A number of years ago, when I was visiting Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to be steered and beered around the town by my good friend Blair MacKenzie Blake (whose writing appears online at the website of prog-rock band Tool, and also in print via our own Darklore anthology). During that visit, I was given a glimpse of Blair's amazing esoteric book collection - a veritable treasure trove of first editions on various occult topics, from Crowleyana to pulp ufology, collected over many years by a man who knows the topics inside out. I certainly felt privileged to lay my hands - if for a short time - on such precious pieces of history. It's just a good thing that I didn't drool all over them, as any lover of books and/or esoterica might have done if put in my position (and I hope BMB has since taken on board my suggestion for a fireproof storage option!).

Now you too can get a taste of Blair's awesome collection, with the release of The Wickedest Books in the World: Confessions of an Aleister Crowley Bibliophile:

The Wickedest Books in the World is a large format (9 X 12) coffee table-style hardcover book containing over 50 glossy full color photographs of the rare, often magnificently produced, first edition books of the renowned British occultist, Aleister Crowley that are currently in the collections of both Blair and fellow bibliophile, Danny Carey (Tool's drumming genius).

Collectors please note! Printed and bound by one of the top printers in the world, this first hardcover edition...

...is strictly limited to 1000 copies, with the first 156 copies numbered by way of an anti-consecrated page carefully removed from the author’s personal copy of the 1922 British first impression of Crowley’s notorious The Diary of a Drug Fiend (placed inside a clear envelope). Additionally, the first 333 copies are individually numbered and SIGNED by both the author and the author of the book’s foreword, DANNY CAREY (who is featured throughout the book as avid collector of Crowleyana).

Along with the wonderful images you'll find text touching on Crowley's history, the story of how many of his most coveted books have meandered their way through the decades and into Blair's collection, and also a foreword by Danny Carey. You can pick up your own copy of this wonderful book via Danny Carey's newly redesigned website (and I suggest you don't wait too long). Alternatively, go directly to the purchasing page.

(And don't forget to check out Blair's book of sumptuous occult-influenced prose-poems, Ijynx too!)

This article is excerpted from Darklore Volume 2, which is available for sale from Amazon US and Amazon UK. The Darklore anthology series features the best writing and research on paranormal, Fortean and hidden history topics, by the most respected names in the field: Robert Bauval, Nick Redfern, Loren Coleman, Jon Downes and Daniel Pinchbeck, to name just a few. Darklore's aim is to support quality researchers, so it makes sense to support Darklore.

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Occult Rock
by Greg Taylor

Few guitarists have been as influential as the legendary Delta Bluesman, Robert Johnson. His recordings have inspired fellow blues musicians such as Muddy Waters, song-writing genius Bob Dylan, formative rock gods The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, guitarists Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton (who labelled Johnson “the most important Blues musician who ever lived”) - who in turn have influenced subsequent generations of musicians.

However, rumours swirled about Johnson’s involvement with the occult even before his premature death – aged just 27 – in 1938. His seemingly instantaneous mastery of the Blues gave rise to legends that he had made a deal with the Devil, who had given Johnson his skills in return for his everlasting soul. Tales circulated of the young black musician from Mississippi who had taken his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery’s plantation at midnight, and met there with a large man who took the guitar and tuned it, and gave Johnson mastery of the instrument in a Faustian bargain. Within a year of this fabled meeting, Johnson was recognised as one of the greatest Delta Blues musicians…but within two more years, he had met his end – and, we suppose, delivered on his side of the contract.

Johnson’s song titles provide a vivid reflection of his occult ties. “Hellhound on my Trail”, “Me and the Devil Blues”, and the narrative of “Crossroad Blues” (“Went down to the crossroads, bent down on my knees”) all add colour to the myths surrounding this seminal musician. But as Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh point out in their book The Elixir and the Stone, these allusions to the occult world are a fundamental part of the Blues, not least due to its origins in the music of Voodoo:

Welp, if this isn't the place for relocating Daily Grail HQ, I don't know what is: Part of the legendary Boleskine Estate bordering Loch Ness (former home of occultist Aleister Crowley and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page) is up for sale:

[A] 1.9-acre plot on the former estate has been put on the market for £176,000 with planning permission for a three-bedroom log house, and 140ft of the Loch Ness foreshore.

"There's been a great deal of interest in the plot because of the Crowley connection. We've had various enquiries from all over the place. People do tend to be interested in things that are sinister, but we've also had enquiries from people who just want a base in the Highlands with some nice views over Loch Ness," said Kevin Maley, of Inverness agents Strutt and Parker.

