Lucifer Rising – Gavin Baddeley

Plexus – 2006
This book deals with the different manifestations of Satanism within modern culture. It focuses on rock music and heavy metal, but it also discusses serial killers and horror movies. Sounds pretty great, right? A recommendation for this book showed up on my goodreads account, and my copy was ordered within moments of reading its description. I’m pleased to say that it didn’t disapoint. The author is a priest in the Church of Satan, and the history and outlook of LaVeyan Satanism is central to this book. I like LaVey, so I was entertained, but the author’s tone might be grating on some readers, particularly if they were Christian.

The first few chapters give a short yet surprisingly comprehensive history of Satanism, but the latter half of the book is mostly taken up with interviews. Some of these are excruciatingly embarrassing (Glen Benton is an idiot), and some are genuinely hilarious (Euronymous is precious). Varg Vikernes from Burzum has claimed that the interview with him is entirely fake. (He also claims that this is the worst book that he has ever seen.) I know lots of Burzum fans who claim to dislike Varg. Well, I always thought Burzum’s music was crap, but I think he’s a pretty funny guy. (Don’t get me wrong; I know he’s a right-wing scumbag, racist, murderer and all-round crazy person, and I certainly wouldn’t say that I ‘like’ him, but let’s be honest; he regularly brings the lols.) There were a few interviews in here that weren’t hugely insightful, and it seemed that some of the interviewees may have been chosen based on their availability rather than their unique insight or authority on the topic, but this doesn’t take away from the cooler parts of the book. It might also be worth noting that I’m a fan of quite a few of the musicians interviewed herein, so I was probably more entertained than most people would be. If you don’t like rock music, this book might be a bit boring.

Baddeley suggests that there are as many different forms of Satanism as there are forms of christianity. (He also shows how hazy the lines between some forms of christianity and Satanism can be.) This book acknowledges the fact that Satanism is a very loosely defined set of beliefs and behaviors, and the author provides a thorough and entertaining account of the movement’s more interesting facets. (I picked up some cool recommendations for bands, movies and books too.) Overall, I would recommend this as a good primer for anyone with an interest in the Devil’s place in Rock’n’Roll.

I started writing a paragraph about my own take on Satanism, but it turned very lengthy very quickly, so I think I shall save it for a later date. Until then, Hail Satan!
(Update: This is what that paragraph eventually turned into.)

The Fiery Angel – Valery Bryusov

20160325_000821

Neville Spearman – 1975 (Valeri Briussov)
Dedalus – 2005 (Valery Bruisov)

I came across the title of this book when I was reading Colin Wilson’s The Occult two years ago, and from his description, I knew that I’d have to read it at some stage. I spent a while trying to track down a copy at a decent price, and when I found one, it spent a few months lying on the shelf before I got around to reading it. When I finally got around to it, I was met with an unpleasant surprise. Some of the pages were entirely blank. See the below video for details:

Like I said, I had ordered this a good while before picking it up to read, and so I didn’t feel it fair to demand a refund. I doubted that the bookseller had known about the defect, but I was having a slow day in work, and I decided to drop them an email to pass the time. Below is the message I sent.

my email

When I wrote that email, I did not expect a response. Fortunately, I was wrong; they replied promptly:

Many’s the stupid email I have sent, but I have never been so satisfied with a response. Normally you get a feebly polite apology. I take my hat off to the individual who sent the above response to me. It makes me happy to think that there are companies out there that deal with customers as they should be dealt with. If you’re talking to a jackass, talk to them like they’re a jackass. (Although, note that the seller did very courteously offer to send me a replacement.) I was extremely satisfied with my dealings with this seller, and I encourage all of my readers to buy books from them whenever the opportunity arises.

Anyways, I soon thereafter bought a different copy of the book (the more recent Dedalus edition), and that version lay on my shelf for another year before I got around to it. While the Spearman edition has a foreword by Colin Wilson, the Dedalus version has an afterword by Gary Lachman. Surprisingly, the Dedalus version also omits a two page foreword by Bryusov himself that really should be part of the text. In it, Bryusov claims to be the editor of the tale and not the author so-to-speak. Otherwise, the text of the two books are identical copies of the same original printing. (There are identical imperfections on the same pages in both versions, one of which looks like a squished fly.) If I had to choose, I would buy the Spearman version, but I would make sure that it has all of the pages before buying! (My copy is missing pages 76, 77, 80, 81, 84, 85, 92, 93, and a few more.)

Two things before I start my actual review. First of all, the name of the author is spelled differently on my two copies of this book. It’s spelled Valery Bryusov most places online, so I’m going to use that spelling. Next, this post contains a few spoilers. If you are sure you want to read this one and you’re like me and like knowing as little as possible about a book before reading it, maybe you should read the book before you read the rest of this. (But make sure you do come back to finish reading this when you’re done. I discovered some cool stuff about this book that you’ll want to know!) If you’re not sure about whether or not you want to read this one yet, read away. The spoilers here won’t ruin the suspense of the novel.

So what’s the big deal here? Why did I bother with this book? Well, it’s a novel about magic, the witch-craze, repressed sexuality and perversion. What more could I possibly ask for? Set in 16th century Germany, it tells the story of a hard man called Rupprecht who’s making his way home after gallivanting around Mexico for a few years. He becomes enchanted by a girl who is staying in the same hotel as him, but he quickly notices that she’s carrying some serious baggage; she is possessed by demons and she practices black magic. As so often happens, this woman’s personality flaws make her seem all the more attractive, and Rupprecht decides to wander around with her for a while. She tells him that she’s searching for a former lover, and Rupprecht agrees to help her find him. Oh, and it also turns out that her old lover is either an angel or devil. (We’re never made entirely sure which side this ‘Fiery Angel’ is on.) At this point, Rupes’s compliance makes you start to wonder whether it was by natural or infernal means that he was so enchanted; shouldn’t he be taking this as his cue to tell Renata to fuck off?

