visual novel" style which has generally not been very popular in the Western market), released in 2000, subsequently turned into a 6-episode straight-to-video animation (with various prequels, followups and sidestories), both later translated into English (the anime having a dub so abysmal it turns what was meant to be a dark and horrific story into a comedy, and has been widely mocked on YouTube). The plot revolves around the mayhem which ensues when a bunch of high school students find an old grimoire (apparently something like the Constitution of Honorius bound up with a luridly pornographic treatise on witchcraft), and proceed to try out the spells contained therein, largely (this being an "ero" or if you prefer "hentai" game and anime) in order to get laid.

"Have you ever read the books

that I wrote centuries ago?

The Clavicles of Solomon

is nothing by their side.

They lay bare secret arts

that stood the ravages of time

and practices once more exposed

that everyone should know."

Black Widow, "Way to Power."

And just for the record, in the ritual in the prologue of the first episode / opening of the game, they're not chanting "Jesus" (official subtrack) or "Satan" (dubtrack) but

Z.Z.N.Z.

EDIT: fixed a bunch of dead YouTube links to Black Widow tracks.

The Reality Police

(written many years ago and buried on a file of random notes on background for occult-themed fiction on my hard drive ever since)

Magick can be considered as the art and science of producing changes in consciousness (Fortune)

Therefore advertising, political spin-doctoring, etc., are all species of magick (any sufficiently advanced applied psychology is indistinguishable from magick).

But the greatest magicians of all are those who can produce culture-wide paradigm shifts. (This is what Crowley meant by describing people like Buddha, Mohammed et al as Magi; and behind them, people like Luther, Blavatsky, etc., as 8=3). John Dee, who was probably responsible for the British Empire (he certainly coined the name) is in the running; but the greatest of the modern era were those who created the modern era - Marin Mersenne and René Descartes.

We can imagine a politically conservative group who desperately want to preserve the modernist paradigm (probably because their power and prestige depends on it). They will therefore do everything in their power to rubbish and discredit any kind of belief in magick, precisely because they do believe in magick (even if this belief is never expressed in such terms) and understand the power of belief. Outfits like CSICOP (whose prominent members include a number of ‘stage magicians’, who if they know their art at all know about manipulating peoples’ perceptions) may therefore be considered nothing less than a species of reality police.

The Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Month Club (2)

[The following is a work of fiction, produced in connection with a background for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.]

The Codex of Infinite Stars is a work of questionable ontological status. It is believed by some to be entirely mythical and by others to be a modern hoax; certainly it has never been printed in its entirety, and no known institutional collection on or off this planet (including the BL, the Bodleian, the BNF, the Vatican library, the Miskatonic University Library, the Great Library of Celaneo or the Royal and University libraries of Celephaïs), even those with carefully-guarded manuscript codices or printed copies of the Necronomicon, De vermiis mysteriis or Geschichte von unaussprechlicen Kulten has a copy, although certain purported "excerpts" and "transcriptions" have been circulated in MS. and TS. and printed in occultist journals. While sharing certain themes these "excerpts" differ so wildly in style and tone that it is difficult to believe they are all the work or the same author, or all taken from the same book. It appears that the first of these "excerpts" were manifested in the waking world in the 1970s by a member of a society called the Stellar Temple who claimed to have found the codex in a library attached to an "astral temple" encountered while fleeing a flock of nightgaunts on his way to a reputed access point to one of the Tunnels (a set of connected 'astral' realms believed to be part of the shattered remains of a previous universe). Further "transcriptions" have been made by other Stellar Temple members and freelance magicians; these include hallucinatory prose-poems, rambling pieces of speculative prehistory, strange geometric diagrams which appear to have more dimensions that can reasonably be represented on a flat piece of paper, sketches of alien landscapes and indescribable creatures, &c. &c. &c.

