0:08

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts

0:10

and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil

0:13

Ford and J.F. Martel. For

0:15

more episodes or to support the

0:18

podcast, go to weirdstudies.com. Hi,

0:22

welcome to Weird Studies. This

0:25

is Phil. This

0:48

week, J.F. and I are talking

0:51

to Amy Hale, a folklorist, anthropologist,

0:53

and leading scholar of the British

0:55

surrealist painter Eiffel Calhoun. Amy

0:58

is the author of Eiffel Calhoun,

1:01

genius of the fern-loved Gully, which

1:03

we discuss extensively in this

1:05

show. The first 20 or

1:07

so minutes of our conversation deal

1:10

with Amy's career as an independent

1:12

scholar and with the importance of

1:14

independent scholarship, which is

1:16

to say, scholarly research and

1:18

writing conducted outside of academic

1:20

institutions. As I say

1:22

in the show, independent scholarship is

1:24

especially important to the intellectual sphere

1:26

of the weird, the

1:28

intellectual weirdest sphere, to coin a

1:30

term. If you want proof of

1:33

this, I urge you to attend Shannon

1:35

Taggart's 2024 Lily Dale

1:37

Symposium, which runs from July

1:39

25th through July 27th in Lily

1:41

Dale, New York, a spiritualist hamlet

1:43

that makes you feel as if

1:45

you've wandered into a John Crowley

1:47

novel. J.F. and I presented our

1:50

work at the 2023 Lily

1:52

Dale Symposium and will once again appear

1:54

there in a live show on Thursday,

1:56

July 25th. Amy

1:58

will be there as well. delivering a talk

2:01

titled, The Making of Magical Cornwall.

2:04

I have been to dozens of

2:06

scholarly conferences and symposia over the

2:08

years, and the 23 Lilydale Symposium

2:10

was the most consistently exciting one

2:12

I have ever attended, in

2:14

large part because of its blend

2:17

of artists and researchers from both

2:19

inside and outside of academic institutions.

2:23

2024's symposium promises to be

2:25

just as exciting, with presentations

2:27

on topics ranging from mediumship

2:29

and remote viewing, to space

2:31

cults and spontaneous human combustion.

2:34

Be there or be square. It

2:38

just occurred to me, what a very square thing

2:40

that is to say. Be there

2:42

or be square. But you

2:45

know what's an even more infallible

2:47

indication of squareness? Not

2:49

joining our Patreon. Get

2:51

hit through your gold-bricking waves. I

2:53

mean you, the guy or gal who's

2:56

listened to every show in our catalog and

2:58

waits impatiently every other Wednesday to see what's

3:00

shaken on Weird Studies, and who still thinks,

3:02

you know, I'm getting around to supporting them

3:05

one of these days. Well,

3:08

I'm here to tell you that today

3:10

is one of these days. Every

3:14

other entity on the planet has upped its

3:16

prices since COVID, but not us. We're

3:18

still offering you primo, written and audio

3:21

content every other week, for the now

3:23

comical prices of three and six dollars.

3:26

Nine, if you're feeling like a Rockefeller and

3:28

want to join our monthly chat. That's

3:31

like finding a diner where you can still

3:33

get a dollar grilled cheese for an actual

3:35

dollar. And what, you're still on

3:37

the fence? What are you,

3:39

waiting for a gold-embossed invitation on

3:41

cream-laid paper or something? Come

3:44

on, moneybags, I know you're good for it. Anyway,

3:48

after our opening discussion of Amy Hale's

3:50

work as an independent scholar, we turn

3:53

to Eiffel Calhoun herself. Amy's

3:56

monograph is broken into six sections

3:58

on Amy's initiation. into the

4:01

kalhoonic mysteries via Eiffel's sprawling archive

4:03

at the Tate Museum, on

4:06

kalhoon's early life, on

4:08

kalhoon's legacy, and,

4:10

sandwiched between these parts, the meat

4:12

of the book, three sections on

4:14

kalhoon's foundational and lifelong commitment, surrealism,

4:18

culticism, and occultism. In

4:21

our conversation with Amy, we bounce from one to

4:23

another of these topics in our usual improvisatory

4:26

way, so before we

4:28

begin, here is a quick thumbnail

4:30

sketch to orient you. Eiffel kalhoon

4:33

was born into a family of British expats

4:35

in India, but moved back to England where

4:38

she felt spiritually homeless. Thus

4:40

began her great work of seeking and

4:42

grounding herself in places of spiritual power,

4:46

which she found in Cornwall, a

4:48

place famously steeped in magic, and one to

4:50

which both JF and myself have

4:52

family ties. After studies

4:54

in London, Paris, and Chemelieu, kalhoon

4:57

pursued an artistic career as a

4:59

member of the London Surrealist scene in the 1930s and

5:01

40s. After

5:04

the end of her marriage to fellow

5:07

surrealist Tony Delrancio and her estrangement from

5:09

the London Surrealist scene, dominated

5:12

as it was by bullying dogmatic

5:14

Marxists, she became

5:16

an independent artist dividing her time

5:18

between London and Cornwall. Like

5:21

many artists, kalhoon felt a profound

5:23

spiritual affinity to Cornwall, and

5:26

in 1959 she moved permanently

5:28

away from London and spent her last 30

5:30

years in the village of Paul, painting,

5:33

writing, and engaging in an occult

5:35

practice that revolved around sex magic

5:37

and earth mysteries. Her

5:39

Celtic mysticism was seated early in

5:41

her admiration for William Butler Yeats,

5:44

himself in a depth of the Hermetic Order

5:46

of the Golden Dawn. As

5:49

a young woman, kalhoon tried to join

5:51

the Golden Dawn and was rebuffed, but

5:53

Golden Dawn magic, like Yeats himself, remained a

5:55

central influence throughout her whole life, even as

5:58

she would come to the village. to

6:00

be initiated into one occult order

6:02

after another. Calhoun's

6:04

work is one in which artistic

6:07

and occult practices are mingled with

6:09

unusual intimacy. If you

6:11

want to get a hands-on feel for it,

6:13

I might recommend that you get a copy

6:16

of Her Tarot as Color, a late masterpiece

6:18

that is now published by Folger Press. Her

6:21

Tarot is devoid of conventional imagery.

6:24

Instead, it presents us with panels

6:26

of abstract figures in gorgeous colors,

6:28

keyed to the Golden Dawn tables

6:30

of correspondences. Each

6:32

card is the outcome of a meditation

6:34

whereby she would pour enamel onto paper

6:36

and allow forms to emerge from the

6:39

chance happenings of the moment. As

6:41

with any kind of divination, chance

6:43

becomes a means by which the

6:45

deepest spiritual currents can well up

6:47

and manifest, and by which the

6:49

artist can harmonize her limited private

6:51

self with a much vaster order

6:53

of being. This is

6:56

the mantic stain technique you will hear

6:58

mentioned in the conversation that follows, the

7:01

conversation to which I have persistently

7:03

alluded, and which my

7:05

lengthy introduction has been preventing you

7:07

from hearing. So enough

7:09

already. It's time to get on with the show. One

7:37

thing that really interests me about your

7:39

book is the

7:41

narrative that came out a little bit

7:43

in the presentation where I first heard

7:45

you speak when we were at Lilydale

7:47

in July 23, the narrative

7:50

of how you came to this

7:52

topic. And also, the

7:54

way this is played into your life as an

7:56

independent scholar, something that I

7:58

think is important in humanity. a

8:00

scholarship anyway with the neoliberalization of

8:03

the university, the increasing degree

8:05

to which humanities researchers are forced

8:08

into a variety of

8:10

kind of part-time and contingent

8:12

and often very kind of

8:15

liminal employment conditions

8:17

in academia. I

8:19

think the issue of independent scholarship is

8:22

important anyway in something that should be

8:24

on the minds of those like myself

8:26

who are fortunate enough to have well

8:29

whether it's fortunate or not is maybe

8:31

another question but like who

8:33

found some kind of permanent academic employment

8:35

but quite apart from that I also

8:37

think that in what I like to

8:39

call the weirdest fear or the intellectual

8:42

weirdest fear that circle of

8:44

intellectual life where we talk about

8:47

magic, esotericism, the occult,

8:50

supernatural phenomena etc and talk

8:52

about those things in

8:55

a way that doesn't assume

8:57

the standard issue default

9:00

historicist materialism by

9:03

which extraordinary human experiences are

9:05

bracketed as funny probably

9:07

wrong things that Philly

9:09

people have fought in the path. That

9:12

zone of intellectual life is

9:14

particularly well supplied

9:16

with independent scholars and independent

9:18

scholarship some of which is

9:21

really the foundation

9:24

of whatever it is I

9:27

mean by the intellectual weirdest fear. So

9:29

I think it's particularly valuable in approaching this

9:31

topic to think about the scholar behind the

9:33

work so I was wondering if I could

9:36

ask you a little bit about that. Absolutely

9:38

Phil and thank you so much for bringing this

9:40

up. I have had kind

9:42

of an interesting career trajectory which I'm

9:44

happy to talk about because I

9:47

get the question a lot about the

9:49

nature of my scholarship and

9:52

my relationship to academia. So

9:55

I'm really happy to go into this in some

9:57

detail in fact I used to teach workshops. about

10:00

this very thing for the American Academy of Religion.

10:03

But one thing that I want to say at the outset is

10:05

that not

10:07

everybody, most people, but

10:10

not everybody who gets a PhD

10:12

in the humanities actually

10:14

wants a tenured position. Not

10:16

everybody wants to be part of the process or it.

10:20

In fact, I never did. And

10:23

I got my PhD in folklore, and

10:25

it was from UCLA, where

10:27

there was actually, in the

10:30

very few places in the United States

10:32

where you can get a folklore degree,

10:34

UCLA is no longer offering that. But

10:37

part of the legacy, I think, of the interest

10:40

in folklore from

10:42

the 1970s is that there was at

10:44

least some sort of emphasis on practical

10:47

skills, on maybe getting a master's

10:50

degree as a terminal degree, which

10:53

is something that you could do there, because

10:55

the idea is that you could potentially, with

10:57

a degree in folklore, go

11:00

into fields that were not

11:02

academic. So you could do policy, you

11:04

could do museum work, you could

11:06

do festival curation, which are still things that you

11:09

can do with a degree in

11:11

folklore. I, very

11:15

personally, I was never

11:17

interested, particularly, in teaching,

11:20

even though I'm pretty good

11:22

with people. I'm actually extremely introverted.

