As my conversation with Gareth Knight was so well received last month I decided to try and have a similar confab with his friend and somewhat younger colleague, Alan Richardson.  Alan has written extensively on Paganism, Celtic and Faery lore, the Arthuriad, the Qabala, Ancient Egypt, British mystery traditions, as well as producing a series of delightful novels.  He has given us important biographies on occult luminaries such as William G. Gray, Dion Fortune, Aleister Crowley, Christine Hartley and Charles Seymour.  A couple of hermits, we conducted our conversation on the digital plane, as Alan no doubt kept one eye on the footy scores in hopes that Newcastle United would stave off relegation from the premier league.  Readers of Alan’s work will have come to know his razor wit and unassuming charm… always laced with a healthy dose of honesty…

DS: Given that you write in various styles and genres – from serious esoterica to wild polyglot fiction -  can you tell us what sort of writing comes most naturally to you? Are you the sort of ‘modal’ writer that works on one thing at a time or are you able to bounce between these extremes at will?

AR:  Well, I dunno what a ‘modal writer’ is. But I wish I could bounce between extremes at will.  When I’ve tried it’s been disastrous. Usually I wake in the middle of the night with a title or a first line for a new project and the whole thing is suddenly glowing and complete in my head like a a big, tangled piece of cosmic string, if that’s an apt analogy. The title or first line is a means of grasping one end and unravelling it. Somehow, rhythm comes into it too. If I can ‘hear’ the rhythm I’m looking for in the prose, the rest of it comes along. ‘On Winsley Hill’ had a very marked sense of rhythm. I kept trying to change it, the whole style, but somehow it wouldn’t let me. I suppose ‘it’ was the spirit of the hill itself. (Where, with the encircling Limpley Stoke valley, Dion Fortune’s parents met, courted and married, incidentally.)

DS:  You have written about inner Egypt, Inner Celtia, Inner Megaliths, Inner Gateways, as well as displaying an ever-inventive imagination in strange and exotic novels like The Fat Git. Where does this come from?  What can you tell us about the private Alan Richardson that produces this magic?

AR:  Oh gosh I don’t know where it all comes from. Y’see I wish in my early days I’d chosen a pen-name for myself to help define and cope with this ‘other’ self of mine. The Alan Richardson who writes these odd books is somewhat different to the lower case alan richardson answering these questions. And I can’t switch into him. Wish I could – I think. It’s one of the reasons I try to avoid contact with the outer world of this strange business: people want to bang on to the upper case AR about all sorts of recondite and esoteric things, but lower case ar hasn’t got the slightest interest in talking about them, and is distinctly, cheerfully and determinedly low-brow. I suppose I’m a bit of a freak in that I can genuinely believe in two completely opposite things at the same time. If it was scientifically proved that the whole magical realm was bollocks it would not bother me in the slightest.

The ‘private’ me isn’t really private at all. I’ve never been able to make a living writing, though lord knows I’ve tried for almost 50 years now. So I’ve had a vast variety of jobs: a teacher; wastrel; actor; general labourer in a brickyard; nursing auxiliary bum-wiping for the NHS; care worker in an OAP home; Instructor for the RNID, teaching deaf and deaf-blind adults using sign language and braille; Instructor in a day centre fo adults with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour. And many more. Now, in my last working years, I’ve got the best job in England managing a specialist Mobile Library which takes Large Print books and Talking books to the elderly in remote communities right across my beloved Wiltshire. Perhaps all these have given me a sense of whimsy. Plus I would add that I’ve gone into these jobs not because I’m caring, but out of the sheer necessity of supporting my family.

DS:  I was particularly struck by On Winsley Hill, and The Giftie before it, both of which show elegant literary craftsmanship with wit, voice, pacing, characterisation, setting, etc,. As someone with a natural flair for fiction are there authors that particularly inspire you or do you just follow your own writerly impulses?

AR:  Well, thanks for those comments Daniel, but I don’t think I’ve got a flair for fiction. To my shame I never read novels unless they are very thin. Perhaps because I’m out of touch with mainstream fiction this is why I’ve never been able to appeal to the mass market. So I only read non-fiction, though voraciously, on all sorts of topics, none of them very learned.

In a sense I was cursed in the early years of my writing by a resonance or echo of D.H. Lawrence. There was a time when I was younger and bit loopy that I thought I might have been DHL reborn. I don’t think that now. But whenever I tried to write a simple tale the ‘tone’ of DHL would come floating in and turn it all into an unreadable pastiche of his style. I eventually exorcised him by writing (and re-writing and re-re-re-rewriting) ‘Shimmying Hips’ which was a parody and piss-take. The main character Godwin Jelph is DHL. Fritha was Freida etc. Every image, every place, is a warped version of his, although only a Lawrencian scholar might notice and appreciate. I put it out on Kindle, and although I’m told it’s largely unreadable at least it got rid of the bugger.

DS:  There is a telling line on one of your Amazon pages: “He does not belong to any occult group or society, does not take pupils, and does not give lectures on any kind of initiation. He insists on holding down a full-time job in the real world like any other mortal. That, after all, is part and parcel of the real magical path.” You seem to have a very humble and down-to-earth approach to an occult world that has harboured no small number of egomaniacs – is this an important ingredient to your success?

AR:  What success is that Daniel? Humble? Me? 40 odd years ago I stuck on the side of my old portable typewriter the letters HSW. The stood for: Humility – because when I was younger I was an arrogant bastard, though I had no achievements which might justify this; Simplicity – because I was uncomfortably aware that all this psuedo-intellectual study of dark and deep things (especially the Kabbalibosh) could well cause me to disappear up my own fundament; Work – because although I do work hard, it doesn’t come naturally to me, and I’d far rather lounge on a couch having adoring but mute servants feed me grapes while I watch ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’.

Plus there is an extent to which I’m a bit of a phoney, magically speaking. Except on rare occasions I can’t ‘see’ a thing. Nor do I have any of the powers you might expect magicians to have, and which I’ve witnessed in a few others of the real kind. So how can I teach anyone? So here is a secret which the little ar has observed in the capital AR: sometimes the latter uses literary style to hide the fact that he hasn’t a bloody clue. But don’t tell anyone, eh?

DS:  If I may extend that last question somewhat – you have been involved with the biographies of some celebrated occultists – Dion Fortune, Aleister Crowley and W.G. Gray – and now find yourself becoming a bit of an elder statesman in the Western Mystery Tradition in your own right.  Where do consider your work in relation with these pioneers?

AR:  Elder statesman! And here was me thinking I was still a Bright Young Thing. Where did all the years go… I just write down what comes along. I’ve often said that the story of how I came to write about Dion Fortune would take a book itself, involving staggering levels of coincidence and serendipity, but I didn’t go looking for any of it. Perhaps I’m just a kind of scribe, with no real axe of my own to grind. In football terms those characters you mentioned are the Real Madrids and Arsenals and Chelseas of this world. Me, I’m probably level with Plymouth Argylle – though I do have the odd FA Cup run in which I can surprise myself.

DS:  A couple of years ago you wrote Sex and Light: How to Google your Way to the Godhead.  Is this an example of one of your “dodgy books on Magick” as per your words in your bio statement?  What about other recent projects – what’s this new romp with the Templars?

AR:  Sex and Light… Well that was orginally called ‘The Google Tantra – How I Became the First Geordie to Raise the Kundalini’. It was a tongue-in-cheek and rude sort of semi-autobiography in part, but mainly a love letter to Margaret. A couple of big publishers were interested in the concept but wanted me to do it without the personal stuff, yet that would have killed it. Tiny little ignotus press took a chance, and then Twin Eagles took it on with its new title. In fact, as I learned only last year, my oldest and wildest friend Maxwell who never showed the slightest interest in the ‘occult’ when we were lads together, actually had experiences of his own which showed he raised the kundalini quite naturally long before me. So he ruined the whole damned book.

