Starless and Bible Black Widow (3.9)

[For one reason or another I have gotten back into studies that I largely abandoned the best part of a decade ago in favour of video game addiction, and so I am toying with ideas on how to actually continue this series.]

"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 . . ."

[Ref Couliano & Walker on late mediaeval / early modern treatises on witchcraft as borderline pornographic works; wherever the hell I read it (prob. Kieckhefer), on books of magic treated as if intrinsically alive / demonic, compared with the way the book in BB is implied not simply to be demonic in so far as its procedures operate through the involvement of demons, but actually has a demon bound to it which obsesses / possesses those who acquire the book & drives them to work the rites.

Observations on Grimoire of Honorius & its reputation & its thus being used as the main model for the book in BB.  Lévi's fantasies & misrepresentation of the work.

(the spell pour faire danser une Fille nue which is used by the protagonist in the game, and by characters in the prequel to the anime, Bible Black Gaiden, in both cases as their first experiment with the book's magic, and with the result of publicly humiliating one of their classmates, appears in two "1670" editions of Honorius as well as the "1517" edition of the Grimorium Verum, but the collections of "plus rares secrets de l'Art magique" in the two volumes have significant overlap; either one was plagiarised from the other, or the same publisher was responsible for both.  The de Blocquel press of Lille, a prolific reprinter of pulp Grimoires in the 19th century, redacted it out of the "1760" edition of Honorius and modified (read: censored) it in Les Véritables Clavicules de Salomon, a re-issue of the GV; Blocquel seems to have had no problem with violence / cruelty against all manner of farm animals, invocation of various major demons, magical abuse of the Mass and curses intended to magically induce a potentially fatal grand mal epileptic seizure (which is pretty much what Pour faire danser une fille nue is represented as doing), but references to nudity were apparently too much for him.)

"Hekas Hekas" & "Zazas" formulas.

General nature of MS. works of magic tending to be fluid things rather than fixed received texts or even stable textual traditions.

How the hell do I tie this back to BW?  Sacrifice shows little actual acquaintance with the literature of Ceremonial Magic (save possibly the reference to Astaroth turning up "in human form," but that was made nonsense of with the rewrites to "Seduction") & the ritualistic portions of their show have more in common with Alexandrian Wicca (story was Sanders actually wrote those bits or at least advised them) than the Clavicle.  The references to magical traditions in the lyrics are pretty vague and scattergun; use of "blood and hair and sweat and ends of fingernails" as magical materia; spells "cast with mirrors, dolls and wax"; bragging about magic books, that "the Clavicles of Solomon are nothing by their side"; controlling the Horsemen of the Apocalypse with "the talisman of Set"; the past lives / reincarnation theme which drives the protagonist's motives is hardly a thing in medieval through to early modern European occulture.]

Starless and Bible Black Widow (1)

[Suggested by Black Widow's 'In Ancient Days' from the album Sacrifice.] 

Oh thou spirit [name], 

By the power of prog rock -- I conjure thee! 

By the dread and terrible name of Zeppelin -- I constrain thee! 

By the might of Jimmy Page's guitar -- I command thee! 

And if thou art still disobedient, I will torment thee for eternity -- or at least, for what shall seem like an eternity -- with bad renditions of Stairway. 

Z.Z.N.Z.

[EDIT: this was originally posted over 10 years ago; I was trying to tag it properly and tidy up the formatting and somehow ended up changing the datestamp on it to today.]

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.

Test, please disregard

HEKAS HEKAS ESTE BEBELOI 

EL + ELOHIM + ELOHE + ELOHIM SABAOTH + ELION + EHEIEH ASHER EHEIEH + ADONAI + YAH SHADDAI + TETRAGRAMMATON SHADDAI + AGIOS O THEOS + ICTURON + ATHANATOS + AGLA + AMEN Slain lamb, be a tower of strength against the demons Sacrificial lamb, give power against the powers of darkness Slain lamb, give us power to bind the rebellious demons Open your gates, ye princes, open the eternal gates And the King of Glory shall enter! The Eternal King, the King of Kings, The Lord Almighty is this King of Glory Glory be to the Father, to the Son and the Holy Ghost. 

ZAZAS ZAZAS NASTANADA ZAZAS