11:25

So the idea of going into a

11:27

classroom, even though I'm good at it,

11:30

don't get me wrong, I'm good at it, but I just,

11:32

I didn't want to do that. I really

11:34

wanted to be much more involved in policy,

11:37

in research. And

11:39

so my first academic job was actually

11:42

doing exactly that. I worked for the

11:44

Institute of Cornish Studies, which is a

11:46

division of the University of Exeter, and

11:49

that was a research institute. And

11:52

I was doing things that I really enjoyed,

11:55

because I felt like my work was a lot more

11:58

engaged. It was also pretty good for college. kind of

12:00

a solitary, locust person like myself,

12:02

even though I'm an ethnographer. And

12:04

then when I left that position,

12:06

because in that position we had

12:09

been trained, we were actually asked

12:11

to develop a master's

12:13

degree that was what

12:16

we would now call hybrid. And this

12:18

was in the late 90s. And so I

12:20

learned how to teach online. And

12:22

when I came back to the States and I

12:24

was on a contract position with the state of

12:26

Florida as a folklorist,

12:30

I came back to the States three weeks after 9-11 and

12:34

that crashed everything. It was a

12:36

temporary contract, but the

12:38

state of Florida, people were not hiring. And

12:41

I really didn't know what to do. And

12:43

this is a huge problem that we have in

12:45

the humanities in general. And I'm

12:47

sure, Phil, you've probably seen

12:49

this issue is that the

12:51

graduate track in the humanities does

12:55

not prepare people

12:57

for jobs outside the professor. So

13:00

when people are trying to figure out, even

13:02

if that's not a thing they want, they

13:05

don't know how to pivot. They don't know

13:07

how to create those networks. They don't necessarily

13:09

have any training. And

13:11

so they're really unprepared for what do I

13:13

do next? It's not like there's this kind

13:16

of incredible buffet. Even though we do have

13:18

skills, we do have things that are useful

13:20

that we can do. But

13:23

I had learned how to teach online. And

13:25

that was something that became a marketable skill for

13:27

me. So I taught that

13:29

way for many years. And one

13:31

of the other reasons that, even though I was trying

13:33

to figure out, oh my God, what do I do

13:35

after my contract with the state of

13:37

Florida ended, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. That

13:41

was something that allowed me the freedom,

13:44

because I knew that I could build an

13:46

income that way, which is what I did.

13:48

And let's be honest, we're talking about how

13:50

do we build an income in addition to

13:52

building a satisfying life? And

13:54

I think we need to talk about

13:56

that explicitly, that we're talking about how

13:58

do we survive. in addition to

14:00

the great life

14:02

of the mind. So I taught

14:05

online and it allowed me to build

14:07

an impound that

14:10

would let me go back to the

14:12

UK to do my research on Eiffel Cauhoon, which

14:15

I was able to do and also because I

14:17

out of the graciousness of my friends in London

14:20

who put me up for you know 20 years

14:22

and continue to when I go over there, they

14:25

supported this research materially in a very important

14:27

way. But I would go there and I

14:30

would teach until three o'clock in the morning

14:32

because I was frequently teaching 40, yes 40

14:35

classes a year, sometimes 10 courses

14:37

in a term and that's pretty

14:39

much. Jesus Christ. And

14:41

I did that until I took a

14:43

consulting job where I was actually

14:46

teaching, I was teaching

14:48

faculty how to teach online and I

14:50

was also doing instructional

14:52

design, I ran an instructional design

14:54

shop and I was consulting on

14:57

curriculum development for institutions

14:59

of higher education. I

15:01

did that until I decided in 2018 that this

15:04

is not the legacy that I wanted to have. And

15:07

it was at that point that I'd

15:10

saved up some money from my consulting gig and

15:12

I left higher education. I

15:15

haven't taught since 2015. I have not missed it to

15:20

be perfectly frank. And

15:22

if I'm rambling too much on this, it's

15:24

because it's something that I actually feel very

15:26

strongly about. Independent scholarship

15:29

is very important. I love the

15:31

fact that I am not fettered

15:34

by academic requirements.

15:37

I enjoy the tune of writing that I can

15:39

do much more now. I still

15:41

occasionally if I feel like I really really

15:43

need to, I will do something that's academic,

15:46

but I enjoy

15:48

telling stories more than I do

15:50

argument points, which is

15:52

what we're supposed to do as academics.

15:54

It's a thing that you are trained

15:56

to do. The essay is about

16:01

crafting an argument. But

16:03

what I really enjoyed about writing Genius at the

16:05

Fern Love Gully was that it allowed me to

16:07

tell a story. And it took me a long

16:09

time to learn how to do that. And

16:12

I'm, you know, something that I'm still working

16:14

on because it's a very, very different form

16:16

of getting information across. To

16:20

kind of go back to the idea of

16:22

the independent scholar. The independent

16:24

scholar is important. I

16:27

really value public scholarship. I

16:29

think engagement with the public

16:31

is absolutely critical. And I

16:33

think more humanities scholars not

16:35

only should choose

16:37

to do that, should be supported

16:39

by their institutions to do that.

16:42

I think that humanities still, and even

16:45

internally, there's this issue about, you

16:48

know, the neoliberalism of the

16:50

university and knowledge

16:53

for the sake of knowledge. And I

16:55

see those too. Knowledge

16:57

production. Knowledge production. But

16:59

also, it really frustrates

17:02

me when I see and I

17:04

saw somebody from the humanities have

17:07

an opinion piece in the New York Times,

17:09

like a month ago saying, humanity

17:11

scholarship, why is

17:13

it important? I don't even

17:15

know. And I'm thinking, really? And

17:19

this whole idea that we should be

17:21

going around parading the fact that the

17:23

humanities are not relevant to the modern

17:26

world. I'm not playing that game even

17:28

as an independent scholar, because I think

17:30

humanities scholarship is absolutely 100% relevant. And

17:32

if I were back in

17:37

that world, and I were running some

17:39

sort of humanities division, and

17:41

the business school came to me and said, Hey,

17:44

we really would like to collaborate with

17:46

with your humanities people on something. I

17:48

see so many of my colleagues going,

17:50

Oh, no, it's filthy lucre. When really,

17:53

we should be saying, great, let's take

17:55

over the business school, because

17:57

we need to be in there. We

18:00

need to be infusing every

18:03

department with

18:05

the skills and the

18:08

values that we have. And

18:10

when we as humanities professionals

18:12

choose to wash our hands

18:15

of those relationships, honestly,

18:18

that was part of my frustration

18:20

with academia. And that's one

18:22

of the reasons why I walked,

18:24

because I didn't want to fight

18:26

those battles anymore with my colleagues.

18:29

Here, here, there's a lot to

18:31

respond to in what you just said. But one thing

18:33

that particularly interests me is

18:35

the distinction that you're making between

18:38

different modes within humanities writing of

18:40

argumentation versus storytelling. And of

18:43

course, you know, there's considerable

18:45

overlap. You make arguments in

18:47

your book and you also tell stories.

18:50

But I've long been really

18:52

interested in storytelling as a modality of

18:54

humanities work. And it's something we

18:56

were to say, what's distinctive about the

18:58

humanities and what maybe does the

19:01

humanities have to offer other

19:03

disciplines, social, scientific, and scientific

19:05

disciplines? I think it

19:07

is that modality, among other things,

19:09

of course. But, you know,

19:12

there's an ethnomusicologist named Stephen Feld,

19:14

who has done a certain amount

19:16

of thinking about this in a

19:19

monograph of his called Jazz

19:21

Cosmopolitanism in Acura, where he's

19:23

like, you know, we don't think

19:25

of stories as doing the work

19:27

of academic argumentation that seems too

19:31

inefficient somehow, lightweight. He's

19:34

like, but actually storytelling can

19:36

do significant intellectual work.

19:39

It's a way of organizing

19:42

ideas, not only as

19:44

sometimes the way people talk about it, it's

19:46

like the spoonful of sugar that makes the

19:48

medicine go down. You know, put it

19:50

in the story, it'll be easier for people to grasp. Although

19:52

that certainly is true. But

19:54

I feel like that storytelling has

19:58

some particular... intellectual

20:00

affordances. It allows you to do a

20:03

certain kind of work, to convey certain

20:05

kinds of ideas. What we certainly think

20:07

of philosophy is being, you know,

20:10

entirely anchored in a practice of

20:12

argumentation and debate, but

20:15

really great philosophers blur the line

20:17

between that and telling stories. You

20:20

know, just a very kind of, maybe

20:22

slightly banal, but and also very dramatic

20:24

example would be like Albert Camus, you

20:26

know, in the myth of Sisyphus when

20:29

he opens the book by saying like

20:32

the question of philosophy is the question

20:34

of suicide, how he puts it. Like,

20:37

is there a reason to live? So that's

20:39

a storytelling mode, right? The classic example

20:41

of the thinker with

20:43

like the typewriter and then the

20:45

gun on his, usually his, in

20:48

this particular cliched image desk. The

20:50

idea is that having

20:52

skin in the game, you know, requires

20:55

you to think of

20:57

ideas in a storied fashion to dramatize

20:59

them, to put them in action. Like

21:01

if the Humanities Department reaches out to

21:03

the Business Department, they should be on

21:06

the basis of certain values and a

21:08

certain engagement with life, which is

21:11

not, you can't represent that

21:13

in a purely kind of didactic

21:15

or intellectual way. There need

21:17

to be stakes and I think they keep the

21:19

Humanities, it's built into the name, right? They call

21:22

them the Humanities because it has to do with

21:24

what it is to be human. How

21:26

should we as humans live, you know? It

21:29

seems like there's this inevitable swerve

21:31

towards story built into the Humanities,

21:34

but doesn't mean that the present

21:36

state of academia recognizes that or

21:38

properly addresses that aspect of it.

21:42

Yeah, it's interesting when you're talking

21:44

about philosophy. I

21:46

mean, I see two things

21:49

happening here. You know, one is

21:51

the subject of storytelling and

21:53

the other one is the

21:55

medium by which we present the

21:57

work that we do. And

22:00

so, you know, I have a PhD

22:02

in folklore and although story was not,

22:05

you know, one of my areas in

22:09

my graduate research, we

22:11

know that it is foundational

22:13

to the human experience. Whatever

22:16

we do, you know, when we are

22:18

talking to each other, we tend to

22:21

relate pretty much everything in a narrative

22:23

form. And interestingly, the only

22:25

time that I've ever taught a course on

22:28

story was when

22:30

I was working for Golden

22:32

Gate University, which is a

22:34

business school operating out of

22:36

San Francisco. And I

22:38

was in their liberal

22:40

arts department and I taught a

22:43

course on storytelling for business students.

