I wasn’t sure if I was going to do anymore of this substack or just delete it, fold-up and put away “Anthony Nine” like a crap boardgame on Boxing Day, and make the quiet exit. Substack’s ongoing position on platforming Nazis is a factor here, but I also increasingly find that I don’t like participating in the “online occult world” as it has further taken shape over the past decade or so. My practice is not an app, I don’t wish to be any edgy chat show host, and I’m old enough to remember when “occult influencer” meant I had your personal concerns in a jar. Got rid of my twitter account a few months back and have zombified all of my other social media. The least online I’ve ever been since there’s been an online.

I do still look at Threads and Bluesky every so often but have not been feeling any compulsion to actively post on any social media or do anything with any sort of visibility. I have mostly been playing Fallout 4, which with some imagination and persistence can be turned into a game of something like “Steed & Mrs Peel conquer the post-nuclear radioactive wasteland with mid-century modern decor, sci-fi weapons and killer robots”. An endeavor that might have been painstakingly designed as a spirit trap for diverting my attention away from anything outward facing for a period.

I look at Facebook even less often, but I do check it sometimes to see what is going on with my friends that are only on Facebook. I clicked on the “Memories” bit the other day and it had some things I had written around this time of year, where I was talking about my experience of Christmas in another country at various points in time since I emigrated ten years ago, as well as some reflections on the various mysteries that are embedded in the iterations of the season as I experience them. Rereading these little memories of past Christmases hit a little close to the bone for me, not least because of how many dead friends there were populating the comments section, who have died since I’ve been living over here, and who I never got to say goodbye to or attend their funerals.

Christmas is considered a hot Petro mystery in Haitian Vodou, because of the implicit “heat” of the presence of the Divine incarnating in matter at the moment of the Nativity. There’s a funny mystical bit in the otherwise quite surreal Sun Ra Christmas record (which you will find in the festive playlist at the end of this newsletter) where the lyrics are “the whole wide world should all give praise to their God, because he is so near” — and if we sidestep a reading of these lines where it appears to be imposing Christianity and Christmas on the world in some sense — the lyrics always make me think of this Petro Vodou notion of Christmas. It does specifically say “their” God after all, and I like to hear that line as being a non-denominational sense of the Divine somehow more present and immanent around this time of year.

My understanding of magic is something like a means to fathom objective processes of nature and being, using the instruments of narrative and our sensory organs, in order to comprehend something otherwise invisible, but which we are nonetheless subject to the dynamic fluctuations of on an everyday basis. In these terms, our subtle and not-so-subtle living experience of the seasons is the important component of this, more so than the various narratives we weave around this experience to try and communicate something of the ineffable.

The popular neopagan idea of a “thinning of the veil” that occurs around Halloween, which supposedly enables communication with the dead, seems a very strange belief from the perspective of traditions that interact continually with the dead on various levels. Developing mediums in Espiritismo would have their work cut out for them if they could only do the practice for a couple of weeks at the end of October. I think there’s a grain of meaning often lost in hyperbole around this idea, however.

My thoughts on the seasons and the dead are influenced by the idea of the four moments of the Sun as expressed in the Dikenga or Congo cosmogram, and present in some form or other in traditions that have a strong Congo influence. Here midnight for the living is midday for the dead, and vice versa, which presents some rationale for a sense of the dead being more active at night and less so during daylight hours. We could then perhaps extrapolate that idea of the dead being either more or less active in accordance with the movement of the Sun, and consider it in relation to a yearly cycle.

Late October to the end of December might be considered in its entirety as a period where the dead are more vivid due to this increase in activity, with the Winter Solstice being the high point or Noon of this movement of the dead, and the weeks on either side of that constituting a time where the presence of spirit is almost inescapable. The Victorian notion of Christmas ghost stories — gaining popularity in parallel with the heyday of Spiritualism — echoes this idea. Halloween to Christmas Eve is a time when the dead draw near, and it’s not a one time thing, as the dead are always present, but here it is unavoidable from the first blood spill of Lamas night to the Epiphany of Three Kings. John Barleycorn is dead. Three Magi are guided by the Star.

The Season is marked by a procession of Saint’s Days reflecting winter mysteries. St Barbara’s Day on December 4th, syncretised with Shango. Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Day on December 12th, representing both Our Lady in the broadest sense as well as a specific permutation of embedded Mesoamerican mysteries. St Lazarus’s Day on December 17th, syncretised with Babalu Aye. Observing these marker days in some form, and meeting certain frequencies of spirit on the road at these moments of the year, help you to move in step and in time with the dead that walk, and move to the same tides and currents.

Put more prosaically, Christmas is also a time for the dead because annual celebratory festivals such as this are so deeply ingrained that their rhythm persists after death like a drumbeat that the dead march to. We think about our loved ones that are no longer with us, and remember our Christmases past with them. We quietly lament and raise a glass of something to lost grandparents, lost friends and lost selves. An illuminated evergreen tree brought inside and decorated with ancestral memories, surmounted by a representation of a Star or celestial being, and raised as a beacon for celebration, feasting and gift giving every year is an implicit and consistent magnet for familial dead. The turn of the year forces a reckoning with where we have come from and where we are going.

These ideas are all very present in the writing that follows, expressed in different ways in the week before Christmas at various points over the past decade. From my first Christmas away from home navigating homesickness and adapting to the very unfamiliar landscape of Miami in 2013, to the slightly unhinged 2017 entry where I’m trying to curse despised political figures using only Christmas decorations and festive novelty glam rock 45s.

Also included below is a playlist that collects together some of my favourite Christmas records from the many mixes like this that I did over the years, with technical help from Seth Cooke who originally hosted them on his Bang the Bore website that is no longer active. I thought these were also no longer online but they can still be found on mixcloud so I’ve included links to the original mixes as well as the new playlist. Festive songs within the genres of soul, R&B, doo wop, disco, Brazilian, Cuban and Jamaican music that, importantly, slap like a truck full of tinsel.

I think people often miss the point of Christmas music, which I like exactly because it is subject to the same movements of the dead that I wrote of above. Christmas music is haunted like all folk songs are haunted, and can function as a repository of spirit or an anchor or magnet for the dead drawn to its winter story. We can live in these songs and see reflections of ourselves in them, and they give voice to little human moments that we may share or can easily contemplate at this time of year. All of life is contained in Christmas songs, and our remembrance of the dead is embedded deep in them, more so than in most secular ritual. Does your Granny always tell you that the Old Ones are the best and such like.

Anyway, in the words of another recently made Christmas ghost, “Goodnight and Godbless and now fuck off to bed.”

Christmas 2013

Christmas in America. I thought I'd miss the cold weather more, but I don't mind so much. Christmas for me is the fucking hard winter. It's an arctic wind off the North Sea biting through me. It's dark nights and icicles hanging off the roofs of terraced houses.

Sometimes it's snow drifts and not being able to get a train from London Bridge. Having to take refuge in the George on Borough High Street or the Royal Oak on Tabard Street until the trains start running again. Pints of Guinness and pub food and that feeling when you finally get into a warm bar after standing pointlessly on a freezing train platform for an hour.

But more than that, it's finishing work for the year and making the annual pilgrimage up to Tynemouth where I grew up. The sea. Long walks on the desolate beach after dark, too cold for anyone else but the occasional intrepid dog walker or masochistic jogger. Magic at the tide. Salt water wind cleansing and purifying the last of the year. Ghost lights out in the mist. Deep Ones only a cold glimmer of the imagination away.

Oddly, I don't actually mind it not being cold. I quite like being able to sit out on my balcony with a Red Stripe in December. It's alright. There's still the sea here. It's not my sea, but it's a sea. You can swim in it without limbs freezing off, so that's something.

The weirdest thing is the cultural differences surrounding Christmas. The things that they don't have here. Mince pies, Xmas crackers, stupid paper hats. I never thought I'd ever miss Slade and Wizzard, for instance, but it's the conspicuous absence of kind-of-annoying things like that which provoke the biggest sense of homesickness and loss.

Ghosts of Christmas Past that normally come rattling their chains every year. Shells of memory that reiterate and recapitulate lost Christmases and imaginary Christmases that never were. An ancestral performance play re-enacted to keep alive some half-remembered flame of familial warmth, light and life in the darkness of winter. Distorted phantoms of memory reflected back at you in a mirrored top hat poised jubilantly above absurd sideburns. Torn wrapping paper of lost days erased like the whisky cheer of grandparents long dead.

So you import all of it. You order in the Christmas crackers from Ebay, you play the stupid songs on Spotify to bemused terrified in-laws, you learn how to make the mince pies from scratch. A good old fashioned shit English Christmas superimposed over glitzy mall nativities and miracles on 34th street. Arcane rituals that you dig out of a tattered carrier bag like tawdry baubles from the 70s that have seen better days. Adding your own old ornaments to this weird and unfamiliar tree. Tropical branches and unfamiliar fruit, but still within the vast verdant body of Gran Bwa and surmounted by the same inextinguishable star. Taping your own postcards of history onto the cut-up collage of American Christmas, an exquisite corpse of Feliz Navidad and Buon Natale.

They probably think Noddy Holder is some sort of festive cocktail here, like eggnog. Whatever eggnog is.

Christmas 2016

Seasons in Miami are performative. There are subtle fluctuations through the changing year, but it's always Florida out there. There's a strange negotiation that people seem to do here, where they mediate the existential vacuum of there being no convincing autumn and winter by pretending that plausible seasons are happening outside when they are not.

People suddenly start wearing hoodies and scarves for no reason as they move between air-conditioned buildings and vehicles, when it's still very much 90 degrees plus outside. You even hear people complaining about how cold it is — when they are inside an office — and you could just turn the AC down any time you want.

Mostly seasons are represented by different sorts of decorative tat from Target though. October brings out the autumnal door wreaths, cheerful scarecrows, and colourful gourds. You get a midnight orange and black flare-up of witchcraft and devilry around Halloween, then it eases back to harvest in the run up to Thanksgiving. All bets are off after that though, when all the plastic Christmas shit comes out.

People go *fucking crazy* with outside Christmas decorations in America — even by Newcastle standards. Inflatable Snowmen as big as the house itself. Entire life size Santa sleighs with mechanized moving reindeer on top of people's roofs. Lights draped around palm trees, where people really do inexplicably put red lights around the bulbous top part of the tree with white lights below, so at night it looks like a row of giant illuminated penises outside their house.

I like American Christmas though. Much like American Halloween, it's both completely alien and weirdly familiar to me from growing up with festive American films and television. In some ways it's like American Christmas is the pure uncut version. What it's supposed to be like from the films. Peppermint candy canes and eggnog (or more frequently in Hialeah, someone’s homemade cochito surreptitiously brought into the office and passed around the desks).

I quietly carry around a tawdry British working class Christmas inside. Limp tinsel and decorations from the 80s that have seen better days. Noddy Holder announcing the season like some harbinger of over-cooked vegetables and terrible office parties. Six pints of lager and two whiskies on top of last night's hangover, drank up before midday in the working mens’ club with my Dad on Christmas Day. Missing my Grandparents who aren't around anymore.

Christmas has always been important to me. I am not without the gift of cynicism, but I put that aside in December. Nothing has become “too commercialized” unless you let it be. I love giving and receiving presents, but that's an adjunct to the ancestral festival that's hard-wired into me. It is what you make it, and I've always treat Christmas as a spell that you cast. I have long been an adept at nicing up the winter.

Take it back to the essentials and it's just about keeping a little flickering light of warmth going in the hardest, coldest part of the year. Our ancestors wouldn't always survive the winter, even just a few generations ago, in a way that we're (for the moment…) insulated from. But that prayer for light in the darkness is old and endures. You are taught it. What other magic gets driven into you as a child, if you're lucky, with the force and fire of Christmas. It's a lovely inherited ritual, but Christmas is about life and death. It's about hope and survival.

Bringing a living tree inside and dressing it in symbolic ornament, lighting a Christmas candle, and getting shitfaced on mulled wine and whatever else is going may wire back to the arguable pagan roots of the festival, but the mysteries that matter will always reinvent and update.

The Christian overlay upon Yuletide reflects the same mystery. The miracle birth of a redeeming light in the darkest of times. A tiny, fragile hope for the future nurtured against the odds. Blood of the Holy Innocents spilled at Herod’s command. Take the long way around on the rough slouch to Bethlehem. No sanctuary at the inn or crib for a bed. The descent of the Divine into matter playing out in the wild barn. Holy Spirit immanent in nature. Shepherds hear the sound of drums. The ox and ram keep time. Wreck a pum pum.

Learned Magi break out the Picatrix and consult their Djinn. Like St Cyprian, wicked necromancer at the top of his game, willingly humbling himself after having encountered the ineffable light, these Three Kings of Orient Are confronted by the grace from which all else proceeds. The Star they follow, predicted in their charts, signals the Great Work. The unveiling of the Divine in a lowly cattle shed. Spirit is immanent in nature. A lamp still burns in the cold, dark night.

This fucking year though. I don't care about the dead rock stars. I watched my country led down the garden path by a flashy spiv selling lies printed on the side of a bus, peddling some fanciful return to a selective vision of the 1950s that even Mad Men was more honest about. I saw actual Nazis holding ‘Hitler was Right’ signs and seig hieling outside Monument Metro in my home town. I'm glad my grandparents weren't still alive to see that. I heard about friends and friends-of-friends abused in the local shops where they live because they looked “foreign”, regardless of whether they were British born or not. A Polish father and son beaten and bloodied in the streets. A mother shot dead by a coward with “Britain First” on his lips.

Then I watched the whole thing happen again in my adopted home. The same thing but amplified in the way that America always is. I don't even want to write about it, but we're through the rabbit hole and there's no script for what this is. I dread what's to come and how it's going to hurt people. And all the while, I can hear the impotent howling rage of ancestors who bled out in Europe to protect their children from this. To safeguard us from a world wracked by that which we are willingly inviting in.

Real time updates of the world’s atrocities fed to us on a flickering strobe at a rate never before experienced by any generation en masse. Small bodies washed up on the beach at Calais or pulled from the wreckage of bombed out hospitals in Aleppo, interspersed with funny cat videos and ‘which desensitized low level trauma sufferer are you?’ quizzes designed to mine your responses for ad targeting.

And interspersed with increasingly harrowing updates from the lives of your friends. Starts slow at first but it seems like there's too much of it this year, and you can't tell if that's really happening, or if you're just hearing about more of it on a continual feed from all over the world. People you haven't even been in the same room with, but who you interact with all the time, so it feels like you know them. Repeatedly crushed under the wheels of the year in one way or another, some terribly.

You might also have been out there broken and distraught on the park bench at some point as well, but didn't talk about it because you keep these things private or you just couldn't type out the words. Not even knowing how you got there, but begging anything that would listen that everything you love would not be torn away. Staring down the cold barrel of something that you knew you simply would not come back from, and that you wouldn't want to if you could. So close to the sulfurous claw of the year that everything else recedes but an acrid, metallic taste and the tangible, physical pressure of its cruel severity bearing down.

By the end of the year, the dead rock stars are besides the point, even though you seem to remember it all being better when David Bowie was still alive. Even though your heroes really are increasingly dead, and your enemies are very definitely in power.

The Christmas lights sit there unopened for a couple of days after you dig them out of the cupboard, because you can't quite bring yourself to go there. This year it all feels as artificial and as contrived as the ridiculous inflatable Snowmen and plastic winter scenes that sit outside in front yards under 80 degree sunshine and cloying humidity. Empty ornaments to give an unconvincing simulation of something that clearly isn't happening.

You get up and you set the fucking light anyway though, even if you might not be able to see it properly through the tears and the numbness. The little flame of it was important enough to be passed along from grandparent to grandparent, and it's what we have. Your ancestors kept it going from year to year, and you're going to damned well make sure to keep it trimmed and burning when it falls to you. In the darkness of life, we keep the lamp lit. Spirit is immanent in nature.

And there's an old magic to that which it's easy to forget about from year to year. Somewhere amid the tinsel, stupid songs and turkey dinners, there's something vital and human to be celebrated. An invincible fire that burns through the years whatever the blizzard, and it’s kindled in the fragile moments when we share a drink or a meal or a gift. Light and warmth enough to make you think that there's still some hope, and there’s still a chance. Fear and uncertainty walk tall alongside us, but there's still enough cheer to raise a glass of whatever you have and say “Merry fucking Christmas you fucking bastards!”

Cursing with Christmas Decorations 2017

I invite you all to join me during this festive season in cursing certain personages using only easily sourced household ingredients, shitty seasonal decorations that have seen better days, and your choice of Christmas Elf.

For this work, you could perhaps use the Keebler Elf to represent Jeff Sessions, or the Elf on the Shelf to represent Jared Kushner. The work will take place during the 12 Days of Christmas under the auspices of the Three Magi or Three Kings, patrons of magicians.

During the run up to Christmas you will prepare a jar of Festive Despair. This will need to be large enough to contain your Elf and the other ingredients. Into this jar you will place shards of cracked and broken Christmas ornaments — ideally fragments of shiny mirrored baubles; broken fairy lights; chili peppers, raw onion, dead insects, and the pages from Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ that describe the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, set on fire and reduced to ash.

Every time you experience some Christmas stress or have a Christmas argument, you will open this jar and breathe this accumulated stress and frustration into it, then put the lid back on and give it a shake.

On Christmas Eve you will attend a church for Midnight Mass, preferably a church at a crossroads. Here you will silently pray to the Three Magi, explaining the reasons for your curse and the swift justice that is required. You will then steal the mass on behalf of your Elf and surreptitiously baptize it in the font with the name of your target.

At midnight on Christmas Day you will place the Elf inside the jar, along with some bones from the turkey you ate earlier in the day, close the lid and light a black candle on top of it dressed in a cursing oil. Pray to the Three Magi and then recite Psalm 109. As the candle burns down, you will play ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ by Wizzard on repeat until the wax is spent.

