Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Saturday, March 19, 2011

ATUA: Voices from La Societe Voudon Gnostique... 2011




I have the delighful pleasure to have work included in the first Journal of La Societe Voudon Gnostique, edited by David Beth and Published by Fulgur Limited


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© Jónas Sen


ATUA is the public vehicle through which the members of the S.V.G.make selected manifestations of their magico-gnostic research and experience available to an informed audience. This first anthology features essays, artwork, and prose and aims to provide insight and inspiration to practitioners on a similar spiritual path




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 Dolorosa



from Fulgur...


Contributors include: David Beth, Craig Williams, Vadge Moore, Hagen von Tulien, Dolorosa, Jonas Sen, Jessica Grote, Roberto Migliussi, Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule, Shannon Esmeralda, Peter Dyde, Ariock Van de Voorde, M.W. Burson, Marc’Aurelio Pozzi, Alan Kostencic and Zdravko Bozic. The material will be presented to our usual standard, and there will be a free audio CD supplement which will include material from Jonas Sen and Lightning Path.



Saturday, January 29, 2011

Andre Domin ...illustration for "Litanies de la Rose"...1919



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"Litanies de la Rose"
Remy de Gourmont (Author)
Paris: Editions Rene Kieffer, 1919


Rose with dark eyes,
mirror of your nothingness,
rose with dark eyes,
make us believe in the mystery,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Rose the colour of pure gold,
oh safe deposit of the ideal,
rose the colour of pure gold,
give us the key of your womb,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Rose the colour of silver,
censer of our dreams,
rose the colour of silver,
take our heart and turn it into smoke,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Remy de Gourmont




Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Lynd Ward... Mad Man's Drum.. Part 1



a few scans from one of my favourite artists, and one of the finest wood engravers of the twentieth century .. 

 Mad Man Drum ~ A Novel in Woodcuts
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Sunday, January 23, 2011

Apuleius' ... "Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass"... illustrations and translations...



'
'Lend me your ear, reader: you shall enjoy yourself'



Illustrations and translations of the Latin novel the



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Isis Revealed
illustrated by Percival Goodman. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1932.



‘Looking up I saw the full orb of the Moon shining with peculiar lustre and that very moment emerging from the waves of the sea. Then the thought came to me that this was the hour of silence and loneliness when my prayers might avail. For I knew that the Moon was the primal Goddess of supreme sway; that all human beings are vitalised by the divine influence of her light; that all the bodies which are on earth, or in the heavens, or in the sea, increase when she waxes, and decline when she wanes. Considering this, therefore, and feeling that Fate was now satiated with my endless miseries and at last licensed a hope of salvation, I determined to implore the august image of the risen Goddess.
  So, shaking off my tiredness, I scrambled to my feet and walked straight into the sea into order to purify myself. I immersed my head seven times because (according to the divine Pythagoras) that number is specially suited for all ritual-acts; and then, speaking with lively joy, I lifted my tear-wet face in supplication to the irresistible Goddess:
....

translated by Jack Lindsay





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illustrated by Percival Goodman. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1932.



“Queen of Heaven, whether you are fostering Ceres the motherly nurse of all growth, who (gladdened at the discovery of your lost daughter) abolished brutish nutriment of the primitive acorn and pointed the way to gentler food (as is yet shown in the tilling of the fields of Eleusis); or whether you are celestial Venus who in the first moment of Creation min
gled the opposing sexes in the generation of mutual desires, and who (after sowing in humanity the seeds of indestructible continuing life) are now worshipped in the wave-washed shrine of Paphos; or whether you are the sister of Phoebus, who by relieving the pangs of childbirth travail with soothing remedies have brought safe into the world lives innumerable, and who are now venerated in the thronged sanctuary of Ephesus; or whether you are Proserpine, terrible with the howls of midnight, whose triple face has power to ward off the assaults of ghosts and to close the cracks in the earth, and who wander through many a grove, propitiated in divers manners, illuminating the walls of all cities with beams of female light, nurturing the glad seeds in the earth with your damp heat, and dispensing abroad your dim radiance when the sun has abandoned us—O by whatever name, and by whatever rite, and in whatever form, it is permitted to invoke you, come now and succour me in the hour of my calamity. Support my broken life, and give me rest and peace after the tribulations of my lot. Let there be an end to the toils that weary me, and an end to the snares that beset me. Remove from me the hateful shape of a beast, and restore me to the sight of those that love me. Restore me to Lucius, my lost self. But if an offended god pursues me implacably, then grant me death at least since life is denied me.”



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Lucius restored to human shape by the Grace of Isis
illustrated by Jean de Bosschère.  London: John Lane - The Bodley Head, 1923.


Thus the divine shape breathing out the pleasant spice of fertill Arabia, disdained not with her divine voyce to utter these words unto me: Behold Lucius I am come, thy weeping and prayers hath mooved mee to succour thee. I am she that is the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, chiefe of powers divine, Queene of heaven, the principall of the Gods celestiall, the light of the goddesses: at my will the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable customes and in many names, for the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the æthiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the ægyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustome to worship mee, doe call mee Queene Isis…’

translated by William Adlington



Sunday, January 16, 2011

Paul Holman... poem... 3






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3


 She had been earthed
( had i earthed
her by my intrusion? )
eyes no longer turned

upon phenomena I
could not locate.
She considered me a 
plunderer, a facund man,
a madman: one who
scries alphabets
of daggers, of arrows.
Zigzagged tights in a

knot in her pocket,
the tip of each
hair luminous a fox-
fire or rotten wood,

she opened the violet
gate at her throat
to release the fractal
silhouette of Pan.