"The house and plot are owned by different people. The plot has been in the same family for the last 40 years, but the owner has decided it's time to go. It's an unusual one in that it's being sold with planning permission for a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, but it would make a perfect holiday cottage," he said.

That would of course be if your "perfect holiday" involves summoning up astral zooforms in order to do the bidding of your black heart.

Nick Redfern wrote a detailed article in Darklore Volume 2 (Amazon US and UK) about this very topic, titled "What Lies Beneath: There's More Than Just a Monster to the Loch Ness Mystery". He covered not only the Page-Crowley-Boleskine topic, but also Men in Black sightings, Big Cat sightings, Kelpie myths of the area, occult rites and exorcisms, and much more. Of course, you already have DL2 don't you, so I'm preaching to the choir here...

Now, let me check my pockets for that £176,000.

Disinfo.com have posted a podcast interview with Alan Moore, creator/writer of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and much mo(o)re. (For those reading this at a later date in the archives, here's the direct link.) It's a great chat, with Moore discussing various aspects of the crossover between magick (of which he is knowledgable, and a practitioner) and the imagination, apocalyptic information overflow, and what he's currently working on. In there you'll hear of Moore's (rather) spooky experiences of 'meeting' John Constantine, how his upcoming book on the magickal arts will include a pop-up altar and a Kabbalah boardgame, and how Paracelsus had a backwards angelic language a century before Dr John Dee. The podcast begins with an interview with DeZ Vylenz, (producer and director of the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore) so if you're in a rush, Alan Moore comes in around a third of the way into the podcast.

Just nobody tell this fanboi that he's part of a magickal experiment, he might pop a fuse...

At TED this year, author Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) took the audience into strange territory in her talk about creativity, expectation and the killing of genius. Unbelievably, Gilbert managed to receive a standing ovation from the scientifically-minded TED crowd after a monologue in which she asked whether we should embrace the ancient conception of genius and creativity being external and separate to us. Basically, she suggested we return to the idea that gods and daimons possess us at times - at least as a psychological crutch. Here's the talk in its entirety:

It really is a breath of fresh air to see this sort of talk getting a positive response from the upper echelons of science and technology. In this post-Dawkins era, when someone like Phil Plait feels he needs to add a caveat just for typing the descriptive word 'magical', I get rather frustrated with the worship of literal thought to the exclusion of metaphor and myth. It's good to see someone standing up for the 'real', everyday human mind like this.

For those who are interested in Gilbert's discussion of daimons and the like, check out Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld. Harpur ties this sort of creative inspiration as the internal manifestation of 'contact' with this 'daimonic reality', and suggests many paranormal events are the outward manifestation:

The first of the great Neoplatonists, Plotinus (AD 204-70), maintained that the individual daimon was "not an anthropomorphic daemon, but an inner psychological principle, viz: the level above that on which we consciously live, and so is both within us and yet transcendent" (author's emphasis). Like Jung, he takes it as read that daimons are objective phenomena and thinks to emphasize only that, paradoxically, they manifest both inwardly (dreams, inspirations, thoughts, fantasies) and outwardly or transcendently (visions and apparitions).

A fascinating talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, and a great book by Patrick Harpur - check them both out if you get the chance.

by Gary Lachman.

Gary Lachman's new book Politics and the Occult: The Left, The Right, and the Radically Unseen is available from Amazon US and Amazon UK.

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Dark Sides: The Jung Case

Although Hitler apparently had little interest in the occult - as Mark Sedgwick writes, “Hitler had no sympathy for occultism of any variety,” - he had close contact with people who did, and the Nazi movement, while not the product of “black brotherhoods” or diabolical “unknown superiors,” was certainly amenable to some occult influences. Himmler’s SS infamously incorporated runic, pagan, and Grail elements and was deeply influenced by the ideas of the occultist Karl Maria Wiligut. One SS officer, Otto Rahn, wrote a bestselling book, Crusade against the Grail, associating the Cathars with the Grail legend. Hermann Wirth, author of the monumental The Rise of Mankind, used meditation to view the past and argued, like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, that the Aryan race began in the frozen north. In 1935 Wirth was a co-founder of the notorious Ahnenerbe, the Nazi “research unit” devoted to uncovering Germany’s ancestral Aryan heritage, whose efforts included sending the SS explorer Ernst Schäfer to the Himalayas to measure Tibetan skulls. And while Hitler himself may have rejected occultism, he was certainly aware of “the power of myth,” a phrase familiar to viewers of the journalist Bill Moyers’ fantastically successful series of interviews with the mythologist Joseph Campbell.