Well, they wander around a while looking for the Fiery Angel, but Renata gets disheartened and decides that the only way to find him will be to ask the devil for help. Renata doesn’t want that kind of guilt on her conscience though, so she convinces Rupprecht that he should sell his soul so that she can find out where her boyfriend is. Rupprecht is a hard man and everything, but he clearly gets off on kinky sado-masochistic power struggles. The more he can debase himself for the sake of his lady, the stronger his mental ‘gasm shall be! He offers his soul to Satan and actually kisses the Dark Lord’s ringpiece in order to cuckold himself; what a creep!

There are several other twists and turns in their complicated relationship, but eventually Renata runs away on Rupprecht. After a bit of moping around by himself, he bumps into Faust and Mephistopheles and wanders around with them for a while. When he finally stumbles across Renata again, she has joined a nunnery, changed her name to sister Maria, and she’s gotten herself accused of witchcraft. (Typical, right?) She is of course guilty of witchery, but one gets the impression that the reasons she is being charged have less to do with her actions and more to do with the fact that nunneries are mad places full of mad people. The whole thing very quickly turns into a Devils of Loudun situation, and Renata is sentenced to death. Rupprecht tries to rescue her, but things don’t really go according to his plans.

That’s the basic plot of it, but there’s a tonne of cool bits that I’ve left out. Rupprecht attends a witches’ Sabbath, he spends time with Cornelius Agrippa and Johann Weyer, he performs ceremonial black magic and summons demons, and Renata and he have a tonne of kinky sex. (Ok, so we don’t get the juicy details, but judging by the way they act with eachother and the fact that Rupprecht claims that Renata wanted to do more than just regular inny-outty, we can assume that no door was left unopened!) One interesting feature of the text is the fact that although this is a novel about witchcraft and magic, it is also very much a piece of historical fiction. At no point in the book does anything happen that might not actually be explained in real life. Perhaps the most curious thing that occurs is that Renata knows Rupprecht’s name before he introduces himself, but I’m sure you can imagine 100 different ways that a person might find out the name of another guest at the same hotel as them.

Despite the fact that it is mentioned in neither Colin Wilson’s foreword in the Spearman edition nor Lachman’s afterword, it turns out that this book, particularly the last few chapters, is actually largely based on a true story. In 1749, a nun named Renata Maria Saengen von Massau was one of the last women in Germany to be executed for the crime of witchcraft. (She died in 1749, but The Fiery Angel is set over 200 years earlier; I don’t think any dates are specifically mentioned, but Cornelius Agrippa, who dies at the end of the book, actually died in 1535.) I found two different accounts of the real Renata’s life in my library. One is from Robbin’s Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. This is a rather sympathetic account that suggests that poor Sister Renata was a victim of mass hysteria. The other account of her life that I read was in Montague Summers‘ book, The Geography of Witchcraft. Monty was fully convinced that this woman was indeed a vile Satanist, and his account is even more fanciful than Bryusov’s.

Despite their different standpoints, Summers and Robbins both present the same basic story. Sister Renata had entered a nunnery when she was about 19 years old. She spent the last 15 of her 50 years in the nunnery as the subprioress. Everything was going fine in her life until a girl named Cecilia Pistorini started throwing fits in order to gain entry into the convent. Cecilia believed her hallucinations and spasms were messages from God, and she thought that this should allow her to skip through the novitiate stage of becoming a nun. Renata wasn’t convinced, and she suggested that the girl might have been putting it all on. Cecilia remembered this, and when she eventually became a nun, she convinced herself and others that Sister Renata was a witch. As she was dying, another senile old hag of a nun claimed that Renata had bewitched her, and this forced to the prioress of the convent to look into the matter. Word got out, and the idea that Renata was a witch caught on with other idiot nuns in the convent. They started imagining that they had been bewitched or possessed and a bunch of them started screaming things out during mass. The more attention they got from the local priests, the more horny they became and the more they acted up. This did not look good for poor Renata. She denied all of the allegations at first, but after twenty lashes with a consecrated rawhide bullwhip, she started to remember her sins.

In Renata’s confession, she claims to have given herself to Satan when she was only 8 years old. She spent her teenage years having sex with demons and learning the craft of Satanism, and then when she was old enough, she decided to join the convent with the sole purpose of bringing it down from the inside. (It’s a bit hard to understand how the other nuns didn’t notice anything for the first 49 years that she had been there.) She claims to have ridden to the Sabbath several times a week, to have made love to the Devil on countless occasions, and to have stolen consecrated hosts with the purpose of throwing them into the toilet. The way she stole the hosts was pretty cool. Before she would go to receive communion, she would cut slits in her flesh, and when the priest would give her the communion wafer, she would sneakily stick it into the communion-shaped holes that she had carved into her own body. She did this just so she could throw the body of christ into the crapper. What a legend!

There’s an interesting part in the Verbatim Reports from Sister Renata’s trials that might have been Bryusov’s source of inspiration for the character of Rupprecht.

“Q. Was she a witch?
A. Yes.
Q. Where did she learn this and from whom?
A. A grenadier had taught her in Vienna, where she and the whole household had gone with her father during the Hungarian war.
Q. How did she meet this grenadier?
A. As happens in wartime. The grenadier had often given her bread when she was hungry, and finally he promised to teach her something.
Q. What then did this grenadier finally teach her?
A. He gave her a paper, on which all sorts of letters were written. On this paper she had to draw a circle and stand inside it. In addition, she had received a charm [Zetel] with various words on it; and if she could read these words, then she could make passers-by in the street lame and crippled.”

In The Fiery Angel, Rupprecht doesn’t meet Renata in Vienna, but he is a soldier that meets her in a time of need, and they do spend time together studying the black arts. I think it’s quite likely that Rupprecht originated as a re-imagining of the mysterious grenadier from the real Renata’s confessions.

In the book, Renata dies in Rupprecht’s arms, but the real Renata was not quite so lucky. Her judges decided to show her some leniency in her execution though, on account of the fact that she had been seduced by Satan at such a young age. She was shown the courtesy of having her head chopped off before being thrown into a barrel of burning tar. Apparently the executioner made such a clean cut that her head popped clean off her body with the first blow from his sword, and he was given a round of applause for his accuracy. Imagine a crowd of people cheering a man for decapitating a 69 year old woman.

