Tag Archives for Erik Davis

Green Hermeticism

Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology


Peter Lamborn Wilson, Christopher Bamford, Kevin Townley
Introduction by Pir Zia Inayat-Khan
ISBN: 9781584200499
Book (Paperback)
Lindisfarne Books
$25.00
6 x 9 inches
224 pages
September 2007

“In Alchemy, there is an injunction to quicken, or revive, the dead, which is illustrated by a dead tree growing verdant again. That is exactly what this wonderful and rare work does in awakening human consciousness to its Divine potential and Ultimate Destiny. Art thus helps Nature to achieve its ideal Perfection. The authors must be congratulated for their insightful words. I wholeheartedly recommend reading it again and again, and again.” —Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, author Alchemy: The Secret Art and The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century

“Environmental solutions today are largely technical, but the planetary crisis is also a crisis of soul—or better yet, of the Imagination. Too tricky for religion, too poetic for reductionist science, Green Hermeticism reheats a prophetic imagination still in love with the material world—a new alchemy of ancient nature.” —Erik Davis, author, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape

“Just when you felt numb and disenfranchised, thinking the world had become bleak and dead, along comes this rare, much needed book to remind us that there is still some sanity, depth, and creative energy percolating up from the heart of Reality. Thank God (and the Goddess Nature) for this smart and inspiring breath of fresh air! Green Hermeticism is where the wasteland ends—and where the world becomes re-enchanted with genuine living thought that goes beyond superficialities. It’s a rare pleasure to be in the presence of living minds who actually know something wonderful and have not been deadened by the opiates of capital or the tenure track. Very highly recommended.” —David Fideler,publisher (Phanes Press) editor (Alexandria), author of Jesus Christ, Sun of God and translator of Love’s Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition (with Sabrineh Fideler)

“The publication of Green Hermeticism has the sense we so rarely get, of a genuine moment in cultural history. It is not just the eloquence of its authors’ knowledge and arguments or that they are showing us, once again, the depth and range and beauty of alchemy, and the Hermetic tradition, and what Peter Lamborn Wilson calls Romantic Science. Nor is it even the links they establish between the Hermetic tradition and ecology, and the value of a science that perceives the world as alive rather than a machine. What makes this work significant is the sense that it shows us how we can use these ideas and knowledge to create a genuine counter to destruction and despair, an alchemy of our politics as well as of our spirit.” —Rachel Pollack, author of 78 Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot

“Green Hermeticism reminds us that the art of the Great Work is to enter more deeply into the dynamic and practical wisdom of the universe, which is our laboratory, where work and prayer combine. When we engage with the All, we know ourselves to be one kindred with all in the viriditas—God’s greening power—where body, soul, and spirit honor each other.” —Caitlín & John Matthews, authors of Walkers Between the Worlds: The Western Mysteries from Shaman to Magus

Hermeticism, or alchemy, is the ancient, primordial mystery science of nature through which people in all times and places have, for the sake of world evolution, sought to unite Heaven and Earth—divinity, cosmos, earth, and humanity, as a single whole. Selfless, intimate, dedicated to healing and harmony, Hermeticism has accompanied and sustained every religious epoch and revelation. It may be found in all historical cultures, from the traditions of India and China in the East to the Judeo-Christian West. It could even be said that Hermeticism is the primal cosmological revelation and the common ground of all spiritual traditions.

Nevertheless, in the great revival of mystical, esoteric traditions and practices during the last century, Hermetic tradition—in fact, Nature herself—has been largely ignored. Today, when the Earth seems most under attack, Green Hermeticism is especially appropriate. The book explores not only the ancient Masters’ inner science, but also their science of Nature.

During spring and summer 2006, Pir Zia Khan convened a series of gatherings to begin to unfold the contemporary meaning of ancient, sacred science for our time. Green Hermeticism is a partial record of that meeting. Peter Lamborn Wilson, explores the many ramifications of the alternative worldview offered by Hermeticism; Christopher Bamford provides a broad historical overview of the tradition from the Ancient Mysteries to contemporary manifestations of the alchemical tradition; while Kevin Townley brings a practical dimension to the gathering teaching the preparation of herbal elixirs and demonstrating that cosmology and philosophy can become a truly healing path for the Earth.

Green Hermeticism is necessary reading for anyone seeking a spiritual and cultural path for the healing of the current ecological and cultural crisis.

Peter Lamborn Wilson (b.1945) is a scholar of Sufism and Western Hermeticism and (under the pseudonym “Hakim Bey”) a well-known radical-anarchist social thinker. His books include Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (City Lights, 1993) and Escape from the Nineteenth Century and Other Essays (Autonomedia, 1998).

