Friday 24 December 2010

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.

Friday 17 December 2010

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.

Wednesday 15 December 2010

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.

Monday 6 December 2010

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.