All in all, this is a very interesting book. I found the first half dragged a little bit, but it really picks up later on. Bryusov knew his stuff when it came to witchcraft, and there are a few books mentioned in here that I am going to have to try to track down. In truth though, this book is more about the psychology of attraction than it is about black magic. Apparently the plot of the story is largely based on events from the author’s own life. He basically took the story of a love triangle that he had been involved in, chose characters from a famous witch trial to play the roles, and set the story 200 years before those people had actually lived. The result is actually deadly. I mean, as mad as it sounds, I think this book would be an enjoyable read for a person with no interest in witchcraft or demonology. For those of us who are interested in those topics, this is a must read. Five stars.

Michelle Remembers – Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder

michelle remembers ross bay
Congdon and Lattes – 1980
I have been horrendously busy with school and haven’t had the opportunity to update this blog, but I feel that this post will make up for my absence. I’m reviewing a Satanic classic; Michelle Remembers. Packed full of horrendous scenes of murder, enemas, cannibalism, and perverse diabolic rituals, this is the book that kicked off the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 80s. It tells the story of Michelle, a woman from Victoria BC who at the age of 27 began to uncover repressed memories of Satanic abuse that she had suffered 22 years earlier. It’s a fascinating piece of writing for several different reasons, and I have quite a lot to say about it.

So, the basic premise of the book is that as a child, this woman, Michelle, suffered such horrendous abuse at the hands of a coven of Satanists that she entirely repressed all memories relating to it. When she becomes an adult, she has a nightmare and goes to tell her psychiatrist about it. The pair become convinced that the nightmare means something, and through a kind of self-induced hypnosis that is never properly explained, Michelle summons forth her 5 year old self who proceeds to give a first hand account of the part of Michelle’s life that she herself was completely unaware of.

michelle smith lawrence pazder A real pair of plonkers. Take a good minute there to really look into the eyes of that utter imbecile. That common, stupid-looking woman believed that Jesus Christ and Lucifer personally did battle over her soul.

According to the child version of Michelle, her mother started taking Michelle to Satanic rituals when she was very small. At one of the first ceremonies, Michelle is anally fingered and frigged and forced to watch her mother engage in an orgy. Michelle gets upset when she sees a woman between her mother’s legs, so she hits her mother’s licker with a bottle. Everyone else in the room sees this happening and joins in on the fun. The saucy lesbian is stabbed to death in front of the child while she is still underneath the woman that she has been pleasuring. Not the worst way to go, I guess…

After Michelle has rudely attacked her lover, the mother abandons her naughty child and leaves her with the Satanists. I’ll be honest here; they’re not very good babysitters. They fill Michelle’s bumhole with water and then make her squirt-squirrel her sphincter’s plentiful bounty onto a Bible. They bury her alive. They kill a bunch of cute kittens in front of her. They cut up quite a few dead babies and mash some of them into Michelle’s face. They rape the child and make a snake go into her fanny. They introduce her to another child, allow them to make friends, and then they cut the other child’s head off and tell Michelle to put the body back together like a jigsaw puzzle. They bury her alive again, this time in a grave with a bunch of live cats. They make her eat part of a burnt corpse. They also cut two holes in her scalp and try to sew on a pair of horns onto her head. All in all, they’re not very nice to her.

Child abuse is literally the least funny thing in the world, and I would not jest about these events if they had ever actually happened. Michelle Smith you see, is a lying piece of trash who made up the whole thing.

An internet search will provide you with countless reasons to believe that this book is absolute nonsense, but I’ll just mention a few of the more salient points. Michelle Smith’s real name was Michelle Proby. Lawrence Pazder’s real name was Lawrence Pazder. Why did Michelle use a fake name if Pazder was using his real one? Well, it was probably to hide some of the evidence that proves that she was full of shit. Michelle had two sisters you see, one older and one younger, and neither of them are ever mentioned in the book, nor have they ever corroborated her story. Michelle’s father claimed that he could personally discredit every sentence in the book. He said, “It was the worst pack of lies a little girl could ever make up. The book took me four months to read, and I cried all the time. I kept saying to myself: ‘Dear God, how could anyone do this to their dead mother?’” He said of his late wife, “There never was a woman on this earth who worked harder for her daughters. There was no hanky panky or devil-worshipping.” He also said that he took Michelle to church every Sunday despite the fact that Michelle claims never to have had a religious upbringing.

One of the first memories Michelle unveils is of one of the Satanists, a man named Malachi, putting her into a corpse infested car and driving it into a wall. The Satanist was trying to make it look as if the corpse had died in the crash (whereas in “reality” this was the corpse of the woman whom Michelle attacked for sucking on her mother’s juicy pussy.) Victoria is a small city; a car crash in Victoria in the 1950s would definitely have made it into the local papers. Surprisingly enough though, no account of any such incident was ever published. Could it be that it never happened? Yes. Definitely.

Michelle was supposed to have been satanically, ritually abused over the course of about a year. One of the rituals she describes is said to have lasted between 80-90 days. Somebody had the good sense to check the attendance records at the school Michelle was supposed to be attending at the time. Guess what; Michelle Proby never missed any significant amount of time from school. Either the teachers were in on the Satanism or Michelle was full of shit.

In some of my favourite parts of the book, Michelle describes how she is taken to Ross Bay Cemetery and buried alive in an old grave. She describes the woman who is with her pulling the top off the grave and lowering her down into the earth. The only problem with this is that the lids of the graves in that cemetery are solid fucking rock and far too heavy for a single person to lift. If Michelle is truly stupid enough to believe that this nonsense happened, I really hope her delusions are vivid and terrifying. I hope she could smell the corpse.

Michelle imagining herself in her rightful place. Hopefully she is underground at this stage.

The other claims about Victoria are pretty silly too. She describes how all of the many Satanists cut off the middle finger from their left hand. You’d think that this trend might be noticed in a small city of 50,000 people. Also, surely somebody noticed all of the dead babies that were going missing. It seems like somebody is smushing up a dead baby every ten minutes in this crazy book. The authors’ only textual evidence of the Satanic problem in Victoria comes from a newspaper article called Witchcraft in Victoria from 1977. The article is about a series of claims from a drug addicted, delusional, evangelical christian named Len Olsen who was eventually sued for his lies. Here is a cool video featuring the guy about whom he made the slanderous claims.