Individual excerpts typically have a 50% chance of having 1d3% Cthulhu Mythos value with proportionate SAN cost, and a 20% chance of containing 1 spell (spell multiplier 1-3). A disreputable publisher called the Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Month Club is rumoured to be in negotiation with various of the "transcribers" to produce a collected edition of the "excerpts," but the BToFELotMC is better known for making extravagant claims and promises than actually ever getting anything into print.

The image heading this article is a sketch purporting to represent the temple housing the Codex, as drawn by a sometime Stellar Temple member (since expelled) called David Calmar.

Mysteries and Sacraments

These excerpts are presented as suggestions for meditation, no more. Hopefully at least some of my readers will recognise the main allusion.

mystery n. (pl. –ies) 1. a secret, hidden or inexplicable matter. 2. secrecy or obscurity. 3 (attrib.) secret, undisclosed. 4 the practice of making a secret of (esp. unimportant things). 5 (in full mystery story) a fictional work dealing with a puzzling event, esp. a crime. 6 a a religious truth divinely revealed, esp. one beyond human reason. b RC Ch. a decade of the rosary. 7 (in pl.) a the secret religious rites of the ancient Greeks, Romans, etc. b archaic the Eucharist. [Middle English via Old French mistere or Latin mysterium from Greek mustērion.]

—The Concise Oxford Dictionary of current English (9th edition).

μυστηριον, το [mustērion] a mystery or secret doctrine; in pl., the mysteries of the Cabiri in Samothrace, of Demeter at Eleusis, etc. 2. any mystery or secret. 3. mystic implements. 4. in N.T., a mystery, a divine secret, something above human intelligence.

—Liddell & Scott’s Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon.

In the Greek New Testament the word μυστηριον or its plural appears once in each of the first three gospels, in the same context, four times in the Apocalypse of John and 20 times in the epistles attributed to Paul of Tarsus (who either was, or brazenly insinuated himself to be, an initiate of one or another of the various systems of Mystery-Religion existing in the Græco-Roman world). In respect of the archaic use of the word in English for the sacrament of the Eucharist, it is appropriate to note that in the Vulgate Latin version of the New Testament, eight of the occurances of μυστηριον were translated as sacramentum (one of them being the sacramentum of the woman and the beast which carries her in chap. 17 of the Apocalypse), in the rest the word was simply Latinised as mysterium.

sacrāmentum –i, n. (sacro), that which binds or obliges a person. (1) legal technical term: the money deposited . . . by the parties in a suit, which the defeated party lost. Hence any civil suit, legal process. (2) military tech. term, the engagement entered into by newly enlisted soldiers, the military oath of allegiance. Hence any oath or solemn promise.

— Cassell’s Latin-English / English-Latin dictionary.

(Later use seems to have taken the idea of a “sacred oath” and extended it to “that which makes sacred” generally; see, again, Concise Oxford Dictionary, s.v. “sacrament.”)

sacro –are (sacer). (1) To dedicate to a god, consecrate. (2) to make holy, make inviolable.

sacer –cra –crum, sacred, holy, consecrated.

—ibid.

Whence, via Old French as usual, English “sacred” (for example, Concise Oxford Dictionary, s.v.).

sēcerno –cernere, to separate, part sunder; TRANSF. (1) to distinguish in thought. (2) to set aside, to reject. Hence participle sēcrētus –a –um, set apart. … neut. substantive sēcrētum –i. (1) retirement, solitude, a solitary place. (2) a secret, mystery.

—ibid.

Whence, obviously, English “secret.” The origin of both perhaps can be traced to …

seco secare secui sectum, to cut.

. . . either literally, or figuratively; whence English “section,” etc. Mystery-religions in one sense do just that, in the figurative sense; they divide people into an in-group, the in-itiates, and an out-group, “the profane” (from Latin, pro fana, lit. “outside the temple”) defined simply as “everybody else.”

The point of all this rambling being to suggest that to hold 'mysteries' (sacramenta) 'sacred and secret' is simply to acknowledge that A = A.

Lege -- iudica -- atque ride.

