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Occultism for kids

My battered 1973 Gollancz hardback. Cover illustration by David Smee.

It may be all Harry Potter starter homes crowding the imaginative landscape these days but the lush fields of the early Seventies bred a peculiar brand of wizardry and wild romance, something I was reminded of recently by reviews of a new compilation of psychedelic singles (yes, another one), Real Life—Permanent Dreams on the Castle Communication label. Mention of a curio from the heady days of 1970, Tarot by Andrew Bown, summoned vague memories of a childrens’ television series, Ace of Wands, for which Tarot was the theme song. You can see the title sequence here and this clip compilation features the whole song plus trippy lyrics (“Velvet roofs, tattooed skies, patterns made from words…”). The wonderfully facetious TV Cream describes the series thus:

ACE OF WANDS (1970–72), THAMES TELEVISION. Jim-Morrison-alike boy magician Tarot (MICHAEL MACKENZIE) has adventures through history, for which read cheap studio set representing pyramid, cheap studio set representing Stonehenge and so on. DR WHO-style menace on a budget. Fought enemies such as Madame Midnight, Mr Stabs and Mama Doc, aided by an owl called Ozymandias (played by FRED THE OWL). Tarot cards and tarot phenomena abounded, much worthy roustabouts ensued. Prog-heavy title theme babbling – “Jet white dove/Snow black snake/Time has turned his face/From the edge of mystery” – singularly failed to assault the charts.

I’ve mentioned before how magic and occultism were more popular at this time than they’ve probably ever been, and this flush of popularity, much of it coming from underground culture, managed to work its way into children’s television in a diluted form. Ace of Wands is easily the most baroque example of this, mixing the bell-bottom trendiness of Jason King with pulp plots given a psychedelic twist (hallucinogenic gases anyone?). Also from 1970 and far more down-to-earth (and, it should be said, more fun for kids) was Catweazle, written by Richard Carpenter and starring Geoffrey Bayldon. TV Cream has the details again:

CATWEAZLE (1970–71), LWT. Hairy tinker who can’t speak but who’s really an 11th Century magician (and who’s really GEOFFREY BAYLDON) tries to escape from some pissed off Norman soliders, jumps in a pond to hide and finds himself transported to Children’s Film Foundation-era Britain. Luckily there’s a posh (as always) boy on hand to explain all our modern day shit to him.

Catweazle quickly became the most popular kids’ progamme of its day and part of its attraction was the way in which Bayldon’s Norman time-traveller mistranslated modern technology as magic. So the telephone became a device called the “telling bone”, electricity was “electrickery” and so on. I had the first Catweazle annual which was an odd mixture of comic strips, text stories and articles about stage magicians with a smattering of genuine occult history.

Best of all for this Seventies kid was my favourite reading on the frequently dull Jackanory (“Ramshackle reading-is-fun relic wherein a Famous Person would sit on a chair with a pretend book and ponderously recount the contents of your local mobile library” says TV Cream) which one week had Ursula K Le Guin‘s A Wizard of Earthsea as its featured book. Try as I might, I’ve been unable to find the name of the actor who read this (black clothes, medieval chair) but I was knocked out by it. Years later the Earthsea cycle is still the only work of Le Guin’s I’ve been able to read, her science fiction seemed boring by comparison.

The inflated success of Harry Potter has had people casting about for JK Rowling’s influences over the past few years. A Wizard of Earthsea was first published in 1968 and also concerns a school of wizards, as do several other pre-HP novels. Rowling has acknowledged this although that acknowledgement hasn’t been loud or regular enough to appease a grouchy Le Guin. The Earthsea books are a lot shorter than the Potter door-stops and the first book at least is rather more sophisticated, reading equally well as a fantasy adventure for children and as a Jungian fable for adults with hints of Buddhist or Taoist philosophy. The characters are also notable for not being the Caucasians that most fantasy characters usually are, one of many details a recent TV adaptation (which Le Guin condemned) managed to ignore. It’s worth noting that JK Rowling is part of my generation (I’m 45, she’s 42) so she would have watched all this Seventies stuff herself. One of the reasons fantasy readers and writers (as opposed to snooty broadsheet critics) are often disappointed by the Potter juggernaut is that it could have been so much more considering the wealth of precedent that it draws upon. But then books rarely achieve this scale of popularity without being conservative and undemanding, Rowling’s work is merely the most recent example of this.

Le Guin spoiled the impact of her excellent first Earthsea book with several sequels of diminishing interest. A new animated film from Japan, Gedo Senki or Tales from Earthsea, based on the later works is released in the UK this month. The great British director Michael Powell had plans for an Earthsea adaptation scripted by Le Guin when he was director in residence at Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios in 1980. Powell was great with fantasy (watch his Thief of Bagdad) so it’s a shame that nothing came of this. Ace of Wands is on DVD now and so is Catweazle. I can’t vouch for the former having much value beyond pure nostalgia but there’s plenty of clips from the latter at YouTube. Proceed with caution.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Bob Pepper
• Of Moons and Serpents
• Austin Osman Spare

The Demon Regent Asmodeus

The Demon Regent Asmodeus (2006).