Are Michelle’s claims really that outlandish? It is possible that a dangerous cult was operating in Victoria at the time; after all, there are sickos everywhere. Well, if Michelle had only told that part of the story, I really doubt that people would have gotten as worked up about this book. The thing is, Michelle goes on to claim that Lucifer himself begins to attend the rituals that she is privy to. We are not talking some meddlesome demon here, we are talking Prince of Hell, the Arch-Fiend, Satan, THE DEVIL HIMSELF. Michelle ‘the imbecile’ Smith wants us to believe that the Fallen Angel Lucifer took the time to travel from Hell to Victoria to participate in a ritual in which he would personally rough up a 5 year old girl.

Not only that, but Michelle is only able to escape because Mary, the virgin mother of Christ, and Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the only son of god, show up to save her. This, stupid, under-achieving, plain little fart of a woman wants people to believe that Christ and Lucifer came to earth to personally do battle for her soul. Jesus and Mary, who couldn’t bother their holes coming down to stop the holocaust, decided that they had better travel to earth to come to the aid of an ugly little cur with no personality.

2016-02-29 21.50.00 See the blur behind the flame? The fools who wrote this book would have you believe that that is the virgin Mary.

Now, if I was going to write a book to inspire moral panic and public outrage, I would do a little research to make my claims seem believable, but Michelle and Lawrence decided not to bother. It shows. Michelle’s description of satanism is unfounded, illogical and incredibly silly. The rituals of the cartoony ‘satanists’ in this book make absolutely no sense; the basic idea behind them seems to be ‘do whatever is wrong’. This is very clearly the satanism of a person who knows absolutely nothing of the subject. A Dennis Wheately novel, this is not. Perhaps the worst part of the book is the persistent rhyming speech that Michelle attributes to Satan. According to her, the Dark Lord can only speak in rhyming couplets. His chapter-long speeches are truly excruciating to get through. I think one of them reads;

My name is Satan, my Kingdom is Hell,
I will hurt your arm, oh little Michelle,
Swear allegiance to me, and poop on this book,
for if you say no, your ass I shall fuck.

Ok, so I obviously wrote that. But I have just read back over some of the actual rhymes in the book, and I have to say that mine is far less silly. Why would the Devil be limited to speak in rhymes? That doesn’t make any sense Michelle, you stupid piece of garbage.

These are Michelle’s drawings of the Devil. Depending on his moods, he would either take the form of an owl with a tail, a fraggle, or a two-legged lizard dog

At several points, Pazder actually refers to the perpetrators here as members of the Church of Satan. Apparently Anton Lavey threatened him with legal action to get him to withdraw these claims, but they’re still in my copy of the book.

michelle remembers front cover
Doesn’t the cover of this edition make it look less like a book about satanic rituals and more like a romance novel about a really boring woman who falls in love with her psychiatrist and tries to give him everything he wants even if it means sacrificing her own dignity? Well, actually…

One of the odd features of this book is that although it was written by the protagonists, it is told in the third person. The narrative perspective makes the book feel like a novel and thus makes it a more tolerable read, but it also adds a lair of buttock-clenching cringiness. Pazder is first introduced in the text as “A handsome man in his early forties,…warm, manly, soft-spoken”, and when Michelle first appears, she is described as “A pretty young woman of twenty-seven, with a heart-shaped face, a delicate mouth, and bountiful brown curls”. Now either they wrote those descriptions of themselves, or they wrote those descriptions of each other. Anyone who would talk of themselves in that manner is a cunt, and anyone who would write about another person in that manner is looking for the shag.

As the narrative unfolds, Michelle and Lawrence get closer and closer. She goes to see him more and more frequently, and he starts holding her hands and maintaining physical contact with her during their sessions. Michelle grows distant from her husband, and Lawrence starts holding things back from his wife. The authors try to present their blossoming relationship as something pure, positive, and misunderstood, but in reality, these two degenerates were beginning a depraved affair that centered on Michelle’s repulsive sexual fantasies. Pazder would sit on the couch with one arm around Michelle as she spewed forth her disgusting fantasies about paedophilia, scat-play, and sadomasochism. I am not even exaggerating; that is literally what happened between the two of them. Michelle Pazder was an unhinged sexual deviant, and Lawrence Pazder, a man posing as a psychiatrist, took advantage of the patient in his care for the satiation of his own vile desires. His leading questions and her dependency and desire to please lead to their corrupt bond becoming stronger and stronger. Although it is not mentioned in the text, the pair eventually defied the catholic faith of which they were once so proud by divorcing their spouses and marrying each other. Imagine the sex talk on their wedding night. Ewwwwwwwwww.

Speaking of marriage, my wife and I were in Victoria recently, and we paid a short visit to Ross Bay Cemetery where much of the book is set. I wanted to see if I could find an entrance to the Satanic Lair that the lads had made, but I didn’t have much luck. However, I did see lots of cool tombstones and decrepit graves.

Some messed up things have actually happened at Ross Bay since the publication of this book. It has suffered a fair bit of vandalism, and has become notorious among heavy metallers due to the alleged actions of a particularly naughty black metal band. While I am all for desecration of hallowed ground, it seems a bit of a shame that people would mess up one of the few interesting historic sites in B.C. If you’re ever in Victoria, the cemetery is an awesome place to go for a stroll.

Below, and in the first image of this post, is the Pooley Angel. This statue was spray-painted blue at one stage and is commonly referred to as the Blue Angel of Ross Bay. Apparently tears can be seen running down its face on the night of a full moon.

ross bay blue angel
COOL!