22:46

And in fact, that is

22:49

something that you're seeing come up

22:51

now again in non-liberal

22:54

arts environments in

22:56

universities, because if you

22:59

look on the back of any cereal

23:02

box, right, pick

23:04

up your Quaker oats. What

23:06

are you going to get? You're going to

23:08

get the story of Quaker

23:11

oats and it's going to be some sort,

23:13

you know, insert a

23:16

heartwarming tale of the

23:19

oldie entrepreneur

23:21

or the good people of wherever

23:24

in probably the 19th century or

23:26

even older and how

23:29

they developed this great

23:31

thing that you're eating and

23:33

now you are experiencing years

23:35

of tradition and good, honest,

23:38

hardworking values. These things are

23:40

built into marketing because this

23:42

is what we love. And

23:44

it's again, talking about

23:46

how we, how

23:49

we convey emotion and

23:52

sensation and affect

23:54

and connection. And

23:56

those are the things that work on people. So

23:59

this is actually something that maybe

24:01

we should be paying a little bit

24:03

more attention to with how we try

24:05

to get some of our ideas across.

24:08

We can make all of the intellectual

24:10

arguments that we want and they can

24:12

be very good and very fine ones

24:15

and very data-driven. But

24:17

if you are not making somebody feel

24:20

something then you're probably going to lose

24:22

them. When I

24:24

think about what I want to do with my

24:26

own work and what I want to do with my own writing, I

24:29

want to be able to embrace

24:31

a method and a modality

24:34

that will allow people to have some

24:37

sort of connection to

24:39

what I'm writing about. Now

24:42

in humanity's scholarship I think

24:44

that there's still in some

24:46

places a resistance to that

24:49

in academic production. Oh certainly.

24:52

You know people who work

24:54

in ethnography where you've got

24:56

that embrace of subjectivity which

24:58

allows for more storytelling and

25:00

for better more interesting ways.

25:04

And when we're talking about the kind of stuff that

25:06

we're all into, the weirdness, then

25:08

that subjectivity and being able to

25:11

talk about that is even

25:13

more important. Yeah absolutely.

25:16

You know and I think that there's more

25:18

potential for that but I think

25:20

the embrace of that academically

25:22

has been very very uneven and there

25:25

are still places where you're going to

25:27

get push back because it seemed is

25:29

not empirical. Or

25:31

from within a more kind of

25:33

cultural studies side of

25:36

the humanities academia, I

25:38

have often encountered a casual

25:41

way of thinking and

25:43

speaking that equates narrative

25:45

with falsehood. Because actually

25:47

you were just providing us with some pretty good

25:49

examples like the narratives on the back of a

25:52

box of oatmeal or whatever where

25:54

narrative is more or less the same

25:57

thing as branding and that's

25:59

unavoidable. I mean, this is

26:01

true also in our humble podcast that

26:03

we have a certain way of expressing

26:06

who we are that's not dishonest, but we're putting

26:08

it in a certain kind of narrative form so

26:10

that people kind of understand what it is we

26:12

do. This throws you

26:14

back into the perennial question of rhetoric,

26:16

which is an issue that goes back

26:18

thousands of years, which is

26:20

like rhetoric is an art and

26:22

it is undeniably efficacious. And

26:25

somebody who wishes to persuade a

26:27

listener of a certain point of

26:29

view can't just use

26:31

argument and expect to carry it

26:33

today. But then there's always been

26:35

this ambiguity around rhetoric as

26:37

something that is both inevitable

26:40

and also desirable, but also feels

26:42

like it has a little too

26:44

much to do with the hydraulics

26:47

of human politics, of like how you move

26:49

people around and get them to do what

26:51

you want them to do, which actually,

26:53

now that we think about it, there's

26:56

always been a very short line

26:58

between rhetoric and magic and magic

27:00

always having a rather similar taint

27:02

that it carries and for the

27:04

exact same reason, because as our

27:07

dear friend Lionel Snell sometimes

27:09

says, the thing that,

27:12

or one thing that

27:14

reliably differentiates magic, capital

27:16

M and his fourth

27:19

part system of magic, art, religion, science,

27:22

that something that differentiates magic

27:24

from art is the in

27:27

order to part that you might create

27:29

a work of magical art, but it

27:31

might be in order to experience a

27:33

certain kind of illumination or

27:36

in order to share a certain kind

27:38

of illumination. But the purely

27:40

disinterested, you know, making it for

27:42

its own sake, that kind of

27:45

autophilic creativity is something that

27:47

he would associate more with the art side.

27:50

And as such, magic has

27:52

always had a rather, I

27:54

don't know, it always

27:56

seems to be a little bit sketchy

27:59

in art cultures. somebody like Eiffel

28:01

Calhoun whose art is so

28:04

magical and so aimed

28:06

at processes of personal transformation.

28:09

I can imagine that

28:11

a sort of a parallel conversation

28:14

could be had on the one hand

28:16

the uses and missy uses of rhetoric

28:19

or storytelling and on the other hand

28:21

the uses and missy uses of magic

28:23

for art to paraphrase the title of

28:25

Nietzsche's. So we're making our way

28:27

towards Eiffel which is good but before

28:30

we go there because I think it's a

28:32

really interesting place we've landed because I think

28:34

that the intersection of magic using

28:37

the word broadly the occult occultism,

28:40

esotericism, the

28:42

intersection of that and art is actually

28:44

absolutely central to your book at least

28:46

to your interpretation of Eiffel. When when

28:48

she was sort of rediscovered it was

28:51

first as a surrealist but you're arguing

28:53

in your book that she was much

28:55

more than the forgotten

28:57

surrealist but rather a pioneer

29:00

of an emergent form of art at the

29:02

end that you call esoteric art which

29:05

is different from religious or

29:07

visionary art. I now want to

29:09

get into all that. To get back a little

29:11

bit to you Amy because I'm curious about this. Where

29:14

does the your interest in Cornish

29:17

folklore and Cornwall in general come from?

29:19

Because I'll tell you something just a

29:21

personal connection I have with Cornwall. I've

29:23

never been to Cornwall. There's

29:25

a really kind of

29:27

lame industrial town near my

29:30

hometown of Ottawa called Cornwall and so

29:32

the association has always been you know

29:35

skewed in that direction for me. When

29:37

I was like 16 years old

29:39

maybe 15 I was

29:42

stricken with like a really serious

29:44

case of what you call Celticism.

29:47

I became obsessed with finding out if

29:49

I had Celtic ancestry and became this

29:51

huge obsession and I knew that my

29:54

mother's name her family name is Gratton

29:57

and I did a bunch

29:59

of research. and I was hoping

30:01

her family was originally from Scotland

30:03

and her island. Scotland would have

30:05

been the best at the time because I just watched Braveheart.

30:09

But finally the data came back and

30:11

the family came from Cornwall and I

30:13

was like, oh, that's so lame.

30:15

At the time I

30:17

didn't know how mystical and strange

30:19

and interesting Cornwall was. But

30:23

that actually got me interested in Cornwall. And

30:25

then I started to discover, you

30:27

know, again, I've never been there. I've only read

30:29

about it. Just the

30:31

deep kind of connection between

30:34

Cornwall and a particular apprehension

30:37

of otherness, of strangeness

30:39

in British society in general,

30:41

in British history. But

30:43

also just thinking the incredibly rich

30:46

history of the region and its

30:48

engagement with, I don't know what

30:50

to call them, alternate modes of thought, etc.

30:52

Could you talk a little bit about your

30:54

interest in Cornwall, what brings you back there

30:56

and maybe how this plays into the

30:58

story you're telling in your book? Sure.

31:01

Well, first, you

31:03

got to get to Cornwall, man. I mean,

31:06

you know, I will

31:08

say that I keep going back

31:10

because it has never

31:13

ceased to be amazing

31:16

for me. And

31:18

I don't mean that in any kind of

31:21

romanticized way, although, you know,

31:23

it's got all of that,

31:25

but I love it works and

31:27

all. You know, I love the gritty parts. I love

31:30

the hard parts. I love the poor

31:32

parts. I love the beautiful coastal areas. You

31:34

know, it's just an

31:37

amazing place and has a history of being an amazing

31:39

place. But you know, my own

31:41

story with it is like you, I caught

31:43

a bad case of Celticism when I was

31:45

about 15, 16. That was in

31:48

the mid 80s. And in

31:50

a way, although I have continually interrogated

31:52

that, it's never really let up. What

31:55

I was looking for back then, because

31:57

it was, you know, about the same

31:59

time. that I started identifying

32:02

as a witch and as a

32:04

pagan, which I still do. And of

32:07

course those things kind of came together in

32:09

this very heady mixture for me, Rhythmist of

32:11

Avalon, and whoo there we go. My

32:14

bachelor's degree is in anthropology and

32:16

my goal when I left

32:18

high school was that I wanted to find the

32:20

roots of the kelvs because they

32:22

were super magical. And an

32:24

interesting thing that was happening during the 80s,

32:27

which I didn't recognize at the time, but

32:29

kind of wonder why this happened, there

32:32

was a book club, I don't know

32:34

what it was, but there was a

32:36

book club in the States and

32:38

they were selling a lot of reprints

32:42

of kind of esoteric Arthuriana and

32:44

esoteric Celtic stuff from the 19th

32:46

century and they were just repackaging

32:48

it and selling

32:51

it. And of course you know we didn't exact, I

32:53

didn't exactly have the critical apparatus for it, but my

32:55

mother saw these things just like, oh

32:57

Amy would like these. Also she

32:59

did that, they did a reprint of

33:02

Crowley's Magic and Theory in Practice. So my mom

33:04

got me that at 16, she's like, oh I think you'll

33:07

be interested in that. Well she was right. Aw

33:11

thanks mom. But

33:13

you know she got me all these

33:15

books and so I was reading all

33:17

of this kind of crazy 19th century

33:19

ethnography that had this very perennialist viewpoint

33:21

that was locating you know the kelvs

33:24

and with this kind of wisdom

33:27

traditions, magical traditions and

33:29

I kind of wanted to know what that

33:31

was about. So when

33:33

I was an undergraduate I wanted to

33:35

understand why

33:38

people were so interested in

33:41

that thing we call Celtic. And

33:44

I have really continued to interrogate that

33:46

because the context for what that means

33:48

and how that is expressed have shifted

33:51

so dramatically. So when I

33:53

was an undergraduate at New College in

33:55

Florida, which if anybody is

33:58

familiar with, shout out to new

34:00

college because it was a great

34:02

institution. I had

34:04

the ability to do some independent research for

34:07

writing my BA thesis. I

34:09

went to Galway and I did self-directed

34:12

fieldwork or which

34:14

meant going to a lot of pubs really,

34:18

into a lot of trouble at 20. But

34:21

I went and I sunk my teeth

34:23

into, and this was 1989. I

34:29

was interested in how people were interested

34:31

in the idea of the Celts back

34:33

in 1989. What

34:36

fascinated me was at that point the people

34:38

I was talking to, Ireland was very poor

34:40

and they're like, you know, we're really interested in

34:42

the fact that we're going to be joining the European

34:44

Union and that that's going to come

34:46

online in the early 90s, and

34:48

that's going to really improve our condition.