The electrifying power of the swastika; Albert Speer’s dazzling lighting effects at the Nuremberg rallies; Hitler’s “demonic” oratory and his own deification as the Führer; the romantic vision of a bucolic Germany rooted in “blood and soil,” as opposed to an urban, mechanical modernity - all were part of the myth of National Socialism that Hitler and his followers sold to an interested public. A myth was instrumental in Hitler’s success, the dark lie voiced in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Whether the Protocols were “true” or not probably never occurred to Hitler; what was important was that they agreed with his own views and that, like himself, many people believed they were true. (The people who believed in the Protocols weren’t necessarily unintelligent; one of their most fervent supporters was Henry Ford, father of the assembly line and mass production. Like many influential people, faced with evidence that the Protocols were forged, Ford refused to believe it.) Like the French syndicalist George Sorrel and the political philosopher Leo Strauss, Hitler knew that in politics, myth is often more important than the “truth,” a difficult commodity to pin down at any time. Reason and rationality are boring and demand effort. Myth bypasses the inhibitions of the critical mind, and reaches down to the vital forces below. This is what makes it exciting and enlivening. It is also what makes it dangerous. In saying this I am not arguing “against” myth, merely pointing out that it entails something more than just “following your bliss.”

Yet many at the time were willing to risk the danger and embrace myth over reason. One was the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, perhaps more than anyone else, the single most important figure in the reawakening of spiritual thought in modern times. Although for much of his career Jung obscured his interest in the occult, in his later years his writings on Gnosticism, alchemy, the paranormal, spiritualism, and even flying saucers brought these otherwise marginal areas into the field of respectable research.

Spoon-bender extraordinaire Uri Geller received an award last week which James Randi might not be too happy about (although he could take it both ways I guess): the Berglas Foundation - Services to Magic Award. Personally accepting the award at the 37th International Magic Convention in London, Geller once again gave indications during a post-award Q&A that he's moving away from his claims to paranormal abilities, although he did add some caveats:

If I was to start my career now, my career would be destroyed, the speed of the internet, the technology allowing events to be reported, I’d not be able to start my career in the way I did those years ago.

...I thrive on controversy, looking back on my career, I called myself a psychic, I constantly need to re-invent myself, you will not get a straight answer... Lets say I wasn’t real, lets say for the last years I’ve fooled the journalists, the scientists, my family, my friends.. You.. If I managed to fool them, I must be the greatest..?

I have seen things in my life that I cannot understand or explain, I cannot bend spoons like some of the magicians, you can, it blows my mind when I see that, I have no idea. I had the idea and cheekiness to call it psychic, in fact all I wanted was to be rich and famous, I wanted to buy my mother a TV.

I dont think I am gifted, I think all of you are gifted, you must have encountered things that you couldn't understand. I never made money from bending spoons, I made money from finding oil and gold, I don't know how I did that, maybe it was luck.

So, is that a confession that the spoon-bending is sleight-of-hand, but with the addition of some separate 'mysterious powers' to retain some of his aura? (And, if anyone thinks that Uri's a bit full of himself when he says "the greatest?", remember that Jim Steinmeyer told me he thinks Geller is "one of the greatest magicians of all time"...)

Previously on TDG:

• Phenomenal Juxtaposition
• More Geller
  

We've mentioned previously the movie Chemical Wedding, a fictional story about the return of 'The Great Beast', Aleister Crowley, written by Bruce Dickinson (lead singer for Iron Maiden). There's currently a very interesting video on YouTube by Julian Doyle, who directed Chemical Wedding (and was also responsible for the editing on a number of Monty Python/Terry Gilliam classics) - Doyle recently filmed his visit to the Crowleyana collection of Gerald Yorke, a former friend and disciple of Crowley who amassed a huge collection of Beast-related items during his lifetime.

Doyle chats with Yorke's sons John and Michael about their father's famous collection (the Rolling Stones even visited), telling many a fascinating tale along the way - everything from evil magic wands calling for blood, through to spells on vellum 'treated' by certain other bodily chemicals. I've embedded the video below for those interested - wonderful to hear these eyebrow-raising stories from ostensibly 'proper' British gentlemen!

Those early documents of L. Ron Hubbard sound especially intriguing, would love to see what they say. Mr Yorke will probably find a line of Scientology suits marching down his driveway tomorrow...