Christopher Bamford is the editor in chief of SteinerBooks and its imprints. A Fellow of the Lindisfarne Association, he has lectured, taught, and written widely on Western spiritual and esoteric traditions and is the author of The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity and An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West. He has also translated and edited numerous books, including Celtic Christianity, Homage to Pythagoras, and The Noble Traveller (all published by Lindisfarne Books). HarperSanFrancisco included an essay by Mr. Bamford in its anthology Best Spiritual Writing 2000.

Kevin Townley has been a lifelong student of Western Hermeticism. Early on in his studies, he was drawn to the writings of Dr. Paul Foster Case and has been a member of the Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.) for eleven years. Kevin is currently the Vice President of LPN- USA, an esoteric organization dedicated to the study and practice of Qabalah and Laboratory Alchemy. His studies have led him around the world seeking original Rosicrucian and alchemical texts, as well as individuals who practice this royal art. He is the author of The Cube of Space: Container of Creation (Archive Press, 1993) and Meditations on the Cube of Space (Archer Books, 2002).

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan is the spiritual leader of the Sufi Order International (established by Hazrat Inayat Khan in London, 1917) and founding director of the Suluk Academy, an esoteric school in upstate New York. His initiatory heritage integrates the sacred transmissions of the Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri, and Naqshbandi lineages within a post-denominational, inter-spiritual goal. Pir Zia holds a master’s degree in religion from Duke University.

"Druids and Ferries: Zen, Drugs, and Hot Tubs" by Erik Davis (Arthur No. 16/May 2005)

Druids and Ferries: Zen, Drugs, and Hot Tubs

by Erik Davis (techgnosis.com)

(This adaption from the author’s 2006 book Visionary State appeared in Arthur 16/May 2005 edition of Arthur.)

I first heard about Druid Heights a few years ago, when I began doing research for a book about the history of alternative spirituality in my home state of California. A musician, Colin Farish, described a gorgeously constructed round wooden building hidden in the woods of Marin County that once served as a library for Alan Watts. Farish told me that the building was condemned, and that he was working hard to save it, perhaps by transporting it elsewhere. It turned out that Farish had lived on the property where the library stood, a hidden bohemian community that went by the intriguing name of Druid Heights.

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“Nearer the Heart of Things”: Erik Davis profiles JOANNA NEWSOM (Arthur, 2006)

Always Coming Home

How California harper JOANNA NEWSOM’s masterpiece album Ys grew from a time of personal turmoil, ambitious collaboration and eating hamburgers again.

BY ERIK DAVIS
Photography by Eden Batki

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ARTHUR MAGAZINE No. 25/Winter 02006

Last February in Los Angeles, Joanna Newsom took to the stage at the ArthurBall and performed, for the first time in their entirety, the five loonnggg songs that make up her new album Ys. Many folks present were already chest-deep in the cult of Joanna, a fandom that made 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender a leftfield indie hit and turned Newsom herself into the sort of music-maker who inspires obsessive devotion as well as pleasure. At the time I admired Mender, but was, as of yet, no acolyte. I dug a handful of songs, but like many listeners, I found Newsom’s eccentric voice sometimes grating. I also feared that the outsider waif thing was just an underground pose stitched together with lacy thrift-store duds and an iPod stuffed with rips of the Carter Family and Shirley Collins.

My bad. The performance I saw that night was preternatural: a young artist stretching beyond her art towards something even more essential, simultaneously in command of her craft and caught in the headlights of her own onrushing brilliance. The song cycle she played was to Mender what, I dunno, Astral Weeks is to Blowin’ Your Mind, or what Smile is to The Beach Boys Today! She sang of meteorites and bears and ringing bells, of her and him and you, and she played not for us, it seemed, nor for herself exactly, but for the very presences her music conjured. Her songs were not performed so much as drawn from herself like nets dredged from the sea, heavy with kelp and flotsam and minnows that flashed before darting back into the deep. When she occasionally stumbled and lost her way, the material itself would pick her up again and carry her forward.

None of us standing there in that rapt crowd had ever heard music like this before. Newsom’s wild Child ballads seemed loosed from some location heretofore unseen in the realms of popular song, a secret garden lodged between folk and art music, or an unnamed island lying somehow equidistant from Ireland, Senegal, and California’s redwood coast. The music fluttered and leapt, and though there were few obvious refrains, the patterns she played circled round some magnetic core of return, at once familiar and strange. Yes she was genius. But genius has become such a throwaway word, a thumbtack of muso claptrap that marks the person rather than the source that lies behind the person. And this music was all source. And yet, it was she and not the source we heard—this charming young harper with the arresting voice and the awkward stage patter and the lacy thrift-store duds.