The Templars? Oh you mean the recent ‘Dark Light’ published by Mutus Liber. Well, it’s just a romp, based on my magnificent Mobile Libary. A number of the characters in it are described ‘as is’, being fellow workers in the library service. I thought that was one way to get some sales. But the Templars, like DHL, have floated in and out of my psyche for years and although I’ve asked them what they wanted from me I never got any sort of sign or answer. I suspect ‘Dark Light’ will do to them what ‘Shimmying Hips’ did to DHL – drive them away in a huff. It is the greatest novel ever written about the Wiltshire Mobile Library Service – if only because…etc etc

Then again I’ve got the non-fiction ’Geordie’s War’ coming out in the autumn which is the one project I’m really proud of. It’s about what my grandad did in the Great War, and how it affected my Dad and then me. It’s a strange little book, I think. Actually, forget the Humility thing – it’s bloody brilliant. I had the Northumberland Fusiliers in my psyche for several months of convalescence after a serious op, and I think I’ve done them proud. Oddly, Sting appeared as if my magick and it turns out he’s as obsessed by the Great War as I had become, so has done me an excellent Foreword.

DS:  Finally, do you feel that we are at the end of a golden age or are there up and coming thinkers and writers that give you hope for the future?  What advice do you have for aspiring neophytes in your field?

AR:  I don’t read many books on magick, but those recent ones by Wendy Berg, Josephine McCarthy, Mike Harris, R.J. Stewart, Normandi Ellis and Gareth Knight are in classes of their own. They know what they are talking about, and make me hugely jealous.

Advice for aspiring neophytes? First, do no harm. Then work hard, don’t give up, don’t worry if you make an absolute dick of yourself at times – and DON’T DO DRUGS.

Interview conducted on Monday, May 13, 2013
Photograph – Alan Richardson in Australia

For more information about Alan Richardson  visit his Amazon Author page.

Skylight Press has published two novels, On Winsley Hill and  The Fat Git, as well as two edited works, The Old Sod: The Odd Life & Inner Work of William G. Gray (with Marcus Claridge) and Working with Inner Light: The Magical Journal of William G. Gray (with Jo Clark).  We will be publishing his non-fiction memoir, Geordie’s War, later this year.

In 1997, Farrell left Pharos and joined Chic and Tabatha Cicero’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and formed a branch of their Order in the UK. Around that time he wrote his first book Making Talismans, a work that sought to present a complete magical system in order to bring about inner and outer change. Farrell consulted shamanism, paganism, the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn and Dion Fortune to ascertain what talismans are and how they work. Some time later he moved to Sofia and wrote Magical Pathworking, The Druidic Order of Pendragon (with Colin Robertson), which revealed the rituals and secrets of a Druid order active in Derbyshire from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1940s. This was followed by Gathering the Magic, a practical guide to sustaining successful esoteric groups in an Aquarian age fraught with an array of new challenges. Turning his hand to fiction, Farrell wrote an esoteric novel called When a Tree Falls, a sort of Dantean ontological quest where the protagonist confronts a myriad of alternate realities. This was followed by Egyptian Shaman, described by fellow esoteric author Lupa as “an innovative, realistic approach to shamanic practice.” In the book Farrell presents a system that integrates various facets of Egyptian mysticism, both ancient and revived.

In 2009 he moved to Rome where he established a new international Golden Dawn Order, called the Magical Order of Aurora Aurea, which is dedicated to fusing a practical modern magical current to the Golden Dawn system.  He also wrote two histories of the Golden Dawn, the first of which being King over the Water, a contentious work that explores the Cipher documents and other founding materials, as well as the contributions of William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Mathers. In an enthusiastic review Peregrin Wildoak states the following – “Mr Farrell has produced something unique here: a brilliant mixture of solid reporting of historical information combined with an experienced magician’s insights and publication of original documents.”  This 
was followed by a second work on the subject called Mathers’ Last Secret, which has since been amended to Mathers’ Last Secret Revised. Continuing the thread from his first book Farrell studies the various facets of Mathers’ Magical direction and comes to some compelling conclusions, the sort of which that will place his book up there with Pat Zalewski’s Golden Dawn Rituals and Commentaries and Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn.

As well as compiling an impressive booklist, Nick Farrell is active in many other areas.  He provided the research for the HorusHathor, a Golden Dawn Tarot deck painted by Harry and Nicola Wendrich. He is also a respected journalist that has worked in various hotbeds around the world, as his website attests: “My journalism career has meant that I have seen some interesting sights, been shot at, had death threats gone to parts of the world I would never have seen. It is also a good earthing for all the imagination stuff that occultism tends to throw up.” He is the author of many engaging essays on a wide array of subjects and also maintains a provocative blog as “the thoughts, rants and ramblings of Golden Dawn magician and writer.” Skylight Press is thrilled to publish Nick Farrell’s upcoming book, Magical Imagination: The Keys to Magic, and become a part of his wonderful work. He continues to live and work in the great historical city of Rome with his wife Paola.

Enter Gareth Knight, the respected esotericist author, mythographer and Middle Ages scholar, who took a deep interest in the Mélusine tale sometime prior to penning these inquisitive lines in his blog entry of October 2010:

“Ever heard of Melusine? She deserves to be better known. A major figure in medieval French lore and legend who is little known in the English speaking world apart from an essay by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould as one of his “Curious Myths of the Middle Ages” published way back in 1894, and where he seems to take her for a mermaid, depicting her with a fish’s rather than a serpent’s tail.

She is however an altogether different creature. Indeed she has given her name to the type of faery who enters the human world to mate with a human being, bringing great good fortune until he makes the mistake of distrusting her.”

Close on the heels of that statement came two Mélusine related books, Melusine of Lusignan and the Cult of the Faery Woman (R.J. Stewart Books, 2010) and The Romance of the Faery Melusine (Skylight Press, 2011). The first was described by the author as a “short monograph” on the Mélusine legend – and the second was his own translation of an evocative early 20^th Century novel by André Lebey. In the first book Knight makes a strong case for Mélusine being one of the pre-Christian water-faeries (like the Lady of the Lake or Lorelei), illustrating how the story can become one of magical empowerment and transformation, as similarly suggested by his treatment of the tales of the Arthuriad (see the author’s many books on the subject). But not content to let his work rest there Knight collects together all the best source materials, many of which he translates from the French, and presents his own researches into the Lusignan family of the 12th century. As per his introductory words regarding the great Matriarch –  “…I think the lady deserves better” – Knight has delivered a stunning compendium that will be of tremendous value to historical scholarship.

The result is The Book of Mélusine of Lusignan: In History, Legend & Romance, a remarkable collection of source texts and commentaries, many of which being made available in English for the first time. Part One is Knight’s own translation of Légende de la Fée Mélusine by the Abbé Vergnaud, former parish priest of Lusignan, which in turn quotes largely from a mid-19th century version of Couldrette. Part Two contains an English translation of The Romans of Partenay or of Lusignen: otherwise known as The Tale of Melusine translated from the French of Coudrette (c.1500-1520 A.D.). As Knight explains – “The prose redaction, provided as a marginal crib by the famous Victorian scholar Walter Skeat, is perhaps more terse than my own…” Part Three is Knight’s translation of Essai sur Mélusine, Roman du XIVéme siècle par Jean d’Arras, a scholarly analysis by the distinguished French scholar Louis Stouff, described as “the definitive academic work on Mélusine.” This account, published by the University of Dijon, provides commentary on the romance, the identity of Jean d’Arras and his commissioners, along with cultural, geographical and historical interests. In Part Four Knight collates various materials about the Castle, Town and Church at Lusignan, including Histoire de la Maison Royale de Lusignan by Canoine Pascal, Notre Dame de Lusignan XIéme et XIIéme Siècle by Suzanne Devillards & D. Sabourin, and L’Histoire de la Ville from a brochure of the Lusignan Tourist Office that Knight himself visited. Parts Five and Six comprise two essays by Gareth Knight, the first “A Historical Outline of the Lords of Lusignan” is followed by “Faery Tradition & the Kingdom of Jerusalem.” These essays begin with a scholarly and historical approach to the Lusignan family, their role in the crusades and various paths to kingship  – but as always, Knight follows with a more intimate exploration into the spiritual portents of the story.  He traces vibrant faery connections and their significance to various sister myths such as the Swan Knight of Lohengrin and seeks to illuminate a sacromagical light in the familial patterns between them. Skylight Press is thrilled to publish another unique and valuable scholarly work by Gareth Knight, the scope of which for this subject matter is unparalleled in the English language.

The Book of Mélusine of Lusignan is available from various retail outlets such as Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or direct from the Skylight Press website.