I recently reviewed Communion by Whitley Strieber, and if you read that review, you will notice that like Michelle, I make fun of ol’ Whit-Strieb for having things shoved up his dirt-box. You may also notice that I didn’t get quite as worked up over the stupid story that he told after regressive hypnotherapy. That’s because Whitley Striber’s equally silly story didn’t end up ruining people’s lives. There are lots of nutty books out there, but Michelle Remembers had a tremendously negative effect on society in the early 1980s. The authors appeared on Oprah and became celebrities, Pazder became known as the leading authority on Satanic Ritual Abuse, and innocent people were publicly and unfairly accused of child abuse. The only good thing to come from the author’s irresponsible perversion is the over-the-top 1980s Satanic Heavy Metal that their book inspired. Fundamentalist christians are a pain in the ass, but these two pieces of shit weren’t even particularly devout. (As mentioned above, they divorced their partners and remarried, a mortal sin in the Catholic faith.) They were a pair of attention seeking scumbags who weren’t concerned with how their perverse fantasies might affect the lives of others. I know that Pazder is dead, but we can only hope that Michelle is too.

I hated the authors, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book. If you’ve made it through this review, you’ll probably enjoy it too. Reading it will make you want to listen to Slayer and spit at a priest.

HAIL SATAN 666!!!

michelle remembers mausoleum ross bay

Witchcraft (The Story of Man’s Search for Supernatural Power) – Eric Maple

Octopus Books -1973

This is a pretty cool coffee table book on witchcraft from the 70s. Most of it is the kind of stuff you expect from a 140 page overview of an overwhelmingly broad topic, but there were a few cool bits in here that I hadn’t come across before; some of the details on the torture techniques of the inquisitions made me feel rather uncomfortable. The section on Wicca is far too long, but otherwise the book is pretty good. The images are by far the best part. I have a bunch of other books on the topic that are far more detailed, but I paid less than a dollar for this one, and I feel like it was a wise purchase.

An irresponsible mother allows a dog-like serpent to give her a little bit of licky-licky-bum-bum in front of her kids.

20160107_222216
The caption below this Roman mosaic in the book claims that its intention was to “to crush the evil eye’s potency by means of pecks, bites and stabs”. Hang on though! The eye isn’t just being pecked, bitten and stabbed; there’s also a man farting at it. And is that just a fart? That brown stream spewing from the man’s anus looks like it’s carrying baggage! Either way, think of how disrespectful that is! Imagine being captured by your worst enemy; he pokes you with his trident, throws you in a cage with gross insects and wild animals, stabs you with a sword, and then adds insult to injury by farting in your eye. What a blackguard!

20160107_221636
Good boy Jimmy, scratch that mentally handicapped woman’s face with your rusty nail. She won’t be casting any more spells on you after that!

20160107_222116
These images are the coolest part of the book. They’re from the aftermath of the 1963 desecration of Clophill Graveyard in England. These grisly exhumations are thought to have been the work of Satanist Necromancers. 7 graves were desecrated and chicken’s feathers and blood were found strewn across the scene. One of the corpses was a lady named Jenny Humberstone who died in 1722. Her grave was opened 3 more times after the initial incident. I suppose that if you’re going to dig up a corpse, it’s probably more polite to exhume somebody that nobody remembers. It’s still pretty fucked up if you ask me. There was actually a horror movie made about Clophill church a few years ago, but it looks absolutely shit and I probably won’t be watching it.

Demonology Past and Present by Kurt Koch and Satan, Satanism and Witchcraft by Richard W. DeHaan

Well it’s Halloween today, and I thought I had better make a post to give you something to read before the trick-or-treaters come to set fire to your cat. Here’s a review of the two books that I have managed to read since September. Enjoy!

Demonology Past and Present – Kurt Koch
Kregel -1973

Satan, Satanism and Witchcraft – Richard W. DeHaan
Zondervan – 1972

These ones aren’t just shitty books; they’re actually shit books. I have barely any free time anymore, and so I have to limit my leisure reading to my Sunday morning craps. Being in school has made it so that those holiest of moments on the Sabbath are now my only opportunity to read about Satan without feeling irresponsible. (I used to limit my toilet reading to the collection of Poe’s poems that I kept under the bathroom sink. Whenever my phone was out of battery and I couldn’t play solitaire while pinching a loaf, I would treat myself to an old ‘Edgar Allan Poo’.)

As you have probably guessed, these two books are awful. They came as part of a collection I purchased a few years ago from a hippy lady in the suburbs. She was selling a collection of 6 books, only 2 of which I actually wanted to read. I have since read and reviewed all 4 of the books that I was not interested in, but the ones I wanted have remained on the shelf. Anyways, both of these books deal with the topic of Satanism from a Christian point of view, and unsurprisingly, they are both repulsively stupid.

Let’s consider the authors for a moment. One of them is named Kurt Koch. Old Kurty is a classic case of “Koch by name; Koch by nature”. And what about his companion; Mr. Richard W. DeHaan? Well, they say that a picture speaks a thousand words, but the below picture only seems to repeat the word ‘wanker’ a thousand times.

As i have probably mentioned elsewhere, I find it fascinating to read the ideas of people who take each word of the Bible as being literally true. Let’s be completely honest here; 99% of the time, when a non-christian comes into contact with a christian, the non christian can instantly be sure of the fact that they are more intelligent than the christian. Oftentimes though, we can give the christian the benefit of the doubt; although the person claims to be a christian, it can be safely assumed that they have not actually read the bible. When a person has actually read the bible and still claims to be a christian, you can safely infer that that person is an imbecile of the lowest order. To all whom encounter them, rubes of this variety seem to be entirely incapable of thinking critically.

