Enoch Soames – { feuilleton }

Painted beetle (2016) by Akihiro Higuchi.

• David Horbury: The Tate’s Queer British Art exhibition ignores the pioneering scholarship of Emmanuel Cooper, author of The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the last 100 years in the West (1986).

• L’Androgyne Alchemique is an exhibition at the Azzedine Alaïa Gallery, Paris, by pascALEjandro, a collaboration between Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

• At Strange Flowers: an interview with DJ Sheppard, biographer of poet Theodore Wratislaw (1871–1933), one of the models for Max Beerbohm’s hapless Enoch Soames.

• Eloise or, the Realities is a new 122-page comic book by Ibrahim R. Ineke “inspired in part by Children of the Stones and The Owl Service“.

• Cormac McCarthy hasn’t published a novel for over ten years now but this new piece of writing addresses the mysterious origin of language.

• “…she invented a kind of symbolic code that channelled the occult and the Renaissance masters”. Yo Zushi on Leonora Carrington.

• John O’Reilly on the Samuel Beckett cover designs created by Russell Mills and Gary Day-Ellison for Picador.

• Porter Ricks (Thomas Köner & Andy Mellwig) have announced their first album in 18 years.

• At The Daily Grail: Alan Moore on science, imagination, language and spirits of place.

• All 66 issues of Performance Magazine (1979–1992) are now available online.

• The Throbbing Gristle catalogue is being reissued (again).

• Lost Soul In Disillusion (1967) by The Power Of Beckett | Liquid Insects (1993) by Amorphous Androgynous | Biokinetics 2 (1996) by Porter Ricks

Post number three thousand, and searching the memory for anything which might be filed under MMM led to more occult art. Moina MacGregor Mathers (1865–1928) was the wife of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s. Moina was the sister of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and later took to signing her illustration work “M. Bergson MacGregor”. The illustration above, however, a frontispiece for her husband’s translation of The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (1897) was signed “M.M.M.” (The signature has been removed in this reproduction but is visible here.) That triplet of initials is typical of western occultism; when Aleister Crowley (no friend of the Mathers) was appointed head of the O.T.O. in Britain his new lodge was named Mysteria Mystica Maxima, or M.M.M.

Ms Mathers wasn’t the greatest of artists but her few works have a fin de siècle charm, and are informed by occult study which she and her husband took seriously. The example below is from yet another slim volume of mystical poetry, Poems (1897) by Golden Dawn adept Charles Rosher. No need to wonder why Max Beerbohm made Enoch Soames a poet; it often seems that those who weren’t writing poetry in the 1890s were in the minority.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Whirlpools
• The Sapphire Museum of Magic and Occultism

Tag: Enoch Soames

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MMM