{occult} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The Return of the Sorcerer

The story’s first appearance in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, September 1931. No illustrator credited.

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery is a series I’d have happily watched if one of the UK channels had rebroadcast it in the 1980s, the way that Channel 4 did with the original Twilight Zone. This weekend I watched for the first time the opening episode of Night Gallery‘s third and final season, an adaptation by Halsted Welles of Clark Ashton Smith’s The Return of the Sorcerer. Smith is a writer whose works are still mostly neglected by film and television but he was in good company in Night Gallery, a series which featured adaptations of stories by a number of fellow Weird Tales writers including HP Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch. The story is one of Smith’s modern-day horror tales in which a poverty-stricken translator is offered a lucrative position at an old and sinister house, a place where a fearful occultist requires translations of an ancient volume. The Arabic text turns out to be passages from an early edition of everybody’s favourite forbidden tome, the Necronomicon, and Smith’s story, which was published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in 1931, is the first outside Lovecraft’s own to mention the book, thus beginning the expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos by other hands.

The Night Gallery adaptation was broadcast in 1972. Unlike the first two seasons, where episodes ran for an hour, the third season reduced the running time to under 30 minutes which doesn’t give director Jeannot Szwarc (credited as Jean Szwarc) any time to build up the suspense, if he was capable of such a thing. If you’ve ever seen any of Swarc’s feature films you know not to raise your expectations. As a compensation for the absense of atmosphere we get some striking set designs and a decent cast. The fearful magus, John Carnby, is played by Vincent Price, encountering the Necronomicon for the second time in his career after he’d earlier used the book to summon an eldritch monstrosity in Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace. Bill Bixby plays the wary translator, while Patricia Sterling is Carnby’s toad-loving partner in Satanism, an addition to the story by Halstead Welles, whose presence adds an extra dimension to the proceedings. The episode could never be considered a lost classic but I enjoy seeing stories by the Weird Tales writers making their first infiltrations into the wider culture. This one is worth watching for Vincent Price and the magical decor alone. I think I ought to go looking for more Night Gallery episodes.

More of those Cocteau hands-through-the-wall. Bixby’s character doesn’t seem very perturbed that the scarlet hall is filled with mysterious vapours.

Mystical decor: on the left, Frieda Harris’s Ace of Discs from the Thoth Tarot deck; on the right, The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

Mystical/Satanic decor: the painting in the background is Frieda Harris’s Ace of Cups from the Thoth Tarot deck.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cthulhu Mythos in the pulps
• Illustrating Zothique
• The Plutonian Drug
• More trip texts
• Yuggoth details
• The Garden of Adompha
• The City of the Singing Flame
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

In the footsteps of The Soul

Adeline Carr, aka “The Soul”, wandering through the streets of Holborn while worrying about her future. Her dress is an Erté creation with curiously complicated sleeves.

After checking out of my Bloomsbury hotel on Saturday morning I decided to walk over to the nearby Atlantis Bookshop, London’s oldest occult bookseller, which is located in Museum Street close to the British Museum. I know the shop well but this visit was different since the route would take me past a number of locations mentioned in the fiction serial which runs throughout the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

The Dweller in the Abyss is a story about “The Soul”, a young woman in the 1920s who was originally going to be a kind of occult investigator for a comic series Alan Moore and I were planning for ABC in the late 1990s. This didn’t work out for a variety of reasons but The Soul has been reborn in the new book, with her character reinvented in order to demonstrate the personal evolution of a neophyte entering the world of magic. Adeline Carr, “The Soul”, is an artist’s model who lives in the first-floor flat above the Atlantis shop. I won’t go into detail about the story, the whole thing needs to be read with the complementary material surrounding it, but Adeline’s wanderings around this quarter of the city take her to a number of well-known locations which you can visit today, and which I illustrated to a greater or lesser degree.