On closer inspection though, these people are capable of a form of critical thinking. Unfortunately, the logic on which they base their thought is both flawed and perverse. Instead of using reason to reason, they use fear, prejudice and a unhealthy splash of utter nonsense. The authors of these two books are particularly fond of this approach. They weave a web of dogma around the topics of Satan and Satanism, and make themselves look like a pair of proper fools. One of the big points that both authors push is that many people who are having problems with their mental health are actually possessed by a demon and more in need of an exorcist than a psychologist or a doctor! My favourite argument that is put forth in either of these books though, is DeHaans argument for the consistency of the Bible’s attitude towards witchcraft. There has always been a bit of a problem with this issue; despite the infamous “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” rule, there are actually quite a few witchy characters in the bible. There is a particular incident in Genesis when Jacob plays with some sticks to alter the appearance of the lambs being born to Laban’s flock. (Gen 30:37-43) He peels patterns into the bark on some sticks, and the animals who mate near the sticks will give birth to offspring with a similar pattern on their fur. Now let’s think about that for a moment. If a woman were to have attempted something similar to this 500 years ago, she would almost definitely have been burnt as a witch. If somebody was to do something similar in the 1970s, the authors of these books would likely have attempted to perform an exorcism on them. How then does DeHaan get around the fact that Jacob, grandson of Abraham himself, was a dirty, occulting, sorcerer? Well, it turns out that God was actually trolling Jacob; he had organised the sheep to mate a certain way, and Jacob’s twigs never had any effect. Therefore, the sticks were a waste of time and Jacob hadn’t actually done magic. That’s fair enough, but DeHaan seems to think that this gets Jacob off the hook; however, it doesn’t change the fact that Jacob attempted to do magic. Just because he was a shit sorcerer doesn’t mean he wasn’t a sorcerer. It’s all about intent, you fucking dope DeHaan. (On a depressing side note, I just looked it up, and it seems that many people are still seriously discussing the tenability of Jacob’s approach to genetic engineering.) DeHaan’s twisted defenses of other biblical witches are just as unsatisfying, but this is hardly surprising. He is stretching the prim, white blanket of reason over an awkward, shit-brown, virulent mass of obtuse, dogmatic rubbish.

There was one cool part of DeHaan’s book where he lists some other books that you shouldn’t read. I haven’t heard of these, and maybe he made them up, but I’m sure as hell going to keep an eye out for them in the future. Let me know if you have copies!!!

To conclude; these two books were truly moronic. Don’t waste your time with this kind of crap unless you’re crapping. School is really getting intense now, so it’ll probably be another little while before I post anything else. In the meantime, have a good Halloween, listen to metal, worship Satan and remember to keep it anti-christian!

The Worship of the Serpent – The Rev. John Bathurst Deane

Health Research Books – ?

I’m not entirely sure how this book ended up on my wanted list (I think I came across the title when researching the Ophite gnostics), but I spent a few months last year trying to find an affordable copy. The book was originally published in 1833 and text is available online, but I don’t like print-on-demand books and I ended up ordering a copy that was supposedly published in 1970. The publishing company is called Health Research Books, and there is a website url given on the back cover of the book. Strange for a book from 1970 right? The cover looks like shit; I don’t know what that fucking picture is supposed to be, but inside is a decent facsimile copy of the original book.

The idea behind the book is rather interesting. The author claims that the events in the Book of Genesis are literally true, and that all of humanity can trace its origins back to Noah’s family on the ark. He notes that all mythologies feature serpents or serpent-like creatures in some form or another, and he argues that all mythological serpents have their origins in the serpent of Eden. The fact that so many myths and stories contain serpents is intriguing, but the argument here is pretty weak. Deane spends most of the book discussing the etymologies of the names of different mythological serpents and gods and showing how these names could have originated in different words for snake. It was enjoyable enough, but at no point did I feel remotely convinced in what Deane was saying. Some mythological serpents are representatives of evil, but others are benevolent creators. Deane’s thoroughly protestant response to this is to claim that any culture in which the serpent has become a positive force must have been made up of savages.

Mankind’s obsession with serpents is fascinating; we just can’t get enough of those slithery fucks. Why do so many cultures incorporate snakes into their mythologies? This is a legitimately interesting question, but I don’t believe that the answer lies in-a-gadda-da-vida. This book’s responses to this question come from within a Christian paradigm, and the book ultimately serves as an example of the phenomenon it discusses rather than as an answer to the question it poses. The worship of the serpent is a damn cool topic, but this book is only going to be useful to a psychology student interested in studying the egocentrism of 19th century Christian clergymen.

This picture of Medusa’s minging face was one of my favourite parts of the book.

The Political History of the Devil – Daniel Defoe

Nonsuch – 2007
When I was a kid, somebody described Hell to me as “the worst thing imaginable”. This naturally resulted in several nights of me lying awake in bed, trying my hardest to imagine the worst thing imaginable. I amused myself coming up with several repulsive and intrusive tortures involving instruments of both the sharp and blunt varieties, but I remember becoming quite upset after realizing that the worst imaginable punishment wouldn’t be being sentenced to an eternity of any kind of physical torment; no matter how bad the pain could be, it would be always be far worse if my shitty deeds had resulted not only in an eternity of torment for myself, but also for my family. Worse still would be my shitty deeds dooming every soul to an eternity of torment. If Hell was truly the worst scenario imaginable, then all it would take would be one sinner to doom every other soul: if Satan really wanted to obliterate any positivity in the suffering soul of a sinner, he would weigh them down with the guilt of having doomed everyone else to the same misery as themselves. I myself felt horrendously guilty after imagining this, because according the logic of my thought, Hell would evolve to correspond to the worst scenario ever imagined up until the present moment in time. As I was sure nobody else had yet thought of something so horrible, I concluded that I had just become responsible for dooming every soul to an eternity of communal torment. For even if I led a pious life, my irrevocably imagined worst-of-all-possible-hells would be activated on the death of the next sinner, and all would be lost.

There are countless other paradoxes that occur when reason is applied to religious dogma, and a few of these are discussed in The Political History of the Devil. In this book Daniel Defoe attempts to apply reason to dispel several myths about the Devil and his minions. Defoe however, was a solemn believer in the powers of Heaven and Hell, and there is a strange irony in his writing here. He uses reason to mock those who claim that the Devil might appear to human eyes, while simultaneously positing Satan’s existence. Although he feels comfortable making fun of the unfounded beliefs of children and the elderly, he is still willing to acknowledge every event in the Old Testament as true.

Now this book is written as satire, so attacking the writer’s logic is fairly pointless, but I just thought it was bloody cheeky to be making fun of people for their silly ideas about silly beliefs when the author himself clearly held those same silly beliefs. Truly, this is a silly book.

