We are delighted to be returning to Berlin for the Occulture Conference this October. Four days of talks, performance and conversations at what is the leading practitioner event in Europe. Held at an intimate venue, we suggest that you purchase tickets early to avoid missing out. The first tranche of speakers have been announced with more to follow.
The abstract for our talk, which will be our first public appearance since before the lockdown travesty, is given below. We are enthused that new Scarlet Imprint author, the tarot scholar Christophe Poncet, is speaking at the event too. His joint work with Peter Mark Adams, The Esoteric Tarot, is in preparation and will be followed later this year by the first of his ground breaking three volume opus on the Tarot de Marseille.
Berlin is the perfect venue for the Occulture Conference, a thriving artistic and creative city at the heart of Europe with museums, galleries, restaurants and nightlife. We look forward to seeing many of our readers there.
Christophe PoncetInvestigating early esoteric uses of the Tarot de Marseille: Serious game, oracle, and talisman
When Court de Gébelin, Etteilla and other savants re-discovered the occult tarot at the end of the 18th century, they referred to the deck known today as the Tarot de Marseille, claiming that its design originated from ancient Egypt and that its mysterious trump cards were ‘hieroglyphs’ embedding treasures of sacred wisdom. These claims were subsequently rejected by historians and the dominant theory nowadays is that the tarot was never used, before the 18th century, for anything else than card-playing. This lecture will explore the dissident thesis proposed in 1980 by the great Renaissance scholar Frances A. Yates. For her, the tarot trumps were ‘hieroglyphs’ indeed, but in the sense of the Renaissance, when the tarot flourished and acquired its specific ‘de Marseille’ design. At that time, the Egyptian characters’ meanings were lost since long and Champollion had not yet deciphered the Rosetta stone. Thus, the Egyptian culture was known chiefly through the writings of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus, the famous Corpus hermeticum, a collection of texts mixing philosophy, astrology, alchemy, and magic. Unfortunately, Frances Yates died before she could explore the Tarot de Marseille images. However, our investigation into the twenty-two trump cards, which we expose in various articles and in two books published by Scarlet Imprint (forthcoming in 2023, The Esoteric Tarot – with Peter Mark Adams – and The Tarot of Marsilio), reveals that indeed, these cards are not mere illustrations of the Renaissance everyday life, as the academic consensus dictates, but work as multilayered enigmas that constitute a progression into the revelation of profound ideas. Would such ‘hieroglyphs’ have been used only to play cards? Our research, documented by numerous texts and images of the Renaissance, leads to three possible concurrent ways of using these cards, which we will successively explore: first, as a serious game to teach philosophy; second, as an oracle to tell the future; third, as a talisman to focus celestial energies.
Peter GreyAtomic gods: Magick beyond the nuclear horizon
If there were gods of the stone, bronze and iron ages, then who are our atomic gods? Who are their adepts, what doctrines do they espouse? Can new gods come into being? Have the old gods died? What rites are we to perform? What does the future require from us?
Kenneth Grant suggested ‘something flew in’ with the Babalon Working in 1947, the year between the nuclear Trinity test at Los Alamos and the incident at Roswell. In this talk I will argue that the door was opened into the atomic age. It is a door that we cannot return through, which opened into an era we have barely understood. Jack Parsons and a cabal of science fiction writers were on the cusp of a revolution in thought, science and sexuality. Their radical and magical vision of the future, distorted by a reductive materialism, haunts us. It is a vital part of the mission of magic to recover and develop these occulted knowledges and transcend the cynicism and despair which plagues us; to reclaim the sacred.
Ours is an age of mutation, transformation and the end of old certainties: new entities emerge, atavisms arise, death cults form and reactionary forces regroup. We have moved from the permissive sixties to the dystopian eighties and into the digital millennium. I will describe how magic has both persisted and fundamentally changed. As the world becomes more unstable, we must inevitably confront the forces of annihilation, and go beyond the limits of the nuclear horizon.
Alkistis Dimechtransformation spells
Photo by Burning Moon
Living flesh has the power to transform, to create and recreate itself; from the moment of conception, before even the contours of a self emerge, this power is movement. The potential of transformation is intertwined with our vulnerability, our passibility, to undergo ordeals or ecstasies that transfigure us. Of this passibility Michel Henry wrote, ‘In the depths of its Night, our flesh is god.’ My dance is born in this Night, in encounter with the unknown, alien and holy.
In the choreographic sequence of transformation spells I explore the frisson and tensions between becoming and being, fusing my fascination with the Utterances or Spells of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, particularly those explicitly concerned with the transformation of the deceased (76–88), with my foundation in the philosophy and methodologies of butô. Of these, butô-fu (the dance notation or score) – compositions of images and words that affect the dancer’s imaginal to effect bodily transformations and movement – function similarly to the hieroglyphic Utterances.
Dark dance: Eros, Illness and the Sacred
Hijikata Tatsumi
Butô – dark dance – belongs to the antinomian anti-tradition of dance (or anti-dance, as it has been called) that descends from Nietzsche. I begin this talk considering dance after Nietzsche – tracing the return of the archaic gods in Isadora Duncan’s unrestricted Hellenism and Nijinsky’s Faun and Rite of Spring, to the ecstatic dances of Mary Wigman and Anita Berber’s provocative eroticism. With butô’s first steps in the Japanese underground, Hijikata Tatsumi initiated a radical reappraisal of the body, drawing inspiration from this western anti-tradition and from his upbringing in the remote region of Tôhoku, inhabited by rice farmers and kami. Through his dances and writings, a convergence of eros, illness and the sacred emerges, themes which obsess and inform my own dance practice. Expanding on the potent creative tensions at play in the carnal body between illness, eroticism and the sacred in pursuit of an antinomian dance, I will close with my ‘testimony of a headless dancer,’ a call for a return to the occulted and carnal body as the source of renewal and living gnosis.