chaotopia

CRAB AND BEES MATTER OF BRITAIN by Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith. Peakrill Press This is a thoroughly hallucinatory book. It starts like this: It was all snakes. Nothing was straight.  From the opening sentences we plunge into a world of myth, where stories that maybe resemble those in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century book History of the Kings of Britain , or tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table intertwine with near-contemporary linear-world characters and events. Echoes of the Flood that inundated many places at the end of the last Ice Age bump up against contemporary tales, Harold Wilson going to Scilly to die. This book confuses the centuries and mashes up the millennia, showing us how myth might grow from overheard inaccurate pub conversations. And it’s all spiced with the pungent intellectual delight of playful false etymology.  It’s a rich cosmology. ‘The wind, the warmth, the water and the soil moved in circles, tangling with the stories in cir...

The book was given me by my friend Anwen who runs Airy Fairy, Sheffield's premier pagan bookshop, meeting place and cafe. It was written by her friend Jamie and features a Freya painting modelled on Anwen on the front cover.  So this is a book that came out of a community that overlaps my own local magical one, and I wanted to give it a thorough review.  And it is well worth the effort. It's an unusual and, in its own way, groundbreaking book.  But it’s taken me years to do. First the book went missing when I was moving house two years ago. Then… well, enough of excuses. The review is finally here.  Anglo-Saxon Paganism consists of essays about the history and myths of the Anglo-Saxon world plus the author’s own versions of the mythic tales. The book is a rich offering, with nice attention to history and useful timelines to contextualize the origins of AS culture. I’m going to dive into the bits of the text I particularly engaged with before discussing the book’s sh...

As you probably know, Carl Abrahamsson is editor of The Fenris Wolf , the occasional occultural journal which has been blending magic(k), avant garde art and psychotherapy since 1989. Abrahamsson is a ferociously productive writer, whose output is nigh-impossible to keep up with with—essays, talks, films, books and more. He describes his approach as ‘anthropological’; he often frames occultural things as aspects of a more universal human quality or other.   In one of these essays, ‘The Magic of Dreams’, he tells us the overall frame of his magical life:  ‘The key to a good life was (and is) simply to control your own time, and never flex away too much from the insight that Time is a currency strongly linked to our perception of freedom. True Will needs to be merged with Time, that’s a solid formula for successful magic.’ I can relate to that a lot. Being able to control one’s own time is the polar opposite of the corporate work nightmare that we are supposed to accept as norma...