You will then take your Elf out of the jar and move it to a different location around the house. Make sure you put the Elf in the nastiest places you can think of. Stuffed behind the toilet, inside the cistern, next to the bins, strung up by the neck with threadbare tinsel in a filthy shed, etc.

Repeat this process every night during the Twelve Days of Christmas, with black candle, cursing oil, petitions to Magi, psalm 109, filthy location, and Roy Wood with Wizzard.

On the final day, Three Kings night itself, do not take the Elf out of the jar this time, but fill up the jar with a mixture of vinegar and eggnog, then take it to the cemetery and bury it at a location that you are drawn to - making sure to leave appropriate offerings for the dead and any boneyard ruler you have dealings with.

Close the work by drinking a Manhattan.

Ghosts of Christmas

So between the years 2011 and 2017 I made this series of Christmas mixes across the various genres of music that I like. I called the first one “A Voodoo Christmas in South Norwood” as an obscure pun on the chapter of Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen entitled “A Vodou Christmas in Haiti”. I lived in South Norwood within the London Borough of Croydon at the time, while quietly serving my Lwa and buying a lot of records, so it seemed to make some sense as a title for these festive mixes. I wanted to continue making these Christmas mixes after I moved to Miami, so I just updated the title to reflect the bit of South Florida where I now lived.

The original mixes are all still on mixcloud here:

A Voodoo Christmas in South Norwood 1
A Voodoo Christmas in South Norwood 2
A Voodoo Christmas in Hialeah 1
A Voodoo Christmas in Hialeah 2
A Sweet Christmas Morning in Hialeah
A Dutty Christmas Night in Hialeah

And below is a new playlist that I put together this week containing some of my favourite Christmas tunes from all of the above and a few that aren’t on any of them.

Something people don't always get with "curses" and such like, is that it doesn't have to be a baleful ray of withering doom. It could just move a thing in a particular way at a terrible time. It doesn't go this way for you, it goes that way. We are made of these moments.

More often than not, provided that we are not ourselves psychopaths, the feeling of "I want to curse this person" arises because the individual is causing some form of imbalance within your vicinity. Before it ever gets to a "curse", there should be scope to engage in some way with the situation itself, ideally employing multiple angles of approach in terms of magical response and worldly action.

Yet if the most expedient way of resolving the imbalance involves the person causing it seeing the consequences of their actions fall upon them, then the substance of that work is already there and you're just making dinner for it. Uncorking the bottle.

And this cuts both ways in the sense that consciousness and right action are in themselves fundamental defenses against malefica, as we are made of what we conjure around us in our daily actions and the works we clothe ourselves in.

Kicking Against the Pricks

Here are three works for situations where there is an abusive or predatory person or someone giving unwanted attention. The works are non-denominational, non-initiatory and designed so they can be done discretely with accessible materia and minimal setup.

Opening the Table

White household candle and a cup of water. Can look like nothing in a minute. This isn’t magic that needs any elaborate ritual setup or requires you to complete a lengthy course of internal psychic exercises before you can make it work. It’s magic for people under duress, living in difficult circumstances, or with limited space and time on their hands. Magic that has to be done on the quiet, or that you can’t afford to be caught with. Magic that can roar into being out of nowhere to vivid manifestation and then vanish again in a moment as if it had never been there.

Some form of cross symbol is useful to include as a component, on a number of levels, but it may be substituted with another holy symbol or omitted entirely if this is a deal breaker. It may be helpful to think of this usage of the cross as a representation of the crossroads or a point of transition between worlds. Brazilian traditions have the notion of the Cruzeiro or central cross of the cemetery as a kind of beacon for spirit or an access point to the dead. A similar use of the cross is being employed here.

Candle and cup of water can *be* the presence of the Divine Fire of Spirit and the Holy Grail. Illumination and refreshment. Ghost lighthouse and watery medium for the dead. There is a way in which magic can inhabit some of the structural aspects of Christianity and wire into the mysteries that are deeply encoded in it. Grimoire magic does this, as do many cunning and conjure traditions. It can be seen in the Kongo understanding of cross, holy water and vestments as Nkisi, and in many strategies of Espiritismo and Latin American magic. There’s a sense where you’re almost accessing older pre-Christian gear that flies under the radar of regular churchgoing narratives while hiding in plain sight. The syncretism that exists between Christianity and several ATRs is workable because of this deep reach into the mysteries that it is possible to locate within its form and structure.

I intend for these works to be non-denominational, adaptable and not tied into any particular belief system, but structurally - in my own sorcery practice - I will typically draw upon components such as cross, holy water, psalms and saints in this way. It’s therefore important to understand what is taking place below the surface form of these works, as a prerequisite, even if you intend to adapt or embellish upon the format as presented. I would of course recommend simply performing the moves as offered here - and not trying to reinvent the wheel or over-complicate the magic by placing unnecessary obstacles in your own path - but remix if you need to. The important thing here is putting workable, effective magic into the hands of people who need it.

I would open a simple table of practice such as this by placing the cross or other holy symbol in the centre, with a cup of water to the right and a candle to the left. After lighting the white candle – I typically open with a short prayer or series of prayers such as the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary and Glory Be. If I’m doing something situated more firmly in a grimoire mode, I might substitute something like the Astrachios prayer of success from the Grimorium Verum as the opening preamble. There can be some flexibility in your choice of prayers and holy symbol, as long as it makes sense and is cohesive with the rest of what you are doing.

The purpose of these initial moves is to set the scene and open the work. Create a gentle transition into magical space, and provide spirit with a medium for manifestation. None of these works are going to lean too heavily into any particular tradition or call upon any named spirits, but they can be best understood as a low key mode of Spiritism. After saying the opening prayers, in your own words spoken from the heart, call upon your ancestors, spiritual protectors, patron saints and guardian angel to assist in the work.

We’re deliberately not naming anybody in particular here but keeping it loose and generic, and creating an open channel that’s casually conducive to unnamed supportive spirits that are already in your corner and that will already want to help you in your time of need. Just because we might not yet know the names of all our ancestors, spiritual protectors, patron saints or guardian angel - doesn’t mean that they are not there, or amenable to inhabiting works such as this in some sense, if given a viable pathway to do so.

The matter of imposter spirits or unsettled dead entering the picture and potentially causing problems is offset by the presence of the holy symbol and prayers, which provide some structure and function as a kind of filter to minimise the liability of such intrusion. In terms of an ancestral spirit component being brought into play, if your ancestors were predominantly Christian for the past several hundred years, the presence of Christian spiritual structures in the work provides a walkable pathway for those immediate dead, which in turn have deeper reach into further abyssal dead in the waters. If your past few hundred years of immediate ancestors were predominantly of another faith, then you would obviously adapt the spiritual structures of the table accordingly.

“Spiritual protectors, patron saints and guardian angel” covers a lot of bases and could mean multiple things. Opening the table in this way serves the purpose of inviting spiritual support almost indirectly. You’re not concretely pinning anything down to this or that, but rather cultivating a particular environment that is conducive to the presence of spirit, while implicitly sending out an all-points bulletin to whatever sources of spiritual support may be in your corner. Opening the table with these few moves provides this presence of spirit with some of the substance required to strengthen its reach, while also establishing certain venerable structures and frameworks that will provide some degree of firewall against the potential for any adverse or counter-productive spiritual intrusion.

All of that is going on under the surface of these components, and I wanted to provide some sense of the depth that can underpin this prestidigitation of objects on a table, but there’s no need to overthink it. White household candle and a cup of water. Cross or holy symbol. Prayers to open the space. Speaking your need to spirit. There’s no need to spend more than a few minutes on it – but everything needed to open the various works given below on a sure footing is contained in these moves.

To gain the upper-hand against a bully or abuser

Amansa Guapo is a folk name given to several plants traditionally employed in Afro-Cuban traditions as well as other Caribbean and Latin American forms of magic. The literal translation of “Guapo” in Spanish means “handsome man”, but it has cultural nuances depending on the usage. In this instance, it carries an implied meaning of “bully” or “brute”, and refers to an over-bearing, domineering or aggressive man. “Amansa” is a verb form of “Amansar” meaning “to tame or make docile”. It is often translated into English on the labels of spiritual products as “Tame a Bully”.

William J. Irizarry Jr, in his book 'Ewe Osain', a study of 221 plants, herbs and trees used in Afro-Cuban traditions, lists Amansa Guapo as Schaefferia Frutescens, also known as the Florida Boxwood. This is an endangered flowering evergreen shrub that grows from South Florida, through the Caribbean and Central America, and into North West South America. The Florida Boxwood also has the folk name Cambia Voz, or "Change Voice" and is used to change a person's opinion and speech on something.

Another candidate for Amansa Guapo is Savia Sessiliflora, a shrub or small tree native to Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. Hyptis Verticillata is also often sold as Amansa Guapo, which is a member of the mint family with a long history of medicinal use in Mesoamerica dating back to the ancient Aztec and Mayan cultures. It grows in Florida, Mexico and throughout the Caribbean. Lydia Cabrera declines to give a botanical name for Amansa Guapo in the extensive plant encyclopedia included in her seminal work ‘El Monte’ (translated into English for the first time this year since its original publication in 1954). Botanical names are included for most of the other herbs listed, so this omission perhaps speaks to the inconsistency around the identity of this plant.

In practice, all of the above have a history of being used as Amansa Guapo, so as long as you are buying the leaves from a reputable supplier who provides plants such as this to the religious communities that require them, you should be good. If you live in a large US city where such communities are present and active, you can probably find a supplier who will sell you the fresh leaves. Fresh plants are always better than dried, as they contain more of the living essence or “ache” of the plant intelligence, but dried leaves of Amansa Guapo are also readily available from various suppliers.

During the pandemic, many brick-and-mortar Miami botanicas took their businesses online and opened outlets on Etsy, so you can currently source some quality materia from these online stores. Often the plants will be grown by the supplier, and then cut and dried to order, which is the next best thing to fresh and can easily be shipped to smaller cities that don’t have good botanicas, or indeed internationally. Generally speaking, I am an advocate for using locally available fresh plants such as basil, mint, rosemary, and so on – over more obscure herbs grown in far away places. But I also enjoy geeking out over interesting magical plants with hyper-specific uses such as this, so here we are.

You could use Amansa Guapo in a spiritual bath – either the fresh leaves macerated by hand, or the dried leaves steeped for an hour in hot water, and then strained into a large pan or basin of water. Other appropriate and compatible plants could also be included here to nuance the work in particular ways – but there’s an argument for keeping it simple and not over-complicating the magic for no reason. Amansa Guapo leaves, white flower petals and Florida water would create an easy three-ingredient spiritual bath for circumstances where you need to gain the upper hand over an abusive or controlling individual in your life.

Obviously getting out of a bad situation as quickly and safely as possible is preferable to remaining within that dynamic and attempting to ameliorate the problem, but this is for circumstances where you can’t immediately do that for whatever reason. It can also be used to ease the process of extricating yourself from such a situation and minimising potential problems from the difficult individual in question. Magic such as this deals in the reality of things and their daily minutia, rather than how we might like them to be, and there are often remedies that will meet you where you are rather than where you would ideally want to be.

After opening the table of practice as suggested above, you would fill a large pan or basin with lukewarm water, and then either macerate the fresh leaves into the water by hand or strain the water from the steeped dried herbs into the basin. If you’re using the dried herbs, you can just macerate the flower petals into the water to fulfill this component of putting the work of your hands into the creation of the spiritual bath. As you tear up the leaves and/or flower petals into the water, pray to your ancestors and spiritual protectors for their assistance in helping you to gain the upper hand within whatever the situation is. Speak openly and from the heart, as the expression of genuine need is more important here than any specific wording.

Once the plants and petals are sufficiently macerated into the water, you can add about a quarter of a 7.5 oz bottle of Florida Water, then just leave it on the table of practice for about an hour or so with the white candle burning next to it. I personally like to use a white glass-encased seven-day candle that can actually be placed in the centre of the basin containing the bath.

If I were making a spiritual bath like this myself, I would definitely be doing so at the boveda and in the context of Espiritismo Cruzado, but for these works I’m trying to offer very simplified standalone practical moves that would be accessible on their own terms, and don’t call on anything beyond your own ancestors and unnamed spiritual protectors in a very generalised way. These works are still ultimately a simplified form of Spiritism, however, in the sense that the virtues of the botanical ingredients included are only part of the operative magic, and there is a component where you are calling upon and directing the unnamed spiritual support that is in your corner to inhabit the work and infuse the materia.

Before taking the bath it is recommended to take a regular shower, ideally using African black soap or castille soap. You will then pour the basin containing the prepared bath over yourself from the shoulders down. Try to air dry rather than towel dry as much as possible afterwards, and then change into clean and preferably white clothes.

This same bath recipe – following the same process – could also be deployed as a floor wash – if you wanted to subtly change the nature of a particular environment in such as a way that you will have the upper hand over what takes place there. Similarly, you would clean the floor first with a regular mop and bucket, and then wash it again with the Amansa Guapo, white flower petals and Florida water wash.

In Lydia Cabrera’s entry on Amansa Guapo in ‘El Monte’, she describes the hair or other personal concerns of a problem person being tied up in a bag with Amansa Guapo leaves, which provides another potential angle for employing this herb for gaining the upper hand against an overbearing or domineering individual.

For protection when at risk from physical danger

If a situation has escalated to the point where you are at risk from physical danger, then a simple protection powder can be made from red brick dust, salt and powdered dragon’s blood resin.

Red brick dust is a staple of African American hoodoo conjure and has its roots in ancient folklore concerning the protective properties of red ochre. This natural clay earth pigment consists of a mixture of iron oxide, clay and sand, and its use by early humans has been dated by archaeologists to around 300,000 years ago, coinciding with the emergence of Homo sapiens. The red pigment was used by ancient Africans as a form of sunscreen, which extended endurance, linking it to the ability to travel longer distances in search of food and shelter. The red colouring and presence of iron oxide connects red ochre, and by extension red brick dust, to both Mars and Ogun. A line of red brick dust outside one’s front door is typically deployed to protect a home.

Salt has purification properties and is believed to repel evil in many cultures. It is mentioned several times in the Bible and used extensively in folk magic around the world. Protective folk magic involving salt might include drawing a circle of salt around a butter churn to prevent witches from souring the butter, or throwing a pinch of salt over your left shoulder to chase away the devil. The dead are thought to have an aversion to salt in some traditions, and it can be used as a cleansing and purifying agent following works of necromancy or other dealings with unsettled dead.

Dragon’s blood is a red-coloured resin gathered from several species of tree, such as the Dracaena draco, native to the Canary Islands and Morocco, and from the rattan palms of the genus Calamus of the Indonesian islands, which are also used to make the fighting sticks used in the Filipino martial art Escrima. The resin was known to the ancient Romans and is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia. It was used in medieval ritual magic and alchemy, and is also used in African American conjure as an incense used to remove negative spirits or influences and as a basis for Dragon’s Blood Ink that is used to inscribe magical seals and talismans. The resin has protective and empowering virtues, and it lends an active fiery quality to the other two more inert primal ingredients.

Red brick dust is readily available as an ingredient you can buy from suppliers of spiritual products, and it’s perfectly acceptable to make use of this if needs be. There is an opportunity here to strengthen the powder with the work of your hands, however, if you can yourself grind a red brick into dust. A red brick might be sourced by scouring the streets on a city drift, or you might go to a particular location that holds a mystery of protection and defense by virtue of its past or present, or you could be guided to a location in a dream or any permutation of these. Smash the red brick into bits with a hammer and then grind it into a powder with a pestle and mortar.

Dragons blood resin can also be found in powdered form for expediency, or you can purchase the resin and grind it in a pestle and mortar also. The salt can be any type of salt but I normally opt for coarse ground Kosher Salt. The completed powder should be equal parts red brick dust, salt and dragon’s blood. Once you have ground and mixed the powder to a satisfactory consistency it can be transferred to a small bowl or dish. A red candle is then placed in the centre of the dish of protection powder and allowed to burn completely out as you recite Psalm 91 over it three times.

“You will not fear the terror of night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.
A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,    
but it will not come near you.”

Something important to understand about the use of psalms is that the transmitted energetic and emotional pattern of the verses is more important than the specific wording, which will change from translation to translation anyway, and exists in many variants. Some of the wording of the psalms can be icky on occasion, and this can be a real barrier to their use for a lot of people, myself included for many years. However, the magic of the psalms is not really located in the words so much as in the cadence, ebb and flow of the spoken charm and its deeper embedded meaning. The psalms were originally songs set to music, and songs will readily become haunted.

All folk songs are haunted by the ghosts of those who have plaintively sung them, and by the dead whose experiences are reflected in the meaning of the song itself. Similarly, songs in traditions such as Vodou and Espiritismo are essential components that serve many purposes and provide structure within a service. When you are singing for the Lwa, you are joined on some level by all the voices of those who have previously sung these songs. Songs may be seen as a spiritual substance inhabited by the dead over many centuries of repetition. The psalms are thousands of years old, and similar to the use of a holy symbol and prayers when opening the table, their structure provides a road for related spirits to travel into the work.

Once prepared, this protection powder can be deployed in numerous ways. You could use it to draw a line outside the threshold of your door as per regular red brick dust, or you could place it in the four corners of where you live, or sprinkle it around the outside of your house. It could be added to a carrier oil to create a simple protection condition oil and then used to anoint a red candle. If you were seeking to place protection on another person, you might draw a circle around their photo with the powder, dress a red candle in this oil and pray Psalm 91 over it. My own preferred use of this powder is to place a little in my shoes before leaving the house if I feel like I might need a background protective influence.