A strong impetus for the spate of 20^th Century Jesus novels was inadvertently supplied by Albert Schweitzer in The Quest for the Historical Jesus, a work that inspired ensuing second and third quests conducted by a series of German authors and more recently, the ‘Jesus Seminar.’ Schweitzer’s idea was to strip away two millennia of hagiography and get to the historical essence of the man, which resulted in his portrait of the eschatological prophet very much in keeping with the Judaic tradition.  His method of enquiry led to David Friedrich Strauss’s Jewish messiah, Karl Barth’s Essene Jesus, Friedrich Ghillany’s Mithraic Jesus, and Bruno Bauer’s exalted Jesus of the communal imagination.  But it was Ernest Renan’s seminal Life of Jesus that first presented the historical Christ within something of a novel setting, indeed it was scoffed at as “pure fiction” by Schweitzer.  Renan, a revered rationalist and Hebrew scholar, attempted to present an entirely human Jesus who sought to undermine Roman rule and establish a new theocracy, often resorting to subversive methods (like the staged raising of Lazarus) to win support.  Although presented as a biography Renan’s work opened the door to similar accounts of a purely historical Jesus, many of which can be found in 20^th Century novels from around the world.  Anthony Burgess’s Man of Nazareth sought to depict Jesus as part of very real and viable Roman world, alternating between exacting explanations and a powerful series of flashbacks in an attempt to synthesise the biblical material.  Similarly, Nino Ricci in Testament strips away the mythological portents and presents Jesus as an eccentric genius caught between two competing cultural identities.  Another quite remarkable work that deserves far more attention is King Jesus by Robert Graves, which although deeply controversial attests to some remarkable scholarship in presenting a very new hypothesis.  Jesus, son of Antipater (Herod’s oldest son), is embroiled in a complex Hebrew plot to bring about the ‘Golden Age.’  It delves into the dark patriarchal religion with its competing mystery cults (which include Graves’s ‘White Goddess’ theme) and its succession of warrior-priest kings.  An equally brilliant attempt to present a historical gospel is José  Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a beautiful novel that explores the psychology of Jesus from a poetic and visionary standpoint.  Here, Jesus lives and operates in a real word of senses and impressions as a man but is strongly implored from within to navigate the omens and take on the godhead.  George Moore takes on a similar task in The Brook Kerith by presenting Jesus as a man of conflicted states of being.  Eventually, the passionate and meditative thinker overcomes the impulsive revolutionary and finds his true purpose.  Often, this quest for the historical Jesus has a distinct mission and Shasaku Endo annexes Jesus from the trappings of the Old Testament in order to make him more suitable for Japanese culture.  This is not to say that A Life of Jesus is not a deeply historical text for it follows St. Paul’s well-documented attempt to make Jesus and his message more palatable for the gentile world.

So often, writers attempt to get at truth simply by considering another point of view, and after all this is often the only distinction between the original gospel writers and their heretical rivals.  As with all scriptural texts, a way to increase the notion of authenticity was simply to attribute the corpus to a first-hand witness, whether major or minor.  Many novelists of the 20^th Century followed this tendency although a few chose to subvert it by bringing in new or historically dubious witnesses.  Norman Mailer takes the most direct witness approach in The Gospel According to the Son by writing his novel from Jesus’s point of view.  This is controversial in and of itself because all the sayings of Jesus are traditionally taken on faith through the witness of the disciples and first saints of the tradition.  Mailer genuinely attempts to massage the gospel material but in typical Mailer fashion drifts off into many strange tangents, including Jesus’s internal wrangling with Jewish culture and an epic psychological battle with Satan.  Gabriel Meyer keeps it in the family by offering Jesus’s father’s account in The Gospel of Joseph.  So much has been written about the relationship with the heavenly father that the earthly father is so often relegated to a footnote in the story.  Based on a series of Coptic texts Joseph is presented as a sort of masonic sage and finally given his due.  Taylor Caldwell chooses a couple of obvious witness, although each controversial in their own way.  I, Judas tells the story of shamed disciple, Judas Iscariot, who must betray himself in order to fulfil Christ’s explicit directive, which is necessary to the divine plan.  Great Lion of God is the account of Paul, alleged author of about half of the New Testament despite never having met Jesus Christ in the flesh. Her account is largely sympathetic with the man who arguably changed the course of an infant Christianity, infusing many new and specifically non-Jewish ideas into the mix.  Pär Lagerkvist also takes on a challenging point of view in presenting the account of Barabbas, the ultimate sinner pardoned to make way for Jesus’s execution.  Barabbas is an extraordinary novel about a peripheral figure made to agonise over the terms of his freedom on the road to his own belief.  Arguably, Anita Mason takes on an even more obscure figure in The Illusionist in the enigmatic and esoteric figure of Simon Magus.  In her account, both Simon and Jesus are part of a large tradition of miracle workers and showmen, despite the fact that Jesus is already dead at the time of the story.  Not content with a single witness Sholem Asch weaves a complex tapestry from the competitive accounts of Cornelius (Pilate’s Jerusalem governor), Judas Iscariot, and yet another Joseph (this time a young student of Nicodemus).  In doing so, Asch is able to creatively deal with the oft-perceived inconsistencies between Roman and Jewish accounts in his novel, The Nazarene.  Perhaps more famously, at least due to the adapted film version, Lew Wallace goes outside of the gospel witnesses to tell the tale of Judah Ben-Hur, another Jew similarly betrayed into impossible conditions.  What most people don’t know is that the novel Ben Hur is strangely subtitled “A Tale of the Christ” despite the fact that less than 20% of its pages have anything to do with the personage of Jesus Christ.  In Kingdom of the Wicked, his second and slightly less well-known novel on the subject, Anthony Burgess provides the irreverent account of Sadoc, an ailing Roman shipping clerk, whose gross exaggerations on events are posited as the reason for the fantastical nature of our surviving gospels.  Frank Yerby introduces Nathan bar Yehuda in Judas my Brother, the account of a son of one of Jesus’s childhood companions. Rather cleverly, he manages to combine copious theological material with very secular considerations of the era.  But perhaps the most adventurous point of view account can be found in Gerd Theissen’s Shadow of the Galilean, which is not a novel in the strict sense.  Here Theissen follows the life of Jesus but without ever really catching up with the elusive prophet.  It is a story around the figure, casting the net wide in his societal circles in order to present a shadowy yet creative anachronism of the gospels.

Perhaps a subset of the modern POV gospels can be described as feministic, those coming from a feminine viewpoint and/or infusing various levels of feminist thought, despite the first example coming from a male writer.  James P. Carse hints as another masculinist gospel in the title of The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple, traditionally an attribution given to the apostle John, but throughout ascribed the pronoun “she.”  Jesus’s ministry of trenchant sayings is freshly invigorated from a women’s perspective, and more so from a position of deep intimacy.  But most feminist accounts follow the mystical figure of Mary Magdalene, an increasingly perplexing figure that crops up numerous times in various mystical schools and their subversive texts.  In According to Mary Magdalene Marrianne Fredriksson tells the tale of this delphian women long after the death of Christ, a story necessitated by the increasing distortions of the male disciples and their converts.  Fredriksson retains the early church notion that Mary was a reformed prostitute but allows her character to contradict their persistent dogma.  Similarly, Angela Hunt’s Miryam of Magdala is the dark and conflicted figure in Magdalene, a novel that explains so-called “demon possession” and Mary’s on-going struggles with dark forces despite the intervention of a decidedly human Jesus.  Michele Roberts takes up the mantle by couching her story in the contentious discovery of an authentic “fifth gospel” in her novel, The Wild Girl.  Something toward the essentialist feminist position is strongly evoked as the patriarchal trappings of the Judaic worldview are dispensed with quickly, allowing Christ’s message to centre on a spiritual and tantric unity.

