The Invocation of The Black Sun Alchemy
The Invocation of The Black Sun Alchemy
The Invocation of The Black Sun Alchemy
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Edited by Jim Peters, Richard Hing, Grey Malkin & Andy Paciorek.
3
Twisted Roots is dedicated to: Niccolo Paganini, Robert
Johnson, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Syd Barrett, Delia
Derbyshire, Mark E Smith and all those who gave more than
just a bit of their soul to provide us with a lifetime of music,
stories and inspiration.
4
Contents
Album Review - The Wicker Man (Paul Giovanni and Magnet) - Jonny
Trunk…………………………………………………………………………..20
Standing at the crossroads, believe I'm sinking down - The Dark Blues
- Andy Paciorek………………………………………………………………45
The Devil Has All the Best Tunes - The History of Occult Rock -
Darren Charles……………………………………………………………….53
“God gonna cut you down” - Cave and Lanagan - Andy Paciorek……93
Ballads of Blood; the Wyrd and the Uncanny in the Child Ballads -
Grey Malkin…………………………………………………………………106
5
Ballads & Candles – An interview with Maddy Prior - Katherine Peach
…………………………………………………………………………………137
Album Review - The Seasons (David Cain & Ronald Duncan) - Bob
Fischer………………………………………………………………………...219
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The Invocation of the Black Sun: Alchemy and Sexuality in the Work
of Coil – Hayes Hampton………………………………………………….247
Season of the Witch and The Living Dead - An interview with John
Cameron - Jim Peters……………………………………………………….334
Album Review - Valerie and her Week of Wonders (Lubos Fiser) – Jodie
Lowther………………………………………………………..……………..340
Contributors………………………………………………………………....341
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The Invocation of the Black Sun:
Alchemy and Sexuality in the Work of Coil
By Hayes Hampton
For this pair of openly gay men recording music at the height of the
AIDS epidemic, alchemy allowed Coil to articulate a queer identity
that was grounded in the physical world—especially in the body—
but in a spirituality that unraveled the culturally-constructed body.
Coil’s negotiations of bodily and sexual identity were complicated by
the social disapprobation and homophobia that accompanied the
advent of AIDS in the UK. Aware of the cultural origins of that
homophobia and of embodied identity itself, Coil extended their re-
imagining of the gay body to the urban landscape around them,
creating music and accompanying visual images at the points of
intersection between individual and cosmic, personal and
transpersonal. Coil, in short, used alchemy to create a new way of
performing gay identity and of imagining the self. Indeed, Coil’s use
of alchemical symbols, tropes, and texts points toward a new way, in
popular culture at least, of envisioning the tension between matter
and spirit -- a particularly fraught dichotomy given mainstream
society’s fear of gay bodies and late twentieth-century occultists’
growing skepticism regarding the supernatural.
248
Coil’s beginnings as a band coincided with increasing public
awareness of AIDS and the backlash against gay men that
accompanied it. Balance and Christopherson responded to this
backlash not with the pleas for understanding and equality common
in the pop sphere, nor with the performative anger and political
parody common among post-punk musicians; instead, they used
social attitudes regarding pollution and contagion as the basis for
creating a queer approach to alchemy. Alchemy, for Coil, was both an
esoteric pursuit and a hermeneutic; it was their mystical alternative to
the Marxist-inflected social analysis taking place on albums by
contemporary bands like Crass, Gang of Four, and Scritti Politti, born
of a skepticism towards political solutions arising in part from the
pariah status conferred on gay men during the AIDS panic. In a 1985
interview, Balance and fellow band member Stephen Thrower spoke
of the hypocrisy of the British political system and the banning of gay
books and harassment of gays by police. Thrower remarked, “I
wouldn’t want to politicize [the fight against oppression], because
then you’ll make the same mistakes as those you’re fighting against.