While these works are all slanted for circumstances where sexual harassment is taking place, they are equally applicable to situations where you are experiencing homophobic or anti-trans abuse, or if you’re holding the line against tinpot fascist knobheeds protesting drag queen story hour outside your local, or any variation of bullying or oppression.

To send away someone giving you unwanted attention

This is a variation on the lemon souring spell that I received directly from spirit during the course of writing this piece over the weekend. The use of a lemon for souring work can be found in numerous traditions, but this adaptation is specifically for when you want to weaken someone’s unwanted interest in you and send them away.

You will need some sort of sympathetic link to the target of the work, ideally some of their hair or other personal concerns if possible, but failing that a photograph or their business card could be substituted. Work with whatever you can get, but the stronger the link to the person, the more effective the work is likely to be.

Next get a deck of playing cards and identify a card that best personifies the person. For instance, the Jack of Clubs would be suitable for situations of workplace harassment, the Jack of Diamonds could be used to represent someone with money and power, and so on. Using a playing card in place of a poppet or doll is an idea given in Professor Charles Porterfield’s ‘A Deck of Spells’ and is a very versatile strategy for this sort of magic. Write the name of the person seven times on the front of the card going in one direction, and then write the words “Go Away” seven times over it going in the other direction so that the words make a cross shape. Then flip the card and write “Go Away” or even “FUCK OFF” on the back of the card. Once the card is prepared, tape a photo of the person and any personal concerns you have been able to acquire to the front of the playing card.

Next get two three-inch nails and place them on a fireproof surface - an enamelware plate or even a terra cotta planter tray are ideal for this. Douse the nails in a little Florida water and then set them on fire, allowing the flame to burn out and being careful not to set fire to anything else.

Then take a lemon, cut it in half, and sprinkle a good amount of alum powder on both sides of the cut-open lemon. Alum has a puckering effect and is used to shut up the mouth and stop gossip in Tapa Boca works within several traditions. The lemon is being used here to sour the person’s unwanted interest in you, while the alum is employed to stop-them-up, shrivel their passions and dull their advances.

Take the prepared playing card representing the target and place it between the two halves of lemon doused in alum powder, and then drive the two prepared nails through the whole thing, making a cross shape with the nails, and pinning together the two halves of lemon with the playing card in between. The nails are not just practically fixing the work together here – but have the action of piercing through the person’s natural defenses, such as they may be, and puncturing their resistance so that the influence of the work may seep in. Setting the nails in a cross shape also represents the crossed condition that you are placing on them.

Once the lemon is fixed in this way, place it on some sort of plate (which you are not going to use again to eat from), and douse the whole thing with more alum powder. Next take a white candle, turn it upside down, and use a knife to expose some of the wick at the bottom of the candle. Place the white candle upside down in a candle holder next to the lemon and light this exposed wick, burning the candle backwards to introduce a reversing principle designed to send the person away. Allow this candle to burn completely out as you pray Psalm 18 over it.

"I have pursued mine enemies, and overtaken them:
neither did I turn again till they were consumed.
I have wounded them that they were not able to rise:
they are fallen under my feet.
For thou hast girded me with strength unto the battle:
thou hast subdued under me those that rose up against me.
Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies;
that I might destroy them that hate me.
They cried, but there was none to save them:
even unto the LORD, but he answered them not.
Then did I beat them small as the dust before the wind:
I did cast them out as the dirt in the streets."

"He delivereth me from mine enemies: yea, thou liftest me up above those that rise up against me: thou hast delivered me from the violent man."

The next day, place the whole work, including any remaining candle wax, into a brown paper bag and take it to a location far away from where you live. When I lived in London, I would often carry works along these lines to far-flung stations on the tube line where I would generally never have any cause to go. West Ruislip, Uxbridge, Morden or Upminster. Somewhere far, far away from my own ends where I’ve never been before and that I’m unlikely to return to anytime soon.

The ideal location to leave the work would be a T-junction crossroads – which contains the idea of a blocked road. The symbolism of the crossroads, but one of the roads isn’t there, and that’s the road that they can no longer follow. If you can find a crossroads like that with a Stop Sign on it, even better.

Place the brown paper bag containing the work at the base of the Stop Sign at the blocked-road T-junction crossroads, far away from where you live. Put your left foot on top of the bag and press down slightly. You don’t want to stamp down too hard on it here and fuck up the work, accidentally dislodging the nails from the lemon, but just introduce the component of having the person underfoot. You can apply enough gentle pressure to maybe squeeze the lemon a little so its juice flows into the work, but you want to leave the lemon/card/nails arrangement intact within the bag. With your foot on top of the work, firmly tell the person to “Go Away” or indeed “FUCK OFF!” With this done, leave the work there, turn around and walk away without looking back or returning to the area.

Thinking About Rome

Yes – I think about Rome, and its repertoire of epic 1960s pop music, all the time. The Shoggoth dress, the increasingly oppressive brutalist urban industrial landscape.

Welcome to Blazing Fire 2, which is the section of my substack that will be home to some of my longer form, more involved writing, as opposed to Rude Interruption, which is for more ephemeral bits and pieces. Eventually I will probably make this a paid subscriber component if there is enough interest, but it’s 100% free for the time being.

Anarchy in N16 began life as a collision of different bits of writing related to the magical landscape of Stoke Newington that I wrote at various points, which I reworked but then ended up adding more to and developing further. I lived in Stoke Newington during the late 90s, not long after I moved to London from the north east, and took some of my most important steps in magic on these roads. I was going to just edit together the existing unpublished writing here, but in the process of drawing the illustration of Abney Park Cemetery’s spirit life above, I started receiving some ghost conversations that revealed how I could expand this piece to do more justice to the landscape and its dead. Once I dug into it though, I very quickly had much more material than I had bargained for, so I’m going to split this piece across two newsletters. This first part deals with my old working crossroads on Rectory Road, and the forthcoming second part will deal with Abney Park Cemetery.

Haunted Soundsystem 2: Cabio Sile is the second in a series of mix CDs that I made in the mid-00s attempting to trace the influence of African Diaspora Traditions on popular music. This one is composed of Orisha-themed music from Cuba and Brazil. Most of these were ripped directly from my vinyl LPs, and I’ve included a few photos of the LP cover art. I started writing some fairly extensive liner notes for each track, but there are 26 songs on this so I’ve decided to split this up between two newsletters as well. Liner notes for the first ten tracks are included here and the next Blazing Fire will contain a repost of the audio with the remaining liner notes. They say that the Devil has the best tunes, but I think Shango makes a very convincing argument to the contrary in this mix.

I’m aiming to write at least three substantial Blazing Fire posts with this depth of content over the course of a year, interspersed with the less content heavy Rude Interruptions. That seems like it ought to be achievable.

Anarchy in N16

Crossroads Pacts

I learned magic by going out to the crossroads and looking for magic. Every week at the crossroads, same day, rain or shine. My form was messy, but the repetition of the process and the manner in which it is done can go some way. The first crossroads where I went looking for magic was on the corner of Rectory Road, N16. I could well have been accused of fucking around in things that the prevailing wisdom tells us not to fuck around in. Yet still, some incontrovertible instinct compelled me out to the crossroads to look for magic.

Maybe a quiet whisper of Hermes or Hecate informing my actions, bubbling up from somewhere deep in the ancestral cord. Sly nod from Odin, fixing me in the gaze of his one good eye, stirring a memory of gallows curses and hanged man murk out of the cold north. A procession of black heart witches and shady necromancers with dirt beneath the fingernails, speaking under their breath about crossroads pacts with forgotten spirits. I wasn't using any of those old names and formulas, but I was still instinctively going out to the crossroads looking for a pact. I was still doing what sorcerers always did.

I didn’t know anything about the history of the area or what was under the roads, but I instinctively grasped that my practice to date had coalesced around these streets in a curious way. London had thrown me here when I needed somewhere to go, and I was drawn irrevocably into a world of magic at the other side of this intersection when I first reached out to it.

My crossroads stood between four different districts of London each with its own character. To the north was Stamford Hill, home to the largest Hasidic community in Europe and with a Jewish heritage stretching back to the 1700s. Rows of terraced doorways fixed with mezuzahs, apotropaic cylindrical talismans containing verses of the Torah pinned to the doorway for protection and as a sign of faith, or sometimes just the painted-over outline of a mezuzah left on an outside wall as a testament to local religious customs and unstable tenancies.1

The main stretch of Stamford Hill follows the old straight track of Ermine Street, one of the original Roman roads out of London that starts at Bishopsgate and goes as far north as York. The crossroads at the top of Stamford Hill was the site of a gibbet in the 17th century, an iron cage displaying the remains of criminals executed at Tyburn. Corpses left to rot in iron for years at a time. Highwayman bones and dissident flesh. Grisly stench and slow-motion decomposition. A warning to those entering or leaving London. Stark skeletal landmarks to the power of the state. 2

To the west was Stoke Newington, which by this time had already soaked up much chattering overflow from nearby Islington, but still held fast to its counter culture roots. The dead of Abney Park Cemetery still held sway on these roads. To the east was Upper Clapton, a stretch that the newspapers at the time had dubbed “Hackney’s Murder Mile” due to its high concentration of shootings and stabbings.

To the south was Dalston, also a very different landscape in the 90s from its later gentrified iteration. The terrain of the Kingsland Road was markedly different from both Stokey and Shoreditch further south. Fashionable bars abruptly gave way to a rush of fresh veg and kebab shops, baklava and betting shops, Wetherspoon emptiness, dancehall riddims and nightbus dread.

Dalston Lane had been the location of The Four Aces Club, which opened in 1966 as the first nightclub in Hackney and one of the first Black music venues in London. Housed inside a former Victorian music hall, which had originally been built for Robert Fossett's Circus in 1886, and where performing elephants had once shared a stage with jugglers and acrobats, its labyrinthine space became the backdrop for decades of musical evolution and experimentation. 

The Four Aces had hosted JA acts such as Prince Buster, The Upsetters, Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and Alton Ellis. Its foundations had been shaken by DJs and soundmen such as Sir Collins, Count Suckle, Jah Shaka, Sir Lloyd Coxsone Outernational, Fatman Hifi and Unity Hifi. Its walls had nurtured the progression of music from ska to rocksteady, dub to lovers, dancehall to jungle. In the early 90s it became Club Labrynth and functioned as a living crossroads between North London soundsystem culture and the development of 80s acid house and illegal warehouse raves into soundsystem-inflected forms such as jungle and drum & bass.

Dalston had also been the stomping ground of the North London conjure impresario, whose name we won’t throw around without caution, but whose Dark & Light Hair Products botanica was immortalised in Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic novel ‘Lights Out For The Territory’. I scoured Dalston looking for that shop, but it had closed down before I moved to the area. Yet what Stoke Newington lacked in functioning botanicas, it more than made up for in Jamaican record shops. Visits to both establishments tended to engage the same awkward self-consciousness and a disorienting feeling of being overwhelmed by a lot of inscrutable things that I had very little existing frame of reference for. 

Stepping inside record shops like Wax Unlimited in Stoke Newington was always a learning curve as I tried to get my bearings within 50 years of Jamaican musical styles cut to vinyl. The record store’s proprietor Gladdy Wax would famously DJ wearing rubber gloves because his records were so rare that they couldn’t be touched by human hands. Digging through crates of Studio One and Bluebeat 45s and often buying records on instinct without really knowing what they were, was almost analogous to sorting through packets of High John the Conqueror root and Devil’s Shoestring in the Brixton conjure shops and trying to educate myself on what I was looking at. 

7” vinyl inscribed like Solomonic talismans with mystic revelation and Old Testament dread. Scratched-up records documenting a living folk music, not just of Jamaica, but of Jamaica in burning confrontation with the country and culture that had held and exploited it as a slave colony for centuries. Soundsystems, dancehalls and shebeens as unconquered space within London incarnate as the material and psychic Babylon. Rocksteady meditations on remaining conscious and resilient amid the injustices and iniquities of the oppressor city and its works. 

My crossroads on Rectory Road was a territory where all these dreams converged. To pour out rum as an offering here was to dial the number of the local ghosts. Opening yourself up to the background dub of Hackney hopes and Clapton fears, Stokey dreams and Dalston defiance. An x-ray music that penetrates the bones, drums in the skull and stabs at the heart. Splashes of sweet liquid hit black tarmac, boring down into the roots of the place, and tunneling into the shared psychic landscape. The gate opens and suddenly the game you were playing becomes real. The magic stops being something that you are working and becomes something that is working you. The living reality of the mysteries pours through the hole you have made in the world and faces you down, stares right back at you and tells you to speak up quick.

The Hackney Brook, one of London’s buried and forgotten rivers, flowed invisibly under the ground at this intersection. Its silent course granting the site a watery aspect. The Kalunga below. A liquid medium to conduct the souls of the dead. The immediate area and its stretch of grass, known as Stoke Newington Common, had been old common land for centuries – only coming under public ownership as recently as 1872. A hold-out patch of the wild that was never truly taken. 

In the late 19th century, a number of 400,000 year old Paleolithic flint axes were discovered here, identifying the site as one of the oldest areas of human habitation in Britain. I like to imagine that some proto-punk Stokey caveman might have set the tone of the spot back then by making primitive offerings at this same crossroads, lending the intersection an irresistible gravity that would shape its character. The same stretch had also been the childhood home of Marc Bolan, who was born at 25 Stoke Newington Common and had spent his youth and ace face mod years on these roads. 

I was 21 when I moved to Stoke Newington and did not begin my practice of visiting the Rectory Road crossroads until after I had lived there for a year or so. The most compelling thing I had encountered in the British occult world at the time had been chaos magic, which had emerged initially in Leeds but also right here in Stoke Newington during the late 1970s. I always wanted magic that worked, that tangibly did things, and wasn’t just a cop-out self help manual or a convoluted system promising vague spiritual attainment. Chaos magic seemed to cut through the mist that had accrued around occultism, and put its focus on magic that worked. 

It had come out of the same instinct as punk in 1970s England, and shared the DIY ethos of punk, in that you didn’t have to wait for anyone to tell you that you could do it. Discovering chaos magic really did feel like the magical equivalent of learning three chords and forming a band with your mates. It made magic appear accessible, and put it into people’s hands, where it belonged, not locked away in fraternal societies or the preserve of self-appointed high maguses.  

I liked how chaos magic made a space for creativity and imagination to exist within a magical practice, and I liked how it permitted an open-minded skepticism to remain your working baseline. Nobody was trying to sell you an ideology, and your practice wasn’t the uncritical reception of someone else’s belief system, but a living laboratory where you could locate what was useful, discard what was superfluous, and begin to develop your own individual sense of magic. I wanted my magic to be able to breathe like that, and out of the various different branches of occultism that I knew about, chaos magic seemed to me the most likely path towards whatever half-glimpsed destination was calling.

Moving to London also finally gave me access to almost mythical bookshops such as Atlantis in Bloomsbury and Compendium in Camden. Entire shops full of otherwise hard-to-find tomes on magic and weirdness. My magical education had been cobbled together from library books and whatever the local chain bookshops happened to get in on a week when I had the money. Then later it was floppy disks filled with text files of various often willfully copyright free chaos magic texts that I downloaded whenever I had a chance to get on the internet. Now there were no such limitations, and I could finally start filling in some of the gaps in my occult reading and getting up-to-speed with the latest permutations of contemporary magic.

Around this same time, I managed to get out of the Post Office in the east end where I had been employed, and started working in central London at a job where I had daily internet access for the first time. I very quickly joined as many occult mailing lists as I could find, and eventually got talking to a woman who lived in South America and who became my first mentor in magic. She would set me lessons by email that I would complete and then I would write up the results and my reflections on them, and the conversation would develop from there. Suddenly though, she was visiting London, and more oddly would be staying at a friend’s house that – in an unlikely coincidence given the sprawling geography of London – happened to be just on the other side of the crossroads at Rectory Road near where I lived. She had me collaborate on designing a chaos magic initiation ritual that she approved, and I was initiated into magic by her in a motel room opposite Finsbury Park. Afterwards we went for kebabs on Green Lanes and she presented me with a knife that had a hilt carved like a monkey’s head to be my initiatory dagger. The crossroads at Rectory Road was already central to my magic, and all I did later was go out to meet it.

The magic of the crossroads is often depicted as a one-time pact or bargain with an anomalous personage, but the heart of the practice is located in the regularity, repetition and rhythm of your intentional attendance in such a space over a period of time. The firmness of your intention, and what you might be called on to demonstrate on successive visits. Anything can happen at the crossroads and you must be there for it and bear witness to it as communication from spirit. Whichever crossroads personage you may be approaching, there’s always a level to the practice where the substance and mystery of a particular junction is assembled out of the traffic that moves on its roads and the ghosts that haunt it. The crossroads of Stoke Newington are dense with layers of spirit that have occupied its roads, steeped in centuries of highly specific local mystery, yet their true centre of gravity is inevitably the unconsecrated necropolis of Abney Park Cemetery.

Haunted Soundsystem 2: Cabio Sile

This was a mix CD that I made years ago of Orisha-themed popular music from Cuba and Brazil, mostly ripped from my vinyl LPs, and which has not been online anywhere until now. I’ve also uploaded this to Mixcloud here if that is preferable to anyone versus the embedded audio below. Liner notes for the first ten tracks are below, and I will write about the remaining songs in the next newsletter.

1. A Elegua – Merceditas Valdes & Grupo Yoruba Andabo

This was not on the original CD version of this mix, but not having any Merceditas Valdes on this seemed like an oversight. While it also made sense to open with Celia Cruz singing for Eleggua, I liked how this recording began with a Mojuba and included Bata drums. Mojuba means "I pay homage to" in Yoruba, and it's a set of prayers said before acts of worship or devotion in Lukumi. There's an extract on the Mojuba from a book by my Padrino in Lukumi here.