The book is divided into two sections. The first is a commentary on the different appearances of Satan within both Paradise Lost and the Bible (particularly the Old Testament). Some of this part is fairly interesting if you have read those texts. There was one part that I liked in which Defoe discusses the curse of Ham. The Curse of Ham, for those of you who don’t know, is the curse that God put on the descendants of Noah’s son Ham. Ham angered God, and God put a curse on him and his descendants, particularly his son, Canaan; “he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” (Genesis 9:25) This passage was used as a biblical justification of slavery. Apparently black people were believed to be the descendants of Ham and Canaan. Now I have deliberately withheld some information here. I’m sure you’re wondering what Ham could have done to deserve such a horrendous punishment. Let me tell you: Noah, the great Holy man and patriarch, got pissed drunk a few years after the flood, and his son Ham found him in a heap. Ham pulled up Noah’s gaberdine and buggered his own father. That’s right: Noah of the Ark was arse-raped by his son. Ok, it doesn’t actually say that his ring was penetrated in the Bible, but ‘seeing the nakedness of his father’ has long been understood as a euphemism for sodomy. And let’s be realistic here, even the angry God of the Old Testament wouldn’t be so cruel as to doom an entire race of people to centuries of oppression just because one man saw his dad’s willy by accident.

It really sucks that they never read that part of the Bible in mass – Ham by name, Ham by nature.

The second part of Defoe’s book is incredibly boring. It’s full of references to people and events that I’ve never heard of, the humour is dry and dated, and I don’t really care about what the author of Robinson Crusoe has to say about the Devil. This is by no means an ‘occult book’; there’s no esoteric knowledge in here. It’s supposed to be funny, but I wasn’t amused. It was a chore to finish, and the last 100 pages were extra shitty.

This particular edition looks nice on the outside, but there’s quite a few typos in the text. It was published in 2007, and the original price sticker on my copy says 25 euros. I bought it for 6 in 2013, and I was back in the bookshop recently, and it’s now down to 3.

I don’t want to be unfair. I’m sure Defoe was a good writer, but this is not a great book. I don’t get the jokes, and I don’t care about what he’s saying. This is what I get for buying a book based on its cover. If I lost my copy, I wouldn’t spend the 3 euro for another. I’ll give this turd of a book a measly 2/10.

The Satanic Mass – H.T.F. Rhodes

Arrow – 1964
Arrow – 1973

Through an unfortunate postal error, I ended up with two copies of this little gem. I came across the title in the bibliography of Richard Cavendish’s Black Arts, and I knew that I had to read it. I’m glad I did; it’s really not as trashy as it looks.

Rhodes seems convinced that the heretical Cathars have been almost entirely responsible for all varieties of Satanic worship since their untimely end in the early 14th century. He portrays the Cathars as neo-Gnostics who renounced the physical world and the Demiurge that had created it. The Cathars supposedly believed that the Catholic church was worshiping this evil creator God, and hence saw any inversion of Catholic ritual as a positive form of worship of the true God.

Rhodes maintains that most Satanism is rooted in Christian dualism. This basically means that devil worshipers only worship the devil because they think that God is the evil one, and anything that goes against this bad God’s wishes must therefore be good. And sure, what other reasons could a person have for turning to Satan? A few dolts aside, I doubt there’s many people who get involved in Satanism solely through their desire to do evil.

What’s interesting about Rhodes hypothesis is that he pinpoints a specific movement and tentatively links their practices with the charges brought against the Templars, witches, Sabbat attendees and dodgy French aristocrats. One of the less convincing, but very interesting arguments he makes is that the alleged homosexuality of the Templars and later heretics had its roots in the Cathar practice of ejaculating into anything other than vaginas. The Cathars preached that sex was evil because it brought forth more souls into the material world. Abstinence may have been their goal, but they were realists. They understood the physical need to ejaculate, and they supposedly preached that it was better to be a sodomite or an onanist than to risk reproducing. Apparently their homosexual compromise was to become institutionalized in later Satanic movements.

Well, at least he’s being creative.

If I were to judge this book by its cover, it would get a 10/10.

My biggest complaint about this book is that Rhodes presumes his reader has a solid understanding of all of the stuff he’s talking about. He introduces obscure characters and events from history and presumes that the reader is familiar with them. I would recommend checking out Huysman’s Là Bas and the wikipedia articles on the affair of the poisons and the Taxil hoax before picking this one up.

There are some really cool parts in here. I was particularly interested in the account of the mass of Saint-Sécaire. A mass “murderous in intention. The victim against whom its malevolence is directed is supposed to wither away and die of the mysterious St. Secaires sickness which no physician can cure.” Apparently there is no St. Secaire on record, and it seems rather uncertain where the origins of this legend come from. I’ve also come across mentions of this suspicious ceremony in Summer’s History of Witchcraft and Demonology, and apparently Aleister Crowley wrote a short story about it too.

I cannot deny that I laughed heartily when reading the details of the ancient and esoteric ‘ritual of the faggot’. The spell spoken during this ritual, which is used to gain control of another individual, contains the line; ” In the name of all demons, depart, faggot”. Imagine the accusations of hate-speech that could be made if a modern day magician was overheard attempting this ritual from inside their garage.

Doesn’t that make you want to read this book?

One final thing that I found very interesting was a biblical quotation on the title page book. It says:
‘Get thee abacko me owld scrat.’
Luke iv, 8 (dialect version)
The King James version of this line from Luke 4:8 is:^“Get thee behind me, Satan”
I can’t find information on the dialect version mentioned in the text. I don’t know if it was an actual text, a joke, or something else. Either way, I would love to read more scripture in that dialect.

I would imagine that a more academic book on Satanic ritual would probably be quite dull. This one has a nice balance of objectivity and goat worship. Rhode’s claims aren’t all believable, but they are worth thinking about. He rarely discusses the rationality or morality of the practices and beliefs of the Satanists, and he tries neither to polish nor to tarnish their already squalid reputation. The links between some of the sections are a bit weak, and in honesty, the last chapter is extremely dry, but overall there is more good than bad. Plus, the 1964 edition is worth owning just for the cover! (I reckon the more-boring later version was redesigned to look like the Satanic Bible.) I’ll give it 7/10 and recommend this book to anyone interesting in Satanism.