That’s just one example why the British socialists don’t mean
anything in the political arena. They’re so dry and boring, and miles
away from the people they mean to represent.”[3]
249
Chief among Coil’s magical influences were Austin Osman Spare,
Aleister Crowley, and Kenneth Grant. All three writers, in various
ways, considered sexual magic the best path for joining the lower
realms of mind and matter to the highest spiritual realms, and
transmuting lower states of consciousness into higher. Though all
three writers accordingly mention the alchemical tradition and
explicitly link it to their work, Crowley’s corpus by far contains the
most frequent references to alchemy and the most overt metaphorical
borrowings from the ancient art. From Coil’s earliest recordings in the
1980s to the handful of albums released after Balance’s death in 2004,
Crowley’s work, especially his interpretation of alchemy as sex magic,
forms a constant source of material for the band. Crowley, a student
of both the Western esoteric tradition and Eastern traditions like Yoga
and Buddhist meditation, created a philosophical system that
presaged Aldous Huxley’s “perennialism” in that it postulated a set
of stable, underlying truths beneath the variegated surfaces of
religious traditions from around the world. For Crowley, this
underlying unity originated in sex. According to Crowley’s
Confessions, a fateful encounter with the head of the German occult
society Ordo Templi Orientis led him to understand that
Freemasonry, alchemy, magic (both ancient and modern), Kabbalah,
and other mystical traditions all pointed to the same secret [5]: the
surpassing magical power of combined male and female sexual
fluids. Throughout his texts, he refers to sexual fluids by such
alchemically-tinged names as “the Great Work,”[6] “the Elixir of
Life,”[7] and the “Arcanum of Alchymia.” [8] This sexually-generated
“True Stone of the Philosophers”[9] seems, in the earliest of Crowley’s
writings concerning it, to have been exclusively the product of
male/female intercourse, but Crowley’s unceasing researches led to
variations that included an individual male’s sexual fluids and the
combined sexual fluids of two males. Because of the unlimited
creative and transformative power he attributed to what were
commonly perceived as mere bodily secretions, Crowley’s vast,
complex, and polygeneric body of writing uses alchemy as one of its
250
master metaphors, and Coil followed him both in their preoccupation
with sexual magic and their use of alchemical imagery.
Crowley’s sexual alchemy was only one side of his larger project of
transmuting base matter into spiritual energy. Another prima materia
used both literally and symbolically by Crowley was shit, most
notoriously in a coprophagic episode that occurred at the Abbey of
Thelema in July, 1920. Biographer Lawrence Sutin summarizes
Crowley’s goal during this period as “the creation of a ‘divine Self’
fully released from the fears and inhibitions of the all-too-human
soul,” and therefore “self-prescribed magical ordeals … were his chief
focus in the summer of 1920.”[10] Crowley would, “on an almost
nightly basis,”[11] enter a room he called the Chambre des Cauchemars
and ingest a peyote extract he had obtained from the Parke-Davis
pharmaceutical company[12] and/or opium, hashish, ether, heroin,
alcohol or cocaine. A brochure Crowley issued to promote the Abbey
makes it clear that he saw the Chambre as an alchemical vessel for the
dissolution of the self-- the false, lower self, at any rate. Drugs,
however, weren’t enough to force Crowley into a confrontation with
his most elemental fears and reflexes and so he and his sex-magical
partner Leah Hirsig entered into an escalating sado-masochistic game
(with Hirsig dominant), designed, as Crowley wrote, to “[make] me
free forever of my preferences for matter, [make] me Pure Spirit.” [13]
The game culminated with Hirsig goading Crowley into eating her
shit, mocking his hesitation by calling him a “False Priest.” Crowley’s
understandably intense description of this event includes, as an
indication of his near-shattering disgust, an allusion to the alchemical
black sun but ends with his declaration that “I passed ordeal, I took
oath; I am indeed High Priest.”[14]
251
777, Crowley’s compendium of magical correspondences and
symbolism, he calls the Egyptian dung beetle “the Bark of the
Midnight Sun,”[16] portraying the insect as symbolic of the power of
the aspirant’s higher self to ferry him across “the black pool of the
Abyss.”[17] Crowley published a collection of poems, in fact, called The
Winged Beetle, inspired by the dung beetle’s evocation of the begetting
of renewal from waste, light from darkness, creation from
destruction. It isn’t surprising, then, that, as artists steeped in
Crowley’s work, Coil would be drawn to shit as a liminal substance.