Merceditas Valdes was one of the first Lukumi akpwóns (singers) to be recorded in 1949. She made a number of recordings, with her debut album Merceditas Valdes released in 1960, but following the Cuban Revolution, the commercialization of Afro-Cuban music was restricted and her recording career was halted. Valdes began recording again in the 1980s, and made several LPs titled Ache 1 (1982) through Ache V (1993) before her death in 1996 at the age of 73. This song for Elegua with Grupo Yoruba Andabo is from Ache IV (1990) in this later revival of her career.

2. Eleggua – Celia Cruz

Celia Cruz shouldn't really need any introduction. This recording is from a 1954 LP called Santero, which also featured Merceditas Valdes. While identifying as Catholic, the Cuban singer recorded many songs for Orisha, both solo and with her group La Sonora Matancera. Following the Cuban Revolution, she remained in exile – first in Mexico and then in the U.S. – and continued her recording career overseas. In 1973 she began recording for Fania Records and became internationally known as the "Queen of Salsa".

3. Tabú – Xavier Cugat

Tabú was written by Cuban singer and composer Margarita Lecuona, and became part of the repertoire of 1950s Exotica, following popular instrumental recordings by Arthur Lyman and Les Baxter. Versions that include vocals include a roll-call of Orisha as part of the chorus, which interestingly will tend to change depending on who is singing it, with different Orisha name-checked in the various versions. Xavier Cugat was a Spanish-Cuban classically trained violinist and bandleader who helped to popularize Latin dance music trends in the U.S., such as the conga, the mambo, and the cha-cha-cha. He was the bandleader at the Waldorf–Astoria hotel in New York for 16 years, on either side of WW2, and his band included Desi Arnaz, Yma Sumac, Tito Rodriguez, and Miguelito Valdes. While leading his band he was known for holding a conductor's baton in one hand and a small chihuahua in the other. Cugat also had a parallel career as a cartoonist and caricaturist and his work appeared in the Los Angeles Times. I think it’s Miguelito Valdés singing here but I'm not 100% sure. There's another Xavier Cugat, Miguelito Valdés and Machito version of this but it's different from this one.

4. Zarabanda – Machito

Machito and the Afro-Cubans were among the first big bands to fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz improvisation and arrangements, and they recorded the first jazz song Tanga (1942) that was based in-clave. They were the first to include the Cuban music triumvirate of congas, bongo and timbales in a big band setting, and the first to use the term "Afro-Cuban" to overtly acknowledge the African roots of this music. While Xavier Cugat played before society elites at the Waldorf-Astoria, Machito and his band played for the Latin-American communities concentrated in East Harlem and the South Bronx. He worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and directly influenced a generation of New York Latin Jazz band leaders such as Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez.

Here he is singing about Zarabanda, the Mpungo of iron in Palo Mayombe. I had thought about removing this track as everything else on this mix relates to Yoruba while this is Congo, and wondered if there were enough Congo-influenced Latin tunes like this for a separate mix, along with records such as Bilongo/La Negra Tomasa. That would need some more research though, so I just left it on because it's great.

5. Lucumi – Miguelito Valdés

Miguelito Valdés was a former amateur boxing champ who was one of the biggest singers in Cuba in the late 1930s. He was known as Mr Babalu following his hit with the Margarita Lecuona-penned song Babalu, which Desi Arnas would later also become internationally known for following his role in the sit-com I Love Lucy. More about that, and how the Orisha of smallpox came to be globally associated with this jaunty sit-com adjacent number, in due course. Valdés moved to New York in the 1940s and continued his music career, even making appearances in movies alongside Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. Here he is singing directly about Lucumi.

6. Ogum – Arlete Moita

Abruptly shifting over to Brazil with this one. I could have done this as two separate mixes really, rather than mixing up the Cuban and Brazilian Orisha music, but that's what I did at the time. I think it works to show how Orisha music is expressed so differently through the cultural lens of Brazil compared to Cuba, while also exerting a wider influence on popular music in different ways. I know hardly anything about Arlete Moita, other than that they recorded several Umbanda LPs in the 1970s. I think you can really hear the parallels with other Brazilian popular music forms such as Samba and Bossa Nova in many of these recordings of Umbanda songs. There are loads of Umbanda LPs like this around, often on private press labels, and they are generally always good. This is a call and response song for Ogum, the Orixa of Iron.

7. Prayer to Ozain – Eddie Palmieri

Puerto Rican pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri recorded the LP Lucumí, Macumba, Voodoo in 1978, featuring music inspired by these traditions. It has fantastically 1970s cover art of a woman wearing Elekes – beaded necklaces consecrated to Orisha that are typically the first thing a person receives upon entry to Lukumi. The necklaces on the cover look like they could be real consecrated Elekes beaded to represent specific roads of Orisha, rather than a standard set of botanica Elekes bought for a photoshoot. This track is a short interlude prayer to Ozain, the Orisha of plants and the forest.

8. Canto de Ossanha – Quarteto Em Cy

Another oversight from the original version of this mix is that it somehow had none of the Vinicius de Moraes and Baden Powell Os Afro-Sambas recordings of songs for the Orixa. More from that record later, but I'm going with the Quarteto Em Cy version of Canto de Ossanha here for its Bossa Nova perfection. Quarteto Em Cy were/are four sisters from Bahia called Cybele, Cylene, Cynara and Cyva, who recorded with almost every major Brazilian artist of the 60s and 70s, including providing the backing vocals on the original Os Afro-Sambas record. Ossanha is the Brazilian form of Ozain, the subject of the previous Eddie Palmieri tune, the Orixa of plants and the forest.

9. Babalu – Yma Sumac

Margarita Lecuona's other wildly successful Orisha-themed song was Babalu, named for Babalu-Aye, the Orisha of smallpox, infectious disease and healing. Babalu-Aye is syncretized with Saint Lazarus, who is an extremely popular saint in Cuba. In the lyrics, someone is wondering what to do with a statue of Babalu-Aye, and is instructed to put 17 candles in the shape of a cross (17 December being Saint Lazarus's Day), and offer aguardiente, a cigar and some money.

Initially a hit for Miguelito Valdés in Cuba, Babalu later became the signature song of Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, who had played in Xavier Cugat's band before WW2. In 1951, Desi Arnaz appeared in the TV sitcom I Love Lucy, starring as Cuban orchestra leader Enrique "Ricky" Ricardo, alongside his real-life wife Lucille Ball. His character would frequently perform the song in episodes of the show and eventually opened a nightclub called Club Babalu.

From here, the word Babalu entered into U.S. popular culture in some really weird ways, mostly separated from its meaning. There was a 1959 Doo Wop tune by The Eternal's called Babalu's Wedding Day. The Hanna-Barbera cartoon Quick Draw McGraw featured a racist Mexican donkey character called "Baba Looey" that was based on the character of Desi Arnaz (in the way that Cuban and Mexican cultures are somehow indistinguishable to white America...) There even used to be a nightclub called Babalou in the crypt of Saint Matthew’s Church in Brixton.

The Valdés version would have been the obvious choice to include here, but I wanted to show the transmission of this song into bizarro 50s Exotica, and that's this Yma Sumac interpretation. Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo, who performed as Yma Sumac, began her career singing Peruvian folk songs in her village of Ichocán, in the Cajamarca region in the northern highlands of Peru. She had a four octave – arguably five octave – range and even won a Guinness World Record for Greatest Vocal Range of Musical Value in 1956. In 1950 she was signed to Capitol Records and paired with Exotica composer Les Baxter. She worked with Baxter on her debut album Voice of the Xtabay, which led to performances at Carnegie Hall, the 1950s Las Vegas casino circuit, and a starring role alongside a young Charlton Heston in a B-movie called Secret of the Incas. Her obituary in the Guardian describes her as "marketed as a mixture of Carmen Miranda and H Rider Haggard's She." Sumac claimed to be an Inca princess directly descended from Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor, a claim that was formally supported by the government of Peru for a period. Other (debunked) rumours argued she was really Amy Camus (Yma Sumac, spelled backwards) from Brooklyn. “The creatures of the forest taught me how to sing,” is how she described unintentionally developing her massive vocal range by imitating the birds and other animals of the Andean mountains.

10. San Lazaro – Celina y Reutilio

This is one of my favourite records of Cuban Orisha music. Celina y Reutilio were the husband and wife duo of vocalist Celina González Zamora and guitarist Reutilio Domínguez. They made many recordings in the style of the traditional acoustic folkloric music of the Cuban agricultural countryside, such as the guajira, the guaracha and the punto Cubano. Celina’s mother was a devotee of the Orisha and their music incorporated many themes of Yoruba and Congo spiritual traditions. This is a song for San Lazaro or Saint Lazarus, who is syncretised with the Orisha Babalu-Aye.

I will write up liner notes for the remaining records in the next Blazing Fire, but here are the track listings so you can know what the rest of the tunes are.

11. Manteca – Dizzy Gillespie & Chano Pozo
12. A Santa Barbara – Celina y Reutilio
13. Chango – Celia Cruz
14. Quequele Xango – J B Carvalho & J B Junior
15. Canto de Xango – Baden Powell & Vinicius de Moraes
16. Elegua Chango – Tito Puente & his Orchestra
17. Omishango – Mongo Santamaria
18. Shango – Eartha Kitt
19. Louvacao a Oxum – Maria Bethania
20. Canto de Iemanja – Baden Powell & Vinicius de Moraes
21. Promessa de Pescador – Sergio Mendes & Brazil '77
22. Yemaya – Katherine Dunham
23. Yemanja – Jairo a Rodrigues
24. Yemaya – Celia Cruz & La Sonora Matancera
25. Baila Yemaya – Celia Cruz
26. Obatala – Mongo Santamaria

Welcome to Blazing Fire 2, which is the section of my substack that will be home to some of my longer form, more involved writing, as opposed to Rude Interruption, which is for more ephemeral bits and pieces. Eventually I will probably make this a paid subscriber component if there is enough interest, but it’s 100% free for the time being.

Anarchy in N16 began life as a collision of different bits of writing related to the magical landscape of Stoke Newington that I wrote at various points, which I reworked but then ended up adding more to and developing further. I lived in Stoke Newington during the late 90s, not long after I moved to London from the north east, and took some of my most important steps in magic on these roads. I was going to just edit together the existing unpublished writing here, but in the process of drawing the illustration of Abney Park Cemetery’s spirit life above, I started receiving some ghost conversations that revealed how I could expand this piece to do more justice to the landscape and its dead. Once I dug into it though, I very quickly had much more material than I had bargained for, so I’m going to split this piece across two newsletters. This first part deals with my old working crossroads on Rectory Road, and the forthcoming second part will deal with Abney Park Cemetery.

Haunted Soundsystem 2: Cabio Sile is the second in a series of mix CDs that I made in the mid-00s attempting to trace the influence of African Diaspora Traditions on popular music. This one is composed of Orisha-themed music from Cuba and Brazil. Most of these were ripped directly from my vinyl LPs, and I’ve included a few photos of the LP cover art. I started writing some fairly extensive liner notes for each track, but there are 26 songs on this so I’ve decided to split this up between two newsletters as well. Liner notes for the first ten tracks are included here and the next Blazing Fire will contain a repost of the audio with the remaining liner notes. They say that the Devil has the best tunes, but I think Shango makes a very convincing argument to the contrary in this mix.

I’m aiming to write at least three substantial Blazing Fire posts with this depth of content over the course of a year, interspersed with the less content heavy Rude Interruptions. That seems like it ought to be achievable.

Anarchy in N16

Crossroads Pacts

I learned magic by going out to the crossroads and looking for magic. Every week at the crossroads, same day, rain or shine. My form was messy, but the repetition of the process and the manner in which it is done can go some way. The first crossroads where I went looking for magic was on the corner of Rectory Road, N16. I could well have been accused of fucking around in things that the prevailing wisdom tells us not to fuck around in. Yet still, some incontrovertible instinct compelled me out to the crossroads to look for magic.

Maybe a quiet whisper of Hermes or Hecate informing my actions, bubbling up from somewhere deep in the ancestral cord. Sly nod from Odin, fixing me in the gaze of his one good eye, stirring a memory of gallows curses and hanged man murk out of the cold north. A procession of black heart witches and shady necromancers with dirt beneath the fingernails, speaking under their breath about crossroads pacts with forgotten spirits. I wasn't using any of those old names and formulas, but I was still instinctively going out to the crossroads looking for a pact. I was still doing what sorcerers always did.

I didn’t know anything about the history of the area or what was under the roads, but I instinctively grasped that my practice to date had coalesced around these streets in a curious way. London had thrown me here when I needed somewhere to go, and I was drawn irrevocably into a world of magic at the other side of this intersection when I first reached out to it.

My crossroads stood between four different districts of London each with its own character. To the north was Stamford Hill, home to the largest Hasidic community in Europe and with a Jewish heritage stretching back to the 1700s. Rows of terraced doorways fixed with mezuzahs, apotropaic cylindrical talismans containing verses of the Torah pinned to the doorway for protection and as a sign of faith, or sometimes just the painted-over outline of a mezuzah left on an outside wall as a testament to local religious customs and unstable tenancies.1

The main stretch of Stamford Hill follows the old straight track of Ermine Street, one of the original Roman roads out of London that starts at Bishopsgate and goes as far north as York. The crossroads at the top of Stamford Hill was the site of a gibbet in the 17th century, an iron cage displaying the remains of criminals executed at Tyburn. Corpses left to rot in iron for years at a time. Highwayman bones and dissident flesh. Grisly stench and slow-motion decomposition. A warning to those entering or leaving London. Stark skeletal landmarks to the power of the state. 2

To the west was Stoke Newington, which by this time had already soaked up much chattering overflow from nearby Islington, but still held fast to its counter culture roots. The dead of Abney Park Cemetery still held sway on these roads. To the east was Upper Clapton, a stretch that the newspapers at the time had dubbed “Hackney’s Murder Mile” due to its high concentration of shootings and stabbings.

To the south was Dalston, also a very different landscape in the 90s from its later gentrified iteration. The terrain of the Kingsland Road was markedly different from both Stokey and Shoreditch further south. Fashionable bars abruptly gave way to a rush of fresh veg and kebab shops, baklava and betting shops, Wetherspoon emptiness, dancehall riddims and nightbus dread.

Dalston Lane had been the location of The Four Aces Club, which opened in 1966 as the first nightclub in Hackney and one of the first Black music venues in London. Housed inside a former Victorian music hall, which had originally been built for Robert Fossett's Circus in 1886, and where performing elephants had once shared a stage with jugglers and acrobats, its labyrinthine space became the backdrop for decades of musical evolution and experimentation. 

The Four Aces had hosted JA acts such as Prince Buster, The Upsetters, Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and Alton Ellis. Its foundations had been shaken by DJs and soundmen such as Sir Collins, Count Suckle, Jah Shaka, Sir Lloyd Coxsone Outernational, Fatman Hifi and Unity Hifi. Its walls had nurtured the progression of music from ska to rocksteady, dub to lovers, dancehall to jungle. In the early 90s it became Club Labrynth and functioned as a living crossroads between North London soundsystem culture and the development of 80s acid house and illegal warehouse raves into soundsystem-inflected forms such as jungle and drum & bass.

Dalston had also been the stomping ground of the North London conjure impresario, whose name we won’t throw around without caution, but whose Dark & Light Hair Products botanica was immortalised in Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic novel ‘Lights Out For The Territory’. I scoured Dalston looking for that shop, but it had closed down before I moved to the area. Yet what Stoke Newington lacked in functioning botanicas, it more than made up for in Jamaican record shops. Visits to both establishments tended to engage the same awkward self-consciousness and a disorienting feeling of being overwhelmed by a lot of inscrutable things that I had very little existing frame of reference for. 

Stepping inside record shops like Wax Unlimited in Stoke Newington was always a learning curve as I tried to get my bearings within 50 years of Jamaican musical styles cut to vinyl. The record store’s proprietor Gladdy Wax would famously DJ wearing rubber gloves because his records were so rare that they couldn’t be touched by human hands. Digging through crates of Studio One and Bluebeat 45s and often buying records on instinct without really knowing what they were, was almost analogous to sorting through packets of High John the Conqueror root and Devil’s Shoestring in the Brixton conjure shops and trying to educate myself on what I was looking at. 

7” vinyl inscribed like Solomonic talismans with mystic revelation and Old Testament dread. Scratched-up records documenting a living folk music, not just of Jamaica, but of Jamaica in burning confrontation with the country and culture that had held and exploited it as a slave colony for centuries. Soundsystems, dancehalls and shebeens as unconquered space within London incarnate as the material and psychic Babylon. Rocksteady meditations on remaining conscious and resilient amid the injustices and iniquities of the oppressor city and its works. 

My crossroads on Rectory Road was a territory where all these dreams converged. To pour out rum as an offering here was to dial the number of the local ghosts. Opening yourself up to the background dub of Hackney hopes and Clapton fears, Stokey dreams and Dalston defiance. An x-ray music that penetrates the bones, drums in the skull and stabs at the heart. Splashes of sweet liquid hit black tarmac, boring down into the roots of the place, and tunneling into the shared psychic landscape. The gate opens and suddenly the game you were playing becomes real. The magic stops being something that you are working and becomes something that is working you. The living reality of the mysteries pours through the hole you have made in the world and faces you down, stares right back at you and tells you to speak up quick.

The Hackney Brook, one of London’s buried and forgotten rivers, flowed invisibly under the ground at this intersection. Its silent course granting the site a watery aspect. The Kalunga below. A liquid medium to conduct the souls of the dead. The immediate area and its stretch of grass, known as Stoke Newington Common, had been old common land for centuries – only coming under public ownership as recently as 1872. A hold-out patch of the wild that was never truly taken. 

