The Extended Tree
Most students of the Hermetic Kabbalah will know (sometimes obsessively) about the Golden Dawn and various splinter offshoots that carried that tradition into the period between the two world wars. WW2 was hugely destructive to esoteric traditions in Europe. The history of the generation that began again after WW2 is…
Tree of Life (“Ilanot”) Database
My friend Sally Annett has been kind enough to point me at this database of Kabbalistic diagrams, many of which are based on the Tree of Life. http://ilanot.haifa.ac.il/site/?page_id=11
Paradise Lost/Gustave Dore
I have spent months reading Paradise Lost, and because I tend to deep-dive into topics, I have been reading around the poem and the poet. The story of Adam and Eve in Eden is an amazing story that is fundamental to Judaism, Christianity and Islam (although the story in the Koran…
Sola Busca Tarot
I was browsing Amazon and saw that Lo Scarabo had published a limited-edition print of the Sola Busca Tarot deck. So I bought a copy. The reason for my haste was three-fold. Firstly, it is an extremely early Tarocchi deck (it has been dated to 1491) and it is printed…
Basilique Saint-Epvre de Nancy
Many churches devote the space above a large doorway (the Tympanum) to a representation of Ecclesiatical Reality. What I mean by this is that the material world that we inhabit is viewed as an aspect of a larger reality, and that larger reality is dominated by divine personages whose life…
Twin Peaks/Paradise Lost
I have been studying Milton’s Paradise Lost while watching Season 3 of Twin Peaks (and subsequently re-watching Season 2). Like retroviral DNA they have swapped and intertwined and formed a strange composite in my head. Those with an interest in religion and esotericism will understand that there is always a larger…
A Dark Song
It is difficult to find interesting depictions of the practices of the WET in film. Perhaps my favourite is the Hammer production of “The Devil Rides Out” with Christopher Lee, who played a large part in bringing Dennis Wheatley’s book to the screen, to the extent of researching in the…
The Picatrix
I possess a beautiful leather-bound edition of the Picatrix by Ouroboros Press in Seattle. My friend Richard Brzustowicz is credited in the acknowledgements, and this makes me unreasonably happy. However … the background to the translation is a mystery to me. I know nothing about the history of the texts used in…
Aunt Sally
There is an English game called “Aunt Sally”. The object is to knock the head off a dummy with a ball or stick. The version I recall most clearly was at a school fete. Good-natured teachers would dress in a ridiculous costume and sit immobile in a chair, while the public…
The Folly Tarot Trumps
I thought it would be fun to add colour-tinted versions of the Folly Tarot Trumps to the website (as found in B & W in Playing the Fool). The link is: http://www.digital-brilliance.com/contributed/PtF/index.php A sample … everyone loves the Devil, so here is the fiend himself.