{occult} – Page 105 – { feuilleton }

Andy Paiko’s glass art

The Glass Chair.

Today’s glass artists continue to astonish. Andy Paiko‘s one-off creation above is a chair whose vitrines contain a rhesus monkey skull, a piece of octopus coral, a murex spiny trumpet shell, the skeleton of a rat, and a mountain lion skull. The piece below contains a 24 carat gold-plated coyote skull with the work as a whole being described by the artist as representing various stages of the alchemical process. Go and feast your eyes on the rest of his creations. Thanks again to Thom for the tip!

Canis Auribus Tenere.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Josiah McElheny
• The art of Angelo Filomeno
• IKO stained glass
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Glass engines and marble machines
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• The art of Lucio Bubacco
• The glass menagerie

The art of Pamela Colman Smith, 1878–1951

Following yesterday’s post about Frieda Harris’s Tarot designs, it only seems right to acknowledge the other major Tarot artist of the 20th century. Pamela Colman Smith has been overshadowed by her male mentor, Golden Dawn scholar AE Waite, even more than Frieda Harris whose name at least gets mentioned as much as Crowley’s in discussion of her paintings. US Games lists Smith and Waite’s so-called Rider-Waite Tarot of 1909 as “the world’s most popular tarot deck” and uses a silhouette of Smith’s design for The Fool as the company logo, yet it was years before I saw a credit for Smith as artist of this deck, her personal presence being reduced to a tiny monogram in the corner of each picture.

The Absurd ABC by Walter Crane (1874).

I’ve often thought of Smith’s deck as “the Art Nouveau Tarot” which it isn’t really—it’s more late Victorian in style, if anything—but it was created when Art Nouveau was at its height and has some of the character of the poster art of the period. Smith’s designs are incredibly striking in places, with the clarity of drawn archetypes, and her style possibly owes something to the books Walter Crane created for children in the 1870s and 1880s; the clean lines and bright colouring are very similar. In that respect, Smith’s deck might be more fittingly labelled “the Arts and Crafts Tarot.”

left: Pamela Colman Smith’s Hermit; right: Barrington Colby’s inner sleeve for Led Zeppelin IV.

Pamela Colman Smith also worked as a book illustrator but her other work is overshadowed completely by the popularity of the Rider-Waite cards. Her design for The Hermit was famously borrowed by Crowley obsessive Jimmy Page in 1971 for a gatefold illustration, View in Half or Varying Light by Barrington Colby, on Led Zeppelin IV. This use alone makes it possibly the most famous Tarot card in history (there was even a statue made of it for the now defunct Hard Rock Park Led Zeppelin roller coaster) but I doubt many people familiar with the image could name the original artist.

Happily, Ms Smith’s obscurity is gradually diminishing. US Games recently produced the Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative set for the 100th anniversary of the Rider-Waite deck, a package featuring a book of her artwork (including non-Tarot drawings), prints, postcards and a reprinted set of cards. A long overdue reappraisal but, as is always the case, it’s better late than never.

Mary K Greer’s Tarot blog has some excellent postings devoted to Pamela Colman Smith including this page which gathers links to sites containing further information about the artist’s life and work.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot
• William Rimmer’s Evening Swan Song
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995

Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot

left: The Magus from the Thoth Tarot by Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley (1938–1940?); right: The Magus from The Major Arcana by John Coulthart (2006).

Phantasmaphile presents another magickal art event in NYC next week. Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot is described as “a personal narrative by Jesse Bransford”, an artist with a very distinctive approach to traditional occult symbolism. Bransford’s talk will focus on the peerless Thoth Tarot deck which Frieda Harris painted over several years under the careful direction of Aleister Crowley. The Thoth deck for me is still the ultimate Tarot deck. Crowley and Harris sought to create a Tarot for the 20th century, throwing out much of its tired and degraded iconography. This they replaced with dramatic interpretations which brought new layers of symbolism to the cards—including references to contemporary science—and also acknowledged the developments of Cubism and Futurism in the visual sphere. Tarot decks have proliferated since the 1960s but the Thoth deck has few (if any) rivals. I made use of Crowley’s controversial reordering and renaming of the cards in 2006 when I produced my set of Major Arcana designs based on international symbol signs.