In the late 19th century, a number of 400,000 year old Paleolithic flint axes were discovered here, identifying the site as one of the oldest areas of human habitation in Britain. I like to imagine that some proto-punk Stokey caveman might have set the tone of the spot back then by making primitive offerings at this same crossroads, lending the intersection an irresistible gravity that would shape its character. The same stretch had also been the childhood home of Marc Bolan, who was born at 25 Stoke Newington Common and had spent his youth and ace face mod years on these roads. 

I was 21 when I moved to Stoke Newington and did not begin my practice of visiting the Rectory Road crossroads until after I had lived there for a year or so. The most compelling thing I had encountered in the British occult world at the time had been chaos magic, which had emerged initially in Leeds but also right here in Stoke Newington during the late 1970s. I always wanted magic that worked, that tangibly did things, and wasn’t just a cop-out self help manual or a convoluted system promising vague spiritual attainment. Chaos magic seemed to cut through the mist that had accrued around occultism, and put its focus on magic that worked. 

It had come out of the same instinct as punk in 1970s England, and shared the DIY ethos of punk, in that you didn’t have to wait for anyone to tell you that you could do it. Discovering chaos magic really did feel like the magical equivalent of learning three chords and forming a band with your mates. It made magic appear accessible, and put it into people’s hands, where it belonged, not locked away in fraternal societies or the preserve of self-appointed high maguses.  

I liked how chaos magic made a space for creativity and imagination to exist within a magical practice, and I liked how it permitted an open-minded skepticism to remain your working baseline. Nobody was trying to sell you an ideology, and your practice wasn’t the uncritical reception of someone else’s belief system, but a living laboratory where you could locate what was useful, discard what was superfluous, and begin to develop your own individual sense of magic. I wanted my magic to be able to breathe like that, and out of the various different branches of occultism that I knew about, chaos magic seemed to me the most likely path towards whatever half-glimpsed destination was calling.

Moving to London also finally gave me access to almost mythical bookshops such as Atlantis in Bloomsbury and Compendium in Camden. Entire shops full of otherwise hard-to-find tomes on magic and weirdness. My magical education had been cobbled together from library books and whatever the local chain bookshops happened to get in on a week when I had the money. Then later it was floppy disks filled with text files of various often willfully copyright free chaos magic texts that I downloaded whenever I had a chance to get on the internet. Now there were no such limitations, and I could finally start filling in some of the gaps in my occult reading and getting up-to-speed with the latest permutations of contemporary magic.

Around this same time, I managed to get out of the Post Office in the east end where I had been employed, and started working in central London at a job where I had daily internet access for the first time. I very quickly joined as many occult mailing lists as I could find, and eventually got talking to a woman who lived in South America and who became my first mentor in magic. She would set me lessons by email that I would complete and then I would write up the results and my reflections on them, and the conversation would develop from there. Suddenly though, she was visiting London, and more oddly would be staying at a friend’s house that – in an unlikely coincidence given the sprawling geography of London – happened to be just on the other side of the crossroads at Rectory Road near where I lived. She had me collaborate on designing a chaos magic initiation ritual that she approved, and I was initiated into magic by her in a motel room opposite Finsbury Park. Afterwards we went for kebabs on Green Lanes and she presented me with a knife that had a hilt carved like a monkey’s head to be my initiatory dagger. The crossroads at Rectory Road was already central to my magic, and all I did later was go out to meet it.

The magic of the crossroads is often depicted as a one-time pact or bargain with an anomalous personage, but the heart of the practice is located in the regularity, repetition and rhythm of your intentional attendance in such a space over a period of time. The firmness of your intention, and what you might be called on to demonstrate on successive visits. Anything can happen at the crossroads and you must be there for it and bear witness to it as communication from spirit. Whichever crossroads personage you may be approaching, there’s always a level to the practice where the substance and mystery of a particular junction is assembled out of the traffic that moves on its roads and the ghosts that haunt it. The crossroads of Stoke Newington are dense with layers of spirit that have occupied its roads, steeped in centuries of highly specific local mystery, yet their true centre of gravity is inevitably the unconsecrated necropolis of Abney Park Cemetery.

Haunted Soundsystem 2: Cabio Sile

This was a mix CD that I made years ago of Orisha-themed popular music from Cuba and Brazil, mostly ripped from my vinyl LPs, and which has not been online anywhere until now. I’ve also uploaded this to Mixcloud here if that is preferable to anyone versus the embedded audio below. Liner notes for the first ten tracks are below, and I will write about the remaining songs in the next newsletter.

1. A Elegua – Merceditas Valdes & Grupo Yoruba Andabo

This was not on the original CD version of this mix, but not having any Merceditas Valdes on this seemed like an oversight. While it also made sense to open with Celia Cruz singing for Eleggua, I liked how this recording began with a Mojuba and included Bata drums. Mojuba means "I pay homage to" in Yoruba, and it's a set of prayers said before acts of worship or devotion in Lukumi. There's an extract on the Mojuba from a book by my Padrino in Lukumi here.

Merceditas Valdes was one of the first Lukumi akpwóns (singers) to be recorded in 1949. She made a number of recordings, with her debut album Merceditas Valdes released in 1960, but following the Cuban Revolution, the commercialization of Afro-Cuban music was restricted and her recording career was halted. Valdes began recording again in the 1980s, and made several LPs titled Ache 1 (1982) through Ache V (1993) before her death in 1996 at the age of 73. This song for Elegua with Grupo Yoruba Andabo is from Ache IV (1990) in this later revival of her career.

2. Eleggua – Celia Cruz

Celia Cruz shouldn't really need any introduction. This recording is from a 1954 LP called Santero, which also featured Merceditas Valdes. While identifying as Catholic, the Cuban singer recorded many songs for Orisha, both solo and with her group La Sonora Matancera. Following the Cuban Revolution, she remained in exile – first in Mexico and then in the U.S. – and continued her recording career overseas. In 1973 she began recording for Fania Records and became internationally known as the "Queen of Salsa".

3. Tabú – Xavier Cugat

Tabú was written by Cuban singer and composer Margarita Lecuona, and became part of the repertoire of 1950s Exotica, following popular instrumental recordings by Arthur Lyman and Les Baxter. Versions that include vocals include a roll-call of Orisha as part of the chorus, which interestingly will tend to change depending on who is singing it, with different Orisha name-checked in the various versions. Xavier Cugat was a Spanish-Cuban classically trained violinist and bandleader who helped to popularize Latin dance music trends in the U.S., such as the conga, the mambo, and the cha-cha-cha. He was the bandleader at the Waldorf–Astoria hotel in New York for 16 years, on either side of WW2, and his band included Desi Arnaz, Yma Sumac, Tito Rodriguez, and Miguelito Valdes. While leading his band he was known for holding a conductor's baton in one hand and a small chihuahua in the other. Cugat also had a parallel career as a cartoonist and caricaturist and his work appeared in the Los Angeles Times. I think it’s Miguelito Valdés singing here but I'm not 100% sure. There's another Xavier Cugat, Miguelito Valdés and Machito version of this but it's different from this one.

4. Zarabanda – Machito

Machito and the Afro-Cubans were among the first big bands to fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz improvisation and arrangements, and they recorded the first jazz song Tanga (1942) that was based in-clave. They were the first to include the Cuban music triumvirate of congas, bongo and timbales in a big band setting, and the first to use the term "Afro-Cuban" to overtly acknowledge the African roots of this music. While Xavier Cugat played before society elites at the Waldorf-Astoria, Machito and his band played for the Latin-American communities concentrated in East Harlem and the South Bronx. He worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and directly influenced a generation of New York Latin Jazz band leaders such as Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez.

Here he is singing about Zarabanda, the Mpungo of iron in Palo Mayombe. I had thought about removing this track as everything else on this mix relates to Yoruba while this is Congo, and wondered if there were enough Congo-influenced Latin tunes like this for a separate mix, along with records such as Bilongo/La Negra Tomasa. That would need some more research though, so I just left it on because it's great.

5. Lucumi – Miguelito Valdés

Miguelito Valdés was a former amateur boxing champ who was one of the biggest singers in Cuba in the late 1930s. He was known as Mr Babalu following his hit with the Margarita Lecuona-penned song Babalu, which Desi Arnas would later also become internationally known for following his role in the sit-com I Love Lucy. More about that, and how the Orisha of smallpox came to be globally associated with this jaunty sit-com adjacent number, in due course. Valdés moved to New York in the 1940s and continued his music career, even making appearances in movies alongside Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. Here he is singing directly about Lucumi.

6. Ogum – Arlete Moita

Abruptly shifting over to Brazil with this one. I could have done this as two separate mixes really, rather than mixing up the Cuban and Brazilian Orisha music, but that's what I did at the time. I think it works to show how Orisha music is expressed so differently through the cultural lens of Brazil compared to Cuba, while also exerting a wider influence on popular music in different ways. I know hardly anything about Arlete Moita, other than that they recorded several Umbanda LPs in the 1970s. I think you can really hear the parallels with other Brazilian popular music forms such as Samba and Bossa Nova in many of these recordings of Umbanda songs. There are loads of Umbanda LPs like this around, often on private press labels, and they are generally always good. This is a call and response song for Ogum, the Orixa of Iron.

7. Prayer to Ozain – Eddie Palmieri

Puerto Rican pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri recorded the LP Lucumí, Macumba, Voodoo in 1978, featuring music inspired by these traditions. It has fantastically 1970s cover art of a woman wearing Elekes – beaded necklaces consecrated to Orisha that are typically the first thing a person receives upon entry to Lukumi. The necklaces on the cover look like they could be real consecrated Elekes beaded to represent specific roads of Orisha, rather than a standard set of botanica Elekes bought for a photoshoot. This track is a short interlude prayer to Ozain, the Orisha of plants and the forest.

8. Canto de Ossanha – Quarteto Em Cy

Another oversight from the original version of this mix is that it somehow had none of the Vinicius de Moraes and Baden Powell Os Afro-Sambas recordings of songs for the Orixa. More from that record later, but I'm going with the Quarteto Em Cy version of Canto de Ossanha here for its Bossa Nova perfection. Quarteto Em Cy were/are four sisters from Bahia called Cybele, Cylene, Cynara and Cyva, who recorded with almost every major Brazilian artist of the 60s and 70s, including providing the backing vocals on the original Os Afro-Sambas record. Ossanha is the Brazilian form of Ozain, the subject of the previous Eddie Palmieri tune, the Orixa of plants and the forest.

9. Babalu – Yma Sumac

Margarita Lecuona's other wildly successful Orisha-themed song was Babalu, named for Babalu-Aye, the Orisha of smallpox, infectious disease and healing. Babalu-Aye is syncretized with Saint Lazarus, who is an extremely popular saint in Cuba. In the lyrics, someone is wondering what to do with a statue of Babalu-Aye, and is instructed to put 17 candles in the shape of a cross (17 December being Saint Lazarus's Day), and offer aguardiente, a cigar and some money.

Initially a hit for Miguelito Valdés in Cuba, Babalu later became the signature song of Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, who had played in Xavier Cugat's band before WW2. In 1951, Desi Arnaz appeared in the TV sitcom I Love Lucy, starring as Cuban orchestra leader Enrique "Ricky" Ricardo, alongside his real-life wife Lucille Ball. His character would frequently perform the song in episodes of the show and eventually opened a nightclub called Club Babalu.

From here, the word Babalu entered into U.S. popular culture in some really weird ways, mostly separated from its meaning. There was a 1959 Doo Wop tune by The Eternal's called Babalu's Wedding Day. The Hanna-Barbera cartoon Quick Draw McGraw featured a racist Mexican donkey character called "Baba Looey" that was based on the character of Desi Arnaz (in the way that Cuban and Mexican cultures are somehow indistinguishable to white America...) There even used to be a nightclub called Babalou in the crypt of Saint Matthew’s Church in Brixton.

The Valdés version would have been the obvious choice to include here, but I wanted to show the transmission of this song into bizarro 50s Exotica, and that's this Yma Sumac interpretation. Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo, who performed as Yma Sumac, began her career singing Peruvian folk songs in her village of Ichocán, in the Cajamarca region in the northern highlands of Peru. She had a four octave – arguably five octave – range and even won a Guinness World Record for Greatest Vocal Range of Musical Value in 1956. In 1950 she was signed to Capitol Records and paired with Exotica composer Les Baxter. She worked with Baxter on her debut album Voice of the Xtabay, which led to performances at Carnegie Hall, the 1950s Las Vegas casino circuit, and a starring role alongside a young Charlton Heston in a B-movie called Secret of the Incas. Her obituary in the Guardian describes her as "marketed as a mixture of Carmen Miranda and H Rider Haggard's She." Sumac claimed to be an Inca princess directly descended from Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor, a claim that was formally supported by the government of Peru for a period. Other (debunked) rumours argued she was really Amy Camus (Yma Sumac, spelled backwards) from Brooklyn. “The creatures of the forest taught me how to sing,” is how she described unintentionally developing her massive vocal range by imitating the birds and other animals of the Andean mountains.

10. San Lazaro – Celina y Reutilio

This is one of my favourite records of Cuban Orisha music. Celina y Reutilio were the husband and wife duo of vocalist Celina González Zamora and guitarist Reutilio Domínguez. They made many recordings in the style of the traditional acoustic folkloric music of the Cuban agricultural countryside, such as the guajira, the guaracha and the punto Cubano. Celina’s mother was a devotee of the Orisha and their music incorporated many themes of Yoruba and Congo spiritual traditions. This is a song for San Lazaro or Saint Lazarus, who is syncretised with the Orisha Babalu-Aye.

I will write up liner notes for the remaining records in the next Blazing Fire, but here are the track listings so you can know what the rest of the tunes are.

11. Manteca – Dizzy Gillespie & Chano Pozo
12. A Santa Barbara – Celina y Reutilio
13. Chango – Celia Cruz
14. Quequele Xango – J B Carvalho & J B Junior
15. Canto de Xango – Baden Powell & Vinicius de Moraes
16. Elegua Chango – Tito Puente & his Orchestra
17. Omishango – Mongo Santamaria
18. Shango – Eartha Kitt
19. Louvacao a Oxum – Maria Bethania
20. Canto de Iemanja – Baden Powell & Vinicius de Moraes
21. Promessa de Pescador – Sergio Mendes & Brazil '77
22. Yemaya – Katherine Dunham
23. Yemanja – Jairo a Rodrigues
24. Yemaya – Celia Cruz & La Sonora Matancera
25. Baila Yemaya – Celia Cruz
26. Obatala – Mongo Santamaria

It’s been a minute since my last newsletter - due to a combination of circumstances but mostly because I’ve been doing a lot of magic and not having sufficient time available to also write about it. But I’ve also been giving some thought to how I want to use this platform, and what sort of frequency of content will be sustainable for me on an ongoing basis. My aim is to create at least three content-heavy Blazing Fire posts over the course of a year, which will contain my more polished writing and eventually be for paying subscribers only. In addition to that, I want to aim to make Rude Interruption monthly, containing more ephemeral and less involved content and updates. The next Blazing Fire isn’t far off - but due to some travel commitments I won’t have time to work on it for a couple of weeks so I thought I had better post something else in the interim.

Black Candle is a reworked and extended version of a thread I wrote on twitter @spaceweather9 last week, which was in response to various online calls to curse the Supreme Court following its recent decisions. I have certain criticisms of the sort of online mass workings towards political ends that have become popular in recent years – but more pertinently, I wanted to share some alternative strategies for how one might approach activist magic in such a way that circumvents some of these thorny issues.

Duppy Conqueror Sounds 1 is a playlist of some recent music I’ve been listening to, mostly dancehall and reggaeton with some UK things here and there.

In other news, the latest issue of Fortean Times contains an obituary that I wrote for Jake Stratton-Kent who died earlier this year. The task of writing this went around the houses a little before it landed back with me, so I thought I would have an attempt at trying to communicate something about Jake’s work and why it mattered to the FT’s more general readership of non-occultist Bigfoot enthusiasts and such like. Here’s a short extract:

“While there was already growing interest in classical magic, the publication of The True Grimoire heralded a watershed moment and the beginning of a renaissance in grimoire studies. Jake’s writing and online presence shaped many vectors of this into being, but also reflected an ongoing culture-wide process of recovery and recapitulation of older magic that had been simmering for some time and was beginning to attain critical mass.

As well as new practitioner editions of occult manuscripts that Victorian occultists did not have access to when they constructed their interpretations of ceremonial magic, this Grimoire Revival also crossed several language barriers and included new practitioner translations that had not previously been available in English language editions.

As these currents and trajectories of the Grimoire Revival took shape, Jake Stratton-Kent continued to be a mover and shaker in the world of chthonic magic, contributing his acerbic wit and down-to-earth takes that centred practical cunning and spirit conjuration. Jake believed that magicians shouldn’t be afraid to get their fingers burned in the pursuit of magic and his life and work are a testament to that burning, uncompromising fearlessness.”

Black Candle

It's more difficult to effectively curse a high profile public figure than you might like it to be as they exist more as a complex of swarming ideologies and invested dreams than as a regular person, and the pathway for the work can get lost or diverted within that complex maze.

Similarly, if the substance of your curse consists of little more than a black candle and a spoken charm, it's hubris to expect that to upturn a world. If you have not accrued very much first-hand experience of malefica or know your way around the field of that work and its variables, then trying to throw fairly basic black candle curses at high profile public figures in a live situation with the eyes of the world upon it might not be the best introduction to that sphere of practice, and we should also be mindful of seeking easy solutions to complex problems.

