The magicke of landscapes, the landscapes of magicke. AEWCH 118 featuring Phil Legard!

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Friends,
In a time of confinement, how do we magically evoke landscapes in us? And how do we create maps for ethical approaches to magical landscapes? for that exploration, I’m so excited to welcome Phil Legard to the show. I was first introduced to Phil’s massive body of musical and scholarly magical work via Ben Chasny (who appeared on AEWCH 45 and who Phil has worked with). Phil has a massive amount of musical work available, including his musical projects Hawthonn, Xenis Emputae Traveling Band, and Sulis Noctis -you can listen to all of them and support him by paying for your music on the Larkfall bandcamp page.Recently, Phil has published the effort of years of transcribing and working with the 16th century grimoire-ic book of magic in process An Excellente Book Of The Arte Of Magicke, by imperialist demon-summoner Humphrey Gilbert and his scryer (lover?) John Davis. It’s now available from Scarlet Imprint, featuring essays by Phil and commentary by Alexander Cummins. We talk about the book at length on the episode, as well as the dubious character of its authors. And we talk about Phil’s concerns about magic and politics. This is a long and deep episode.Two other things: 1. There’s a fun synchronicity in this episode that I left in just to show how things like this happen. 2. The episode ends with “Hesperian Garden: Threshold I” one of Phil’s forays into speculative music and the work of angelic magician, John Dee.

ON THIS EPISODE, WE DISCUSS

• The importance of helping leftist politics and magic find each other
• The change in spiritual responsibility when you start communicating magic versus when you keep it to yourself
• The anti-capitalist function of time and space in art
• Tree people, rock people, and the personhood of everything
• How people add to landscapes and spirits add to people and landscapes add to spirits
• The spiritual bodies of our houses and of music
• Vowels as spiritual beings, consonants as megaliths
• Becoming-psychotic
• Google Glass as an anti-magic technology
• The pitfalls and wonders of speculative music
• The intersections of magic and imperialism
• The temptations of summoning demons
• Why people fuck themselves up doing white magic, too
• Doing magic in academia

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Phil, visit his excellente blog and website. It has some pretty incredible essays on sound, landscapes, and magic. Here’s a link to Phil’s paper, “Materia Magica Nova: Towards a Critical Magic” which we open the show with a discussion about. And here’s The Well Head, which is Phil’s project with his wife Layla Legard (called Hawthonn) which turns you into a well. Seriously. Finally, here’s free access to Phil’s beautiful book, on psychegeography Psychogeographia Ruralis.

• I talked about spiritual politics with Michael Brooks on AEWCH 117, and also hierarchies in spirituality and politics with David Graeber on AEWCH 99.

• Below is an image of Mên-an-Tol, the sacred stone site that sparked profound change in Phil’s life and art.

• Phil has done lots of work exploring “speculative music” and his articles and sources on it all link here.

• Phil mentions the artist/musician Ian Johnstone, and later, he mentions composer Fred Lerdahl. I’m only mildly familiar with both, but I’ll be looking deep into their work now.

• Here’s a short article on psychogeography (and for more, check the booklist linked above).

• Phil has written a great brief essay on Joseph Hauer, “Josef Hauer’s Eternal, Atonal Universe“.

• Want to learn more about the literary group the OULIPO? Here’s a good intro. And thanks to Phil, I’m now learning about Ramón Lulle and his mystical divinatory wheels.

• I discuss the etheric body between the stones on AEWCH 116 with Are Thoresen.

• The Game Of Saturn by Peter Mark Adams is another great Scarlet Imprint book, mainly available through their site, and covers the Sola-Buscas tarot deck.

• I talked with the problems of Sylvia Fedrici on AEWCH 99 with witchcraft scholar Thomas Waters.

• Johann Gottfried von Herder is pretty fascinating, and relatively forgotten.

• Cunning-Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic is well-worth checking out.

• Remember the first oracle from The Neverending Story? Anyway, be careful.

Until next time, friendes,
CH