1: Russell Square

The first location I encountered—although my drawing of it appears near the end of the story—is the park in Russell Square, one of two such parks in the Bloomsbury area. It was raining on the morning I was there but Adeline’s walk through the park takes place on a sunny spring afternoon. The real place is rather more wooded than I showed it (there are more trees on the page which faces this one) but artistic licence is in operation here, and the park has been reorganised once or twice since the 1920s.

2: The British Museum

The next location is one I didn’t photograph, the British Museum. If it hadn’t been raining I might have walked through the gates to get a corresponding shot of the portico but the rain was heavier at this point and a large mass of umbrella-wielding tourists were crowding the entrance.

3: Museum Street

Into Museum Street and the Atlantis shop where the Bumper Book of Magic is visible in the window! This view shows the windows above the shop where Adeline lives. (Adeline’s windows aren’t a precise match but artistic licence again… Also, windows get replaced, especially after the wartime bombing that London endured.) The shop hadn’t opened yet so I walked round the corner into Bloomsbury Way to face the imposing bulk of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s church.

4: St George’s, Bloomsbury

To date, this building and Christ Church, Spitalfields, are the only Hawksmoor churches I’ve visited in person. The church is an important location in Adeline Carr’s journey into magic, being the place where her spiritual revelations begin and reach their eventual climax. The pyramid-capped tower looks slightly different to the one I was drawing. The steeple, which is based on Pliny’s description of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, was originally decorated at its base with statues of lions and unicorns but these were removed during a restoration of the building in the 1870s. Like many London buildings, the church suffered from the ravages of neglect, wartime bombing and air pollution during the 20th century (Hawksmoor’s St John, Horsleydown, was destroyed entirely during the Blitz). Restoration of St George’s began in the late 1990s, a process which included the return to the steeple of the missing lions and unicorns. (See this website.) Visiting the place this time I was hoping to get a view of the tower from the passage that runs along the side but the gate to this was locked. You can, however, see the church from the rear via a narrow road where the steeple rises over the dingy back rooms which fill out the plot.

5: The Atlantis Bookshop

And so to the Atlantis shop again. It was a genuinely magical moment seeing the book in the window after spending so much time thinking about this very location and the events that take place in the flat above. By coincidence (or is it? etc), the book sitting next to it is by Gary Lachman who I’d been with the previous evening for the book launch. After the shop had opened I talked for a while with the proprietors, showing them the place on page 39 of the Bumper Book where their establishment is mentioned. The Atlantis isn’t the only occult bookshop in London (or even the only one in Bloomsbury…Treadwell’s is nearby) but if you’re in London it should be your first port of call if you’re looking for a copy of the Bumper Book.

• The Atlantis Bookshop

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moon and Serpent Rising
• Serious houses: The Lud Heat Tapes, 1979
• London churches of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries
• The Cardinal and the Corpse
• Terror and Magnificence

Weekend links 747

Eden Flag with Solar-Anal Emblems and Hexes (2017) by Elijah Burgher.

• A note for regular readers that I’ll be in London for a couple of days next week, so the weekend post may be delayed by a day, if it arrives at all. I’ll be attending this event at The Century Club, Shaftsbury Avenue, a talk about The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic which will be published here and in the USA a few days from now. I’m told that copies of the book will be on sale if anyone wishes me to sign a copy.

• “Published two years before André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), which delineated the contours of the capital-S Surrealism movement, Les Malheurs represents a proto-Surrealist experiment par excellence.” Daisy Sainsbury on Les Malheurs des immortels (1922) by Paul Éluard and Max Ernst.

• “It has been two decades since Japan’s tidying boom began, and the nation remains as cluttered as ever. I know this because I live here.” Matt Alt in a long read exploring the Japanese cultivation of clutter. Don’t be shamed by minimalist interiors.