Coil’s use of shit was not merely magical allegory, however, since as
gay men in 1980s Britain, Balance and Christopherson were
inextricably associated in the popular imagination with the lower
depths of the body, of urban space, and of morality. Transmuting the
base materials of homophobic rhetoric and of gay sexuality was of
primary concern for the era’s gay musicians, whether through the
alchemy of civil rights rhetoric, or declarations of pride, or
glamorized visions of bathhouse decadence. As far as the
homophobic political right was concerned, however, gays were
polluting “normal” society with their “unnatural” acts. Where the
rhetoric of contagion and sin was, imagery of excreta was not far off.
A Gay Times history quotes the remarks of one “James Anderton,
Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police,” who in 1986 “told a
conference on Aids [sic] that gay men ‘were swirling about in a
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human cesspit of their own making.’”[18] Such language, queer scholar
Jon Binnie argues, is typical of homophobic rhetoric in which “gay
men [are] pathologized as wasteful, as trash—associated with death,
disease and the sewer.”[19] Gay men in the 1980s thus became
symbolic of all that is loathsome, repulsive, excluded from
civilization. Coil’s recordings responded to this anathematization in
part by focusing on another liminal bodily fluid, blood, on the album
they made in response to the AIDS crisis, Horse Rotorvator. Songs such
as “The Anal Staircase,” “Slur,” “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini),”
“Blood from the Air,” and the band’s cover of “Tainted Love” depict a
world both eroticized and menacing, suffused with blood.
Fear of “killer blood” fueled gay plague stories in the British press for
years,[21] and drove an anti-gay panic which culminated in 1988’s
Section 28 law, which prohibited “local authorities” from “funding …
books, plays, leaflets, films or any other material showing gay
253
relationships as normal.”[22] Sociologist Eric Anderson coined the term
“homohysteria” to refer to this period of “backlash to the gains made
by gay men and feminists of the ‘60s and ‘70s.”[23]
254
For Coil as for Crowley, even the highest secrets of magic and the
most sacred oaths were means to an end: literally the end of the
individual self by the metaphoric death of spiritual enlightenment
and the attendant dissolution of the socially-constructed personality.
Ultimately Crowley’s “magick” was designed to dissolve the
practitioner’s identity completely, by unmooring it not only from
conventional values but from all attachments, preferences, and
identification with a stable self. John Balance put this ethos into
practice in his art and his life, via ritual, drug and alcohol use, and
immersion in his art, often to the point of “Mental breakdown,” as he
remarked to one interviewer, adopting as a motto Captain Beefheart’s
lyric “God, please fuck my mind for good.” The interviewer, in
response, linked Balance’s behavior to alchemy, and Balance agreed:
“Of a sort, as long as it transmutes in the right direction.” [26]
255
Crowley envisioned the highest level of initiation as the point where
man, having dissolved his individual humanity, resolves into god, or
what Crowley called “Unity…above all division.”[31] Thus, Crowley’s
magical system aims at psychic alchemy, using the aspirant’s habits,
proclivities, and even resistance to change as transformative material.
In his most complete statement, Magick: Liber ABA, in a chapter
entitled “Of the Eucharist; and of the Art of Alchemy,” he describes
the later, more painful stage of the process: “just as the Aspirant, on
the Threshold of Initiation, finds himself assailed by the ‘complexes’
which have corrupted him … so does the ‘First Matter’ blacken and
putrefy as the Alchemist breaks up its coagulations of impurity.” [32]
Stanton Marlan, in The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness,
looks in depth at the black sun’s relationship to the alchemical nigredo
and its metaphoric eclipse of consciousness. The black sun, in
Marlan’s summary, brings together “blackness, putrefactio, mortificatio,
the nigredo, poisoning, torture, killing, decomposition, rotting, and
death … a web of interrelationships that describe a terrifying, if most
often provisional, eclipse of consciousness”[33] --that is, the dissolution
of the mundane self both desired and feared by the magician, and the
confrontation with the “dark forces” [34] he or she must master in
order to evolve spiritually. These “forces” were understood by
twentieth-century magicians like Crowley not so much as external,
256
demonic forces but as psychological negativity: shame, guilt, fear, and
disgust.