34:51

I found that fascinating. When

34:53

I went to graduate school and

34:56

I wanted to continue studying kind

34:58

of meta-Celtuses really

35:02

in the early 90s. I

35:04

wanted to explore a place where

35:06

Celtic was problematic in a different

35:08

way. Ireland was great. In

35:10

1994, I went to Cornwall and I started

35:15

working with some language activists there. The

35:18

language movement at the time, I mean, it's

35:21

still challenging, but the language movement was very

35:23

fractious. It was also very

35:25

passionate. What really

35:27

gripped me was not that

35:30

the landscape was beautiful and that there were

35:32

all of these romantic

35:34

Celtic notions about Cornish

35:36

heritage, but that it was

35:38

a social justice issue, and

35:42

that the Cornish were and

35:44

are a distinctive ethnic

35:47

group within the UK, and

35:51

that the place was and is

35:54

impoverished, and that

35:56

there were people who wanted a measure

35:58

of self-determination and were not. being

36:00

heard within that framework, hearing

36:02

those stories, and

36:05

learning the relationship between colonization

36:09

and certain social justice

36:11

movements, and the

36:13

story since the 1700s of what

36:17

it means for people in that part of

36:19

the world to be Celtic, that is the

36:21

thing that keeps me interested in what that

36:23

story is, and what

36:25

Celticity means for people on the ground,

36:27

whether that's in a spiritualized sense, whether

36:29

that's in a political sense, and sometimes

36:31

how those things play together, and sometimes

36:33

how they don't play together. And

36:36

those stories have never stopped

36:38

being interesting or relevant for

36:41

me, and watching how Cornwall

36:43

and Cornwall's Celtic identity changes

36:45

and morphs and intersects with all

36:48

of these different things over

36:50

time is just gripping.

38:00

You You

39:00

You Reason

39:15

where that Cornwall is relevant in this

39:18

particular context is that I feel

39:20

Calhoun Lived in

39:22

Cornwall for many decades considered it her

39:24

spiritual home I would say although she

39:27

had many spiritual homes. It seems she

39:29

was I mean you picked

39:31

a very complicated and complex character To

39:33

focus a book on which is great.

39:35

It's amazing how many Threads

39:38

you managed to keep you

39:41

know weaving through this book, you know, every time

39:43

I've made a list of all of the different

39:46

traditions movements Disciplines

39:48

that you touch on in your book

39:50

It's an incredible weave work that you've

39:53

managed to pull off here to try

39:55

to get to the essence of who

39:57

this fascinating woman was,

40:01

but certainly a big part of that was

40:03

her attachment to Cornwall and how she chose

40:05

it as a kind of base

40:07

of operations at some point. And

40:09

in the book, you don't shy away from either side

40:11

of that, like the laudable kind of interesting

40:14

and creative aspect of that,

40:16

a Celticism that she

40:19

kind of represented, but also the problematic aspects

40:21

of it. Maybe you can

40:23

tell us a little bit about Eiffel in Cornwall and

40:25

why she ended up there or how she ended up

40:27

there. Maybe that can get us going, moving

40:30

towards her character and her work. Sure,

40:33

sure. Colleen's relationship

40:35

with Cornwall is interesting. It

40:38

was definitely highly

40:40

romanticized. I

40:43

think that previously, as

40:45

people have come to embrace

40:48

her as, I kind of am thinking of her

40:51

almost like a Cornwall-based Frida Kahlo

40:53

figure in the way that

40:55

she's been embraced by a number of

40:58

people in Cornwall, both Cornish and non-Cornish.

41:01

I think there was this idea that

41:03

when she came to Cornwall to get

41:05

her, when she got her studio at

41:07

Vau Cave, which she

41:09

had intentionally kept primitive,

41:12

that she didn't have the means

41:15

that she actually had. Because

41:19

she did keep it very primitive,

41:22

kept it without running water. She

41:25

bought Gluck's studio in Hampstead.

41:28

Not bad. She was going

41:30

back and forth between Cornwall and

41:33

London. Until

41:35

she moved to Cornwall full-time and

41:37

bought some land and property there

41:40

in the late 1950s, the

41:42

press considered her to be a

41:45

London artist. She even

41:47

said in The Living Stones, her book about

41:49

Cornwall, that she had never spent two seasons

41:51

in a rose air. I

41:54

think it's really important to place her as somebody

41:57

who, until the last

42:00

part of her life that she existed

42:02

in a couple spaces. She

42:05

started going to Cornwall as, well,

42:07

she went probably as a child,

42:09

but she started really exploring Cornwall

42:12

and developing a very specific relationship

42:14

with the sacred sites there as

42:17

a war evacuate in probably 1939, 1940. She

42:22

left London and went to Cornwall.

42:24

And we see from some of her earliest,

42:27

I call them earth mysteries pieces, where

42:30

she's looking at the idea

42:32

of and representing her series

42:34

about energy transmissions and portals

42:36

and other dimensions through these

42:38

sacred sites in Cornwall. After

42:41

she starts encountering them with people who

42:43

were playing with automatism in 1939, the

42:45

surrealist kind of

42:48

goes down to Chamelea and

42:50

she works with the

42:52

surrealists there, Revoter

42:54

Mata, Gordon Ansela Ford,

42:57

who are interested in ideas

42:59

of the fourth dimension, automatism,

43:02

she kind of takes those, she goes to

43:04

Cornwall, she goes to these sacred sites she's

43:06

still working at with ideas of the fourth

43:08

dimension, and energy

43:11

exchange, electromagnetic currents

43:13

under the earth, and how our

43:15

bodies can connect with them. And she finds that

43:17

Cornwall's a really potent place for that. Of course,

43:19

she's not alone in that. There ends

43:21

up being a whole history of people who

43:24

are interested in that in Cornwall because

43:26

there's so many megalithic monuments and ancient

43:28

sites there. So that's really

43:30

kind of her first foray. But she

43:32

also has a passion for the Celtic

43:34

and for her own sense of Celtic

43:36

identity. She was born in

43:38

India of a colonial family.

43:41

When she came to England and as

43:43

she grew up, I think she felt

43:45

very decentered. She didn't feel

43:47

English, she didn't feel Indian. So

43:50

she looked to her Celtic ancestry

43:52

and tried to figure out how

43:54

she could ideologically make that fit

43:56

with a lot of the spiritual impulses that she

43:59

was also developing young person her

44:01

relationship with the occult. And

44:03

so she ends up going

44:05

to Cornwall, having these super powerful experiences like

44:08

many people do, and eventually

44:10

settles there in the late 1950s.

44:12

But yes, even though she

44:15

was absolutely aware of and

44:17

articulated the colonial

44:19

relationship between Cornwall and England,

44:23

she is still much

44:25

more interested in affairs of

44:28

the spirit than she is pushing

44:30

for political self determination for Cornwall.

44:34

For me, she's kind of a historical

44:36

case study sitting in

44:38

between these tensions of

44:41

how celticity becomes defined and

44:43

enacted and performed by people

44:46

in both a spiritual sense and

44:48

in what we might call understandings

44:51

of and constructions of ethnicity. You

44:55

introduced me to a term that I

44:57

had not been aware of before, a

44:59

cardiac celt, which I

45:02

rather like, which is to say celticism is

45:04

an elective identity, is something that you feel

45:07

in your heart. And that

45:10

can also become a magical identity. And this

45:12

is an interesting, this is actually getting back

45:14

a little bit to something I said earlier

45:16

in our conversation about the trickiness of

45:18

magic, that it so often seems

45:20

to trade in the same

45:23

kind of smoke and mirrors, massaging

45:28

of reality or packaging of reality

45:31

that we might associate with rhetoric,

45:34

generally branding, and so

45:36

on. I think

45:38

a lot of modern conversations

45:40

around identity are very

45:42

interested in asking what are the

45:44

material conditions under which you can

45:47

claim a given identity? Are you

45:49

actually Celtic? What is

45:51

the measurable aspect of your political

45:53

commitment or the material

45:55

basis of your political commitment? And

45:58

when we're talking about

46:00

anything magical, we're no longer necessarily

46:02

talking about material bases, but something

46:04

much subtler and made of, as

46:06

I like to say, ideas stuff.

46:09

So it occurs to me that Calhoun would

46:11

be an interesting

46:13

in-between character as somebody

46:16

who feels very passionately

46:18

the issues around Cornwall,

46:20

including political issues, but

46:23

is not engaging with identity

46:25

in quite the same way that a lot

46:27

of contemporary people would think

46:29

of as identity. And

46:32

likewise, just as a political figure,

46:34

I think you make a very

46:36

good case for her being a

46:39

kind of feminist figure, somebody who

46:41

has a lot of relevance to

46:43

our understanding of feminist art, as

46:46

indeed a number of recently

46:49

either rediscovered or reassessed

46:51

female artists like Hilma of

46:53

Clinton, for example, have

46:55

been. And yet at the

46:57

same time, as you point out throughout this book,

47:00

if we were to typify

47:02

her politics, it would be a kind

47:04

of perennialism

47:06

we might associate with René

47:09

Guinon or indeed

47:11

Julius Ivala, who are,

47:13

to put it mildly,

47:16

politically questionable

47:19

characters, a perennialism that asserts

47:21

that basically the entire

47:23

project of modernity is a mistake.