…with the Bumper Book, we wanted to present what we hope are lucid, coherent and joined-up ideas on how and why the concept of magic originated and developed over the millennia, a theoretical basis for how it might conceivably work along with suggestions as to how it might practically be employed—and, perhaps most radically, a social reason for magic’s existence as a means of transforming and improving both our individual worlds, and the greater human world of which we are components. And we wanted to deliver this in a way that reflected the colourful, psychedelic, profound and sometimes very funny nature of the magical experience itself. That, we felt, would be the biggest and most useful rabbit to pull out of the near-infinite top hat that we believe magic to be.

Alan Moore talking to Rob Salkowitz about the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

• “When it comes to pure cinematic terror The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has no equal,” says Mat Colegate. I’d avoid being quite so definitive but it’s a film I’d put in a list of my favourite cinematic horrors.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.

• At The Quietus: Lara Rix-Martin on the heavy existentialism of Soviet science fiction. Previously: Zone music.

• New music: Decimation Of I by Meemo Comma.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Exentrica.

• Hex (1971) by Gil Mellé | Hex (1978) by Jon Hassell | Hexden Channel (2012) by Pye Corner Audio

Weekend links 746

Composition B (No.II) with Red (1935) by Piet Mondrian.

• “Red is practically faultless, save, perhaps, for one hard-to-get-excited-about foray into atmospheric free jazz (Providence), though the sprawling, epic roller coaster of emotion and dexterity that follows (Starless) surely makes up for any shortfall.” Patrick Clarke on 50 years of my favourite King Crimson album. I like Providence, the piece is part of a live performance in Rhode Island so the Lovecraft connection adds to the aura of doom that pervades the album; and the structure of the album’s second side—jazz improv followed by a multi-part, Mellotron-heavy epic—harks back to the group’s debut.

• “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.” Hunter Dukes on the yellow rectangle that denotes silence in the Silos Apocalypse.

• The Art of Sidney H. Sime, Master of Fantasy, an exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner, London. Meanwhile, at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, there’s Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation.

• “I did not realize how much I had done. I am a serial polluter.” Ralph Steadman and his daughter, Sadie Williams, talking to Steven Heller about Steadman’s latest exhibition which is touring the USA.

• New music: Come Back To Me [Demo] by Broadcast; The Last Sunset Of The Year by Marcus Fjellström; Hexa by Cleared.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artists summon mythical creatures of the Echigo region for the 2024 Wara Art Festival.

• The Italian Art of Violence: Samm Deighan on the giallo cinema boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

• Gavin Friday’s favourite albums.

• Red (1991) by Jarboe | Red Earth (As Summertime Ends) (1991) by Rain Tree Crow | Red Sun (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff

Weekend links 744

Postage stamp design by Dario Canovas celebrating Argentina as guest of honour at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair.

• Sideways Through Time, Joe Banks’ book of Hawkwind interviews, was initially available as an exclusive supplement with the special edition of Days of the Underground, Joe’s essential history of Hawkwind’s first decade. From the end of October both books will be available as separate editions from Strange Attractor, with the interview collection being republished in a revised and expanded edition.

• “Two heads are better than one”: Another extract from Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts In Dr John’s Gris-Gris by David Toop.

• “Rammellzee was an electric presence”: Thurston Moore on NYC’s graffiti-writing hip-hop pioneer.

• New music: Long Tail Of The Quiet Gong by Robert Rich, and Neostalgia by Heiko Maile, Julian Demarre.

• At Colossal: Postage stamp designs by Tùng Nâm showing portraits of endangered animals.

• At Public Domain Review: Edwin D. Babbitt’s Principles of Light and Color (1878).

• At Print magazine: An interview with design anthropologist Keith Murphy.

• At Unquiet Things: Tristan Elwell’s visual spellcraft.

• Mix of the week: Bleep mix 287 by Sarah Davachi.

• Mariam Rezaei’s favourite music.

• Over Under Sideways Down (1966) by The Yardbirds | Stepping Sideways (2003) by John Foxx & Harold Budd | Trip Sideways (2010) by The Time And Space Machine