Most often it is the more subversive accounts of the life of Jesus that get the most attention, simply because their authors choose to magnify elements of the story that the traditionalists tend to overlook.  Such a divisive figure was Hugh J. Schonfield who set out to “spill the beans” about a very tactical and decidedly mortal messiah planning out his PR campaign in meticulous detail.  The Passover Plot presents the elaborate yarn of Jesus and his co-conspirators fixing the crucifixion in order to ensure survival and thus strategically aligning themselves with many Old Testament prophesies.  Arguably the most hailed of Christological fictions is Nikos Kazantzakis’s acclaimed novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, although much vaulted by Martin Scorsese’s controversial film version.  Less conspiratorial than Schonfield’s plot, but perhaps equally blasphemous, Kazantzakis presents a very human Jesus riddled with doubt and anxiety.  The famous dream sequence from the cross opens up a hypothetical and alternate reality that provides a telling gloss on the Christ that eventually emerges from Pauline Christianity.  Such an embattled human figure can also be found in Jim Crace’s wildly imaginative Quarantine, a novel that zeros in on Christ’s mysterious 40-day fast in the desert.  In that desert fasts are rather traditional zealot fare Jesus is accompanied by a strange collection of pilgrims, each reacting differently to the rough but exotic locale and the hallucinations that come with voluntary starvation.  As per natural bodily conditions Jesus dies at about the 30-day mark but the religion generated in his name is born of the bizarre connections made in those caves.  Delving deeper into both the split personality and competing perceptions of Jesus is A.J. Langguth’s little known Jesus Christs, a post-modern novel that attempts to look at the emerging savour through a kaleidoscopic lens.  In this remarkable work the figure of Jesus is singularly unobtainable, a complex web of personalities and projections eternally multiplying and mutating either by design or chance.

In the wake of Dan Brown and writers of his ilk the figure of Jesus has been sequestered to the cagey province of the treasure-seeker, where his person ekes into being through excavation and the unravelling of intricate puzzles.  Wilton Barnhardt’s genre-fiction account, simply named Gospel, is a complex detective story involving a precocious theological student and a battle-hardened ex-Jesuit.  The notion that new discoveries can shake the very foundations of Christianity is well grounded in 19^th Century rationalism and the quest to uncover new manuscripts.  Following the controversial work of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (the first two of which sued Dan Brown for plagiarising Holy Blood, Holy Grail in The Da Vinci Code), Liz Greene’s historical The Dreamer of the Vine explores the notion that Jesus married Mary Magdalene at the Wedding of Cana and that their secret bloodline extends throughout the ages, in this case interweaving with the extraordinary prophecies of Nostradamus.

For others, the treasure is quite simply found within, and Christ becomes an internal figure to be channelled through the imagination or the astral plane.  Of course, this idea was very much promulgated by the ‘Ascended Master Teachings’ of the Theosophists, as inspired by various tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism.  Such an exotic imaginal rendering comes from the remarkable Russian author, Mikhail Bulgakov, in The Master and Margarita, a fiction channelled through a distraught writer and psychiatric hospital inmate known only as ‘The Master.’  A secondary narrative involving Pontius Pilate, Jesus and Satan occasionally haunts this 402-page epic through some strange but candid gnosis, often to alarming effect.  In another novel by Kazantzakis, The Greek Passion, the truth of the gospel is evoked through the staging of old passion plays.  Meek and rustic Greek villagers at first don the habit of their roles but then develop a devastating religious fervour as the masque becomes real.  In the irregular account of The Fool in Christ: Emmanuel Quint, German author Gerhart Hauptmann embodies Christ in a poor, rejected lowlife riddled with strange dreams and a persecution complex.  In similar fashion the great Gore Vidal channels his Messiah through the ironically named Eugene Luther, a key elder in the Cavite movement founded by one John Cave (with telling initials).  Vidal’s Christ is both stymied and animated by oppositional figures, an Isis goddess figure and a meddling populist named Paul.

Of course, the attempt to conflate or merge Jesus with esoteric or pre-Christian pagan elements is not a new phenomenon, the best being D.H. Lawrence’s controversial and ground-breaking novel, The Man Who Died (originally The Escaped Cock).  As with many subversive accounts Lawrence’s Christ escapes the cross and transcends the whole Judeo-Christian experience in a secret, mystical, but decidedly human afterlife.  In an admixture of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths a resuscitated (both physically and spiritually) Jesus enters the Temple of Isis by the ancient waters of Babylon to become a bridegroom of a very different sort.  In Paul Park’s The Gospel of Corax, Jesus becomes the travelling companion of a Roman healer, and when exposed to the Zoroastrian Magi and various Buddhist sages decides to shed his rebel status for that of an enlightened Eastern mystic. Such accounts attempt to explain the similarity between Jesus’s message and that of other shamanic saviours of the East, many of which were born of a virgin and rose from the dead three days after violent execution.  Other writers attempt to assimilate the miracular proclivity within the Jewish tradition with older and contemporaneous systems of magic, perhaps encouraged by Morton Smith’s famous theological treatise, Jesus the Magician.  One such author, Richard A. Muller, explores the power of staged illusion in his provocatively named novel, The Sins of Jesus.  Muller follows the common device of focusing on those missing years where Jesus develops magical powers (in both senses of the word), which somehow leads to self-deception and esoteric truth, both of which inform and drive the resultant mythos that comes down to us through two millennia.

Often bizarrely, it is the most outlandish and deliberately satirical stories of Jesus Christ that seem to uncover the greatest truths.  The great scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian comes to mind, when the newly converted followers immediately split into two rivalling factions, one set following the gourd and the other the strewn sandal, in a clever parody of schism and denominationalism.  For Benito Pérez Galdós the vehicle for such elucidation is comedy and his Nazarin presents Christ as the quintessential quixotic fool, stumbling hilariously through the stations of his mission.  James Morrow’s bold farce, Only Begotten Daughter, follows the story of Jesus’s futuristic half-sister, Mary Katz, born of a celibate father after a sperm bank accident.  Her story presents the culmination of the second-coming prophecy in a way that current believers would never readily accept, with a second godly progeny turning gasoline into milk just to distinguish herself from the first.  Where some authors satirise by deft mirroring and hinted alternatives others are bold and up front with stark and purposeful makeovers.  Chris Moore made quite a splash with his fairly recent offering, Lamb, in which the one true gospel is imparted by disciple and “best bud” – Biff.  Moore makes no attempt at historical veracity and has no sense of biblical loyalty whatsoever, giving a wholly contemporary account of Jesus as a man of Kung Fu, Yoga, sleight of hand, Chinese food, lattes and the art of making explosives.  Theodore Sturgeon’s Godbody also tackles Jesus on contemporary terms, probing the possibility of his return to a small American town where he then becomes a divisive and morally dubious figure.  In much the same way, Skylight Press author, Chris Hill, explores how the emergence of a messianic figure on a small remote British island would affect its inhabitants in his recently released Song of the Sea God. Other authors have employed the sci-fi device of time-travel, often farcically, in order to get at something authentic in the late Iron Age.  In Michael Moorcock’s sardonic novel Behold the Man, Karl Glogauer travels back in time and is shocked to find a shy, reluctant healer that bears no resemblance to any accepted religious notion of Jesus Christ.  Such a discovery leads to an emotional crisis and the bizarre irony that the true and historical Jesus is not a convert of the faith that bears his name.  Quite the opposite in The Didymus Contingency, Jeremy Robinson’s protagonist travels back in time with the expressed intent of uncovering a liturgical fake, only to find a refreshingly human character full of life and verve in dark and desperate times.  Not to be outdone, Gore Vidal caricatures the source of Christianity as being under threat by a computer hacker’s virus in his cyberpunk classic, Live from Golgotha.  In this story Saint Timothy is visited by Saint Paul in a vision and exhorted to write his gospel before the teachings of Jesus (originally an obese man) are deleted forever.  With a clever net of interweaving satires Vidal suggests that Paul’s version of Christianity (and that of the many pontiffs that follow) may have itself been a hack of the original, suggesting that the New Testament is some sort of simulacrum. Thus, any gospelising intent becomes pure fiction.

The blasphemetic gospels, as presented here, elucidate a phenomenon that is still in its infancy stages for there are many more to come.  In that it comprises a sizeable multi-genre literary corpus it is surprising that there has not been more comparative and theoretical scholarship on the subject.  Perhaps the only attempt thus far is the criminally little known work of Theodore Ziolkowski who’s Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus scrutinises the aesthetic challenges of various novelists that have attempted to depict the enigmatic and iconoclastic figure of Jesus Christ.  Along with a few of the better known authors briefly examined above Ziolkowski explores rare and out-of-print novels by the likes of Giovanni Papini in order to understand literary ‘christomania’ and its plethora of Christological fictions.  Perhaps the heretical impulse to concoct a ‘fifth gospel,’ whether written or unwritten, is in all of us that live in the shadow of Christendom, and that such an impulse even as it takes us beyond the borders of blasphemy, extends to something orthodox within.