Sorry to keep the tankards of Kool-Aid raised high, my friends, but Newsom’s album is also pretty dang nifty: the cult disc of the decade, like the aforementioned Astral Weeks or In The Aeroplane Over the Sea. She is supported on the album by Van Dyke Parks, the sometimes Brian Wilson collaborator who feathered four of Newsom’s five songs with vivid and sprightly arrangements. The orchestration adds another dimension to Newsom’s already evocative ramble through memory and desire, a journey that goes in turns intimate and cryptic, like the alchemical meanderings of a deep dream.

Faced with music as singular as Ys, it seems almost churlish to try to pin the butterfly down. (Or is that a moth?) That said, there is no denying that the spirit of prog has moved across the face of its waters. The album, after all, has an allegorical Renaissance portrait for a cover, features oboes and French horns, and draws its odd, difficult-to-pronounce title from the Celtic folklore of France. (It sounds like ees, as in “Oui, Serge Gainsborough ees very heep.”) And indeed you must return to Van Der Graaf Generator or Trespass-era Genesis to find this sort of dramatic and, sorry, literary fit between highly wrought lyrics and the dynamics of long, intricate, tempo-twisting songs. However, I would urge you even farther back, to the great songs on the great Incredible String Band records, which also embroider earth visions onto patchwork tunes that combine heavy insights and bucolic play. For though the landscape of Ys is not particularly psychedelic, its peaks are very high, from “Emily”’s invocation of the cosmic void to “Cosmia”’s final ascent through the moonlight.

Happily for all, Newsom approaches such high-fallutin matters with a demotic American spirit and a folk fan’s love of homespun melody and pastoral grit—not to mention a canniness that makes her at once too young and too old for the truly pompous. Ys may be precious, but it is precious because the spirit behind it is rare. It does not rely on sentiment, nor does it make Great Statements. It is, rather, a Great Work: an organic but deeply intentional labor from start to finish, from the inspiration through the cover art, from the arrangements through the final, analog mixdown. Newsom gathered a stellar cast of characters around her, including Steve Albini, Jim O’ Rourke, and Van Dyke Parks, who contributes some of the best work in his career. But it is Newsom’s own visionary ambition that makes this record the very opposite of a sophomore slump. A lesser artist would have simply ridden the quirky crest of The Milk-Eyed Mender, but Newsom glimpsed a golden ring glittering on the far horizon, and she stretched beyond herself with pluck and hooked it good.

HOMESTEAD
The house that Joanna Newsom recently purchased is, well, rather Joanna Newsom. The building lies in the outskirts of Nevada City, an old mining town nestled in the western foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada range. It has a small circular driveway, rose bushes, and a broken fountain with two cherubs smeared with mud up to their necks. The one-acre property is fringed by sycamores and pines, and two massive ivy-swaddled conifers loom over the patio out back, dripping gobs of sap onto a weathered table. The firethorn bushes that cloak the breakfast nook and the porch haven’t been trimmed in a while, deranging the otherwise orderly air of a proper British cottage. Past their plump clusters of golden berries, you can glimpse her old, worn-out pedal harp, peeking through the window like a stage prop.

Newsom answers the door with a smile and invites me in. She is dressed in a knitted brown skirt, a low-cut sleeveless shirt, chocolate brown knee-high socks and moccasins. The wide leather belt tugged snug around her waist looks a lot the belt she wears in her portrait for the cover of Ys. The bangs are gone, and she’s cute as a vintage button.

“I’m sorry. I just moved in and I haven’t really been here much.” There is not much furniture beyond a couch and, alongside her harp, a gorgeous Craftsman wooden stool inlaid with turquoise. There is hand-written sheet music scattered on the floor and one large decoration waiting to be mounted on the wall, a nineteenth-century funereal display scavenged from a San Francisco thrift store. “It was there for years, and finally I had to have it.” Having spent the last few weeks obsessively listening to Ys, I can see why, so crisply does the thing reflect some of her major themes and images: inside the large glass case, two stuffed doves face off over clusters of dried wheat, neatly arranged over a fat and faded ribbon printed with condolences.

We settle down on the table outside, and dig into the past. Newsom grew up around Nevada City, but she lived for years in the Bay Area, where she studied composition and creative writing at Mills before dropping out, writing some songs and recording them with her first boyfriend, the musician and producer Noah Georgeson. Even then, she kept returning to the nest on weekends, but feared the phenomenon an old Austin friend of mine referred to as the velvet rut. “It’s a real easy place to get kind of stagnant in your head, to get overly comfortable and have the years pass by.” Now that her career has taken off and she is constantly traveling, she decided to return to the place that, in her words, makes her feel happiest and most at home.

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