isbn: N/A - Magazine
data: 2022
1ª Edição - £10
UNDEFINED
BOUNDARY
THE
JOURNAL OF PSYCHICK ALBION
VOLUME
ONE / ISSUE ONE
EDITED
BY CORMAC PENTECOST
Temporal
Boundary Press
“The
boundary in undefined”
Published
by Temporal Boundary Press, Shrewsbury, 2022
©
Temporal Boundary Press and individual contributors 2022
Photographs
pp. 69, 71 & 74 © Helen Billinghurst & Phil Smith
Edited
by Cormac Pentecost
CONTENTS
Introduction
by Cormac
Pentecost – 1
Gog,
Magog and the Stubborn Illusion: The enduring resonance of Andrew Sinclair’s’Albion
Triptych’
By Andrew
Hedgecock – 7
Shadows:
The Dark Streets of Kimballs Green
By Paul
Bareham – 15
A Lady
on a White Horse
By Nigel
Wilson – 23
Ponderings
Upon Paul Nash, The Ancient Soul With A Surrealist Heart
By Rebecca
Lambert – 35
The
Magical Praxis and Politics of Penda’s Fen
By Duncan
Barford – 45
The Sick
Rose: Magic/k is the Opium of the Middle-Classes
By Patrick
Weir – 55
Crab
& Bee’s Provisional Demonology of Old Quarries and Suburban Woods
By Helen
Billinghurst & Phil Smith – 67
“…tomorrow
will be beyond imagining.” – The Solstice and Susan Cooper
By Karen
F. Pierce – 77
In a Remote
County
By Mark
Valentine – 93
Alex
Sanders: A Liminal Discography
By Stephan
Canner – 101
Contributors
- 111
ALEX
SANDERS: A LIMINAL
DISCOGRAPHY
BY
STEPHEN CANNER
Liminal
Discography: An experimental, creative approach to discography that attempts to
transcend the traditional boundaries of the practice, going beyond mere lists
of releases by artist, label, or genre. Liminal Discography can be viewed as a
form of creative non-fiction, standing at the threshold between scholarly
research and artistic practice. The intent is not to define the material, nor
to lock it into a rigid hierarchy, but to unearth its unexamined aspects.
Liminal Discography is less interested in making statements than in allowing
new questions to emerge. It is a methodology that while founded on facts,
statistics, and the ‘official record’, also embraces rumor, innuendo, poetry,
and the visionary.
In the
early 1960s a thin, balding, middle-aged man who worked as ‘porter,
book-duster, and odd-job man’ in the John Rylands Library in Manchester became
something of an unlikely celebrity. By creating a colorful backstory,
skillfully manipulating the popular media, and proclaiming himself ‘King of the
Witches’, Alex Sanders managed to forge a career as one of the most
recognizable occult figures in Britain.
One way
to chart the cultural presence of characters like Sanders is to map and
chronicle the objects generated by or around them, These include media objects:
newspaper and magazine articles, books and films; as well as more personal
expressions: correspondence, diaries, or other manuscript behind history
itself. Sound recordings also belong in such collections but they are easily
overlooked as important sources of information. This may be due to the fact
they often replicate what is available in textual sources, and so can be seen
as analytically at a group of related recordings as a whole can reveal subtle
narratives that transcend what is recorded in the grooves of vinyl or shellac,
or on a strip of metal oxide. Why was a recording reissued at a certain time?
How has it been reused, reworked, or repurposed in other recordings? How does
it relate to recordings that were made before or after it?
Examining
these sorts of questions can reveal new lines of inquiry about the subject
itself.
What
follows is a discography of commercially released recordings on which Alex
Sanders appears (or is purported to appear). As an example of Liminal
Discography it is not intended to be definitive nor does it claim to have the
final word about its subject. It is offered as a starting point for further
questions, other creative research angles, and should be viewed as both
subjective and as a work in progress.