47:26

A project of modernity that underwrites exactly

47:28

the same notions of identity that I

47:30

was just talking about, but

47:32

that of course goes much deeper

47:34

than that or is much more extensive

47:36

than that. A perennialist idea is, among

47:40

other things, a position that

47:42

holds the relationships

47:44

of different classes within society

47:46

is ordained by divine order

47:49

that to the extent that people

47:51

determine their own place in society,

47:53

they may be going against God or

47:55

going against a kind of a natural

47:58

order that does not change, that's. why

48:00

they call it perennialism. And

48:03

this is not, by the way,

48:05

saying that therefore we should think

48:07

of Calhoun as a terribly problematic

48:09

character and an unreliable figure in

48:11

either Celtic movements or movements of

48:14

any other kind, but simply to

48:17

try to get at something that I think

48:19

is very strongly developed in

48:21

your book, which is that she's a complex

48:23

character who contains

48:26

multitudes and multitudes of

48:28

ambiguities and contradictions. Well,

48:31

that's a tasty can of

48:34

worms that you set in front of

48:36

me. Luckily, it is one that

48:38

I have had thoughts on.

48:41

First, I definitely want to credit

48:44

Marion Bowman with the phrase cardiac

48:46

kelp. It is

48:49

so exceptionally useful in

48:52

helping to, I think, gently

48:54

unpack that impulse that

48:57

we see in what is

48:59

called Celtic spirituality, which is really where Marion

49:01

has done a great service

49:03

in her academic research. So definitely

49:05

point people toward her work on

49:07

that. Yeah,

49:10

so, I feel in politics

49:12

and traditionalism and all

49:15

that stuff. First, she absolutely

49:17

read Gwenhall. She read Gwenhall.

49:19

She was reading him pretty early on.

49:22

She also read and was very inspired

49:24

by Oswald Spengler. You

49:27

know, and I see

49:29

these things and like, oh, dude, really. But

49:32

I mean, I don't have any evidence,

49:34

although she probably did, you know,

49:37

given her wide

49:39

background, she probably did

49:41

read Ebla. But

49:43

I don't see a lot of his

49:46

influence in her work probably because, you

49:48

know, sexist AF, right? So his

49:51

hatred of women was, it wasn't

49:54

somewhat disqualifying, wasn't subtle.

49:56

So I think even if she, you know, took some

49:58

stuff away from her, I don't know. She

50:00

probably would have been put off by that. I

50:03

think there are a couple of things at

50:05

play, and one of which is

50:08

that kind of capital T

50:10

traditionalism and perennialism, which really

50:12

infused her work. And

50:15

then the very changing

50:18

political landscape where

50:20

we now find ourselves in

50:22

relationship to some of these thinkers.

50:25

I honestly feel that

50:28

if Cole Hoon was around

50:31

today, that she would

50:33

probably be way more far away than I

50:35

would be comfortable with. You

50:37

know, there are a lot of things though that

50:39

she actually didn't, or that I

50:41

have not seen evidence for. There are

50:43

a lot of places that she didn't go.

50:46

She absolutely felt that each culture and each

50:48

group had an essence. And

50:51

I think when we're talking about this stuff and

50:53

where it becomes, you know, when it becomes really

50:55

problematic is this idea of

50:57

essentialism. And whether it's

50:59

gender essentialism or cultural essentialism, it

51:02

is really the embrace of these

51:04

ideas of essences, which

51:06

are something of course, that drives

51:09

a lot of magical practice. And

51:11

that there are people who are luckily also

51:13

unpacking, but you know, let's be honest, correspondences

51:16

is, you know, planetary magic, all

51:18

these things, they're about essences. They're

51:22

about working with and expressing essences. So it's

51:24

like, you know, when we're doing magic, are

51:26

we doing this because we really believe that?

51:29

Or are we doing this because we're finding it artful? And

51:32

I think that there's, we can

51:34

transition onto that too, because I think

51:36

that that's magically

51:38

where people are pushing back against

51:40

some of that essentialism right now is a

51:43

really interesting question.

51:45

But for her, those essences were very, very real.

51:47

So we do see things in her writing

51:49

where she she's like, look, every

51:51

culture's got its own thing, and you just

51:53

got to kind of find your place and

51:56

nothing's any better or worse than any other.

51:58

And I really. feel that she

52:01

believed that today, I don't think that's

52:03

a particularly useful concept for us to

52:05

be holding. And so

52:07

for somebody who did hold it, she at least

52:09

wasn't terribly gross about it. I

52:12

think we should probably make a

52:14

distinction between perennialism and traditionalism. I don't

52:16

know. Yes, that's useful.

52:18

A lot of quite liberal or

52:21

progressive figures in the

52:23

past. Somebody like Aldous Huxley

52:25

was a perennialist. There are

52:27

many, many examples. That's just the one that comes to mind.

52:29

Whereas traditionalism tends to veer

52:31

towards a kind of thinking

52:34

about castes and thinking about like

52:37

one tradition having been corrupted, but

52:39

existing in its pure form somewhere,

52:41

usually near where I live. This

52:45

is very true. And I did

52:47

conflate those two terms illegitimately, for

52:49

which I apologize deeply. I

52:52

think they're both prone to essentialism. Well,

52:54

they intersect. They intersect

52:56

hugely. And most traditionalists

53:00

were or are perennialists. Yes,

53:02

yes, exactly. Exactly. And they both

53:04

share a kind of essential

53:07

investment in essences. But

53:09

what you argue in the book is that, I mean,

53:12

another part that you actually get into

53:14

her like quote unquote

53:17

gender essentialism when

53:19

she, for example, espouses traditional

53:21

ideas of what constitutes the feminine and the

53:24

masculine and all that. But

53:27

your argument is that the way she deployed

53:29

these ideas, the way she used them in

53:31

her art and what she did, what she

53:33

did in her generation, what she was able

53:35

to accomplish, where she was

53:38

willing or had the guts to

53:40

go, despite the strictures and constraints

53:42

put on her gender in

53:44

her time, that is where

53:46

we should try to derive

53:49

some idea of what she represents,

53:51

for example, within a feminist context.

53:53

It's like she accomplished things as

53:55

a woman that were

53:58

not easily accomplished. in

54:00

that time, I was

54:02

just blown away by her

54:05

prolific output. I

54:08

mean, she's a fantastic painter,

54:10

an amazing thinker, incredibly learned

54:13

in matters of esoteric science

54:17

and whatnot, and able

54:19

to synthesize her occult

54:22

interests and her artwork in

54:24

a smooth way. It's really kind of

54:26

beautifully married. There's a

54:28

vision driving her. How

54:30

we assess that vision now

54:32

politically or ethically or culturally

54:35

is, in a way, probably ultimately less

54:37

important than just recognizing the sheer... Like

54:39

you call her... The subtitle of your

54:42

book is The Genius of

54:44

the Friend-Loved Gully. Like there's something kind

54:47

of monumental about her as a figure

54:49

within the history of art and the

54:51

history of ezoterrorism in the 20th century.

54:55

And that is probably where we should focus

54:57

our energies if we want to assess what

55:01

this person has contributed. Absolutely.

55:04

I'm kind of a sucker for figures like

55:06

this. I'm bringing this up, as I say,

55:08

not, and statically not, because

55:10

I want to engage in the kind

55:12

of takes, criticism that I despise, where

55:15

we're going to dredge up things that might

55:17

make a given creative figure seem a little

55:20

weird in a bad way so that

55:23

we then can engage in gossip,

55:26

a sort of elevated gossip by which we can

55:28

introduce this person and bring them down a peg

55:30

or two. Like

55:32

I'm a Wagnerite. I am passionately

55:34

dedicated to the music of Richard

55:36

Wagner, who was a terrible human

55:39

being and had ideas

55:41

a great deal more objectionable. I

55:43

mean like on a different order

55:45

of magnitude of objectionableness. And

55:48

yet there is the artistic

55:51

accomplishment. And what

55:53

JF is just saying, I think, points us

55:55

to the sense that you can't just kind

55:57

of round it all down to a person's

56:00

views. You have to

56:02

take into account the

56:04

rich and complex and many faceted aspects

56:06

of a person, but what

56:09

really remains of them and what

56:12

continues to emanate a

56:14

great deal of power after their death,

56:16

what is there of them

56:19

to exert an influence in the present

56:21

day, is a kind of

56:24

aesthetic accomplishment. And I suppose

56:26

what's interesting about working

56:28

with such figures is that you're playing the game

56:31

on hard mode. You can't quite,

56:33

in good conscience, simply

56:35

say, well I'm an asceticist and all

56:37

that matters to me is the

56:39

aesthetic accomplishment. So I don't care what Wagner said

56:41

about the Jews. I only

56:44

care about the art. But then

56:46

at the same time I think the equal

56:48

and opposite temptation, which is to

56:50

say, well art doesn't matter. What

56:53

matters are political opinions and

56:55

the actions taken upon

56:57

those opinions. It's the

57:00

bothness of the situation that really

57:02

compels, I think, hard thinking. Hard

57:05

thinking and hard feeling. And

57:07

it also compels, I think, a certain position

57:09

on the part of the critic or the scholar,

57:12

which JF has used the

57:14

expression already in this conversation, which is

57:16

skin in the game. You know, it's

57:19

all very well to sort of say

57:21

that a given artistic figure is beyond

57:23

the pale if you don't care about

57:25

the aesthetic dimension of

57:27

that artist's work. But if

57:30

you do care, I feel like if you do

57:32

care, then you're kind of on the hook for

57:34

the complexities and ambiguities of that

57:36

person. And something that I appreciate

57:38

about your book is that it seems to

57:40

me to be a work

57:43

of exactly that character or

57:45

coming out of that kind of

57:47

relationship between the scholar and her

57:50

subject. Yeah. And I do

57:52

feel like I've got skin in the game

57:54

here. I've done a lot of writing

57:56

and research about the impact of

57:58

traditionalism and the new. write on

58:00

contemporary paganism and contemporary cultism.