Alan Moore readers have finally discovered my little easter egg on the Mindscape of Alan Moore DVD so I can now talk about the creation of this miniature work. Director Dez Vylenz and I thought it would be nice to have a hidden extra somewhere on the main disc and this was the result.

Glykon and Asmodeus by Alan Moore (1994).

I’d always liked the Asmodeus section that Alan reads on the first Moon & Serpent CD and had the idea for some kind of animation based around the reading using his 1994 portrait of Asmodeus for the visuals. I used Apple’s Motion application for the animation of the DVD menus and it was this application that also animated the three-minute film. Alan’s picture was the sole source for all the visuals even though for most of the running time these are a kaleidoscopic mesh of circles and hexagons. The reading (with sound effects by Tim Perkins) works symmetrically, building to a central point then reversing itself so that the words from the first half are read in reverse order. I followed this scheme with the animation; the film begins in abstraction, evolves into the Asmodeus portrait then devolves back into abstraction. There’s also a symmetrical split to the visuals which are matched along a vertical axis in the centre of the screen. I had James Whitney’s Lapis in mind when creating these circular patterns although Whitney’s forty-year-old film remains abstract throughout. Whitney’s film was also done the hard way, one frame at a time, without the luxury of computer filters.

The Mindscape of Alan Moore is available via mail order from Shadowsnake Films.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alan Moore in Arthur magazine
• Of Moons and Serpents
• Lapis by James Whitney

Weel done, Cutty-sark!

Brad David wrote last week asking about the picture I used on the recent Jack Rose poster design. I’d seen this engraving for years in various books but was unsure of its provenance so the enquiry made me curious as well. The picture in question is an illustration for the poem Tam O’Shanter by Robert Burns and since it’s a depiction of cavorting witches and warlocks it turns up frequently in occult encyclopedias.

After a bit of searching it transpires that the engraving is based on a series of six paintings illustrating the poem by Scottish artist John Faed (1819–1902). Here we’re seeing the moment just before drunken Tam (his face visible at the window) shouts “Weel done, Cutty-sark!” to the young witch in the centre, whereupon the lights go out and a shrieking horde of angry witches chase him home.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Prince Iskandar’s horoscope

The horoscope of Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, the Turkman Mongol conqueror, by Imad al-Din Mahmud al-Kashi, showing the positions of the heavens at the moment of Iskandar’s birth on 25th April 1384.

From the Wellcome Trust image collection. Considering the Wellcome Trust’s medical background, there’s a surprising amount of non-scientific material in its image library, not least a collection devoted to Witchcraft. This perhaps reflects the wide-ranging interests of the Trust’s founder, Henry Wellcome. Jay Babcock and I visited the exhibition of artefacts from Wellcome’s vast collection at the British Museum in 2003 and that proved to be a similarly surprising cabinet of curiosities, including sheets of tattooed human skin and Charles Darwin’s skull-headed walking stick. I was sure I had a photograph of the latter but don’t seem able to find it if it’s still around. Never mind, the BBC has a picture, together with other items from the exhibition. Also on display there was a specially-commissioned film from the Brothers Quay which can now be seen in their DVD collection.

Via Boing Boing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy
• Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East
• The Atlas Coelestis of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr

Chiaroscuro II: Joseph Wright of Derby, 1734–1797

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768).

As promised, one of my favourite chiaroscurists. The impression Joseph Wright’s work made on me at the age of 13 was one of many revelations from my first visit to the Tate Gallery. The paintings which struck me most of the older works there were all of the Romantic or late-Romantic era: Turner, Francis Danby, John Martin, Philippe de Loutherbourg and Joseph Wright’s enormous An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which is now housed in the National Gallery. The National Gallery site has this to say about the picture:

A travelling scientist is shown demonstrating the formation of a vacuum by withdrawing air from a flask containing a white cockatoo, though common birds like sparrows would normally have been used. Air pumps were developed in the 17th century and were relatively familiar by Wright’s day. The artist’s subject is not scientific invention, but a human drama in a night-time setting.

The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved. The painting reveals a wide range of individual reactions, from the frightened children, through the reflective philosopher, the excited interest of the youth on the left, to the indifferent young lovers concerned only with each other.

The figures are dramatically lit by a single candle, while in the window the moon appears. On the table in front of the candle is a glass containing a skull.

As with many paintings, the online reproductions do little justice to the subtlety of Wright’s rendering of light and shade. This remains his most famous picture although he made another on a similar theme, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (below) and, like Godfried Schalcken, he has at least two studies of people viewing statues by candlelight, a common practice at that time for the way the light gave classical sculpture a spurious life. Wright’s painting of The Alchymist is another popular work, turning up frequently in occult encyclopedias. Being a native of Derby he also became (along with de Loutherbourg) one of the first painters to depict the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution whose flaring furnaces provided an ideal subject for dramatists of flame and shadow.

Before leaving the tenebral world, I’ll note that Claire left a message to say that issue 24 of Cabinet Magazine has a feature on shadows in art, symbolism and philosophy.

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