The Devil’s Own – Peter Robson

Ace Books – 1969

I picked this one up from the bottom of the esoterica shelf in an out-of-the-way, used book store that mostly stocks old mystery novels. It had a picture of a man who is on fire on the front, and the heading on the back cover reads; ‘THE SPAWN OF LUCIFER…’ The most promising feature of all though, was the fact that when I started reading it, it was not yet listed on goodreads.com. Oh yes my friends, this kind of book is what it’s all about. It’s a collection of short accounts of the lives and atrocities of 25 of Satan’s most heinous disciples. Among the accused are Aleister Crowley, Rasputin, and John Dee, but many of the other names in here are a little less well-known.

The accounts given seem to be somewhat based in truth, but I suspect that they were mostly just patched together from urban legends, rumors, lies and complete fabrications. Some of the exaggerations are commonplace and believable, but others are downright silly. For instance; I have come across the mysterious figure of the Comte de St. Germain in several other books, and I was a little surprised to see him appear in this. Hitherto, I knew of his claims of being immortal, but that hardly seemed comparative to the cannibalistic orgies of the sadistic black magicians in this little collection. It all made sense however, when this book informed me that the Comte de St. Germain was actually “the Devil – in the guise of a gigantic werewolf.”

Most of the characters mentioned in here were definitely real people, but there are some accounts which are probably complete fabrications. There’s an interesting section on an evil priest named Raoul Hannah who lived in Belfast. He is supposed to have been involved in the slave trade, voodoo cults and human sacrifice. He is also apparently responsible for bringing the black mass to Ireland. According to the book, this Satanic St. Patrick’s rituals always culminated in “the sacrificial murder of an unknown African Negro”. Given this peculiar fact, I wonder how often he was able to celebrate this sacrament; there probably weren’t many “African Negroes” in Northern Ireland in the 1930s. Anyways, I was fairly excited to do a little research on this lad, but the passage ended with a note:
In order to protect those whose families were quite innocently involved in the story of a man named “Raoul Hannah,” the real identities and the exact location of the town in the north of Ireland have been withheld.
I’ve searched online and can find no trace of this story. It’s a pity because it was one of the most interesting tales in here. I reckon it’s complete bullshit and that Peter Robson made it up to fill a few extra pages, but then again, there are only 3-4 sections in the book that I have not found some basis for. There’s a possibility that it is true and that Robson did just change the names. If you have any idea about where this story came from, please contact me and let me know.
(My hunch is that this is section is probably just a bio on Ian Paisley.)

There are other monstrous individuals in here whom I have not been able to track down. Two of the most diabolic, Raoul Plessy and Gustav Labahn, are probably fabrications of Robson’s. I would be happy enough to accept that these three suspicious entries were completely made up, but that would be to presume that they never existed only because they’re not mentioned online. In fact, there is one particularly horrific account in here that tells of a young girl named Bernadette Hasler being sadistically tortured by a religious order called “the Seekers of Mercy”. It seemed pretty bullshitty when I was reading it, but when I looked it up online I was disturbed to find an image of a teenage girl on the cover of a French crime magazine with the headline “Le Martyr de Bernadette torturée au mort au cours d’une séance exoricsme”. There’s also an article written in German that mentions the case, but I could find nothing in English. Now, I’m not taking two articles that I can’t read properly as evidence of Peter Robson’s account being accurate, but they have convinced me that it’s not complete bullshit. It’s weird to come across a story as disturbing as this without being able to find out more about it online. It makes me wonder about my dependence on the internet as a verifier of knowledge, and I am both simultaneously upset and excited to know that sometimes the truth isn’t out there.

There are other cool parts in this book. I liked the section on Abbé Boulan. I’ve already mentioned my interest in finding a reasonable account of this character, but as was to be expected, the account herein is fairly dubious. There are some glorious passages though:

Her arms were stretched out in the form of a cross, and she held black candles in her hands. A cloth with a cross embroidered on it was placed on her breasts, and the chalice was placed on her abdomen.Then a goat’s throat was cut, and the blood poured over the woman. Next, Boullan performed a ceremony over the woman which involved frequent kissing of her body and drinking the goat’s blood. During the whole disgusting performance, the unfrocked priest screamed out curses and threats

I would genuinely rather read that than an accurate portrayal of anyone.

Also, there is a super cool fold-out advertisement in the center of the book.
Only 10 cents for a copy of the Complete Illustrated Book of Psychic Sciences?!?!?!

I really enjoyed this little book. It’s trash to the Nth degree, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Buy a copy and read it on the way to work. 8/10.

The Black Arts – Richard Cavendish

Picador – 1972

This book is a tricky one. Half of it’s great, half of it’s horrible. The sections on ritual magic, witchcraft and satanism are really interesting, but the book also contains comprehensive sections on numerology, cabala, tarot, astrology and alchemy. Personally speaking, when I buy a book on ‘the Black Arts’, I’m not really interested in reading about people playing with cards or counting the numbers in their names. I want blood rituals, human sacrifice and horrible acts of depravity. (Reading this book could be compared to going to a Slayer concert and then finding out that Tool are the opening band.) I’m going to largely ignore the parts that I didn’t like for this review; if you want to learn about tarot, fuck off and prance over to your nearest renaissance fair.

There’s some really interesting stuff in here about demons from Biblical Pseudepigrapha. I’m still only about halfway through the Christian Bible right now, but I’m really looking forward to finishing that and then reading the Books of Enoch, the Testaments of Solomon and the Life of Adam and Eve. There’s something particularly exciting about the idea of Jehovah being good mates with the demons back in the day – Yeeeeeeoweh and de lads!

One of my favourite things about the book is the fact that it reads more like a history book than a grimoire or set of instructions. A large amount of the information is utterly unbelievable, but Cavendish manages to reference his sources in such a way as to avoid any accusations of credulity that might be thrown at him. He politely leaves it up to the reader to decide what they think is bullshit and what’s legitimate, and this approach makes this kind of book far more interesting to read.

There’s a great bibliography and a ‘suggestions for further reading’ section at the back. I’ve already ordered quite a few of its sources, and I’ll hopefully get around to reviewing them here sometime soon. I’m going to pretend that I didn’t begrudgingly wade through 5 chapters of new-age shite and give this book a glorious 7.5/10.