58:03

I've written pieces about John Michel that

58:05

actually lost me some friends, which was

58:08

unfortunate, but hey, he was the dude

58:10

he was. He was also

58:12

really complicated. And again, the implications

58:15

for having certain views have changed

58:17

dramatically in the last 40 or

58:19

50 years. And I feel

58:21

pretty confident that if Eisel were

58:23

in today's milieu, I

58:25

might find her views and she

58:28

might have become more objectionable. But,

58:31

you know, there was some stuff I probably

58:33

didn't agree with, but there were a lot of

58:35

things that she didn't express a lot,

58:38

you know, like never

58:40

saw any anti-Semitic writing

58:42

from her. Never saw any

58:45

overt racism. Unlike Dion Fortune, you know, anybody

58:47

who's going to be an apologist for Dion

58:49

Fortune has got a lot of work to

58:51

do. But Colhoon's work in

58:54

Crying of the Wind, she had a pretty

58:56

homophobic streak, but only

58:58

toward gay men. Apparently did not

59:00

like gay men very much. I think that probably had to do

59:03

with something about how her marriage ended. You

59:07

may notice I just did a book,

59:09

Sex Magic, on her erotic corpus

59:12

and her sex magic, in which

59:14

I looked a lot at how

59:16

she might be considering things like

59:18

gender essentialism. And I like

59:20

to think that a lot of Colhoon's

59:23

radicalism, because she was in so many

59:25

ways completely radical, but she was radical

59:27

in this weirdly orthodox fashion, right? So

59:30

she's doing all of this stuff around queer

59:33

magic and the figure of the

59:35

divine androgyne, which are ideas

59:37

that were kind of standard issue

59:39

in some ways for

59:42

late 19th, early 20th century

59:44

occultists. But now, as

59:46

we're starting to really

59:48

pull apart gender essentialism, some

59:50

of these ideas have kind of a different context

59:52

in which we can play with them. But

59:55

for Colhoon, this is the

59:57

way that it was before the fall. This is the

59:59

way that that humans are when they are

1:00:01

perfected. This is just how it is. And

1:00:04

we need to do everything we

1:00:06

can so that we can get back

1:00:08

to that. It's not futurist. She

1:00:11

wants to go back to this idea

1:00:13

that the traditionalists and the perennialists all

1:00:15

love that the golden age was in

1:00:18

the past, not because we're innovating. It's

1:00:20

because we messed it up and we

1:00:22

need to get back there. But that

1:00:24

sensibility of hers produced

1:00:27

things that were radical challenges

1:00:29

to the social order, particularly

1:00:31

the role of women in

1:00:33

society and in magic and

1:00:35

in culture. So

1:00:37

there's this kind of fascinating balance between

1:00:40

what the end result ends up being

1:00:42

in terms of this super

1:00:45

challenging stance and the place

1:00:47

where she would have perceived it coming from.

1:00:49

Right. No, that's super

1:00:51

interesting. So if

1:00:53

you could sum up what her

1:00:57

vision was, give us

1:00:59

a summary of what her magical

1:01:01

slash artistic or magical

1:01:03

artistic vision was. How would you

1:01:05

do it? What was Eithle Calhoun

1:01:08

trying to accomplish with her art?

1:01:11

I think there were times in

1:01:13

her life where she was concerned

1:01:16

with, first of all, questions

1:01:18

of human liberty and liberation.

1:01:20

Those were important concepts for

1:01:23

her. The idea that

1:01:25

humanity was divine in

1:01:28

origin and that humans could have

1:01:30

access to that part of themselves.

1:01:34

And for her, her project

1:01:36

was trying to be

1:01:38

in that state of union with

1:01:40

the divine and with what she

1:01:42

also called enlightenment, the

1:01:44

pursuit of delight. That

1:01:47

was her project. Very simply, that

1:01:49

was her project. And she wanted that

1:01:51

for herself and she

1:01:53

wanted that for everyone. Although,

1:01:56

having said that, again,

1:02:00

like a lot of

1:02:02

the kind of perennialist

1:02:05

and also certain types of

1:02:07

her medicists in the

1:02:10

first part of the 20th century and even today.

1:02:13

I don't think that she felt

1:02:15

that everyone could achieve

1:02:17

that. I think she did feel

1:02:19

that there was, I think she was elitist

1:02:22

enough to believe that that

1:02:25

was something that only initiates

1:02:29

and people who were prepared for

1:02:32

that kind of knowledge could

1:02:34

actually attain. So

1:02:37

although she wanted for humanity to

1:02:39

be better, I don't

1:02:42

think that she was necessarily

1:02:44

hugely democratic about it. And

1:02:47

again, it's not because she wrote things

1:02:49

explicitly saying this, but the

1:02:52

systems that she was working

1:02:54

with magically and pretty much

1:02:57

the entire character of her

1:03:00

magic was around

1:03:02

this idea of initiation

1:03:05

and magical currents. And

1:03:08

those were predicated on

1:03:11

the fact that you had to be

1:03:13

ready. And I don't think she

1:03:15

thought everybody was. One

1:03:45

of my favorite parts of your book is right at the

1:03:47

end where you have a lengthy quote from, I guess

1:03:50

a letter from Linda, the

1:03:52

British punk artist, Linda Sterling, talking

1:03:55

about the hand of Eiffel. And

1:03:57

so, you know, Colhoon

1:03:59

herself. may have had notions about

1:04:01

who's ready and who isn't, who is

1:04:04

initiated and who isn't. And obviously,

1:04:06

that was a matter of considerable

1:04:08

practical importance there because the story

1:04:10

of her life is punctuated with

1:04:12

associations with different magical orders and

1:04:15

being initiated, or in some cases not being

1:04:17

allowed in. It's interesting

1:04:19

how her initial rejection from the

1:04:22

Golden Dawn seems to have cast

1:04:24

long shadows throughout her entire life.

1:04:27

But what's interesting is that regardless of

1:04:29

what Calhoun might have thought about what

1:04:31

we might call magical agency, the

1:04:34

ability of magical power to transmit from one person

1:04:36

to another or from some source to a person,

1:04:39

clearly posthumously that agency

1:04:41

has become quite

1:04:44

unpredictable. There seems

1:04:46

to be sort of an Eiffel-Calhoun current,

1:04:49

and Linder writes about having

1:04:51

picked up on it. And I found this

1:04:53

really interesting. So if you don't mind, I'm

1:04:55

going to read all

1:04:57

or at least most of the letter

1:04:59

that you excerpt here. The

1:05:02

hand of Eiffel is a curious phenomenon. The

1:05:05

hand has a light touch which can

1:05:07

easily be mistaken for coincidence or serendipity.

1:05:10

I sometimes willfully call out to the

1:05:12

hand of Eiffel Calhoun, though, especially

1:05:15

during my ongoing act of

1:05:17

homage to hermantic stain technique.

1:05:20

In 2014, the hand of

1:05:22

Eiffel held my hand as I laid

1:05:24

down the certain scalpel that I'd used

1:05:26

for over four decades to create photo

1:05:28

montage. In exchange for sacrificing the blade,

1:05:31

the hand of Eiffel then offered me

1:05:33

enamel paints to let spill over the

1:05:35

surfaces of found photographs. I'd

1:05:37

found a large stash of health and

1:05:39

efficiency magazines in a bookshop in Penzance.

1:05:42

The shop was a stone's throw away from the

1:05:44

Newland Gallery. The naturist magazines

1:05:46

all date from the last years of

1:05:48

Calhoun's life and other coincidence or the

1:05:50

hand of Eiffel at work. The

1:05:53

leap in faith from the precise cut of

1:05:55

a scalpel to suddenly having only the slenderest

1:05:58

amount of control over enamel paints took

1:06:00

some time to adjust to. The

1:06:03

hand of Eiffel has taught me to

1:06:05

be far more fluid in my image-making

1:06:07

and to not only contemplate the surface

1:06:09

image, but to see through it and

1:06:11

beyond it. Mind

1:06:13

pictures emerge from the enamels as they

1:06:15

slowly congeal, and my fascination for

1:06:17

the mantic stain technique became

1:06:20

such that I wanted to know what a mantic

1:06:22

cord would sound like and which

1:06:24

ingredients a mantic perfume would contain,

1:06:27

and what sort of mind pictures would

1:06:29

conjure up in the wearer. And

1:06:32

I love this. For one thing, it's something

1:06:34

that I can kind of relate to, the

1:06:36

idea of taking on an artistic technique

1:06:39

whereby you are surrendering a certain amount

1:06:41

of your own volition, your own intentionality,

1:06:44

and allowing another hand,

1:06:46

whether it's the hand of

1:06:48

Eiffel or some unlocatable intention

1:06:50

out there, allowing another

1:06:53

hand to guide your own, a feeling

1:06:56

when you are co-creating with

1:06:58

spiritual agencies. I

1:07:01

found that so interesting. Absolutely.

1:07:04

And I just wanted to

1:07:06

say that the hand of Eiffel is a

1:07:09

phrase that all of us who are working

1:07:11

in Kool-Hoon scholarship or who are her fans

1:07:13

kind of use. And in fact, I know

1:07:16

your listeners won't be able to see it

1:07:18

right behind me. I have a postcard that

1:07:20

Lally Macbeth sent me that is the hand of

1:07:22

Eiffel, which sits behind me. It

1:07:24

actually came out of the ancient scent

1:07:26

project, which a number of

1:07:28

artists in Cornwall. So Lally

1:07:30

Macbeth, Penny Macbeth, Steve Patterson

1:07:33

put together and

1:07:36

it was working with her automatic work.

1:07:39

This was, I can't remember the first year

1:07:42

that they did it, but they

1:07:44

were basically working with her automatic

1:07:46

techniques and with some of

1:07:48

the ancient sites to produce a number of

1:07:50

shows that were inspired by Eiffel's work in

1:07:53

the West of Cornwall. And so they experienced the

1:07:55

hand of Eiffel. And this is a gift that

1:07:57

they gave to the rest of us. who

1:08:00

work with her material because it's true. Once

1:08:02

you are touched by the hand of Eisel,

1:08:05

your life will move in mysterious ways.

1:08:08

And this has been for me

1:08:10

so transformative, not

1:08:12

just because I'm watching

1:08:15

her moment happen. I

1:08:17

mean, when I started working with her in 2000, it

1:08:21

was me and Richard Shillito and very few other

1:08:23

people who actually knew who Eisel Colvin was. And

1:08:26

it's only maybe about 10 years ago

1:08:28

that people started picking up on her

1:08:30

work. And now there's going to

1:08:33

be an exhibition next year,

1:08:35

starting at Tate's and Olive's and then

1:08:37

moving to Tate Britain. And

1:08:39

that's just going to, this

1:08:42

waterfall is happening. And

1:08:44

it's really exciting to watch, because

1:08:47

we understand, we have the context,

1:08:49

I think, for understanding her work.