The Tarot in general and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot in particular represent a miasmic confluence of image and thought into a single structure that is both liberating and overwhelming in its scope. In creating the deck, Crowley (in collaboration with painter Lady Frieda Harris) sought to integrate the mythological structures of the major mystical systems of both Western and Eastern occult traditions and to bring them into line with contemporary scientific thinking. The symbolism of the cards blends Kabbalah, Alchemy, Astrology, Egyptian mythology, quantum physics and even the I-Ching in ways that are at the same time clear and utterly confounding.

In an image-soaked personal narration Bransford, whose research-based artwork has delved into many of the territories Crowley sought to unify, will discuss some of the basic concepts of Tarot symbolism, returning to Crowley’s deck as among the most total example of the cards’ syncretism and as the most controversial.

Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot takes place at Observatory, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NYC on Friday, July 17 at 7:30pm. Admission is free and there are further details at the Observatory website and Phantasmaphile.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists
• Aleister Crowley on vinyl
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995

In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman

Extending the recent pagan theme, Ubuweb posts Derek Jarman’s determinedly occult and oneiric film, In the Shadow of the Sun (1980), notable for its soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle. This was the longest of Jarman’s films derived from Super-8 which he made throughout the 1970s between work as a production designer and his feature films. He never saw the low resolution, grain and scratches of Super-8 as a deficiency; on the contrary, for a painter it was a means to achieve with film stock some of the texture of painting. Michael O’Pray described the process and intent behind the film in Afterimage 12 (1985):

In 1973, Jarman shot the central sequences for his first lengthy film, and most ambitious to date, In the Shadow of the Sun, which in fact was not shown publicly until 1980, at the Berlin Film Festival. In the film he incorporated two early films, A Journey to Avebury a romantic landscape film, and The Magician (a.k.a. Tarot). The final sequences were shot on Fire Island in the following year. Fire Island survives as a separate film. In this period, Jarman had begun to express a mythology which he felt underpinned the film. He writes in Dancing Ledge of discovering “the key to the imagery that I had created quite unconsciously in the preceding months”, namely Jung’s Alchemical Studies and Seven Sermons to the Dead. He also states that these books “gave me the confidence to allow my dream-images to drift and collide at random”. The themes and ideas found in Jubilee, The Angelic Conversation, The Tempest and to some extent in Imagining October are powerfully distilled in In the Shadow of the Sun. Jarman’s obsession with the sun, fire and gold (which spilled over in the paintings he exhibited at the ICA in 1984) and an ancient mythology and poetics are compressed in In the Shadow of the Sun with its rich superimposition and painterly textures achieved through the degeneration “caused by the refilming of multiple images”. Jarman describes some of the ideas behind In the Shadow of the Sun:

“This is the way the Super-8s are structured from writing: the buried word-signs emphasize the fact that they convey a language. There is the image and the word, and the image of the word. The ‘poetry of fire’ relies on a treatment of word and object as equivalent: both are signs; both are luminous and opaque. The pleasure of Super-8 is the pleasure of seeing language put through the magic lantern.” Dancing Ledge p.129

Ubuweb also has some of the short films which were used as raw material for the longer work: Journey to Avebury (1971) (with an uncredited soundtrack by Coil), the Kenneth Anger-esque Garden of Luxor (1972), and Ashden’s Walk on Møn (1973).

Update: The Ubuweb films have been removed so I’ve taken out the links. The one for In the Shadow of the Sun now goes to a copy at YouTube.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
• The Angelic Conversation
• The life and work of Derek Jarman

Born again pagans

Ave Pan by the amazing J Allen St John. Via.

In the spirit of basic human generosity I try not to be too anti-Christian here, especially when so many churchgoers these days feel themselves rather beleaguered; after centuries persecuting much of the world, the world has finally pushed them back and it hurts the poor things. Much as I’d love to refer to Christianity as a Patriarchal Death Cult that seems unfair to those of its adherents who aren’t hate-mongering bigots, those who put agape before “Thou shalt not…”. But goddamn if those self-appointed leaders don’t make generosity difficult at times. Men (and they’re always men) such as poisonous geriatric Pat Robertson whose recent blather has included this gem:

Any country that openly embraces homosexuality throughout the history of mankind has gone down into ruin. That’s history. That’s the historical record. Whatever nation embraces this so-called lifestyle, it ends up in the garbage heap of history.