Daniel Staniforth is the author of The Groundlings of Divine Will, a book that wilfully distorts the orthodoxy/heresy binary in a perverse mirroring of Jesus and Shakespeare  and their gospel traditions.  

© Daniel Staniforth/Skylight Press

Gareth Knight, an author of some forty books on a wide array of subjects following his training in Dion Fortune’s Society of the Inner Light, is now firmly established as

DS: It strikes me that your work is now coming to a second perhaps third generation of readers who perhaps aren’t quite as aware of your background. You have retired from public service but continue to be a prolific author on quite a few fronts. Tell us a little bit about how you work and what you are up to these days.

GK: Third generation? Yes, sounds a bit awesome. Especially when I reflect that my first book, A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, and still going strong, was written fifty years ago. Having reached my ninth decade most of my esoteric activities these days are done sitting at a computer keyboard. And a lot easier that is, I must say, compared to the old days of hammering away at a secondhand typewriter with three carbon copies jammed in the roller. Correcting a mistake was a real hassle, a messy job with an India rubber applied to all copies. I feel lucky that people still seem to want to read my work and that Skylight Press is there to design it so well and distribute it.  

DS: It has come to my attention that you are a pianist and lover of music, particularly Jazz. Is music an escape or release from your work or is it a part of the mystical experience? What are your listening or playing habits?

GK: The best thing about music making is doing it along with other people. I led a traditional jazz band in my misspent youth, spent summer weekends playing flugal horn and glockenspiel with a local brass band in my middle years, and until recently filled the piano chair in a rehearsal big band playing anything from Count Basie to Stan Kenton. I also had a go at writing music arrangements, somewhat a bit off the beaten track, such as modern jazz or old ragtime numbers for the brass band, including a cheeky version of “The Stripper” (never to be played on Sunday afternoons or at church fêtes!).

I still play the piano a bit at home, and would be what might be called an improvising musician – never playing anything the same way twice. As for listening, I like any jazz from ancient to modern – pianists Jelly Roll Morton to Thelonious Monk, and with a particularly soft spot for cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. Classical music does not do a lot for me although I have recently been smitten by the astonishingly gifted and lovely virtuoso Alison Balsom playing baroque trumpet.

DS: You have written on the Oxford Inklings, the various texts of the Arthuriad, and more recently have translated works from mediaeval French literature. Coming from a literary background myself I also notice a lot of literary allusions in your esoteric work, often the Romantics and Victorians (with Coleridge seeming to be a particular favourite). Can you elaborate on where this might come from and whether or not you have a conscious approach to the literary realm?

GK: The magical imagination has been best demonstrated and theorized about by nineteenth century romantic poets – a fact I learned from the former Hawkwood College principal Bernard Nesfield-Cookson, from the poet Kathleen Raine, and from reading What Coleridge Thought by anthroposophist Inkling Owen Barfield. I simply took the hint and plunged in.

I have always had a leaning toward the French and when I retired from work took an external BA degree in French at the University of London which gave me the ability to translate a few interesting texts – introducing the faery Melusine of Lusignan to the Anglosaxon world and getting closer acquainted with early Arthurian romancers such as Chrétien de Troyes. 

DS: My introduction to your work was through Experience of the Inner Worlds, which was first published almost 40 years ago. Recently, you have worked on quite a few new editions of texts from your early days, which must be quite an experience. Can you tell us what it is like going back to these works? Do you feel that you have changed or grown across the arc of your books?

GK: The one I would really like to get back to is A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism as it is showing its age in some respects – most of the occultism is all right but there are some embarrassing social comments which I would no longer identify with. I was able to go some way to make amends with a new Introduction to the paperback edition in 2000, although I am not sure that many people read Introductions!

As for my later works, it may sound a bit complacent or conceited but I have not found much need to revise them – in fact I have been quite awed by my former erudition. Did I really read and comment on all the works of C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield for The Magical World of the Inklings?  So in all honesty  it is not so much with a big head as realizing I might have passed my best! 

Not likely to pull off that kind of thing again, any more than doing unscripted weekend workshops off the cuff. Time to pull in the horns a bit and play to what remain of my strengths. Funnily enough, I share the experience of Dion Fortune in having, more than once, picked up a book and read it with interest before realizing it to be one of my own!

DS: Many readers might not know that you spent many years working in the publishing trade both as a submissions editor for a large publishing house and a proprietor of a small press. A lot has changed since then. How do you see the current publishing world in comparison to those days? What advice would you give to an aspiring writer in your field?

GK: I think large publishing houses are much the same apart from getting larger and multinational in place of the old family firms that had thrived for the previous couple of hundred years and more. When I was with Longmans it was still run by the family since its foundation in 1724. In the modern world a middle sized publishing firm finds it hard to make ends meet.

On the other hand small publishing is a lot easier with the advance of technology making short print runs feasible, and with increased distribution and promotion opportunities via the internet. In my early days when printing was done with slugs of hot metal in a Linotype machine the only way I survived was by scrounging money from generous benefactors and having a specialist mail order bookshop on the side as a customer base. Mind you,  publishing is still not as easy as it might look!

As for advice on writing – read a lot and write a lot. Read the very best in your chosen genre, whether it be highbrow literature, journalism or pulp fiction. And write at least a thousand words every day – most of it will be rubbish for the first hundred thousand words or so but paper is cheap and recyclable. Above all enjoy it, don’t give up the day job and be lucky! Very lucky! If getting rich is your object you might do better to play the national lottery. Chances are about the same, and you can use the money you might have wasted on a creative writing course.

DS: Much of what you write is sought out by what seems to be a robust ‘speciality’ or ‘niche’ audience of practitioners, theorists, students and neophytes. But in a mainstream sense it is all lumped together in the ‘New Age’ or ‘Mind Body Spirit’ sections along with Alien conspiracy theories and blissed-out Angel picture books. What is your sense of your readership - who do you write for?

GK: I suppose I more or less write for myself. A personal quest to research into something and hope a reasonable number of like minded souls might care to pay the cost of a book to be looking over my shoulder, so to speak. Which is not a very good formula for earning a living but I have only ever looked upon it as a congenial hobby. 

The esoteric world is a very fragmented one – with almost as many “isms” as there are readers to go round. Just look at the shelves on a specialist occult book shop. And then cast a glance at the occult shelf of a big book store to see a smattering of elementary books geared to the lowest common denominator.

DS: As perhaps the foremost ‘elder statesman’ in the Western Mystery Tradition and yourself a part of Dion Fortune’s legacy do you have strong notions of lineage within the community? Is there a core of new writers and thinkers to be excited about or have things become too diffuse in our digital age of ‘anything goes’?

GK: As to lineage I suppose that I am a Dion Fortune man. I was bowled over by her books when I first came upon them, and learned my occultism in the society she founded, and have continued on from there as the path has opened at my feet – for details of which see I Called It Magic, my esoteric autobiography. Some people now talk of a “Dion Fortune/Gareth Knight tradition” so I suppose I must have done something right! However, the tradition is wider than that, and flourishing in many ways with some very bright people coming through. For specific examples of which consult the list of authors at Skylight Press!

DS: Finally – people often comment on the vast range of your subject matter and expertise – can you give us an inkling as to what you’re working on at the moment? What new topics can we expect?

GK: Currently girding up my loins to cope with the proofs of my forthcoming blockbuster The Book of Melusine of Lusignan in History, Legend & Romance. On the translation front I am two thirds of the way through another book by André Lebey, L’Initiation de Vercingetorix  a fascinating evocation of the Celtic world of two thousand years ago, probably to be called Druids against Caesar.

As for the next bit of original work, I am teetering on the edge of an ambitious and possible foolhardy attempt, if I should live so long, to cast some esoteric light on the modern scientific world, (or scientific light on the modern esoteric world), with the provisional title of Stellar Alchemy & Magical Harmonics. Might as well aim high and end with a Big Bang rather than a whimper. 

Interview conducted on Friday, April 19, 2013
Photograph circa 1990 by Rebecca Wilby

For more information about Gareth Knight please visit his website or facebook page.