1:08:52

Now, there are a whole bunch

1:08:54

of convergences that are coming together that are

1:08:57

shining a spotlight on what

1:09:00

she did. And it's inspiring

1:09:02

to people. But for me, it's kind

1:09:05

of taught me a lot about magic and

1:09:07

about the idea of will in magic.

1:09:09

If I can go here for just a second,

1:09:11

if you don't mind, just a slight

1:09:14

magical turn, because

1:09:16

I have always in my

1:09:19

own life been very okay and very directed, I'm going to

1:09:21

do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do

1:09:23

this. And although

1:09:25

I knew that writing about an

1:09:27

artist was probably going to produce some

1:09:30

changes in my life, there are certain

1:09:32

things that I never would have expected.

1:09:34

Like the fact that I now professionally

1:09:36

write for art galleries and I am

1:09:38

writing more books about art and I'm

1:09:41

not writing specifically right now about Cornwall.

1:09:43

And it's because there is a tension between

1:09:45

me doing

1:09:48

my will and opening up the door

1:09:51

to let something else happen

1:09:55

and knowing when you need to

1:09:57

let the magic do its own work.

1:10:00

and when you need to follow that.

1:10:02

Because if I, even from five years

1:10:04

ago, if I went down my

1:10:07

magical to-do list and the things that I thought

1:10:09

that I was going to be doing, if I

1:10:11

stepped to that, that I wouldn't have

1:10:13

taken so many of the amazing turns that

1:10:16

are so incredible for me right now that

1:10:18

I'm enjoying so much. And a lot of

1:10:20

that's the hand of ISIL. The

1:10:22

hand of ISIL and also learning how to

1:10:24

listen to the universe instead of trying to

1:10:26

direct it myself. Well, I mean,

1:10:28

that's such a key idea in the book. One

1:10:31

of the words that comes up most often

1:10:33

in the book is automatism, right? And

1:10:35

here you're talking about a technique

1:10:39

initially developed within the art

1:10:41

world by the surrealists, right?

1:10:44

But also a term you

1:10:46

can connect with mediumship and spiritualism

1:10:48

and channeling and that sort of

1:10:50

thing. So the idea that a

1:10:53

human agent, an artist, can

1:10:56

relinquish any attempt to

1:10:59

control the universe and allow something

1:11:01

to come through, obviously

1:11:03

this is something that goes way back in

1:11:05

art. The Iliad starts

1:11:07

with Homer calling on the muse to take

1:11:09

over and tell the story. But the

1:11:12

way that the surrealists brought this idea

1:11:14

back online in art is very interesting.

1:11:16

And then what's really interesting to me

1:11:18

is how ISIL Kahoon, who was, of

1:11:21

course, involved with the surrealists in the

1:11:23

UK during the war, right

1:11:25

up until the war, right? And even into

1:11:27

the war years, how she received

1:11:31

or integrated or assimilated this notion

1:11:33

of its automatism and then took it

1:11:35

to this whole other new place afterwards

1:11:38

when she was freed from the

1:11:40

movement, because we all know how

1:11:42

horrible surrealist circles were in terms

1:11:44

of like dictating what everybody should be thinking

1:11:46

and doing. It's just the most ironic and

1:11:48

hilarious thing ever, if you ask me. But

1:11:52

they were obsessed with the aesthetic form

1:11:54

of the tribunal and with the ritual

1:11:56

of excommunication. They were just great at

1:11:59

that. Anyways, sorry.

1:12:02

But once she read the room and she thought,

1:12:04

well, I can't do my own thing in this

1:12:06

place. And she kind of struck off, and there's

1:12:08

a series of events that led to that. She

1:12:10

took automatism and she reinterpreted it in

1:12:13

light of her deeper metaphysical beliefs. This

1:12:15

is what I got from your book.

1:12:17

And so, for example, the surrealists were

1:12:20

inclined to look at, for example,

1:12:22

automatic writing or automatic painting and

1:12:24

interpret it as a way of

1:12:27

silencing the conscious ego so that the

1:12:29

unconscious could speak through the person. So

1:12:32

this is what Gilles de Durez, who

1:12:34

writes beautifully about what he

1:12:36

calls the spiritual automaton. It's like

1:12:39

the spiritual automaton of the depths

1:12:41

of the unconscious. But

1:12:44

de Durez also writes about the spiritual

1:12:46

automaton of the supra-conscious world, which you

1:12:48

find in unlikely places in the history

1:12:50

of philosophy. For example, Spinoza, in some

1:12:52

of his writings, mentions that

1:12:54

pure thought, pure logical deductive thought, can

1:12:57

be a kind of automatic process. Like

1:12:59

you're just finding yourself stumbling through a

1:13:01

bunch of deductions towards

1:13:03

the truth. And that's a kind

1:13:05

of maybe a rationalistic way of

1:13:07

interpreting something that you'll find in Platonist

1:13:09

thinkers who believe that if you connect

1:13:11

with the intelligible world of forms, you

1:13:14

don't have to think anymore. Something is thinking

1:13:16

through you. And I think Eiffel Colhoon was

1:13:19

much more inclined to that sort of thing.

1:13:21

When you talk about how

1:13:23

she used, for example, theosophical

1:13:25

color theory and encoded her

1:13:27

paintings with that and created

1:13:30

paintings that were in a

1:13:32

sense like talismans or sigils

1:13:34

for triggering awakening in herself

1:13:36

and in the viewer, she's using

1:13:38

automatism as a way to connect not to

1:13:41

the deep unconscious world, which to her, I

1:13:43

guess, was just an aspect of this other

1:13:46

world she's trying to connect, but with this super

1:13:48

conscious, almost platonic realm

1:13:51

where through geometric form,

1:13:53

through number, through aesthetic

1:13:56

symbols, one could kind

1:13:58

of like download and transmit and... convey

1:14:00

a deeper and wider and

1:14:02

higher reality, right? And that's a

1:14:04

super important part of her

1:14:06

method, her technique, you know? Yeah,

1:14:09

absolutely. I think

1:14:11

a lot about these models of

1:14:14

our own permeability and

1:14:17

the way in which we conceive

1:14:19

of consciousness

1:14:21

information. And I

1:14:24

think that she probably saw

1:14:27

and experienced and cultivated

1:14:29

this kind of permeability

1:14:32

that she certainly believed in

1:14:34

it because our subconscious,

1:14:37

which, yeah, she definitely believed that a

1:14:40

lot of these automatic techniques and also

1:14:42

her dreams, her dreams primed

1:14:44

the pump for a lot of her

1:14:46

work, her dream life, her dream work,

1:14:48

her dream research. She

1:14:50

did work with dream researchers in the 50s.

1:14:52

It was really important to

1:14:54

her, but where did these things

1:14:56

come from? You know, it's just these very

1:14:59

different models of understanding where

1:15:02

we get information and how

1:15:04

we're connecting to other spaces.

1:15:06

So the subconscious was

1:15:08

very important in terms of these

1:15:10

automatic methods and how she was

1:15:13

using them. But,

1:15:15

yeah, she saw them

1:15:17

as also being connected to the elements. So

1:15:19

she had elemental schemes. So if she was

1:15:21

trying to work with ideas of

1:15:23

Earth, she would use it to calcimania. She

1:15:26

was trying to work with the element

1:15:28

of fire, she might use fumage and

1:15:31

pull things out of there. So it's not entirely

1:15:33

the subconscious in

1:15:36

the sense that we

1:15:38

are integrated and contained,

1:15:42

that our subconscious is

1:15:44

connected to other things. And

1:15:47

as magicians, what we're supposed

1:15:49

to be doing is, again,

1:15:52

cultivating those techniques to

1:15:55

move beyond those more

1:15:57

easily and at will. And I

1:15:59

often and wonder what would it

1:16:01

have been like in her head? Because

1:16:04

she worked with these correspondences

1:16:07

so deeply that

1:16:09

everything she saw must

1:16:12

have been so layered and so coded.

1:16:15

It must have been a very psychedelic

1:16:18

way of experiencing the world

1:16:20

because she had worked with

1:16:22

these so deeply. That

1:16:25

fascinates me that what would it have been

1:16:27

like looking through her eyes and in

1:16:30

her brain, which I suspect worked faster

1:16:32

than lightning. Yeah, because it's

1:16:34

not just intellectual for her, it's

1:16:36

also applied, right? It's a praxis

1:16:39

of, so she's taking in all

1:16:41

this esoteric

1:16:43

knowledge, but then applying

1:16:45

it and living it, you know? And

1:16:48

so you can imagine that before long,

1:16:50

you're gonna be living in a pretty

1:16:52

magical world if you apply those ideas.

1:16:54

I mean, it reminds me

1:16:56

of stories about Carl Jung in his house

1:16:58

in Bollingen where he was talking to his

1:17:00

pots and pans and stuff. I mean, you

1:17:02

mentioned at one point in your book that

1:17:04

the world has never really been disenchanted and this

1:17:07

idea that we live in a disenchanted world is

1:17:09

kind of a form of negative enchantment in itself.

1:17:12

But certainly she was awakened to the

1:17:14

enchantments of the world. And to see

1:17:17

the unconscious as being connected to other

1:17:19

things, as you say, as the unconscious,

1:17:21

not as simply as a dimension of

1:17:24

the self, but as a dimension of

1:17:26

nature, as a dimension of the earth.

