Month: August 2013

abystle:

100lx: Henry Gillard Glindoni – John Dee performing an experiment before Queen Elizabeth I.

When first painted, the painting showed Dee standing in a circle of human skulls, the accoutrement of practitioners of black magic. The painter later painted over the skulls. Over the years, chemical changes in the pigments have caused the overpaint to become transparent, so that at least five skulls are now (1992) visible: two of them can be seen on the ground behind Dee and another (on its side) is between him and the brazier.

allmesopotamia:

“This tablet is exciting because shows just how seriously Mesopotamian cultures took astronomy. Observers recorded the appearance of the Moon – and also the stars and planets – every single night of the year. (Ok, unless it was cloudy.) They sent reports of these observations to the king. Babylonian astronomers had centuries of astronomical observations to work with. Unfortunately we don’t as not so many of these reports have survived.”

scarletimprint:

A Polish edition of The Red Goddess has been produced by our friends at Okultura.
Delighted that this will reach more people.

http://sklep.okultura.pl/peter-grey-czerwona-bogini.html

Below is the introduction to the Polish edition in English:

Polish Edition Introduction

Poland is the crucible of Europe. Hot lignite slag and bellows breath creating molten gold. It is the epicentre of the sexual alchemical experiments of Dee, and the rebirth of Babalon.

It is in Poland that the Enochian angels sang their most honeyed hymns, and promised a different future. A future fraught with apocalyptic visions, from a schism riven Christianity which could not accept that Woman was the ultimate solution, that sex was the master key of occult power. It is here that the lost Love Goddess makes her dramatic and triumphant entry into the modern world.

Though many look to California and the collision of rocket scientist Jack Parsons with Scientology founder L.Ron Hubbard in the Babalon Working, it is more correctly Europe where the real alchemy occurred. To have The Red Goddess translated into Polish is in many ways inevitable. It is in itself, a vital magical act that completes the circuit and ignites the conflagration. This is a book written to start fires.

It is time to open our hearts and uncross our legs. To ransack the Book of Revelations for the real concealed meanings. To dare to follow the Angels out onto the battlefields once more.  Babalon tells us what we have always suspected, that the Age has changed. The old certainties are not simply being questioned, they are being torn down by a babel of voices. This book is a herald of a time of revolution. For a new generation who will not settle for the lie a realisation dawns; that it is happening, that Babalon is here. 

I have a diary entry from August 7 2006, and it reads:

I’ve come to Kracow for secrets. Looking for what Dee might have seen. Perhaps somewhere amidst the foreboding churches there is a way back into that labyrinth of letters that spelled out the Keys. The Jewish quarter even after being sifted through the gates of Auschwitz is still redolent of secrets.  I lose myself, take enough wrong turns to find empty haunted backstreets. A whore watches me go past from an iron framed balcony. Grafitti threatens violence.

The words I recited in a hotel room, tarot laid out around me, curtains drawn, is echoing on here.  Empty.  I pad patiently after it. I find the bar I didn’t know was there, Alchemia. The radical science has become motheaten owls and dusty alembics. A backdrop of forgotten props for travellers making their safe way around a safe Europe.
The vodka comes as it should in cold swallows. Whatever the crucifix countermeasures once warned of on church doors is not here. I drink in the candlelight. Idly tear out the Sri Yantra logo from a flyer. Pour a little hot wax over the back of my hand to see how drunk I have become.
Not here, it isn’t here, it has moved on.
I knew this, that’s all journeys often are, coming to terms with what was already known.
It is loose in the world, no point in ever going back, unless we then go forward.

A year after this The Red Goddess was published for the first time in English in an edition of an hundred and fifty-six copies.  A year later, clamour lead to a further edition of seven hundred and seventy-seven copies and a further forty nine bound in black goatskin and silk. Now in paperback it has been read on every continent with the momentum continuing to grow insatiably.  

And so I find my words now written in Polish, wondering if my calling in Kracow has lead to this particular book. Excited to see what will now unfold, recognising Her signs in the tempest and the rose.

Poland has a singular history, as a powerhouse of revolutionary ideas and heresies.  Further still, it has a future. The Work is for us to accomplish here and now and though this book is concerned with history, it is in order for us to free ourselves from the false histories of state and church and school. It offers glimpses and paths to pursue deeper into the rose labyrinth as individuals, as groups and as lovers.

We will not settle for less than incorruptible gold, rising out of the leaden mass of Catholicism, rising out of the grey architecture of the soviet bloc, rising out of the false promises of the free market.

This book was written for Her, yet it is also written for you.  
She has more to say, speaking through our bodies, and moving on the wings of the wind.
The war has begun and we stand with the daughter of fortitude.

With Love

Peter Grey

1/1/11

The English version of the book is to be found here: http://www.scarletimprint.com/redgoddess.htm