Indeed, Coil’s black sun logo presents an elegant union of higher and
lower: a union of the spiritual and material, just as Crowley used the
sun to symbolize both sexuality and the highest spiritual truth.[38] For
these reasons, and for its deliberate resemblance to the anus, Coil’s
257
black sun combines deification and defecation, spirituality and
sexuality in one image, and connects them with their magical mentors
Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, and Kenneth Grant, all of whom
explored at length what the Kabbalah calls the qliphoth, the shattered
waste products of the divine act of creation that manifest as “the
negative substratum that underlies all positive life,” with impurity
and disgust on one end of the spectrum, ending in the “demonic and
terrifying paraphernalia of death, hell, and the Devil.”[39]
258
our “nightside of Eden,” to use Grant’s phrase, forming an urban
qliphoth along with the homeless shelter, the public toilet, and the bath
house. Coil, as a band formed in London, whose work is heavily
informed by the history and psychogeography of that city and whose
career can be neatly divided into London (1984-1999) and post-
London (2000-2004) periods, produced a discography haunted by that
city. Coil’s psychic mapping of London is expressed most famously in
Balance’s obsession with the “lost rivers” of London, formerly above-
ground rivers which over the centuries were gradually channeled into
conduits, adapted into early sewers, and covered over with
pavement. The original “lost rivers” were all integrated into the city-
wide sewer system that began construction in the 1860s, and more
rivers joined them. As the alchemist’s alembic is a device in which
gross materials are distilled into finer ones, the sewer along with its
attendant treatment plants and canals is meant to purify the city.
Thus, London’s Victorian-era sewer system is an example of ritual
architecture, a new kind of urban space, combining the majesty of the
palace, the awe of the catacombs, and the saving power of the
cathedral. Intended to guide the city’s waste from nigredo to albedo, the
alchemical state of purification, the sewer is at the same time hidden,
dangerous, and fraught with fear and disgust. Coil’s musical
evocations of London, such as “The Lost Rivers of London,” “Dark
River,” “The Anal Staircase,” “Love’s Secret Domain,” and “Batwings
(A Liminal Hymn),” often concern themselves with enclosed,
subterranean or sewer-like spaces whose palpable unpleasantness or
danger forms, at the same time, an alchemically liminal doorway to
ecstasy or gnosis.
259
contagion, but of genuine transgression. On the other hand, the
band’s lyrics and imagery took gay sex into a cosmic realm, whether
overtly, as in the “ecstatic tale of bukkake” related in “Are You
Shivering?”[41] or more subtly, as in the other logo Coil used in
addition to the black sun: John Dee’s hieroglyphic monad, which
combines symbols of the base elements and the Sun and Moon into a
human figure both corporeal and divine. The hieroglyphic monad
betokens the later stages of the alchemical process in which, having
transmuted both pollution and purity, the aspirant evolves into unity
with the cosmos.