Skylight Press will shortly be publishing The Book of Melusine of Lusignan: In History, Legend & Romance, a collection of related texts edited by Gareth Knight.  His other Skylight titles include To the Heart of the Rainbow, The Magical World of the Inklings, Yours Very Truly, Experience of the Inner Worlds, A History of White Magic, The Romance of the Faery Melusine, I Called it Magic, The Abbey Papers (with Rebecca Wilby), Merlin and the Grail Tradition, Faery Loves and Faery Lais, Tarot & Magic, The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend and Magical Images and the Magical Imagination.  He has also contributed to other such titles as Red Tree, White Tree, At the Gates of Dawn, Both Sides of the Door, Gwenevere and the Round Table and The Magical Battle of Britain (with Dion Fortune).

Stoning the Devil, a recent collection of  interconnected stories set in the United Arab Emirates by writer Garry Craig Powell, dismantles the stereotype of the passive Middle Eastern woman. In this authentic and vivid work of historical fiction, which was just nominated for the for the Frank O’Conor Award, don’t expect to read about the Muslim woman hidden under a burka with no sexual appetite of her own. In fact, the three main female characters are carnal and sexually rebellious, defiant and even passionately violent — making perhaps, not always the most carefully considered decisions — as they are treading new territory — but decisions of their own nonetheless…

…More notable in this novel, is how Powell  moves away from the Western tradition of portraying the submissive Muslim woman as symbolic of a “backwards” Middle Eastern culture, one that should be viewed with hostility, primarily to support a colonial perspective. Writer Amal Amireh picks up this topic, writing, “The fixation on the veil, the harem, excision, and polygamy made Arab women symbols of a region and a religion that were at once exotic, violent, and inferior.“ So the comic, erotic, and even violent sex scenes in Powell’s novel are crucial to this portrait of Middle Eastern women…

A New York native, Jill Di Donato is the author of the novel Beautiful Garbage and a contributor to the Huffington Post, where she writes a column about sex, relationships, and gender politics. In addition, Jill is the Editorial Director of Unruly Heir’s Good Days Media Channel where she often writes about New York characters, arts, and style. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she has also taught writing. Currently, she is an adjunct Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology and teaches in Barnard College’s summer program. She dedicates her work to the empowerment of women through the arts.

Thus begins The Groundlings of Divine Will, a mysterious pamphlet written largely in corrective second person to the Master of Revels by a shadowy and dubious collective, the groundlings of the pit. But who are these people that stand in the stalls of the Globe, the Swan, or Blackfriars for a mere penny? A penny for their thoughts! What are their responses to the plays and how do they differ to those that have come down to us through time? Are we faced with a secret society, a heckling choir, decoders of dangerous secrets, or just a rag-tag collection of driftwood souls that seep up to the Shakespearean stage? And from whence does this manic and subversive gospel come? Are these the synoptic thoughts of co-aspirants or just another clever ruse in the murky name of literature and scholarship?

The author of Weaver in the Sluices and Diddle (poetry and fiction respectively) is responsible for this controversial, self-reflexive, ironic and humorous response to the way that Shakespeare is so often taught in contemporary academia, in some sort of attempt to reclaim the immortal bard – but for whom and for what purpose? The works of ‘Divine Will,’ as he is referred to throughout, have been confined to a vacuum, and almost biblically so in how the scripts have become wilfully detached from their moorings of time and place. In this hybridised long ‘Proem,’ Daniel Staniforth goes to absurd lengths of reattachment, gladly playing havoc with the swirling dictums and counter-dictums of his time, gleefully seeking to subvert the tautological authority of the neck-frilled academicians over the historical groundlings of the pit.

Elements of satire, parody and burlesque are interposed as hagiographical substitutions made for the purposes of irony and deconstruction. The groundlings seek to be reheard as a singular voice, often with strange and uncomfortable utterances that might unhinge the traditional reader or passive viewer of Shakespeare’s plays. Allegiances will be tested, conspiracies will be aired, and any notions of orthodoxy will be put to the rack. Through his precocious groundlings, Staniforth explores the esoteric possibilities of stage as temple, drama as ritual, script as liturgy, and theatrical response as spiritual supplication and discipleship. But religion is wholly uncatholicized and the pit opens to receive all manner of dark variants, suppressed theologies, reformative doxologies, cunning fraternities, magical sublimations, and the folk-soul whispers of a pre-Augustinian Britain. Where lie the allegiances of Divine will in this swirling miasma?

The reader, should they be willing, will be initiated into the amalgamated and timeless world of the Groundlings – a world of alternative histories, unbracketed dualities, demoralized proclivities, and dedoxified modalities. They will “have ears to hear” the invective gospel and share in the divine will. Already many adherents have sublimated themselves – fellow playwrights, writers, poets, theoreticians, alchemists, astrologers, mystics, clerics, necromancers, academics, sycophants, commoners, mendicants, madmen, heretics, and of course, Umberto Eco. The Groundlings of Divine Will simply illustrates how discourse, rhetoric and that grandiloquent power of oration serves as the strongest definition for our collective place in history – or some such pomposity.

Staniforth is not afraid to dip into the cosmic trough and find magical pearls among the swine; the flashing twists and barbs of his heretic wit had me going up and down for hours.
— Rev. Obadiah Horseworthy

The tension between the divine will and human self-will is a subject that pervades the book; to that subject the profoundest insights into the hidden activity of providence and into human nature are brought.
— Emanuel Swedenborg

Groundlings of Divine Will is available from various retail outlets such as Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or direct from the Skylight Press website.

Gareth Knight

My reading at the moment is very much geared up to writing. Still plugging away at translating another book by Andre Lebey - l’Initiation de Vercingetorix – following the enthusiastic reception of my translation of his romance of the Melusine of Lusignan. This one is on Druid rites at the time of Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and their preparation of the great Celtic leader who nearly defeated him. Shall probably retitle the translation Druids against Caesar. With the imminent publication by Skylight Press of my book The Book of Melusine of Lusignan I have probably said all I can about the famous Faery and so have shifted my researches into the male of the species, and the traditions of Oberon, the Faery King. This has meant polishing up my Old French to trawl through a couple of 13th century romances Huon of Bordeaux and Le Romans d’Auberon - whether this will make up into a book remains to be seen. However, the desk has been cleared of Druids and Faeries at the last moment with the invitation to write a commentary on Dion Fortune’s Rite of Isis and Rite of Pan as originally performed by her, and which buttress her novels The Sea Priestess, Moon Magic and The Goat-foot God which I have been re-reading along with other relevant material.

Margaret Randall

Literature is only occasionally my most impassioned reading. More often, I search out historic or scientific texts that end up feeding my own literature. Toward the end of last year, in the midst of the worldwide new age hysteria regarding “the end of the world according to the Maya calendar,” I returned to the Maya. My partner and I made a trip to five of the great Maya sites in Central America. Before and during that trip I reread some of the important literature on the subject, and didn’t stop when I returned home. I was working on a long poem, “Daughter of Lady Jaguar Shark,” that Wings Press will bring out in text and photographs later this year. And I was looking to answer certain questions, especially about the mysterious glyphs the Maya left us and which for centuries have remained unreadable.

Michael D. Coe is probably one of the leading experts writing about the multi-faceted breaking of the Maya code, an endeavour that has spanned continents and decades and involved ethnographers, anthropologists, artists, adventurers, and even a couple of children. His book of that title (Breaking the Maya Code, Michael D. Coe, Thames & Hudson, with editions running from 1992 to 2012) unravels a complicated history, yet is written in such a way that a layperson can follow it. In recent years great leaps in this story have been made, and I was thrilled to be able to buy a feature documentary of the same name by David Lebrun. This beautifully filmed and extremely evocative film is 116 minutes long. It can be ordered from www.nightfirefilms.org. I have watched it several times, and recommend it to anyone interested in the development of complex language and the effects of colonialism on the destruction of cultural memory.

Another fascinating book I read recently is Malinche’s Conquest by Australian writer Anna Lanyon (Allen & Unwin, 1999). This is a hard one to find; a friend was able to get it for me from one of those online sources for used books. La Malinche, a young girl from Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec who was sold by her family and ended up a concubine to Hernán Cortéz, has been despised in her culture for having “slept with the enemy and thereby betraying the race.” Traitors in Mexico are referred to as malinchistas. But who was the offended one in that story, the mixed-race nation or the child sold into slavery against her will?  La Malinche spoke several languages: Nahuatl, Maya, and Spanish among them. She became Cortéz’ interpreter with Moctezuma and others. It seems her vilification began some 300 years after her death, when an eminently male Creole nobility found it useful to scapegoat a woman for the shame of conquest. Although several Latin American feminists have written brilliantly about this historic figure, Lanyon’s book adds a layer of well-researched detail to her life. And it reads like a good novel.