With that in mind, we may then want to approach this sphere with more subtlety and cunning. We may want to be less obvious, less flailing, and more considered in how we move and where we seek to apply pressure. Knowing a few moves to apply pressure is the easy bit. The skill of sorcery is in knowing *where* to apply pressure, and when, and why. Where are the moving parts, how are the dominoes placed, what might be susceptible to being toppled over in such a way that the more difficult target is impacted, and the solid structure is toppled.

It’s always variables all the way down. If you are literally trying to *kill* someone with magic then it's ambitious to expect that you would be able to do that with just a black candle and ill intent. Other factors would need to be in play, and circumstances would need to be stacked up in such a way that your work is just the final straw. It would need a dynamic where you're simply forcing the issue upon something that is already very present and exacerbating a trajectory that there is already ample potential for.

But equally, variables can stack up against the work and make it harder to land something, of which the factors surrounding a public figure are just one set of complicating possibilities among many.

People often describe their activities in this area with imprecise language and speak of curses and hexes, but the specifics around whether you're trying to bring someone a run of bad luck or murk them are best not left imprecise.

Often these things are done hot, in the heat of the moment, and often in response to distressing news stories that feel beyond our control. The energetic pattern is reactive like an instinctive lashing out at something that has hurt or threatens to hurt you.

And there is magic located here – in the way these actions represent an individual or collective reclaiming of power and agency in circumstances where we otherwise feel powerless. It gives tangible shape and form to your dissent, and lends it a gravity that you carry forward with you into the world.

Small, cumulative acts of resistance – affirmed fiercely within your spirit and given tangible shape as a spell – are not nothing, and can impact by contagion creating more conducive circumstances for change through collective attrition, yet malefica is a dish best served cold.

Less coked-up Tony Montana with a machine gun, and more Michael Corleone methodically settling the affairs of his family. "Throwing a Hex" is emotive language, and perhaps just a short-hand, but it's vague and could mean many different types of malign work and potential outcomes.

There is sometimes a disconnect between the passionate impulse to "throw a Hex" and trying to resolve the actual problem. Do you want to bring harm for harm's sake, or are you trying to restore balance to an unbalanced situation, in the spirit of tending a garden by rooting out aspects that will strangle healthy growth.

Would bringing someone a run of bad luck and misfortune be very transformative to the matter of concern? Is the difficult, and for most people, fairly ambitious area of actually trying to murder somebody with magic the only solution you can think of for administering to a situation? Or are you just lashing out and trying to assert agency?

Perhaps your interests might be better served by employing a range of more granular, targeted acts of magic, which seek to undermine a problem from multiple angles until you expose a weak point in the larger structure that you can then further exploit, adjusting tactics as required within the unfolding live situation. Maybe you need to remove someone from the office they hold, or hot foot them out of a position, or distract and confuse so their attention is elsewhere, or occupy them with other matters so they no longer have the facility to cause you problems.

Perhaps it's the moving parts of a person's political campaign that you want to focus on, rather than the figurehead of that campaign. If the top dog is a difficult target, then who isn’t? Who does that hard-to-reach person rely on and what might cause the engine of their actions to grind to a halt if they were taken off the board? Who is already a conspicuous mass of problems waiting for an opportunity to self-destruct, and how might that self-destruction be guided along certain desired lines? What openings and opportunities might be divined within the sprawling, seething eco-system of grifters and propagandists that nourish tin-pot would-be rulers?

Who keeps things running on a day-to-day basis and what would happen if they weren’t occupying that space anymore or began having doubts or making clumsy mistakes in their work? Perhaps you need to make someone just lose interest in their offending activities entirely? Turn sour on it all and drift away to something else. How much energy and effort must it take to sustain these structures of falsehood, fear and bigotry - and what rude uncertainties and awkward conflicts might simmer below the surface begging to be inflamed?

Instead of blindly throwing magical rocks in the direction of the problem as a whole, you might be better served trying to amplify certain qualities that are already inherent in a person or situation. Kindle a small fire and then pour petrol on it. Exacerbate a person's own self-destructive impulses or employ work to sow the seeds of distrust and discord between two people or factions that need to work together to implement oppression.

Fascism means a bundle of sticks and the clue to its undoing is contained in this image. It's only strong when the separate pieces are bound together, and its vulnerability is in the unraveling and unloosening and undermining of these individual components wherever there is an opening.

Duppy Conqueror Sounds 1

It’s Monday — and normally I would aim to send these newsletters out on a Friday to capture the not-doing-anymore-work-this-afternoon contingent, but I’m here nonetheless to interrupt your Monday.

I had planned to post Blazing Fire 2 a few weeks back, but various factors intervened that took away any chance of writing time. Also, in the course of working on an illustration of Abney Park Cemetery to accompany the section about Stoke Newington as landscape of magic, I began to see that there was a better, deeper piece of writing in there trying to get out. Writing and drawing about a specific place is a form of mediumship, and I realised that there were things that wanted to be given shape and form, and I wasn’t adequately doing it. So I’m going to work some more on that and see where it takes me. If there's any point to my writing at all, then it's an attempt to give form and voice to unheard ghosts and the dread whispers of landscape dead heard on the waters, not just for the sake of it.

So in the interim, another Rude Interruption, consisting of various bits and pieces hastily assembled together.

Stealing a Mass in not in fact about the act of stealing a mass, which is when you take a talisman or other sorcerous intention with you to church so that it can be consecrated by its presence at the mass. It seemed like an appropriate title for this piece of writing though, which was originally my response to some occult twitter discourse about whether “Catholic Witches” and “Folk Catholics” were terrible or not. I was trying to describe the vectors of the landscape-based, ATR-adjacent, grimoire-adjacent version of Christianity that exists in my practice, as occultists steeped in modern tropes of neopaganism often seem to struggle with it.

Bedsit Criminals was originally written as some short fiction for an anthology of stories set in David Southwell’s Hookland, but I ended up writing way too much at 18,000 words. It follows the story of aging, former-mod cunning men Tony Wren and Reg Mulgrave as they try to investigate the decades-old disappearance of their friend Anna Pickford. I had the idea of extending this to a novel-length thing that revisits the same group of characters at different points in their lives, like Our Friends in Hookland or something. I haven’t worked on it for ages though, so I thought posting some extracts here might encourage me to write some more of their misadventures.

Also included here is a playlist of recent dancehall and reggaeton tunes I’ve been listening to lately called Mercury is in Reggaeton 9, as well as a review of The Aleister Crowley Manual: Thelemic Magick for Modern Times by Marco Visconti.

Stealing a Mass

There are many well-established loopholes for accessing the magic embedded into Christianity without bolstering the Catholic Church or any other church as an organisation.

Catholicism weaves through traditions such as Vodou and Espiritismo — it's not a mask — but a genuine component. The Kingdom of Kongo converted to Catholicism in 1491, and this Kongo version of Christianity is a real presence in many traditions that have that component.

The Grimoires also obviously have Catholicism as an intrinsic part of their operating system, employing Psalms, consecrations and bindings in the name of God. There is old magic in it, which is not beholden to the worldly church and its works.

Saints and Archangels can be readily worked without any allegiance to the Vatican. Versions of Mary like the Mater Dolorosa in Haiti and Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico or Our Lady of Caridad del Cobre in Cuba take on new meaning while still inhabiting Christianity.

While you can point to evidence of Christian churches being built over older pagan sites in Europe, such as St Brides Church in London, that's not really the point. There are centuries of this magic between ancient paganism and the mid-1950s, and ignoring it is weird.

Texts like the Cyprianic Black Books and texts on Trolldom from Scandinavia show a folk magic that occupies Christianity, folk belief involving trolls and landscape, and the broader influence of the grimoires. This is real magic, but it's often obscured by newer neopagan ideas.

I interact with Christianity in various different ways across multiple traditions, and each with a different feel, Catholic, Protestant, Spiritualist iterations, etc. I got quite into attending Church of England services in various churches located at important magical spots.

Churches that were built on more ancient sites, churches at the top of fairy hills, churches located at crossroads where I did other magic. Stealing a mass is old magic. Gathering holy water and walking circuits of a church is a way of engaging with landscape.

Local saints have power in an area, regardless of whether they are based on any older half-remembered spirit or not. Receiving communion at a site of significance in the landscape is an act of communion with that landscape, as is interacting with the community that worships there

I wasn’t brought up Catholic myself. I used to go to Anglo-Catholic C of E services in London sometimes but I haven't been inside a church in years. My Catholic prayers in Espiritismo are real though, my Catholic prayers in Vodou are real, my Psalms are real. I've seen them be real.

The dynamic of this for me is not very complicated. My sense of "God" is an abstract Divine Source that we come to know primarily through its emanations — which are Spirits, Archangels, Saints, but also literally everything that exists, as well as the dead that once existed.

Plants and trees, seaweed and driftwood, dirts and waters, are all emanations of this abstract Divine source pulsing through everything, and all material components of magic are empowered by essentially being God in a more condensed material form and with a specific aspect.

There's a crossroads where that sort of sense of "God" can intersect with Christianity, and that's really enough to access centuries of workable magic that has lived and breathed through this structure. As long as the reaching towards the Divine is real and genuine, it's enough.

I can't speak for whatever "Catholic Witches" and "Folk Catholics" are, or whether any of these things are fads. I have reason to see things through a Catholic lens because I participate in traditions that have it as an intrinsic component.

Further to that, I found that having had these experiences of genuinely — and with the fullness of my heart — accessing the mysteries that are embedded in Christianity, it offered a solid foundation for various other Christian and Christian-adjacent sorcery that exists.

You will have a much easier time speaking to the dead in Christian cemeteries if you speak the language of the magic that is there and know how to knock on the doors correctly. Christianity, in various forms, is an unavoidable terrain of magic on both sides of the pond.

Bible as magical object. Psalms as spells. Rosaries and Novenas. Holy Water and church dirt. There are a stack of things that can be drawn upon. Even the LBRP started jumping more for me when I became less squeamish around concepts of God and Archangels, and had more of a way to meet it.

I think magic is really more about the person than the style of magic that they do though. People can do magic through some weird lenses, and it doesn't matter, it is still alive. Some people can spend years going through the motions of a system but it still falls flat.

Bandwagon trends in magic can be annoying, but there's always going to be people doing solid magic that will either intentionally or unintentionally fall under the umbrella of any given trend. Every trend that exists is also always going to have wankers in it.

So I think it's more constructive to try and address specific problematic ideas and practices that might exist within a current magical trend or a particular tradition, rather than the broad umbrella itself, as you can't possibly know what people may be doing under that umbrella.

***

People started forwarding this thread on twitter referring to me as a "Christian magician" of all things, so I had to add an addendum that was like, don't get me wrong, my magic has just as much to do with the Devil at the Crossroads sunshine.

Bedsit Criminals

1. The Thing on the Pylon

Tony Wren reached once more into the splayed-open rib-cage of the policeman who wasn't a policeman, and inserted the ticking iron heart. Red-soaked up to his wrists, he fished around in his pocket for a box of Benson and Hedges.

Wriggling, trussed up like a scarecrow under the shadow of the pylon, the head of the imposter lolled around beneath the weight of the adorned police helmet. Thick with tar and pitch, stuck with crow feathers and apple-seeds. Copper wire inserted with toad bone and broken mirror wound about the helmet circumference like a mock crown. Tony wasn't taking any chances.

A low gurgle you could feel in your bowels came from the thing on the pylon. Unintelligible at first, and then erupting into hoarse voice. "It will do no good. The salt book is burned. She is already woven in. In ten years, cold towers will be raised over this island."

"In fifty years the stories will be taken from you. It's happened before. Without them, your children will have empty bellies. They will come to us to be worked to pulp because there is nothing else. Streets drained of warmth. Pubs closed. Roads closed. Only spoiled rancid milk to be sucked from our teat in meager gulps."

Tony lit his cigarette. Caught a glimpse of his reflection in one of the jagged mirrors tucked into the captive police constable's helmet. Took out a comb and drew his neat greased side-parting back into position. Irregular teeth like chipped headstones made an inscrutable grin below his thin lip-warmer mustache.

"Is that so?" said Tony.

"Nothing can be done. The ship has already sailed. The three captains failed. We are well fed over the centuries."

Tony placed a shiny red apple in the mouth of the false policeman as an offering for Old Clip, bringing his diatribe to an abrupt halt. He wound up the clockwork gears of the iron heart thirteen times and muttered words long committed to memory from the Red Book of Bishop Oreleton.

"Well, we'll see about that, my old china. If you're so great and powerful, how come there's a paper bag full of woodlice and mullein stuffed down your trousers?" said Tony.

Undulating skin rippled and hair bristled. A thin film was already starting to form over the wound. It looked less like a person now. That made it easier. Tony flicked the end of his cigarette into the thing's face, turned his back on the scene, and began whistling the tune of 'The Cat and the Cradle' as he continued down the hill.

He was right though. Tony had already scried exactly that in the Wren family mirror and confirmed it with the Moluccan Tarot and other sources. It was the same thing from every angle. The end of the 1970s ushers it in. Within fifty years, the whole world is transfigured — stripped of its hope, purged of the tangled narratives that support it.

Maybe there was something though. Some overlooked corner. A loose thread that could be unravelled. It's always worth having a good rummage to see if there's anything that moves. A Wren doesn't accept a plate of hog pudding if it's turned rotten. Even if it means the unthinkable.

Fuck. There was no avoiding it was there. Tony's whole body gave a slump of defeat as the No. 34 bus trundled up the country lane towards him.

Mercury is in Reggaeton 9

Yes, Nine. I make this playlist every so often of things that I’ve been listening to that are mostly current dancehall and reggaeton tunes, but sometimes some UK grime and drill things here and there. There are another eight of them going back to whenever I started doing that. When there are enough of them I post the link and get maybe three likes from the small subsection of people that care about both objectionable occult takes and perreo tunes.

One of the things I loved about living in Miami is how you would constantly hear the biggest reggaeton tunes of the moment everywhere as the ambient background sound of the town. It was like how dancehall is in south London where you automatically know what the big sounds from Jamaica are because they are everywhere as the texture of the city. I miss that, but still try to keep up on what’s new within these often interrelated and overlapping genres when I can. The last time I made one of these playlists was before the pandemic, as all my windows for listening to music disappeared for some time, but I’m attempting to resume this spiritual practice.

Book Review

The Aleister Crowley Manual: Thelemic Magick for Modern Times — Marco Visconti

I’m not generally known for being the biggest fan of 19th century-style ceremonial magic, so if I’m saying that a book on the subject is good, then that should probably hold some water. The underlying curriculum of material here will be familiar to anyone versed in the milieu of the Golden Dawn and Thelema, but what I think Marco’s presentation of it does really well is add a humanising quality often missing from takes on this magic.

"What does this do and why should I fuck with it?" is a pretty reasonable response to a lot of primary occult texts, and Marco really does address this at every turn, in a way a lot of authors writing about the same material will tend to skip over or divert away from.

I've always got more insight into magic out of candid pub conversations with friends who are experienced practitioners of this or that, where they share their experiences and how those experiences have shaped their understanding, than I have from instructional texts alone. There’s an aspect of that here, where you’re not just getting the method presented from an aloof position, but some active and informative commentary on the experiential nature of this magic and what it is like to bring it into your life.

And perhaps because much of the book is directly based on the author’s online teaching materials assembled to make these practices accessible and workable to people during the urgency and uncertainty of the early pandemic lockdowns, it cuts to the chase of how to meaningfully access this magic.

I'm often critical of the way 19th century occultism has exerted a disproportionate influence over the trajectories of popular magic, and while I veer towards other modes of practice personally, that doesn't mean we should throw the whole Babe of the Abyss out with the bathwater.

Marco positions this book as a manual for beginners, but that sells it short a little, because while I may already be familiar with a lot of the material covered, it has inspired me to revisit many of these practices again by putting the living magic of it front and centre.

So while the crux of the book does walk you through the various anticipated components of a post-Golden Dawn, Thelemic system of magic, what makes it engaging is how it lets you perceive those building blocks through the lens of someone who has made that magic come alive tangibly and experientially.

It's written as an accessible intro text for beginners, but if you already have some familiarity with the material, it also has the side effect of helping you to look at these practices again with a fresh pair of eyes. It reminds you where the magic is and what the point is.

Tune: ABRACADABRA

ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A

I’m still figuring out how I want to use this platform, so expect some inconsistency and trying things out. I think ‘Blazing Fire’ will be more like a magazine format, containing more substantial content and completed writing, and will eventually be the paid subscription tier at some point. And alongside that ‘Rude Interruption’ will remain the free tier for less content heavy bits and pieces, such as reposts of threads I’ve already written on twitter, reviews, etc. So here is my effort at something in that format.

Think of a Green Triangle

This is a repost of something I wrote on twitter a couple of weeks ago trying to challenge the common assertion that visualisation exercises are a fundamental, unavoidable cornerstone for establishing a magical practice. I spent years doing all those “imagine a green triangle in your mind’s eye” meditations when I was a western magic-leaning chaos magician, but I don’t honestly think that intersects with my later spirit-based practice whatsoever. Not sure that Protestant work ethic belligerent picturing of geometric shapes that gets passed from book to book is really the best method for cultivating visualisation either. Anyway, here’s the thread and some further commentary, which I thought of at the time but didn’t get into.

***

I don't really like visualisation exercises in magic as it feels like putting the cart before the horse. It implicitly suggests that you're just making it up, rather than perceiving something subtle yet vividly real. Perception exercises might be a better reframing?

It's another alleged "pillar of magic" that people uncritically take on board, but I don't think pre-Golden Dawn grimoire magicians were doing a regimen of daily visualisation exercises before conjuring the Seven Sisters of Fairy or whatever. It's not really a historical practice.

And it's OK if you get something out of it, but we can be objective about where ideas come from and try to unpack their relative value without feeling like we're betraying the occult football team or occult fandom that we support. Magic benefits from being understood in context.