Published in a wonderful collection of esoteric poetry and essays > Datura by Scarlet Imprint 
previous POEMS
 
PAUL HOLMAN is the author of The Fabulist (1991) and The Memory of the Drift (2000). He was co-editor of Invisible Books in the 1990s.




Eric Gill.... print



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engraving from E.Powys Mathers : Procreant Hymn
One of the first Gill was to illustrate for the Golden Cockerel Press




Saturday, January 15, 2011

André Masson .... print





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etching from Georges Batailles “Sacrifices” (1936)

previous Masson



Thursday, January 6, 2011

Elie Grekoff (1914-1985) ... Tiresias...illustrations 1954




from TIRESIAS by Marcel Jouhandeau, 1954

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these illustrations are from the Bibliothèque Gay

an interesting essay on Marcel Jouhandeau's Tiresias >>  by Ed Madden
The Anus of Tiresias: Sodomy, Alchemy, Metamorphosis

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Monday, January 3, 2011

Leonor Fini... La Galère/Jean Genet ... 1947 drawing..





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Drawing for Jean Genet's La Galère 1947,a long poem written as a homage to murderer
Harcamone, the book was condemned in 1954 and Genet was fined 100.ooo francs.


"By the threads of death
the weapons of these nights
carried my arms paralyzed by wine
the azure of nostrils
traversed by the rose gone astray
where a gilded doe shudders under the brush...
I astonish myself and lose myself
in pursuing your course
astonishing river
from the veins of discourse"         

***
"The tree's blue branches
stretch from the salt to the sky.
 

My solitude sings
to my vespers of blood
an air of golden bubbles
squeezing from my lips."


Jean Genet - The Galley



Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius 1595...poem...Carmina Figurata





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Sometime around the end of the first quarter of the fourth century C.E., a former resident of the imperial city of Rome then living in exile in Achaea began a written campaign for his recall to the capitol. The campaign coincided with the Vicennalia, or twentieth anniverary, of the reign of the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, an event celebrated in July 325 in Nicomedia and again in the summer of 326 at Rome itself. The writing campaign took advantage of this event and consisted of a series of panegyric poems addressed to Constantine in commemoration of both the Vicennalia and Constantine’s earlier defeat of Licinius in 324. The series, included in what is now known collectively as the Carmina or Carmina Figurata, is of an unusual and innovative sort: the poems contain supplementary text “hidden” within the main body of the individual poems and intended to be “discovered” by the reader. These versus intexti poems were apparently intended to dazzle Constantine with their technical virtuosity and thereby inspire the hoped-for recall of their creator, Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius. The campaign was ultimately successful, and the intriguing larger body of work created by Optatianus remains captivating even today, both for its simple visual appeal and for its display of remarkable technical skill.... continued

related previous POST



Sunday, December 26, 2010

Victor Brown.... bookplate for Lily Yeats





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from Poems by WB Yeats, Cuala Press 1935


"There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree..."
wb yeats



Saturday, December 11, 2010

Suniti Namjoshi ....Building Babel..The Black Piglet





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from Building Babel by Suniti Namjoshi

Every retelling of a myth is a reworking of it. Every hearing or reading of a myth is a recreation of it. It is only when we engage with a myth that it resonates, becomes charged and recharged with meaning...



Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Hermann Naumann...the Temptation of St Anthony...





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Illustration for The Temptation of St. Anthony 1965



"O bliss! bliss! I have seen the birth of life; I have seen the
beginning of motion. The blood beats so strongly in my veins that it
seems about to burst them. I feel a longing to fly, to swim, to bark, to
bellow, to howl. I would like to have wings, a tortoise-shell, a rind,
to blow out smoke, to wear a trunk, to twist my body, to spread myself
everywhere, to be in everything, to emanate with odours, to grow like
plants, to flow like water, to vibrate like sound, to shine like light,
to be outlined on every form, to penetrate every atom, to descend to the
very depths of matter--to be matter!"
 
 
The Temptation of St. Anthony or A Revelation of the Soul 
 Gustave Flaubert



Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Julius Klinger... Sodom...1909





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Julius Klinger - illustration for Sodom or The Quintessence of Debauchery by John Wilmot. 1909

previous Klinger




Monday, November 1, 2010

Tadanori Yokoo...Sublime images part 2



Some of my favourite  images the wondrous work of Tadanori Yokoo illustration from Genka (“Illusory Flowers”), a historical novel by Harumi Setouchi.





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a nice link to Yokoos poster works at the wondrous A Journey Round My Skull



Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Birthday greetings...Aleister Crowley...



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 Aleister Crowley Self portrait 1920


October 12th 1875 - December 1st 1947



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 "Lift yourselves up, my brothers and sisters of the earth! Put
beneath your feet all fears, all qualms, all hesitancies! Lift
yourselves up! Come forth, free and joyous, by night and day, to
do your will; for "There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt."
Lift yourlseves up! Walk forth with us in Light and Life and
Love and Liberty, taking our pleasure as Kings and Queens in
Heaven and on Earth."


from my favourite Crowley book!

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Early Manuscripts... Latin Gospels...





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Latin Gospels with beast-headed evangelist portraits made at Landévennec, Brittany, late 9th or early 10th century