Wings Press recently published Sublime Blue: Selected Early Odes by Pablo Neruda. William Pitt Root spent years working on the English translations, which are indeed sublime. Facing page texts, beautiful design, and careful editing make this, like all Wings books, something to cherish. I’ve enjoyed reading these translations of poems I know intimately in the Spanish original, and know I will go back to this collection often.

Alan Richardson

Wot am I reading? Erm…. D-Day and Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. Shane by Jack Schaeffer (one of my favourites, read it at least once a year). Imagining the World into Existence – Normandi Ellis.  Flashman and the Redskins – G.M. Fraser

Kirk Marshall

I’ve just cracked the spine of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, which was accorded a Man Booker Prize shortlisting last year, and which has immediately seduced me with its sprawling seven page-long opening sentence. From what I can discern from the book’s blurb, Thayil’s novel is a work of hallucinogenic historiographical fiction, which recalls the rise and fall of the opium den as a microcosm for community and industry in 20th-century Bombay. Thayil’s prose is pretty mercurial stuff, and albeit I’ve only just embarked on this reading experience, his style demonstrates a consummate facility with word-wrangling, enough to provoke reminiscences of early Rushdie or Bolaño. I’m generally not one to read or invest much passing interest in the titles bestowed recognition by the Man Booker committee of judges — I believe the always ludic & lucid China Miéville coined the neologism “Middlebrowaggedon” to indict the inclination of the contemporary Anglophone prize-wrangling/publishing apparatus to shy away from difficult literature — but I did recently finish reading the discontinuous narrative, Communion Town, which is the début novel-in-stories from a British scribe named Sam Thompson, and I must confess I was struck asunder by the delirious invention of his sentences.

I generally prefer works of literary fiction in which the elements of style, tone and register are afforded priority over plot, accessibility or function; it means that most of what I read isn’t necessarily representative or reflective of the English-language reading public (albeit I’m aware how such a phrase is both problematic and deceptively reductive). What I do know is the visceral power of a perfectly-wrought phrase, and there’s enough examples of consonantal cadence, consecution, catachresis and linguistic craziness in Sam Thompson’s Communion Town to satisfy a wayward lust for any new foray into contemporary experimental literature. Finally, another book which demands an immediate readership is The Alligators of Abraham by emerging Massachusetts-based raconteur Robert Kloss, which has (thus far) offered me my favourite read of the new year. If you’re seeking a novel that introduces an eschatological plague of alligators into pre-Reconstruction war-torn America, whilst Abraham Lincoln’s embalmed corpse is wheedled about from town to town like a sordid carnival attraction for historically-amnesiac Gettysburg patrons, then there can be no book I’d recommend more highly. It instils hope in me that there’s still lifeblood in the pumping artery of contemporary literary art.

Gordon Strong

For research I’m currently reading The Noetic Universe by Dean Radin, and Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna. Suggested to me was The Hearing Trumpet – Leonora Carrington, I bought that. I discovered Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson recently – simple explanations of difficult concepts. I’m re-reading Aldous Huxley Antic Hay and Barbara Pym Glass of Blessings for pleasure. A great failing of current novels is that they have no rhythm or music in the writing. For the sake of nostalgia I’m looking at Stoned – Andrew Loog Oldham.

Richard Froude

I just read Michael Flatt’s excellent Absent Receiver from SpringGun Press, located less than half a block from my house in Denver. When it turned up in the mail I realized I should have probably just walked across the street and picked it up. I plan to offset this environmental mishap by planting flowers on the highway median both north and south of town. I just started Seth Landman’s Sign You Were Mistaken from Factory Hollow Press. This book contains some of the most deeply affecting writing I have experienced in quite some time, I might pick out the wrenching ”A Secret Sympathy.” That may sound like a throwaway remark, but those who know me may attest to how grumpy I am about poetry in general, and as such how rare it is for me to say anything nice about anyone, let alone their writing. Although I have not read Emily Toder’s Science from Coconut Books, I have listened to her reading the poems on the internet and they are sharp, meticulous, beautiful. One of them (my favourite “On Sequins”) even contains my first name, although I am sure this is coincidental. Regardless, Science is next up.

I also await The Year of the Rooster, Noah Eli Gordon’s new book from Ahsahta Press. One might deduce from the striking, oversized, and multi-headed cock that adorns the cover that the work is a cautionary tale of scientific hubris in the tradition of Michael Crichton’s chef-d’oeuvre Jurassic Park. A swift look at the publisher’s website informs me that this is (of course) not the case. I’ve been waiting to read this book since Noah told me about it on my porch 6 years ago. I recommend you join me.

Garry Craig Powell

Michael Ledeen’s The First Duce about Gabriele D’Annunzio, for research; a James Salter novel, Light Years; and just finished Antonio Tabucchi’s marvellous Pereira Declares, a novel about fascism in Portugal in the 30s. I’m now reading Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and  John Woodhouse’s biography, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Defiant Archangel.

Rebecca Wilby

I have my head firmly stuck in the early 13th century at the moment, working on some of the esoteric and Faery lore found in the early Holy Grail literature. My focus is on Le Haut Livre du Graal, an Old French text (edited by W.A. Nitze and T.A. Jenkins and sadly out of print) which provides one of the most eccentric but fruitful Grail adventures, written some time between 1190 and 1220. One of its main protagonists is the ever-rewarding Gawain, who is a very ancient figure and indeed was probably the earliest Grail-seeker before squeaky-clean Perceval and mincing Galahad arrived on the scene. There is a compelling body of evidence linking Gawain to Celtic myth as a pre-Christian solar hero (he crops up in the Mabinogion under his Welsh name, Gwalchmai) and even as a British version of the Irish hero Cúchulainn. Although this idea originated with Victorian scholars, by far the best development of it is by John Matthews in his book Gawain: Knight of the Goddess. In this very enjoyable and well thought out study he shows how Gawain belongs to Celtic tradition in his service of the goddess of sovereignty. But as the Arthurian stories gradually became more Christianised, so Gawain made an increasingly uncomfortable fit with the pious values of the medieval period. And so his character evolves through the romances, from the courteous and near invincible son-of-a-sun-god to an ever more thuggish and hot-headed chancer, until he winds up as something of a Victorian cad in Tennyson’s excruciating Idylls. Of course it’s not just Gawain who originated in Celtic tradition; the whole of the Arthurian mythos is steeped in it, often in complex and obscure ways. One of the best attempts to sort out the tangle is The Grail: from Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol by R.S. Loomis. This wonderful book unravels all the threads, and attempts to show how the original concept of the Grail was by no means chalice-shaped and had nothing to do with the Cup of the Last Supper until relatively late in its evolution. Similarly the spear-that-drips-blood, which forms such a fundamental part of the Grail Hallows, goes far beyond the spear of Longinus and represents a vivid and fiery mystery in its own right.

Chris Hill

Currently I am reading Stoning the Devil by fellow Skylight author Garry Craig Powell and I’m finding it a fantastic read – entertaining and educating in equal measure. I like the way it blends an episodic narrative into a seamless whole. Before that I read Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle which I enjoyed greatly but found a little uneven – it’s very fragmentary and parts feel a bit bolted on – there are some wonderful passages of prose but it seemed to me to lack the overall vision and sense of unity that marks out the very best novels. I’d still recommend it though.