Given the onward march of gay rights versus the mortal diminishing of ageing gasbags like the recently deceased Jerry Falwell, the only thing the garbage heap of history awaits is Robertson himself. One might even propose in a spirit of distinct un-generosity that the reason Robertson’s god hasn’t already called him home is because heaven’s inhabitants want to have a few more years of peace before they have to listen to his drivel for the rest of eternity.

And speaking of drivel, the porcine Newt Gingrich dropped this bon mot earlier in the month while speaking to a crowd of evangelicals:

“I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history,” Gingrich said. “We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.”

Setting aside the obvious point that America is actually surrounded by large tracts of water and a nation called Canada, Gingrich (or Lissotriton vulgaris as we’d call him if he really was a newt) was proposing a specious equivalence between what he would perceive as social iniquities and, er…Satanism or something. Whether he actually believes any of this nonsense is moot; he’s telling an audience of believers who may one day be asked to vote for him what they want to hear. Nonetheless, he complains about paganism as though it’s somehow a bad thing. Maybe he’d like to come to our cheerfully pagan isles and argue the point with the increasing number of genuine witches, warlocks and sundry earth-worshippers. A Guardian feature this week entitled Everyone’s a pagan now reported that:

There are said to be a quarter of a million practising pagans in this country, double the number of a decade ago. That would make them more numerous than Buddhists (of which there are 144,500, according to the 2001 census) and almost as numerous as Jews (259,000).

It’s no surprise that this comes at a time when church attendance, which has been declining for years in the UK, continues to plummet:

According to Religious Trends, a comprehensive statistical analysis of religious practice in Britain, published by Christian Research, even Hindus will come close to outnumbering churchgoers within a generation. The forecast to 2050 shows churchgoing in Britain declining to 899,000 while the active Hindu population, now at nearly 400,000, will have more than doubled to 855,000. By 2050 there will be 2,660,000 active Muslims in Britain – nearly three times the number of Sunday churchgoers. (More.)

Before Pat Robertson starts looking for our place on the garbage heap of history it ought to be noted that Christianity’s high-water mark in Britain was the late 19th century which saw a profusion of church building and church attendance. The decline set in after the First World War with many of those churches being abandoned then converted or demolished. (I can point to at least four sites in Manchester which were once Victorian churches). A recent study by the University of Derby found that the church’s antiquated attitudes to women was driving away one half of the population:

The report claims more than 50,000 women a year have deserted their congregations over the past two decades because they feel the church is not relevant to their lives.

It says that instead young women are becoming attracted to the pagan religion Wicca, where females play a central role, which has grown in popularity after being featured positively in films, TV shows and books. (More.)

TV and films only remind people of what’s always been there. Prior to the 19th century we were a Christian nation in name, of course, and I’ve always been grateful for our many cathedrals. But the far older pre-Christian ways are impossible to forget when you have a landscape littered with significant monuments such as Stonehenge, Avebury, Glastonbury Tor, the Callanish Circle, Silbury Hill, the Uffington White Horse, the Long Man of Wilmington, and the Cerne Abbas Giant whose enormous phallus is one of many things which makes me proud to be British. The latter pair can’t be claimed as prehistoric, unfortunately, but they remain fixtures in catalogues of Britain’s venerable un-Christian past.

Early Christianity did its best to co-opt the sites and festivals of our pagan ancestors but it seems as though two thousand years of dominance may now be drawing to a close. People today are far more sympathetic to spiritual attitudes which see the earth as something to be respected not exploited. And women will obviously respond to philosophies which don’t regard them as some unclean extrusion from a masculine creation with no part to play in religious ritual. Ask yourself what’s more attractive: the regressive bile of withered old men or a touch of pagan poetry?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Great God Pan
• Gay for god