My own experience has been that "otherworldly perception" is something that develops organically through the process of interacting with spirits and other invisible terrain. You learn it on the job by doing it, and the more you move in this space, the better you start to get at it.

I think an emphasis on visualisation possibly situates you consciously in the driving seat of the process too much, and people falter at it because it's not a very organic method of interacting with any invisible terrain and comes with the built-in premise that you’re making it up.

I'm also not sure that the 19th century (and later) occultists who contributed to these exercises becoming embedded in the repertoire of popular occultism necessarily had the same aims in mind as many contemporary occultists who pitch this practice as fundamental to all magic.

So the issue for me is less about the practice itself - which can have value within its specific sphere - but about practices such as this being exported from their context and uncritically promoted as a baseline working necessity for ALL occult practice, which you can't do without.

Because that isn't really true - and we can point to many other cultural versions of magic that vividly deal in spirit but don't have anything equivalent to visualisation exercises. Yet still, it gets rolled out as this essential building block in all manner of different contexts.

***

When I posted this, despite dedicating two-out-of-eight tweets to trying to assure defensive occultists that I’m not bashing the practice within its own specific sphere, so much as criticising the tendency for it to be promoted as if it were essential to every context of magic, I still got a few defensive occultists in my mentions.

One of the comments argued that visualisation is a useful tool for “manipulating energy, putting up shields, healing, grounding” - but that really just unfolds into further questions for me. What do you consider to be the energy that you are manipulating through visualisation? How do the shields work and what are they shielding you from? Is a visualisation method that occurs principally in your imagination really the best approach for grounding? And most pertinently, where would you say that the magic itself is located here? Are these outlined effects being driven by the visualisation itself or by something else that the visualisation assists?

I know this sort of dynamic is a frequent trope in popular magic, but I’ve never really been satisfied with the idea of magical effects being primarily driven by visualisation of those effects. It feels more akin to the sort of New Age ideas that you would find in things like The Secret or the Prosperity Gospel. If you just imagine a thing hard enough it will come to pass, and if it doesn’t, then you obviously weren’t visualising it sufficiently. Go back and concentrate on the green triangle.

I’ve never been able to buy into versions of magic like that. If I want to protect myself against something, I would want more in my corner than an imagined forcefield that someone has told me would function like a real forcefield on some level just because I am picturing it. If I’m trying to heal myself or someone else, then I can see how imagining the subject being healthy might be a supplementary component, but if your framing has the visualisation doing the heavy lifting here, it seems a little close to odious narratives where peoples’ sicknesses or misfortune are attributed to insufficient positive thinking.

In my own practice - the operative component of the magic is really not located in my ability to mentally visualise it happening, and that creative visualisation then becoming “real” as a result of this imaginal effort. Not even “energy work” behaves like that for me. I’m not really an “energy work” person, but I have some experience of it within my Pencack Silat and Tai Chi practices, and even there - it is not a process that is driven by visualisation. My experiences of Chi or Tenaga Dalam arise out of the movements and breathing exercises of those practices, and are very physical, embodied and multi-sensory. If there is a visual component at all, then the dynamic is again closer to what I experience in spirit work, and it’s more about becoming better at perceiving something that is subtly yet tangibly present as a result of the practice, rather than a dynamic where I’m vividly picturing something in my minds eye with my visualisation skills and thereby willing it into manifestation.

Lastly, I get that we all have different propensities, and visualisation might well come easier to me, as someone inclined towards drawing, than it does to other practitioners. Even in this circumstance though, I would advocate for a gentler and more organic approach to cultivating better visualisation. For instance, attending a weekly life-drawing class, and attempting to map what you see onto paper using a variety of art supplies, is likely going to build those skills with more depth and range than the sort of tedious visualisation homework that gets emphasised in certain books.

Jake Stratton Kent (RIP)

Fucks sake though. This was horrible news to receive this week. I only met Jake a couple of time in real life, but I used to talk with him all the time on Facebook, so it feels like I knew him a lot better than I really did. There was a period (which I would put at around 2012-17 or so) where the comments section under his FB posts was genuinely one of the best places you could find on the internet for lively discussion of magic.

The first time I met Jake was at a Scarlet Imprint event in Brighton where he was speaking, and I was doing a DJ set based on the sorts of records that I write about here. Despite it being Brighton, and Jake being an avowed Rocker, no switchblades or bicycle chains featured in our beachfront dialogue. I think we got along pretty quickly, with us both being working class anarcho-punk occultists at heart, and in our shared appreciation of rockabilly and psychobilly tunes.

This event, along with meeting Jake in person and getting myself a copy of his True Grimoire, were really game changers for me - and more than I realised at the time. I had thought I was probably done with “western occultism” altogether - and had entirely stepped away from it to focus on my interest in Vodou and other ATRs. Yet looking through his edition of Grimorium Verum in the following weeks - it occurred to me that this was the sort of magic that had originally spoke to me when I was a teenager getting whatever occult books I could find out of North Shields Library.

It had all seemed fragmentary and unworkable to me at the time. There wasn’t much in print, and I was reliant on the local library, high street and secondhand bookshops for my occult education. Yet it was these little fragments of spells, extracts from spirit catalogues, and evocative woodcut art - found in the sort of 1970s Encyclopedias of Witchcraft that I would routinely devour - that grabbed my imagination the most.

But since it was only broken shards and splinters of this magic scattered here and there, and not enough to assemble a whole practice upon, I eventually gravitated towards a Golden Dawn-derived practice, Thelema, and then chaos magic. This was magic that seemed more workable, accessible, less fragmentary, and seemingly something that more people did in the present day. In my head - like many people - I also conflated these things, because after all, this later mode of ritual magic did draw upon and incorporate some of the older grimoire material and reframe it according to its own narratives.

Looking at the complete text of Verum for the first time though - and hearing Jake and others speak on it in terms of a “Grimoire Revival” - I realised… hold up - this was the thing that had moved me towards magic to begin with, and there really does seem to be this whole other semi-forgotten version of magic portrayed in these manuscripts that sits beneath the later retelling and reversioning that has flooded the space for more than a century.

The more I looked into this, the more clearly I could see it. Jake’s work was a huge component of this, and I think his personality and online presence conjured some vectors of it into being, but it was also an ongoing culture-wide process of recovery and recapitulation of older magic that had been simmering for some time and was beginning to attain critical mass.

This unfolding process was perhaps in part assisted by these previously difficult to track down texts now being downloadable in seconds onto your phone in PDF format, as well as online communication greatly facilitating note-swapping and dialogue between people translating these works and implementing their magic all over the world. This seemed pretty ironic to me, as someone who had listened to countless “techno-pagans” in the 90s harping on about how the wand has now been replaced by the mobile phone, and trying to organize rituals in “cyberspace” - which at the time only really existed as pre-social media message boards. I never would have guessed that the most tangible impact of communications technology on occultism that I would see in my lifetime would be in the recovery of lost magic from centuries ago.

As well as practitioner translations of a wealth of occult manuscripts that Victorian occultists such as Mathers and Waite did not have access to, this Grimoire Revival also crossed several language barriers and included new practitioner translations of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Scandinavian grimoire texts, which had not previously been available in English language editions. Looked at all together and taken on its own terms, this seemed to present a window on magic that was quite unlike the 19th century lens that it had heretofore been popularly viewed through.

This new reappraisal of grimoire magic was also frequently in dialogue with practitioners of African Diaspora Traditions, where grimoire texts are also sometimes employed around the sorcerous edges of various traditions or have some overlap or entwined history. Le Dragon Rouge and Petit Albert are not unknown in Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo; Grimorium Verum and the Cyprianic grimoires have history with Brazilian Quimbanda; and editions of the grimoires published by L.W. Lauron DeLaurence factor in Jamaican Obeah. In all these instances, the traditions are not mixed, and the manuscripts are pretty much followed to the letter and taken in the spirit that they are written, versus the more modern tendency to decide that the “demons” are really aspects of your own psyche to be integrated, or some other distancing mechanism or reinterpretation.

The next time I met Jake was at another event that we were both booked to speak at, this time in Brooklyn at the occult bookshop Catland. The theme of the event was Old World and New World Conjure, and it attempted to trace these same lines and overlaps, featuring several speakers who had a foot in both worlds as practicing grimoire magicians as well as initiates in ATRs that also employed grimoires (and it also incongruously included me going on about various cemetery misadventures in South London to a likely perplexed audience of New Yorkers).

My abiding memory of that event though was the night before where I went round to the AirB&B where Jake was staying and had some drinks. We were drinking some superb caipirinhas that had been made by the grimoire magician Julio Cesar Ody (author of the book Magister Officiorum) but there were no glasses in this AirB&B, just all these cracked and chipped mugs with missing handles. I sincerely wish that had not been the last time I would get to have a drink with Jake and chat about magic, but that’s a nice memory to have of Jake all the same I think. Discussing the intricacies of grimoire magic with him while drinking excellent cocktails out of chipped mugs in Brooklyn.

Spell: Unsolicited Decay Pics

I started my current @spaceweather9 twitter account in 2018, and this suggestion for something that can be done with unwanted photography of penises sent by horrible men remains far and away the tweet that has received the most engagement and retweets since then. I’ll probably include a regular spells section in this newsletter so this seemed like a good place to start.

***

Why do men still send dick pics when they know they can be printed out and put inside a hollowed out courgette (zuchini) with crushed insects, dog shit, rotting meat & alum powder, and then buried under a poisonous tree in the cemetery while reading psalm 37:2. It makes no sense.

Events

Crossing into Spirit: A Bootcamp for Espiritismo Cruzado

I think there is still time to register for Tata Eoghan Ballard's four week mini-course on Espiritismo Cruzado, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in ancestor practices or spirit work. The course is largely asynchronous and consists of recorded lectures, text components and online interactions with both the instructor and other students. It includes an in-depth history of Cuban Espiritismo Cruzado, and its relation to other Espiritismos and religions; information on the structure and pantheon of Espiritismo Cruzado; how to set up a boveda and begin a practice; and strategies for cultivating ongoing spiritual development and mediumship within the tradition. The course is priced at $250 and you need to contact Eoghan to register via his Facebook page here.

Exploring the Oracle: An Introduction to the I Ching

Interintellect are hosting a salon by Dan Lowe on the I Ching on Saturday, 4 February, looking at the history of the text and its practical application in your life. Here’s the blurb:

The I Ching (or Yi Jing) is one of the world’s oldest books, dating back to Bronze Age China (over 3000 years ago). The I Ching is not just a text to be read, but one to be lived. It’s a book of divination – a text that people can use as a source of wisdom and practical advice about their daily lives. Alongside its cultural significance in East Asia, the I Ching has been a source of fascination for Carl Jung, Herman Hesse, John Cage, and many other intellectuals and creators. In this salon, Dan will give the historical background of the I Ching, its underlying philosophy, explain the language and symbolism, and demonstrate its use, as well as opening a discussion on how to best use the book today.

The two-hour interactive salon is priced at $10 and the page to register is here.

You can also listen to Dan speaking on the life and ideas of Wilhelm Reich on the What Magic is This podcast here.

Tune: Point & Kill

As news reports from Tory Britain increasingly start to read like the Scouring of the Shire, this collision of UK Grime and Afrobeat is like a medicine countering these visions of the blasted gammon wasteland and reminding me how London still generates amazing music out of its cultural overlaps, despite certain parties trying to turn the entire UK cultural space over to ghastly floppy-haired posh boys for the past decade.

Mojubá Elegbá Elegbá agó!
Baralayiki, Eshú odara
Mojubá Eshú lona
M’ore nla
Kosí ikú, kosí arun
Kosí ofo, kosí arayé
Fun mi iré owó, iré omó
Iré omá, iré arikú babawá

Blazing Fire

Welcome to Blazing Fire – a newsletter by Anthony Nine containing new writing, extracts from works in progress and unpublished material. This edition contains an unpublished extract from an article on witchcraft and its slippery, permeable meaning; as well as a newly edited mix of Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo-related music from my vinyl collection that I put together years ago but which has never been online until now.

Skip Witches, Hop Toads began life as an essay in Abraxas issue one, an anthology of occult writing published by Fulgur and Treadwells around the mid-00s. There was a point during the most apocalyptic days of 2020 when I had the idea of putting some of my out-of-print articles into a collection and making them available again. Sadly, however, the computer I was working on failed and I lost all the rewrites I had done, which contributed to the project losing steam.

I’ve kept returning to some of these essays here and there, however - but since I frequently no longer agree with things that I wrote more than ten years ago, all the original essays end up being more like writing prompts for my updated perspectives. Almost none of the extract below was actually in the previously published Abraxas version, for instance, as the rise of popular witchcraft over the past decade left much of it sorely in need of an update. I thought it would make a good candidate for the newsletter as it’s the most recent substantive thing I’ve worked on, and its overarching themes are probably more relevant now than they were at the time.

Haunted Soundsystem was a series of mix CDs that I put together around 2009 or so that attempted to map some of the influence of African Diaspora Traditions such as Haitian Vodou, New Orleans Voodoo, Cuban Regla de Ocha, and Brazilian Umbanda on popular music. I made three of these mix CDs, and the first one (presented here) Haunted Soundsystem 1: Eh La Bas, focuses mostly on Haitian drums and New Orleans tunes. There was a period when I was buying a lot of records like this, so all of these tracks were ripped from various LPs and 45s that I had found on this general theme. I played these records out a couple of times at events in London, and also wrote an article trying to trace the same lines for Strange Attractor Journal 4, which later had an extract published in The Wire.

I had found it frustrating that so many conversations about “occult music” always centered these themes in the music of artists like David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Psychic TV, Coil, etc. The influence of African Diaspora Traditions underpins popular music and weaves through New Orleans jazz and brass band, 1950s big band exotica, delta blues, Afro-Cuban jazz, Brazilian bossa nova, Jamaican ska and dancehall, and more - and I wanted to make those lines of transmission more apparent by putting these records together in a way that would also slap. Soul Jazz Records were talking about releasing one of these mixes at one point, but I left the country around then so it never went any further. I found one of the CDs recently, and realized that this predated Mixcloud and similar, so had never been put online before - so here it is now.

I hope you will find something of value in the various twists and turns of this newsletter. Future substack activity might be less content heavy, but I wanted to start off with something substantial. Further down the line I’m thinking about introducing a paid subscription tier that unlocks a quarterly newsletter that carries more depth of content, if there is sufficient interest in such a thing, and keep the free tier for more ephemeral dispatches. Not gonna paywall anything until I get into my stride with the format though.

Skip Witches, Hop Toads (extract)

With the repeal of the witchcraft laws in England in 1951, it hardly took a moment before the assortment of things we file under the term witchcraft began to reassert themselves openly in England. It is easy to sneer at the false claims that swarm around Wicca, the notion of an English witchcraft, the Margaret Murray hypothesis, never again the burning times, and all. Yet this sudden uprising of witchcraft in the mid-1950s is perhaps best understood in the context of post-war Britain at that moment in time. Into the grim austerity of bomb damage and rationing, after Europe ran red with blood, and with half of London in ruins, came an upsurge of witchcraft to administer to the abscess. Someone followed a will-o-the-wisp in the night and the land and dead began to stir.

There was no Old Religion of Witchcraft that looked like Neopaganism. Historically, the term witch tended to be employed as a pejorative, as it still is elsewhere in the world. Yet the notion of the witch was also slippery, and could sometimes bleed into something closer to other primal monster movie villains such as the vampire and the werewolf. The ravenous shapeshifter of the night that kisses the devil’s behind and turns babies into ointment. Every culture has one. A witch could be this non-human or not-quite-human creature of tatters and blood that haunted wild spaces after dark, or else an otherwise human-presenting individual who secretly trafficked with such malefic powers and called upon them for nefarious purpose.

The rural and urban cunning folk who told fortunes and administered folk magic remedies did not identify as witches. More commonly, they were called upon to apprehend witches or overcome their malefic influence on behalf of their community. Cunning folk were more likely to be the witchfinders, not the witches, and the label “witch” was not really an identity to be claimed so much as an accusation to avoid. Over the course of time, this sense of the malefic witch drifted and became entangled with other ideas.

For decades during the 20th century, witchcraft was uncritically depicted as the survival of an ancient nature religion indigenous to the British Isles, and this idea permanently lodged itself into the popular imagination despite the shaky scholarship it was built upon having been debunked. Academic work on the historical basis for magic has well established that there was never any organised or disorganised religion of witchcraft in the British Isles, and neither did witchcraft exist as any sort of secret society or underground cult that you could point to clear evidence of. Witchcraft, as it exists as an avenue of contemporary Neopaganism, does not have any historical continuity that goes back further than the Gardnerian Wicca of the 1950s – itself significantly influenced by late 19th century ceremonial magic, span through a pastoral filter, more than by an intact survival of pagan folk tradition.

British witches themselves have played a prominent role in the debunking of their own false history, and perhaps having absorbed an influence of chaos magic by osmosis, had few problems separating out the methods they employed and the results they derived, from the spurious stories that had accrued around them. British witchcraft has always known what it is about and quietly got on with it. The haunt of the land, the green that speaks, reading the remnants in china tea cups. As embedded in the folk culture of the island as beans on toast or complaining about the weather.

Contemporary witchcraft is contradictory. It can be all the terrible things at the same time. Dollarstore Gandalfs setting themselves up as self-proclaimed elders. Fingers-in-the-ears to anything that threatens their sense of authenticity, unwilling to accept that supposed ancient rituals are decidedly modern. Trad witches on the grift. Marketing goatskin talismanic books that claim to unveil true and hidden hereditary traditions of witchcraft, but nevertheless still read like every other book on the shelf. Witchcraft constructed as an aesthetic assembled out of tarot cards and crystals, soap and bathbombs. Blurring into self-care and novelty toiletry side-hustles to the point where we almost forget that witchcraft ever meant anything else.

