Sussex Coils and Loops

Fine edition

– sold out

Limited to 12 copies, signed by the author

Hand bound in full ivory goatskin, gold tooled and blind debossed, all edges gilt, custom paste endpapers by Victoria Hall. Finished with a red ribbon and presented in a custom, lined slipcase.

Standard hardback edition

– £40

Limited to 300 copies

Bound in chalk white cloth, red foil glyph on front board and titling on spine, green end papers, and dust jacket.

Paperback

– £22

Unlimited

Printed on 120 gsm paper, sewn binding.

Contents

1614
Shrine
Strange, yet now a neighbour to us
The hidden thing, the herdsman, the goad
A daily code, a layered mass
Its gloomy mazes often the theme
A book of Bessie and Sallyann
The double pupil
I saw never fowler wormes
Interview with Jon Williams
The Climping working
Lewinna
Typhon | Delphyne | Python
A final shrine

A serpent or dragon temple
Azimuth fragments

Addenda

Description

“Sussex folk seem ever to have had a leaning towards snaky things.”

Sussex Coils and Loops is a work of parafolklore on the great serpents encountered in the land of south-east England. The book describes a series of ritual actions performed between the winter solstice of 2017 and the summer solstice of 2022 at sites with serpent or dragon legends associated with them. 

We explore hidden woods, secret pools and lonely churches, find clues in stained glass windows, graveyards, fading murals, tattered pamphlets and video games. There are hermits and saints, headless horsemen, mighty oaks and giant puddings. Shrines are constructed, encounters logged. 

Each generation is seen to have added to the recursive legend, and the sources range from Anglo-Saxon and medieval Latin accounts to contemporary storytellers. All seek to plumb the depthless knucker holes and reveal their great and terrifying wyrms.

In Sussex Coils and Loops, Holman deploys a number of strategies to demonstrate and report on these workings. The writing is in turn experimental, documentary, and scholarly. This is unashamedly contemporary landscape magic. 

Holman resists any characterisation of folklore that privileges a notion of authenticity as inherently conservative. Rather, he sees it as a dynamic and unstable process which is constantly taking on provisional, dare we say, snaky, forms

Through its careful scholarship, field investigations, and experiments with form, Sussex Coils and Loops offers a variety of entry points into this living tradition, honouring its unruly, indefatigable nature, and curious to see where it might go next.

Press, interviews, reviews

“This study alone successfully illuminates the long and winding journey of a folk-cultural corpus, as its narratives are embroidered, patched or excised by the vicissitudes of time, fashion, and inclination. It illustrates how folk legends are not inert historical artefacts but living, evolving entities in their own right; initially shaped by, then helping to shape, a specific place, identity and set of customs. These are the things providing a bulwark against cultural homogenisation, and alienation from the land. They should be cherished.”

– Mark Nemglan, In the company of dragons: experiments in parafolklore

“I strongly recommend this book […] it’s full of wonders and surprises; a magical book.”

– Mike O’Leary, author of Sussex Folk Tales

“… a book treading the path of folklore, pilgrimage and praxis.”

– David Wenborn (Dagenham Dave), The Western Gate

“His creativity and interpretation is genuinely catholic, engaged and highly readable. This is a 21st century explorer divining his own histories, creating his own shrines from a tesserae of obscure facts and unlikely material, and placing them in appropriate points of power, even as he questions himself and established texts and interpretations. […] This book is a reliquary, the sacred remains of a contemporary pilgrimage along overgrown paths illuminated by the coloured light of stained glass windows and the creep of solstice suns.”

– Rupert Loydell, International Times

“In Sussex Coils and Loops, Paul Holman approaches the occult, the divine and the mythological without prejudice, lovingly poring over ancient records and Wikipedia page edit-histories, and achieving a rare and beautiful work in the process. Sussex Coils and Loops is part fairytale, part ritual manual and part academic untangling of misquoted texts of yore. A significantly more grounded cousin to near-hallucinatory psychogeographical books such as Andy Sharp's English Heretic Collection, it is every bit as compelling. Focusing on the current of serpentine energy that has been running through the collective subconscious of Sussex inhabitants for centuries, surfacing in countryside tales, Christian lore and artworks – but also in tree roots and dirt-bike tracks, for all with eyes to see – Sussex Coils and Loops winds its way across the centuries, effortlessly weaving together the long-gone and the strikingly recent.”

– Locke Fitzroy, There be monsters here