On Monday, I was in Cambridge to present a paper at The Alchemical Landscape, a symposium held at Corpus Christi college and convened by the Cambridge University Counterculture Research Group. My thanks to Yvonne Salmon and James Riley for inviting me along – it was a very successful and fascinating day, and I’m still following leads arising from it. You can see the full programme here – music was very well represented with contributions from myself, Justin Hopper (on Shirley Collins and ‘pastoral noir’), English Heretic, Drew Mulholland (a pleasure to meet him after all these years!), Chris Lambert and Sharron Kraus. It was also incredible to finally meet Gyrus, whose work on Ilkely and Verbeia have had a marked influence on my own relation to the local landscape over the last 15 years or more!
You can read my paper here: The Many-Coloured Earth: Visionary Creativity, Imaginal Landscapes and the Hermeneutic Imagination. It’s a shame that I didn’t have more opportunity to qualify terms like ‘vision’ and ‘image’, or to discuss the relationship with the creative process (which is discussed here) and the final ‘product’. However, there will be a longer version of this paper in the future which discusses these, further methodological notes and also explores the work of AE in the context of ‘visionary landscapes’ in more detail. If you’ve not read my (less academically inclined) piece on AE and his ‘language of the gods’ you can also do so here.
I’ve also received word from Wounded Wolf Press that Angelystor is nearly sold out. Since it seems unlikely that there will be a second edition, this may be your last chance.
Finally, while wandering around the area of Corpus Christi, I noticed this intriguing clock on the western portal of Great St. Mary’s Church. Obviously my brain is somewhat Coil-addled, following the Hawthonn project and two pieces of Coil-related research currently on-going, but I couldn’t help noticing the similarity between the clock face and the ‘black sun’ logo used by the duo. The ‘black sun’ sign was actually cribbed from Aleister Crowley’s Liber 231, and is related to one of the genii of the houses of Mercuy, apparently called Chiva-abrahadabra-cadaxviii. As a student, Crowley apparently had digs nearby: I wonder if this striking feature influenced him at all?