Sorting through the maelstrom of deluxe editions, glamour selfies and dodgy taxidermy, nobody could be blamed for assuming that the whole endeavour of European witchcraft is a colonial sickness. Concocting an ancient tradition that never existed by stitching together disparate components to fill an insatiable vacuum. Fabricating a lost wisdom and pushing it to compete with the surviving remnants of other cultures it has kneeled upon and choked.

Yet somewhere below the melee of artisan stangs and hand-crafted besoms, the vision of the witch is still hardwired into us and will not go away or ebb from memory. Witchcraft is a night flower. It doesn’t come out in the Sun. Turn a spotlight on it and it slips into flickering shadow, but cats and dogs and foxes know a witch when they meet one in the night.

Witchcraft should never be a tool of the colonizer, but it will always be one while fancy and falsehood determine its expression. Witchcraft is not pretending that you have a different history from the one that you have, and presenting yourselves as the priests and priestesses of an ancient European tradition of magic, when it is not true by any reasonable metric.

A thin line of transmission for European magic may be traced from the strategies and dynamics of sorcery reflected in the Greek Magical Papyri, a disparate collection of spells and formulas from Greco-Roman Egypt dating from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century BC, but unpublished until 1986; and the earliest tomes of the grimoire tradition of magic, such as the Hygromanteia, which can be dated to the 14th century. And then onwards into the later grimoires and comparable texts, which set the tone for European magic through the Late Medieval to Early Modern period. And even here we must be careful not to presume that what has been written down portrays a complete picture, let alone signifies an intact tradition to be inherited.

Yet much of what poses as contemporary witchcraft is only tangentially drawn from this deep, shadowy well itself. Popular western magic in its current form, almost all of it, proceeds from the more recent constructs of the 19th century Magical Revival in Europe. Popular magic of the past hundred or so years owes its debt to Victorian and Edwardian scholars piecing together clues from a relatively small selection of historic texts available to peruse in the reading room of the British Museum. And like proto-chaos magicians, remixing and reversioning grimoire echoes with concepts from Jewish tradition, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry in order to complete its narrative.

The colonial gaze further spliced this 19th century reimagining of magic with influences from Eastern thought and practice, drenched in Orientalism, and imported like tea leaves on the engines of Empire. Flawed translations and unreliable narrators brought notions of yoga, chakras and meditation to merge with initiatory theatre and Solomonic stylings. And from this fertile soil sprang imagined reconstructions of witch cults and pagan rites, which repurposed many of the same moves and structures of the Magical Revival, as a methodology for relating to the distant mythospheres of ancient Greece, Rome, Scandinavia and other romantic bastions of European antiquity.

Refracted a thousand-fold through the kaleidoscope lens of the internet, and untethered from any responsibility to objectivity by new age relativism and post-modern deconstruction, a new sense of witchcraft emerges. The feral, vampiric, anti-social night hag is forgotten, and the witch becomes a catch-all term for anyone mildly interested in tarot cards, astrology, crystals, and similar menu items that have populated mind-body-spirit self-help books for half-a-century.

Words can drift and take on new meaning, and there is magic in reclaiming a historically pejorative word as an act of resistance against a cultural hegemony that outlaws and ostracizes. Often the image of the witch is wrapped up with everything the broader culture has neglected and mistreated. There is fear of the other in the witch. The night hag, cruel and barren. The unsettled dead coming back to haunt you. The wronged landscape finding voice. The well that you have poisoned. The way that you have treat nature. The way that you have treat women. The consequences of everything you have done knocking on your door at midnight.

There is no blame for anyone finding solace and empowerment in this vilified figure that stands outside and points its accusing finger at corrupt systems and entrenched power imbalances. The unprecedented adoption of manifold witch identities at this point in time speaks to something, no matter the specifics of its expression. Witchcraft is as much a way of seeing, as it is anything else. Not a set of mythic stories or a world view, not a set of rituals handed down in a lineage, but a way of considering nature and being.

The lycanthropy of the witch points to a fluidity with animal consciousness. Witches get the moon and the crossroads like a stray dog does. Every component and process of nature has a virtue that can be held. Wing of bat and tail of newt. The turn of the earth and the mansions of the moon. Ghost wood and powdered bone. The shapeshifting and hedge-sitting quality of the witch points to a remembrance of faculties eroded and stifled. Nature as a pulsating, participatory mystery with which we are intimately and irrevocably entwined, versus nature as a static resource to be pillaged and plundered.

Considered in this way, through the broadest possible lens, simply as an arrow pointing towards a suppressed visionary sense of the living magic of immersive, all-encompassing nature and its celestial rhythms, even the tackiest, most cash-in book on popular witchcraft can function as a revolutionary tract for someone.

If a seismic shift in how we relate to nature is required to avert the worst of climate catastrophe, then it's counterproductive to sneer and disparage when some of its unfolding and expression is cringe. It misses the point to focus on the aspect that is crass, or poorly informed, or trying to fleece people of their coin, and overlook how these are symptoms of a tangible compulsion erupting and seeding itself through the host culture in myriad forms, not all of them ideal.

A preponderance of remixed versions of the witch rising up out of the blood tracks of the past and asserting connections with the dead and with nature, the passage of stars, the medicine and poison of the Green. It doesn't matter if some of it is wrong or misses the point. There are always going to be jokers and charlatans. If we can identify value in this process happening at scale, and generating greater numbers of spirit mediums, astrologers, diviners, mystics and magicians, then one person accessing the real gear for every fifty or a hundred aesthetic dabblers following exposure to the same trite retelling is still significant.

If you believe that the various practices that sit under the umbrella of magic have meaning, offer medicine and fortitude, serve a purpose, administer to a sickness, reveal mystery, elevate the spirit – then resenting the use of historically inaccurate nomenclature to describe the process of those ideas attaining greater momentum is not a hill to die on.

But neither should this more macro view of the rise of popular witchcraft deter pushback in the spaces where such slippage of meaning causes something essential to be lost or diluted. There's a pendulum swing between the value of increased transmission, and an outcome where the original global and historical sense of the witch is co-opted, neutered and defanged by assimilation into a safe popular culture iteration.

While the genie can't perhaps be put back into the bottle, and people are not going to stop reframing what a witch is at this juncture, it is worth considering who exactly it serves to have such night terrors recast in a tamer, anodyne and more palatable form. The slyest magic diverts and misdirects rather than opposing directly. An enemy can be neutralised by tying them up repeatedly in the wrong thing, or causing them to put all of their energy into a fruitless labour, or introducing a fatal error that leads them down a blind alley for decades at a time.

Haunted Soundsystem 1: Eh La Bas

The cover art that I used for this when it was a mix CD was a photo that I took of a venerable live oak that stands at the crossroads of North Rampart Street and St Peters, at the corner of Congo Square and just up from Preservation Hall. I would always go to this tree to make service for Papa Legba when I visited New Orleans as it seemed like an important gateway to these mysteries. Audio embedded below but it’s also on mixcloud here if that works better for anyone.

1. Papa Legba - Maya Deren

This is on the 'Divine Horsemen' vinyl LP of Haitian Vodou field recordings that Maya Deren made to accompany her book of the same name. There was a 1950s original pressing that goes for money, but I have the later 70s pressing. I actually got my copy of this via Treadwells in London who had got it from the estate sale of an occultist. Maya Deren made these recordings on equipment powered by her car battery, but it really is one of my favourite LPs in the field recording of Vodou songs genre of record.

2. Voodoo Drum - Ti Roro

I became obsessed with this period in the 1950s when the Exotica records of composers such as Martin Denny, along with the beginnings of modern tourism, opened up a market for "songs from the islands" - which frequently ended up being recordings related to African Diaspora Traditions such as Vodou. Ti Roro was a master Vodou drummer who performed in the upmarket hotels of Port-au-Prince when Haiti was a popular tourist destination. Jazz drummer Max Roach studied with Ti Roro in Haiti in the late 1940s, and the Haitian drummer made several records during his career including the fantastic 'Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi', which I have on vinyl as well, but this particular recording is from another LP called 'Songs, Dances & Drums of Haiti'. I love the introduction given to Ti Roro "and his famous Voodoo Drum" on this one, which "exerts a hypnotic influence over the listener".

3. Rhythm Pum Te Dum - Duke Ellington & his Orchestra

This is such an odd piece of music - it doesn't really sound like anything else I can think of. Late career Duke Ellington where he's making all these idiosyncratic records because he can. This is from a 1956 concept album called "A Drum is a Woman" where Ellington is tracing the journey of jazz rhythms from their origins in Africa to the Caribbean and New Orleans and then to New York, through the characters of "Madame Zajj" and "Carribee Joe".

4: Eh, La Bas - Jelly Roll Morton

Papa La Bas is the New Orleans version of Papa Legba, and "Eh, La Bas" is a traditional Creole song that ostensibly means "Hey, you over there", and whether or not there is any relationship between these two pieces of information is something that I will leave to the listener. This version was recorded in 1938 by folklorist Alan Lomax as part of his extensive Library of Congress interviews with the pianist where he talked at length about his background as a barrelhouse professor playing piano in the "sporting houses" of the Storyville red light district in the formative years of New Orleans jazz (which Jelly Roll hyperbolically claimed to have invented himself).

5. Somebody Done Hoodood the Hoodoo Man - Louis Jordan

Louis Jordan was a big star in the late 30s through to the 50s, duetting with Ella Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby and appearing in several movies. While he is less well known today, his series of "jump blues" 78s with his Tympany Five on Decca Records heavily shaped R&B and are clear precursors of rock & roll. Jordan was known for his comedic, narrative-based songs such as 'Saturday Night Fish Fry' that often included lyrics in African-American vernacular. 'Somebody Done Hoodoo'd the Hoodoo Man' is another example in this vein, and I put it here because it's great and because I like the matter-of-fact everydayness of its conjure narrative. I also love the line “ain’t nothing goes over the Devil’s back, that don’t buckle under his chin” as it makes me think of the various cape-wearing Exu statues in Brazilian Quimbanda.

6. Eh, La Bas (live) – Kid Ory & His Creole Jazzband

Another version of 'Eh, La Bas' this time by Kid Ory & His Creole Jazzband. Ory was an early New Orleans jazz trombone player and band leader, who claimed to have played with semi-mythic jazz originator Buddy Bolden, and had a band in the 1910s that included Joe 'King' Oliver and Louis Armstrong. I included this version because it's a good example of 'Eh, La Bas' as a New Orleans brass standard, compared to Jelly Roll Morton's sparse vocal take on the Creole tune recorded by Lomax.

7. Drum Improvisation No.1 - Baby Dodds Trio

Baby Dodds was one of the most important drummers in early New Orleans jazz, his grandfather had been a drummer in Congo Square, and he participated in the New Orleans jazz funeral and Second Line traditions. Dodds was the drummer for King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and then for Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven groups, and he was one of the first artists to record improvised drumming. I think this improvisation from the LP 'Jazz a la Creole' blurs the lines between improvised jazz drumming and other instances of drumming for spirits included on this mix, so you can easily forget what you're listening to.

8. Rasbodail Rhythm - Emy de Pradines

This is from a 1953 LP called 'Voodoo - Authentic Music and Rhythms of Haiti' by Emy de Pradines and the Haitian Danse Chorus and Orchestra, and is another instance of Haitian Vodou music being recorded and marketed as a weird version of island Exotica. Emy de Pradines, later Emerante de Pradines Morse, was the daughter of Haitian musician Auguste Linstant de Pradines, known as Ti Candio or Kandjo, whose songs and performances were popular on the island from the 1890s to the 1930s. Emy de Pradines sang Vodou songs in Creole on the radio when it was dangerous to do so, and she was the first Haitian singer to sign a recording contract with a record company. Her son is Richard Morse, founder of the Haitian roots band RAM, and proprietor of the Olafson Hotel in Port-au-Prince. The liner notes to this record say the drums on this song are influenced by Taino and Arawak rhythms.

9. Danse Kalinda Ba Doom - Dr John

The drum rhythms of Congo Square were said to include the Kalinda and Bamboula - mentioned in many New Orleans songs. The Kalinda, or Calinda, is also the name of an African folk music and stick fighting tradition practiced in Trinidad and other islands in the Caribbean; while the Bamboula is said to have influenced the New Orleans Second Line style of music. This recording is from Dr. John's 1968 LP 'Gris-Gris', the record where Mac Rebennack first took on the name of Dr. John, the early 19th century New Orleans root doctor and Congo Square drummer.

10. Voodoo - Dirty Dozen Brass Band

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band is part of a tradition of New Orleans marching brass band music, closely associated with funerary marches and Second Line, as well as the confluence of Congo Square drums and early jazz rhythms. Early New Orleans brass bands date to the late 19th century and include the Eureka Brass Band, Olympia Brass Band and Tuxedo Brass Band. Formed in 1977, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band were among the first to incorporate funk and bebop elements into the traditional brass band style, which has since become an established part of the form.

11. Two-Way-Pocky-Way - The Golden Eagles

New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians are likely one of the most direct descendants of Congo Square traditions, and the influence of Mardi Gras Indian music weaves through the history of New Orleans music from jazz to brass band to funk. With a history dating to the 1880s or earlier, the Mardi Gras Indian gangs originally used the cover of Mardi Gras masking to violently settle scores with rival masked gangs from other areas in New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton talks about having been a Spy Boy in a Mardi Gras Indian gang in his Library of Congress interviews with Alan Lomax. Since the 1960s, Mardi Gras Indians have turned their rivalry to the sphere of costume making, music and performance. 'Two-Way-Pocky-Way' means something like "Get out of the way or I'll kill you." There are many versions of this standard, but I like this one as it's like a Mardi Gras Indian practice session with just the call-and-response vocals and the percussion. This is from an LP called 'Lightning & Thunder' by the Golden Eagles, featuring Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, who was also in the Wild Magnolias who made an amazing Mardi Gras Indian funk 7" called 'Handa Wanda' in 1970. 'Haunted Soundsystem 3: Two-Way-Pocky-Way' was another mix CD that I made in this series that had a lot of this stuff on it. Not sure if that one still exists anywhere.

12. Ibo - Katherine Dunham

Katherine Dunham was a dancer, choreographer, anthropologist and activist from Chicago, whose proteges included Eartha Kitt and Maya Deren. She made Ocha in Cuban Lukumi and initiated as a Mambo in Haitian Vodou, after doing ethnographic fieldwork on the islands. The 1957 LP 'The Singing Gods' is a collection of recordings of ritual music she made in Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. At the age of 83 she went on a 49-day hunger strike to protest the discriminatory U.S. foreign policy against Haitian refugees, saying "My job is to create a useful legacy". The track title 'Ibo' refers to a Nation of Lwa called in the Reglemen of Haitian Vodou.

13. Papaloko - Toto Bissainthe

Toto Bissainthe was a Haitian actress and singer known for her blend of Vodou themes and contemporary arrangements. She was a founding member of the theatre company Les Griots in 1956, which was the first Black theatre company in France. She made several albums with Vodou themes, and this is from the 1977 LP 'Chante Haiti'. Papa Loko is a Lwa in the Rada Nation, considered to have been the first Houngan. I don't know why I put this cooling Rada section *after* the earlier frenetic drumming section, as that should be the other way around. Not going to mess with the order of tracks though, and it functions as a nice calming reprieve after the preceding brass band frenzy.

14. Erzulie - Emy de Pradines

This is another track from the LP 'Voodoo - Authentic Music and Rhythms of Haiti' by Emy de Pradines and the Haitian Danse Chorus and Orchestra. This song for the Lwa Erzulie Freda Dahomey has an interesting history as it was written by Emy de Pradines' father, the Haitian entertainer known as Kandjo. He had been diagnosed with polio when he was 9, and by the age of 12 had lost control over the left side of his body. Kandjo was carried on his back to a Vodou ceremony, where a celebrant possessed by Erzulie Freda performed a healing that increased his mobility with the aid of a cane. He composed the song 'Erzulie nennen o', here called simply 'Erzulie', when he was 14 as a tribute to the Lwa that had helped him, and it became one of his most popular and best-known songs.

15. Damballa - Choral Group

This is another from the LP 'Songs, Dances & Drums of Haiti'. The male choir doing almost barbershop quartet-style vocal harmonies for the Lwa is a pretty unusual style to find among these recordings. Damballa is the serpent Lwa of Vodou, associated with peace, healing, wisdom and vitality.

16. Dambala - Exuma

Another song for Dambala, this time by Bahamain musician, artist and playwright Tony McKay, who adopted the stage persona Exuma the Obeah Man. After moving to New York at the age of 17, he performed around the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s, and later made several records as Exuma in the 1970s, which dealt in themes of Caribbean spirits and magic. McKay himself was a practitioner of Bahamian bush medicine.

17. Obeah Woman - Nina Simone

Nina Simone covering an Exuma song. She also did a cover of his 'Dambala', so this live recording - possibly with Exuma in the audience as she calls out to him - seemed like an obvious segue from that song. This is often mistaken for a gender flipped version of McKay's 'Exuma the Obeah Man' but it's a different song. More about that below.

18. Voodoo Juju Obsession - K. Pythacunthapuserectus

Yeah. No idea. This is a psych 7" that would always show up in searches for these sorts of records, so I bought it and it's great. It has the musician and composer Janko Nilovik playing on it, but that's all I know about it. Sort of worked here so I put it here.

19. Obeah Woman - Patricia Rollins

This 7" seems to be what Nina Simone was covering. It was written and produced by Exuma with a vocal by Patricia Rollins, and released in 1973 on the Roulette label, a year prior to the Nina Simone live recording. It's probably Exuma speaking in tongues at the beginning and on backing vocals. Nina Simone's version doesn't mention Shango but this one does.

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