A Witch
Is Born
A&M
Records – AMLS 984 (UK, LP, 1970)
The
cover of the June 19, 1972 issue of Time magazine gave much of the American
public a mild shock when it appeared on newsstands that summer. It bore a
photograph of a figure wearing a black hood embroidered in red yarn with the
Sigil of Baphomet. Human eyes peered at the viewer through ragged holes cut in
the fabric, replacing those of the goat-headed anti-deity, giving the whole
thing a bit of an ‘uncanny valley’ effect. The article the image was created
for, “The Occult Revival: A Substitute Faith’, was a response to the widespread
interest in the dark arts that had been growing in recent years, especially
since the emergence of the 1960s counterculture. Early in the piece, its
anonymous author was quick to point out that this interest was not limited to
North America: ‘England is experiencing such resurgence of witchcraft and other
occult dabbling that an ecumenical commission of Anglicans and Roman Catholics
recently recommended that each diocese appoint an official exorcist to drive
out demons. ‘To capitalize on this situation, Pan American Airlines was at the
time offering Americans a $629 ‘Psychic Tour’ of Great Britain ‘ including a
visit to a psychic healing center, a séance, and a day at Stonehenge with the chief
of Britain’s Most Ancient Order of Druids.’
In
Britain, one of the most prominent ‘faces’ of the occult revival was Alex
Sanders, a favorite subject of magazines and tabloids. His popularity with
journalists was no doubt aided by the presence of his wife Maxine and other
female initiates who often appeared ‘skyclad’ – wearing nothing but the sky –
meaning the press coverage was often little more than exploitation.
In June
1970, A&M Records released an LP in the UK, credited to Sanders, called A
Witch Is Born. It contained a recording of the ceremony inducting a new
initiate into Sanders’ brand of Wicca. Its gatefold sleeve – with liner notes
by Stewart Farrar, who published a book called What Witches Do the following
year – was a little more than a tabloid treatment, complete with photographs of
both Alex and Maxine performing rituals in the nude. What possessed A&M to
release this LP, and who at the label gave the green light, are open questions.
While the label wasn’t known to be particularly conservative, this release was
quite a bit more outré than the vast majority of its releases. Numerically and
chronologically, it was sandwiched between releases by The Flying Burrito
Brothers and Sérgio Mendes, discs much more representative of the label’s output
at the time. It is entirely possible that the idea was to capitalize on the
publicity being received by June Johns’ recent book on Sanders, King of the
Witches, which was still in print in the UK and was released in the US in the
spring of 1979«0. The album is one of a handful of ‘documentary witch records’
that appeared during the era, a list that included Louise Huebner’s Seduction
Through Witchcarft (1969); Gundella’s The Hour of the Witch; Barbara Ann
Roehrs’ Barbara, The Gray Witch (both 1971); and Babetta’s The Art of
Witchcarft (1974).
Opening
Gateways
S. A.
Cassetes – [No #1 (UK, 3xCassette, ca. 1985)
In 1975
Chris Bray, also known as Frater Marabas, an adherent of chaos magick, opened a
small shop in Leeds called Sorcerer’s Apprentice. One regular visitor in its
early days remembers that ‘with its blacked-out windows and visored door, [it]
had from the outside, a forbidding air, tinged with the kind of backstreet
seediness associated at that time with sex shops.’ Besides its sidefront location
just west of the city centre, it also provided ‘[c]onfidential, discreet,
genuine ,ail-order occult supply for the discerning magician, witch, astrologer
and psychic, newcomers and adept.’ By 1980 Marabas had launched a zine called
Lamp of Thoth. Densely packed with articles, each issue sought to educate its
audience in various aspects of occult theory and practice, while also promoting
the shop’s mail-order business. In the mid-1980s, the S. A. Cassettes label was
launched through the shop, with the aim of providing educational material in
audio format. The liner notes from Opening Gateways described the release in typically
opaque language, probably intended to add an air of mystery to whatever the
true source of the material was:
This
tape is part of a collection made many years ago by an accomplished occultist
who was well known within the modern occult movement. He spent a lifetime
researching the occult arts and made these recordings to pass on the beginners
his knowledge about the practice of Witchcraft and Magic. A High Priest of
Wicca and devout Pagan he organized several Covens in the South of England. The
S. A. was entrusted with the copyright of the master tapes upon his death and
now produce and distribute them worldwide.
The
reason this release appears here is that it has been speculated that its
narrator may be Alex Sanders. This attribution is subject to further research
though, as the witch king was very much alive at the time of its release. It
also seems that Marabas was no fan of Sanders. According to Denise Wadsworth
who now runs the Sorcerer’s Apprentice website ‘Marabas says he was more of a
show-man than a shaman.’
