The Brazen Vessel

Contents

Preface

Incant! Incant! (After Salvator Rosa’s Cantata)
The figures and the signs of night
Invocation of Babalon
Embodiment of mystery
Rewilding witchcraft
On sabbatic dance
Raw power: Babalon, witchcraft & female sexuality
Volant: The birdwoman
The Luciferian revolt
Lucifer in a walnut shell
Death mask
The face utterly unlike itself: The ecstasy and passion of Colette Peignot
Strange suppers and spells diverse: Jack Parsons and the origins of The Witchcraft
Beneath the rose
Fly the light: A litany of shadows
The book of spirits: A translation of Le livre des esperitz
The stifling air
The submerged word
In the skin of the beast
In the realm of the senses: Towards an embodied psychedelic consciousness
Dynamics of the occulted body
Forging the body of the witch
Demonic voices
Becoming no-man: The blooded path to Babalon
Satan’s treasures: Dragons, books and the volatilised landscape
The shining land: A foray into the ritual landscape of Cornwall
The pact
The witches’ dance
Cocytus defrosted
Black mass, bright angel
The sacred conspiracy
Seeing through apocalypse
The Amfortas wound
Outside the temple
My time is come: An erotic eschatology of Babalon

Timeline

Précis

The Brazen Vessel documents the creative, magical union of Alkistis Dimech and Peter Grey from 2008 to 2018. It comprises selected texts, essays and presentations, including many previously unpublished works, essays which have fallen out of print and texts that were only published online. The anthology marks the first appearance in print of such pivotal texts as Rewilding Witchcraft, a translation of the critical goetic source Le livre des esperitz, and an extended and original treatment of the witches’ dance. The Brazen Vessel testifies to the prescient, provocative and influential nature of their work.

From the invocation of Babalon, given at the Thelemic Symposium in Oxford in 2008 to the eschatology of Babalon given at Occulture Berlin in 2018, the 35 works gathered here give insight into the process, thought and praxis of the authors, both as individuals with distinct bodies of work, and as a dynamic magical union. The works in The Brazen Vessel cast significant light on ideas developed through The Red Goddess (2007), Apocalyptic Witchcraft (2013) and Lucifer: Princeps (2015), and prefigures some of the material in Lucifer: Praxis (forthcoming 2022).

The texts reveal the continuities and evolution of the authors’ work over a decade. Taken as a whole, their work proposes unorthodox and undogmatic understandings of Lucifer and Babalon, as demonised divine figures, as the sources of transmission of the western traditions of magic and witchcraft. A shared love of poetry and the magical power of the word is evident in their distinctive voices. Both have given primacy to the living body in their practice, through dance, performance, ritual and rites of devotion and ordeal. Both situate their magical work within the wider ecological and political environment. In a polyphony of texts, the ongoing dialogue between two practitioners is made apparent, and the innovative work of Alkistis given its due.

During the ten years documented in the anthology, Scarlet Imprint led a nomadic existence, moving from Brighton to Dover, the French Alps and the Welsh Borders, and finally to West Cornwall; these liminal landscapes and their denizens people the book. The texts evidence a second web of journeys to conferences, gatherings and symposia in London, Glastonbury, Brighton, Cornwall, Scotland, Norway, Belgium, Portland and Seattle. Overlapping with these are a series of pilgrimages to sacred sites from Patmos to Cefalù, to standing stones, stone circles, cliffs, caves and the wilds.

The Brazen Vessel is a work of process, experiment and risk, written by practitioners at the leading edge of the magical revival.