You can check out the trailer for the movie at YouTube, or purchase the book from Amazon. (h/t David at Boing Boing)

Harry Potter fans (and miscellaneous book collectors) out there might want to smash open the piggy bank, with today's announcement of the December 4 publication of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a companion volume to J.K. Rowling's blockbuster series about a boy wizard. The mass market paperback (Amazon US and UK) is already #1 on Amazon.com, four months before release.

Much more pretty and desirable though is the limited edition hardcover (Amazon US and UK). At $100.00/£50.00 (respectively) it doesn't come cheap, especially for a small page count book, but the packaging looks first class - and you can just see the kid's faces lighting up on Xmas day when they open this up...

Tucked in its own case disguised as a wizarding textbook found in the Hogwarts library, the Collector's Edition includes an exclusive reproduction of J.K. Rowling's handwritten introduction, as well as 10 additional illustrations not found in the Standard Edition or the original. Opening the case reveals a velvet bag embroidered with J.K. Rowling’s signature, in which sits the piece de resistance: your very own copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, complete with metal skull, corners, and clasp; replica gemstones; and emerald ribbon.

Offering the trademark wit and imagination familiar to Rowling's legions of readers--as well as Aesop's wisdom and the occasional darkness of the Brothers Grimm--each of these five tales reveals a lesson befitting children and parents alike: the strength gained with a trusted friendship, the redemptive power of love, and the true magic that exists in the hearts of all of us. Rowling's new introduction also comments on the personal lessons she has taken from the Tales, noting that the characters in Beedle's collection "take their fates into their own hands, rather than taking a prolonged nap or waiting for someone to return a lost shoe," and "that magic causes as much trouble as it cures."

With 100,000 copies available, it's hardly what most people would call "limited edition", though relative to the sales of the Potter series I guess it is. And the price looks cheap compared to what Amazon paid for just one of the hand-written copies: £1,950,000.

The Independent is reporting that one of the most comprehensive collections of rare and ancient books on magic (both stage conjuring and 'magick') may be under threat:

The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, based at the University of London, is the UK's largest of its kind and contains letters between Price and the legendary illusionist Houdini. It also has detailed correspondence between Price and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a believer in the paranormal. Titles such as The Hammer of Witches, a 1486 treatise on witchcraft, are among its 13,000 items, which include pamphlets and hand-pressed books as well as photographs.

The collection is under threat after the university's grant for its specialist library was slashed by more than 60 per cent by the Higher Education Funding Council. The £1m cut means the library could cease to exist.

Harry Price was a famous researcher in the 1930s and 1940s, who investigated psychics, hauntings and other occult matters. His investigations, and results, suggest a true scientist - he debunked with ferocity, but also had a number of positive findings. Of the infamous 'Brocken Experiment', he said:

Although our principal object in staging the Bloksberg Tryst was to ridicule the idea that magic ritual, under modern conditions, is still potent, we are not so foolish as to imagine that we have entirely succeeded: superstition is not so easily killed as that! But the experiment was worth reproducing, as the investigation of such things is perfectly legitimate when carried out in a scientific manner; and I consider that the result of our test has advanced us a stage in our knowledge of ancient magic ritual.

The scoffer will tell us that because we had no faith, the experiment was not conclusive; in other words, that the formula will not work automatically. That is all very well, but what sort of a state do we have to induce in order that the magical metamorphosis shall take place? The fifteenth-century scribe who compiled the Black Book says of the Brocken miracle: 'This have I witnesseth myself.' But in my opinion the old man had worked himself into such a condition of ecstatic enthusiasm that he was really in a state of auto-hypnosis or self-induced trance, and when he 'saw' the goat change into the 'faire youth' it was merely an hallucination. I think he wrote out the formula in good faith.

The above passage suggests that not only was Price committed to scientific investigation of strange subjects, but also that he was contemplating ritual magick as a mode of reaching altered states of consciousness - something which debunkers don't normally understand.

Being a conjurer himself, he was familiar with the techniques of stage magic, and so was more than able to spot psychic fakes. However, he was a controversial figure, and the first impression of him being a true scientist may be off the mark - instead, many felt his prime motivation was publicity. So skeptics claimed his positive findings were simply an effort to make headlines...and funnily enough, debunked psychics claimed the exact same thing when he cried hoax.

A great resource for learning more about the career and investigations of Harry Price is HarryPrice.co.uk. You can find out more about the Harry Price Collection at the University of London website.