Rikki Ducornet

There are a number of wonderful books I have read recently, just out: Taiye Selasi’s first book: Ghana Must Go which is wildly engaging; unforgettable; Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala who lost her family in the tsunami that hit Thailand and Indonesia to such devastating effect; she is a terrific writer and one of unusual courage and humanity. I fell in love with both these writers. And Roberto Calasso; I have been reading everything. Calasso has an astounding handle on mythology, Greek and Hindu; I have read his KA twice in the past year. Also reread the latest translation of Prince Genji and currently, as I am writing here in Marfa, Lucretius: Of The Nature of Things. Loving Cesar Vallejo as translated by the wonderful Rebecca Seiferle–a book that I found in my library here in one of the well furnished Lannan houses; Bin Ramke’s astounding Aerial has been like a tincture of deep being, beautiful and unsettling, that I sip daily.(It has been nominated a Book of the Year by the LA Times. ) Laird hunt’s marvelous new novel, Kind One, I read very recently and admired greatly

Daniel Staniforth

Much of my reading is for professional reasons these days but I still manage to do a bit of private reading, which I confess is all over the place.  Regarding fiction, I finally got around to reading the brilliant David Mitchell – and Ghostwritten is a truly marvellous novel.  Also enjoyed Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke  - and just started The Plato Papers by a favourite author of mine, Peter Akroyd.  My poetry reading is very spotty – as I tend to dip into collections rather than read them cover to cover.  I’ve recently been perusing Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light, Elizabeth Robinson’s Counterpart, and Jack Collom’s new anthology, Second Nature.  I also finally found an old copy of  Kathleen Raine’s William Blake, which is a wonderful book.

Most of my reading tends to be non-fiction, circling around a wide range of interests.  As I’ve read much of Elaine Pagels’ work  – I recently went through Beyond Belief, which is not her best but still quite provocative.  Also, finally got around to reading The Underworld Initiation by R.J. Stewart, after seeing it cited so many times in Skylight books (and for good reason).  Another esoteric work that I really enjoyed was Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment, which is the best book I’ve seen so far on the occult in literature, here focusing mostly on Modernist texts.  I recently came back to Templar history after exhausting myself on the topic a few years ago to read perhaps the most informative account to date, The Templars and the Grail, an excellent work by British historian Karen Ralls.  This interlaced with recent smatterings of H.L. Mencken, Bachelard, Ricoeur and Borges.

Rupert Copping

Stoning the Devil. I’m a slow reader and good books are hard to come by. I’ve enjoyed all the Skylight books I’ve read so far, including Diddle by Daniel Staniforth and Immortal Jaguar by Hugh Fox.  And I was interested to learn that Hugh Fox had helped Oscar Lewis in some capacity or other with his Children of Sanchez. Great book, Children of Sanchez.

Joseph Noble

I tend to read several books at once over a period of months.  With some friends, we’ve had a project to read Dante’s Divine Comedy.  We’ve finished the Inferno; now it’s on to Purgatorio.  The three versions I read around in for the Inferno were by Allen Mandelbaum, Michael Palma, and Ciaran Carson.  I’m also reading Shards by Nicholas Rawson which was published in 1973 by Calder and Boyars.  He was first discovered by Samuel Beckett and George Devine.  I haven’t been able to find much else that’s been published by him except for a piece called Texts that was published in New Writers 3, which I have yet to acquire.  Shards is one big, long, wonderfully rambling poem the tone and language of which make me realize why Beckett was drawn to Rawson’s writing.  I have also been reading Chinese Notebook by Demosthenes Agrafiotis, translated by John and Angelos Sakkis, whose short, fragmented lyrics are just what I need to shake my mind out of accustomed ways of thinking into something unexpected; 130 Poemsby Jean Follain translated by Christopher Middleton, whose quiet, short lyrics provide something tender, shimmering, and dark, simultaneously; Armies of Compassion by Eleni Stecopoulous, that dives courageously into the many times unknown world of the self, its body, its pain, and its redemption; The Rova Improvisations by Clark Coolidge, that skitters and peals and rides and tears through linguistic solos that take the words you use every day unconsciously and blows them anew through imagination’s horn; various poems by Murilo Mendez, a sweet, tender, imaginative Brazilian poet, translated by Chris Daniels, and only available privately, but whose yet to be recognized poetry has something in common with Apollinaire and William Carlos Williams in a visionary manner; Circles Matter by Brian Lucas, whose long poem, “Blaze,” ranges peripatetically through the landscape of fire as well as innumerable other unnameable landscapes; Speech! Speech! by Geoffrey Hill, whose hermetic, piling up of images, sounds, and knowledge is both scholastic and stochastic; Trance Archive by Andrew Joron, whose philosophical alliteration and transmigration of sound spills spells; and Poems of Pierre de Ronsard, translated by Nicholas Kilmer, whose poetry is an inexhaustible font of lyricism and music.

sound remembered
beneath the sound board
within the fingers
recognizable and strange
at the rim of
summoning and leaving

Antiphonal Airs is a mixilating series of poems from poet-musician Joseph Noble.  Some are improvisational riffs on specific composers, their lives and work, and some imitate the sonic movement and aleatoric rhythm of music itself.  The sheer scope and range of the collection has been summarised poignantly by fellow poet, David Meltzer: 

A sumptuous collection by poet-musician Joseph Noble.  The certainty of his pitch & intonation reveals a distinct tender voice.  Measured, graceful, his work sustains its depth throughout.  The first section on “early music” is revelatory in its range & insight.  Rich in historical acumen, musical heart, Antiphonal Airs is an impressive body of work

Noble works between polyphony and monody, his poetic lines mirroring the development of the seconda practica of the Baroque, in which the form of vocal music was made to reflect and fit the meaning of the words.  In the opening segment, Invenzioni e Stravaganze, Noble is inspired by early baroque Italian composers, both major and minor, from Monteverdi to Frescobaldi. He weaves in and out of compositional minds, mirroring their musical creativity with an astonishing variety of compositional forms (explained in a short afterword) “from call and answer to dramatic monologue, from riddle to sonnet, from story to list to song, and many invented types.” Through the twin acts of listening and imbibing the poet recovers a number of composers that have been lost to the general listener but recently revived by the ‘early music’ movement.

In At Sound Noble follows the Orphic muse through music’s different phases and stylings, from the primal to the ornate, always following Hazrat Inayat Khan’s dictum that the world and its language come to us through sound and vibrations. As the author attests, the piece is a requiem for his parents in which he allows himself to take creative liberties with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.  In attendance are Edgar Varese, Ferrucio Busoni, Claudio Monteverdi, Dino Campana, John Adams, as well the composers that wrote operas based on the Orpheus and Eurydice story, Monteverdi, Haydn, Gluck, Offenbach and Peri. After an astonishing grouping of poems Noble provides a little insight as to his intentions:

I tend toward a belief, along with Orpheus (or, rather, what Orpheus dramatizes through his many cultural manifestations) and Hazrat Inayat Khan, that the world comes from sound and vibrations, manifests itself through vibrations, that each being has its own vibrations, that particular beings come into existence through vibration. Whether it’s Orpheus travelling down through the levels of the spheres and learning music, which can be taken as a correlative to beings moving as vibrations through the spheres and eventually taking physical forms, or Hazrat Inayat Khan discussing how sound and vibration are the origin of this world and the source from which beings spring, I am fond of this idea of forms and flesh coming from sound and vibration.

A truly ground-breaking work, Antiphonal Airs demonstrates how a poet can speak as both the receptor and creator of music, all the while inhabiting the places of its ambiance – Venice, Brescia, Neuberg, Milan, etc. The work follows An Ives Set, a poetry collection that explored mercurial compositions of Charles Ives, and about which Andrew Joron wrote – “Noble has somehow tinkered a radio out of words, and tuned it to receive transmissions from a lost paradise of music.” In the final sections of Antiphonal Airs, Noble plays Hide and Seek with his voyeuristic ear, intones the deep lyrical poetry found in wordless Songs, and explores the Correspondences between sound and ephemera – from classical to jazz to the avant garde.  Perhaps fellow poet and friend, Elizabeth Robinson, sums it up best:

In Joseph Noble’s Antiphonal Airs, the reader perceives form meeting form, each shaping and naming the other in “aural geometries” that are simultaneously “recognizable and strange/at the rim of/summoning and leaving.”  Noble’s keen ear certainly endows the language of these poems with lyricism and lushness, but below that enticing surface are patterns “silent and/only seen/erased and/only heard.”  Such confusion of pattern, Noble reveals, makes possible the genesis of new meaning, new form.  This he discloses through the attention and responsiveness that the antiphon of his title suggests.  These poems make us aware of correspondences flourishing in interchanges that are no less powerful for their ephemerality: “sound at the edge/ of note and naught.”

Skylight Press is proud to publish Antiphonal Airs, a truly astonishing dialogue between poetry and music.   The cover features a painting entitled Filament by Joseph Noble’s Cloud Shepherd bandmate and fellow poet, Brian Lucas.  Antiphonal Airs is available from various retail outlets such as Amazon, Amazon UK, or direct from the Skylight Press website.