A Witch
Is Born
Grey
Matter – GM06CD (UK, CD, 1994)
This was
the first time the Sanders LP was ever
reissued, as well as its first appearance on CD. Grey Matter was a UK-based
label that also issued a handful of bootleg releases related to Charles Manson,
Jim Jones, William S. Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski.
A Witch
Is Born
Mother
Isle – MI AS01 (Italy, CD, 2009)
This was
a one-off bootleg reissue by this otherwise unknown Italian label. The booklet
included with the disc was a full and faithful reproduction of the original
gatefold sleeve. The timing of this release, at the end of the first decade of
the millennium, puts it firmly in the midst of a huge resurgence of interest in
all things occult, one that arguably rivals that of the late 1960s and early
1970s.
Téléplasmiste
To Kiss
The Earth Goodbye
House of
Mythology – HOM 020 (UK, LP/CD, 2020)
Téléplasmiste is the electronic, experimental, ‘post-industrial’ project of author and publisher Mark Pilkington (Strange Attractor Press) and bagpiper / wind instrumentalist Michael J. York, who was briefly a touring member of Coil. While on a visit there a few years ago, Pilkington discovered that the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall was in possession of a number of recordings by Sanders. He later arranged with museum director Simon Costin to procure copies of them. One of these, a sample of a trance recording Sanders made during a ritual with his partner and lover Derek Taylor at Bexhill in the 1980s, forms the centerpiece of the track ‘An Unexpected Visit’. The use of this sample is in keeping with the overall transmundane vibe of the album, with its title taken from a book by remote viewer and possible CIA spook Ingo Swann, and its cover image by artist-spiritualist Ethel le Rossignol.
A Witch Is Born
Kieh!
Kieh! - # 10 (Europe, Cassette, 2022)
A ´tape
label devoted to odd and uncommon material’, Kieh! Kieh! Was launched during
the midst of the COVID pandemic, apparently from somewhere in Europe. Like many
bootleg/pirate labels, however, the proprietors seem to want to keep the exact
location and details of their operation vague. Like its predecessor Grey Matter,
the imprint is a bit obsessed with the darker side of 20th century
culture, with releases related to Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and
William S. Burroughs. The label goes a bit beyond the cult fringe, though, also
offering recordings by Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, and Marshall McLuhan. Its
catalog is rounded out by a handful of porn and horror soundtracks. This is a
very bare bones cassette reissue of Sanders’s LP. The words ‘Tape Suitable for
Adults Only’ splashed across the cover goes beyond that of the original.
Afterword
Each of these recordings was created and marketed within its own historical and cultural context. But by examining this recorded output from a high level – as a matrix of interconnected events – one can parse out a narrative of cultural ebb and flow that is bigger than its subject. The original LP seems to have been released to capitalize of Alex Sanders’ fame (or infamy), and was more likely to have been purchased by young people interested in its ‘freakiness’ than by serious occultists. The 1985 Sorcerer’s Apprentice recording – whether or not it actually contains Sander’s voice on the tape – raises the question of how the ‘King of the Witches’ was actually viewed by those who took the occult seriously. The LP’s first reissue in 1994 shows the shift from vinyl to compact disc that was happening at the time, a change that occurred during an era that also saw a huge explosion in global zine culture. The darker side of that culture had a very pronounced fascination with the more transgressive figures from recent history. The inclusion of A Witch is Born alongside recordings of Charles Manson in his jail cell and of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple (both from its earlier San Francisco days and from Guyana) in Grey Matter’s catalog hint at its place within a certain fringe, revisionist view of history that was emerging at the time. The 2022 cassette release highlights the renewed popularity of the tape format within recent years, as well as showing that certain 1990s tendency to lump serial killers, cult leaders, and occultists into something of a pantheon of anti-heroes has not totally died out in this millennium. Téléplasmiste’s use of a sample of Sanders’ voice to add texture, depth and mystery to an electronic track hints that there may be more to explore regarding the ‘meaning’ of his presence in such a context. Starting with such a high-level reading and then focusing in on the finer details that emerge, a discography such as this one can be used as a jumping-off place for further exploration, whether that be on items covered in the discography itself
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