Reliquiæ

Described as an “annual journal of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translations and visual art […] spanning landscape, ecology, folklore, esoteric philosophy and animism”, the announcement for the first volume of Reliquiæ immediately had my attention.

Edited by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, and published on their Corbel Press Imprint, the first volume of Reliquiæ brings together work by authors old and new: Christina Rossetti and W.B.Yeats rub shoulders with Richard Harms and Mark Valentine – and there is also the presentation of older, oral material within the pages of the journal in the form of Inuit and Native American creation myths and Manx folktales.

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Say Aaah: Music of the Vowels

The idea that the vowels hold the secret to some mystical, primal language appears to have a genuinely ancient lineage. Notably they seem bound up with the ritual expressions of the Gnostics. For example, in the Nag Hammadi codices we find a Hermetic dialogue entitled The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth. As in some of the dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum (XI & XIII), the master in this dialogue also breaks from philosophical and theological speculations to sing: as though poetry, sound and music may provide the pupil with another route to divine experience alongside meditation and philosophical instruction. What is interesting about the hymns in the Nag Hammadi codex is their peculiarly Gnostic character:

“Grace! After these things, I give thanks by singing a hymn to you. For I have received life from you, when you made me wise. I praise you. I call your name that is hidden within me:

A O EE O EEE
ooo iii oooo
ooooo
ooooo uuuuuu oo
ooooooooo
ooooooooo
oo.

You are the one who exists with the spirit. I sing a hymn to you reverently.”