Like Dee’s celestial monad, the gay male as transmuted in Coil’s work
is a unity of low and high: body, spirit, scatophile, fairy, drug abuser,
cruiser, and angel. Thus, Coil’s alchemy was a magical project, but
also a musical and a social project: through their manipulations of
sound and image, they sought to transmute negative images of gay
sexuality into images of mystery and elemental power. John Balance
and Peter Christopherson took Crowley’s multi-layered excremental/
alchemical vision from the occult underground to the world of pop
culture. Like Crowley, Coil insisted on the necessity of immersing
oneself in embodied existence rather than attempting to evade or
transcend it. In the words of one of Balance and Christopherson’s
collaborators in a 1985 trans-Atlantic alchemical ritual, Coil’s ideal
was to “place [the] soul in direct circumference of the shadow of the
black sun” in order to undergo the “burning and death … that is
required in order for one to go into the upper levels.” [42] Coil’s “upper
levels,” spiritual as well as corporeal, had scarcely before been
imagined in popular culture, a psychic space in which body, mind,
and cosmos melded with orgasm, hallucination, and chaos, “in order
to restore the whole being.”[43]
260
Notes
[1] John Balance, interview, Fist 5 (1992), accessed August 16, 2014,
www.brainwashed.com/common/ htdocs/publications/coil-1993-
fist.php?site=coil08
[2] Brainwashed, “John Balance,” accessed January 4, 2014,
http://www.brainwashed.com/coil/ info/john.html
[3] John Balance and Stephen Thrower, interview, Abrahadabra 1 (1985),
Symonds and Kenneth Grant (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), 705-
710.
[6] Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser,
1986), 148.
[7] Aleister Crowley, Magick: Liber ABA, Book Four, Parts I-IV, ed.
1991), 167.
[9] Crowley, Liber Aleph, 95.
[10] Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 282.
[11] Ibid. 282.
[12] Ibid., 253.
[13] Aleister Crowley, The Magickal Record of the Beast 666, ed. John
www.brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/ publications/coil-1985-
adn-7.pdf
261
[16] Aleister Crowley, 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister
Crowley, ed. Israel Regardie (York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1986), 121.
[17] Crowley, 777, 120.
[18] Richard Smith, “Behind the Story—Section 28,” Gay Times, last
Rights, Risk and Reason, ed. Peter Aggleton, Peter Davies, and Graham
Hart (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 16.
[21] Ibid. 16.
[22] “When Gay Became a Four-Letter Word,” BBC News, last
brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/ publications/coil-1993-
fist.php?site=coil08
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Aleister Crowley, The Magickal Record of the Beast 666, ed. John
262
[32] Crowley, Magick, 273.
[33] Marlan, Black Sun, 11.
[34] Marlan, Black Sun, 6.
[35] John Balance, “Coil: An Interview with John Balance” Compulsion
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345
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Adam Scovell is a writer and filmmaker currently based between
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entities of world folklore. Roll up Roll up for the fright of your lives. Dare
you visit The Carnival of Dark Dreams???
This Game of Strangers (2017) ~ Prepare to taste the worm in the golden
apple of Camelot as the evocative poets Jane Burn and Bob Beagrie peer
behind castle walls and uncover the soiled sheets of the romance /
betrayal of Lancelot and Guinevere. Slipping seamlessly from the lyrical
to the modern, Bob and Jane draw us in like voyeurs to the clandestine
passion and sometimes mundane (though always rich in language)
details of the love affair between the most beloved of the legendary king.
Prepare to read the classic tale of romance and bewitchment as it has
never been told before. Illustrated throughout with atmospheric
photography by several great artists.
North (2017) ~ The eloquent words of two poets brought forth from the
land, the lodestone and lodestar. All roads lead here. Join Tim Turnbull
and Phil Breach as through poetry, prose and the atmospheric imagery of
great photographers, they explore and invoke the physical and emotional
landscapes. Head North my friends and don't look back.
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Hares in the Moonlight (2017) ~ Written by accomplished singer
songwriter, Sharron Kraus. A tale of magic and adventure for readers
aged 8 – 12 in the tradition of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper. Twins
Lucy and Jay rescue a caged hare and then follow it to a moonlit
gathering of hares. They find themselves falling into a world of
shapeshifting and becoming hares themselves.
Wyrd Kalendar (2017) ~ Join Chris Lambert and Andy Paciorek as they
guide you through the twelve months of the year weaving twelve
illustrated tales of Magic, Murder, Terror, Love and the Wyrd.
www.lulu.com/spotlight/andypaciorek
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