1:17:29

That's an idea that we could find other

1:17:31

examples of this, but I think it's exemplified

1:17:33

in her work, in her approach,

1:17:35

for example, to the human body as an

1:17:37

elemental force, right? A lot of

1:17:39

her more sexually explicit kind of, to use,

1:17:41

I don't know if that's the term, but her

1:17:44

more erotic art seems

1:17:47

to tap into these, the

1:17:49

human body as a kind of nexus of

1:17:51

primal forces, which are

1:17:53

not reducible to the Oedipal drama

1:17:56

of a Freud, for example, it's

1:17:58

much more expansive than that. Yes,

1:18:00

and explicit is absolutely the right word because they

1:18:03

were very explicit But yeah, I mean she

1:18:05

you say so but I haven't said it's I don't

1:18:07

see too many of these images in the book I was

1:18:09

flipping Oh I'm

1:18:13

going to send you the PDF when we're done

1:18:15

and then you'll say oh Yeah,

1:18:21

no, I mean Yeah,

1:18:23

the stuff in sex magic, you know

1:18:25

could not have been been published

1:18:29

It could not have but she could not

1:18:31

have displayed it anywhere because it would have

1:18:33

been illegal And in fact the story that

1:18:35

I love to tell when I was working

1:18:37

on that book with Tate Publishing They

1:18:40

actually had to take the contract to

1:18:43

legal because there was a whole section

1:18:45

in there saying that the author promises

1:18:47

not to Print

1:18:49

anything in this book which would be considered

1:18:51

either obscene or blasphemous and I went back

1:18:53

to my editor and I said so This

1:18:56

book is pretty much. That's the whole

1:18:58

premise. It is both Start

1:19:02

to finish There's literally

1:19:04

a big X in my contract where they just

1:19:06

took that out. It was pretty funny She

1:19:10

definitely saw the body as

1:19:12

this conduit and she identified

1:19:14

as an animus so

1:19:17

she saw everything

1:19:20

as Inspirited

1:19:23

which is you know, everything

1:19:25

is Inspirited everything

1:19:27

is connected and this

1:19:30

is kind of you know when I'm working

1:19:32

with contemporary artists today and talking to them

1:19:34

about Magic and the way

1:19:36

that I think we're actually maybe seeing this

1:19:40

this I don't know what you guys think about this but kind

1:19:42

of a a Changing and

1:19:44

explicitly changing paradigm of how we

1:19:47

talk about magic Less

1:19:49

in terms of will and agency

1:19:51

and more in relationship and communication

1:19:55

Mm-hmm, and I I think this is something

1:19:57

that a lot of the artists that I'm

1:19:59

working with with our exploring,

1:20:02

talking about magic in those

1:20:04

ways and more

1:20:07

in about community and responsibility

1:20:10

than this kind of individualist

1:20:12

autonomy. And I think

1:20:14

that there are some examples of

1:20:17

this kind of thinking in Colhoon's

1:20:19

work because she so clearly saw

1:20:21

us as connected and

1:20:23

networked even though she

1:20:26

still had these very essentialist ideas.

1:20:29

We could get information from

1:20:32

all sorts of sources and we

1:20:34

could plug into that with our bodies.

1:20:38

That's a big thing of what she was trying to do. I'm

1:20:42

very interested in what you say about a kind of

1:20:44

shift in a present day

1:20:46

conversation around magic away

1:20:48

from just like a sort of application

1:20:51

of will, perhaps a brute force

1:20:53

application of will to something that

1:20:56

has more to do with communication and connection.

1:20:58

There's a beautiful passage that Lionel

1:21:00

Snell wrote in his magical autobiography,

1:21:02

My Years of Magical Thinking that

1:21:05

gets to this, which I'm gonna just read. So

1:21:08

one thing that haunted me when I first

1:21:10

became interested in magic was fearfulness, the

1:21:13

youngest child's fear of a world that lies

1:21:15

beyond their control. Magical training

1:21:17

eased a lot of those fears, but eventually working

1:21:19

with fear in this way became interesting in its

1:21:21

own right. Instead of wishing

1:21:23

to eliminate fear, I now value its protective

1:21:25

role and find the changes it brings about

1:21:28

in me quite interesting and sometimes useful. A

1:21:30

touch of fear can be a wake-up call to

1:21:33

alertness that is akin to meditation. I

1:21:35

now value fear rather than seek altogether to

1:21:37

eliminate it. This move towards

1:21:40

a greater celebration of life than a wish to

1:21:42

change it, I can see in

1:21:44

terms of a doorway into the artistic culture.

1:21:47

And he's talking here about how

1:21:50

not only does he think in terms of these

1:21:52

four cultures, magic, art, religion, science, but he also

1:21:54

was thinking about how there tends to be a

1:21:56

kind of aeonic movement from one culture to another,

1:21:59

a culture. of magic to a

1:22:01

culture of art, for example. So

1:22:03

this is what his remarks pertain to when

1:22:06

he says about thinking of

1:22:08

a doorway to the artistic culture. I

1:22:11

have once or twice spoken to a gathering of

1:22:13

pagans or other people whom I would consider to

1:22:15

be members of the magical culture. And

1:22:18

I have then suggested that the longer people

1:22:20

practice magic, the less magic they actually do.

1:22:23

Rituals become less and less spells

1:22:25

to bring about change, and

1:22:27

more and more a form of celebration,

1:22:29

as in rituals to celebrate the seasons

1:22:31

or nature. Each time I said that,

1:22:33

I saw heads nodding. Evically

1:22:35

the older heads. So.

1:22:40

Yes, as I

1:22:42

vigorously nod and point.

1:22:45

Yeah, in fact, I was

1:22:47

talking to my partner

1:22:49

about this the other day and thinking

1:22:52

about the other people who

1:22:54

I know who have been involved in the

1:22:57

occult and magical scenes, both in the US

1:22:59

and the UK, and those of us who

1:23:01

are in our 50s and in

1:23:03

our 60s and changes

1:23:05

in relationship to just how we

1:23:07

practice and what we conceive of

1:23:09

as magic. I have

1:23:11

a friend who is just, you know, a

1:23:13

fantastic ritualist. But he says

1:23:15

that his magic now consists of

1:23:18

engaging with music. He's also a

1:23:20

musician. That for him

1:23:22

has become the magic

1:23:24

that he does both listening and

1:23:26

producing music. I know a

1:23:29

lot of older folks, it's like, ah, spellwork.

1:23:32

What even is that? You know,

1:23:34

why would I do that? I

1:23:38

think there's some interesting

1:23:40

ethnographic potential for looking

1:23:42

at how older magicians

1:23:44

and occultists and pagans conceive

1:23:46

of what is magic and

1:23:49

why do they do it? Like divination,

1:23:51

like reading tarot cards. Yeah, now,

1:23:53

you know, I mean, I can, but why

1:23:55

would I, right? You know, whereas maybe back

1:23:57

when I was 20, it was. pull

1:24:00

a card every day, pull a card every

1:24:02

day, that kind of thing. And I think

1:24:04

that our relationship to magical practice, certainly

1:24:07

in this culture, does change over

1:24:09

time. And as somebody

1:24:12

who writes about magic, art,

1:24:14

and artist practitioners in

1:24:17

magical spaces, because

1:24:19

I'm sure you guys have noticed that

1:24:21

occultists are very, very serious people. And

1:24:24

the idea that magic may

1:24:27

be a form of art, or

1:24:29

that there is a heavily aesthetic

1:24:32

component to magical practice, which, of

1:24:34

course, there is, I mean, it's

1:24:36

kind of the whole thing, really.

1:24:39

For I think a lot of people, it

1:24:42

denigrates their idea either of practice, devotion, religiosity,

1:24:45

which is important, or

1:24:48

will, or the idea that

1:24:50

they're actually having relationship

1:24:52

with spirit or spirits or entities.

1:24:54

And if you reduce

1:24:56

in quotes, if you reduce that

1:24:58

to art, then you're saying that

1:25:01

it's artifice, that it's

1:25:03

not real. But I

1:25:05

think that acknowledging the

1:25:07

role of affect, the role of aesthetics in

1:25:11

any magical practice is

1:25:13

really important. And I don't think that

1:25:15

it's in any way reductive or dismissive

1:25:18

of the impact of those practices,

1:25:21

even if you're doing spellwork, right? Even if you're just

1:25:25

trying to get a thing done. On

1:25:27

the contrary, I think that with a

1:25:29

proper understanding of what we mean by

1:25:32

art, I think that it's vital to

1:25:34

affirming a metaphysically realist

1:25:37

take on magic, I think anyways.

1:25:40

I think that a lot of that has to do with a

1:25:43

kind of leavening effect of magical practice.

1:25:45

Like when you start off doing magic

1:25:47

often, personally, when I was experimenting

1:25:50

with that sort of stuff in

1:25:52

my youth, my goal was to

1:25:54

experience something extraordinary, right? But

1:25:57

once you've experienced something extraordinary, it does

1:25:59

a well. weird thing. It

1:26:01

means that what you thought was ordinary

1:26:04

is contingent. Extraordinary things can happen.

1:26:07

Things that are inexplicable can happen.

1:26:09

Therefore, the things that are explicable,

1:26:11

the way the world just kind

1:26:13

of works, becomes extraordinary because it

1:26:16

didn't need to be. It could have been a

1:26:18

topsy-turvy Alice in Wonderland nightmare. But

1:26:20

the world is trustworthy. The world is

1:26:23

reliable. The world is, to some extent,

1:26:25

knowable. And that, to me, the idea

1:26:27

is... The world is beautiful. The world

1:26:29

is beautiful. And those

1:26:31

experiences of the extraordinary have

1:26:34

the extraordinary effect of making the

1:26:36

ordinary extraordinary. And after a while, just

1:26:38

doing your music is enough magical practice

1:26:41

for you because you can see how

1:26:43

that extraordinaryness you were after is

1:26:45

in everything, right? And that's something,

1:26:47

certainly, I get the sense

1:26:50

of the cowloon understood implicitly.

1:26:52

I think you even say it

1:26:54

in the book at one point, is that

1:26:56

everything was laden with

1:26:58

meaning and magic in her world. Now,

1:27:01

I loved... I just loved

1:27:04

what you just said. And I think

1:27:06

you're right. I don't want to live

1:27:08

in a disenchanted world. I don't

1:27:10

want to have to go and do a bunch

1:27:13

of stuff just to open

1:27:15

my eyes to the weird.

1:27:18

I want to embrace that. And I want to be

1:27:20

able to live that all the time. And I think,

1:27:22

Jeff, what you're saying is that once

1:27:24

you start pushing those buttons, and

1:27:27

once you see that the world

1:27:29

is beautiful and also weird and

1:27:31

enchanted and alive, and why

1:27:35

not want to be

1:27:37

in that all the time? That's the world

1:27:39

that I want to live in. If

1:28:08

you enjoyed this podcast, consider subscribing

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1:28:15

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1:28:19

course, support us on Patreon. Music

1:28:22

for the podcast is composed and performed

1:28:24

by Pierre Yves Martel, and

1:28:26

the show is made with the assistance of Meredith

1:28:28

Michael. Thank you for listening.