Pairs of opposites

A note I made a while back to the preamble to the "Stele of Jeu" (PGM V / P. Lond 46 96-172).

The Heavens and the Earth: Nût and Gêb.
The Night and the Day: Nephthys and Isis.
The Darkness and the Light: Set & Horus.
The Moist and the Dry: Shu and Tefnut.

Therefore the Headless One is Atum-Rê of the Heliopolitan Ennead, and not Osiris (or Bes) at all.

The above is not meant completely seriously; it will be observed that there are more than four "pairs of opposites" in that preamble. Actually, if we count "seeds and fruit" there are 8 in all (the just and the unjust, the female and the male, love and hate being the others) so we do have an ogdoad, each containing its own opposite in itself.

While we're on the subject, by and to whom is the final "come forth and follow" supposed to be spoken? The speech markouts in D.E. Aune's translation in Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, seem somewhat arbitrary; the preceding lines are (apparently) spoken by the exorcist identifying himself with the Headless Daimon; so is that "come forth and follow" the excorcist addressing the Headless Daimon, the Headless Daimon addressing the exorcist, the Headless Daimon addressing the daimon to be driven off, or . . . ?

Ritual Consequences

This approach to ritual design has, no doubt, been done before. My own involvement with it started as a sarcastic comment during a "beginner's magick" ritual design class.

For those not familiar; the game of "consequences" involves building a story of stereotyped form by multiple people; each writes down one story element on a piece of paper, then folds over what's just been written and passes the paper on to the next person, who writes the next element. These "elements" could be along the lines of: a male character; a female character; where they met; what he said to her; what she said back to him; end consequence. Alternatively it can be played with pictures of a figure of roughly humanoid outline, the first person drawing the head, the second the shoulders and upper torso, the third the lower torso and arms, the fourth the hips and hands, the fifth the legs, the sixth the feet (the result is likely to look like something created using Golden Dawn rules on Telesmatic Images).

Applied to ritual design, the first step is to agree on a general purpose and structure for the ritual, then to break it up into as many points as you have people (or if you have less than 5 or 6 people, a multiple of the number of people). For example:

1. Preliminary banishing (if appropriate)
   
2. General opening / circle casting.
3. Invocation of quarters / elements / directions of space.
4. Statement of working ("The Oath" of MTP)
   
5. Invocations / power raising.
   
6. Climax of the working.
7. Closing.
8. Concluding banishing (if appropriate).
   

Or the points forming the body of the work could be rather more vague, e.g. "Stuff," "More stuff" and "Yet more stuff"; an invocation of elements or quarters could be broken up into one point for each.

Using the traditional "Consequences" format, the heads would be written down the left marging of a piece of paper; each person in the group in turn would write something next to one of these points, fold over the paper and pass it on. The process could be speeded up by cutting the paper into strips and giving one to each person in the group, then re-assembling when all are done.

For best, or at least strangest, results, this is better done in eclectic groups where those present have between them backgrounds from a variety of different traditions; so for example we might end up with the Star Ruby in point 1, a Wiccan circle casting in point 2, neo-Druid calls to the quarters in point 3, and so on, concluding with old-skool Chaos Magick banishing with laughter, or possibly cheese.

This game has also been called "Ritual exquisite corpse" after the surrealist art technique, although the only time I've seen it done it seemed far too structured for that.

On building pyramids.

One builds a pyramid from the ground up. One does not build a pyramid by suspending the capstone from a skyhook and cementing layers one beneath the other until reaching ground.

What I object to is not hierarchical organisations per se, it is to their use of elaborate fictions, sophistries or mythologies in an attempt to persuade people that those at the top are magically exempt from the law of gravity and do not, in fact, owe their position to the support of those beneath them. Generals without armies are reduced to playing with toy soldiers, physical or digital; Supreme and Holy Kings who find themselves sole and supreme authority over three people and a dog meeting in a leaky basement are, or at least should be, objects of ridicule rather than awe.

Lege--iudica--atque ride.