Soul food

The Moot with No Name, Devereux pub, Strand. Subject: Sin-eaters by Shani Oates.

Intrigued by this subject I took a friend, saying the people at the Moot with No Name are some of the most interesting and knowledgeable people I have met in London. 

Unfortunately Shani read her 'talk' from a large wad of papers using complex and academic language. It was hard to follow. You could see the packed room's attention wandering. 

I only started to make head or tail of it when we were allowed to ask questions. Steve Wilson, the MC of these talks, announced that Shani was the first person from the Robert Cochrane tradition to speak at the moots. Steve Wilson ominously requested that people not ask about 'lineage'. The room, full of the usual assortment of tricoteuses, witches, Shakespearean speaking frog-like creatures, long haired tailors, beady-eyed astrologers and other marginals, grumbled in response.

Robert Cochrane, originally from a strict Methodist background, claimed to come from a line of hereditary witches. He practised from his council home in London and elsewhere. There seems to have been some inter-coven rivalry with Gerald Gardner another hereditary witch (who spent much of his life studying local traditions in Malaysia) before returning to England to work eventually with Aleister Crowley. He started an affair with one of his coven, in front of his wife Jean, and grew fond of 'witches potions' (psychedelic drugs to you and me). He eventually committed ritual suicide, drinking belladonna, at the summer solstice of 1966.

The celebrated witch Doreen Valiente(1) one of his followers, became disenchanted saying

"cease to have silly bickering between covens, because they happen to do things differently from the way we do them. This incidentally is the reason why I eventually parted from Robert Cochrane, because he wanted to declare a sort of Holy War against the followers of Gerald Gardner, in the name of traditional witchcraft."

One of the main problems for Gardner, and is no doubt still an issue, is that the OTO was gender imbalanced, 80% to 20% women. The women were frequently reluctant to participate in the 'Great Rite' (sexual intercourse) on the altar. Spoilsports!

So with a little post-lecture research I have managed to make some sense of the talk.

Shani talked about the relevance of Sin-eaters to 'the craft', how sin is ritually dealt with via confession, expiation and purification.

"Sin" states Shani "has long been recognised as undesirable. No one can be responsible for the sins of somebody else but this is exactly what Sin-eaters do". 

Traditionally each village would have a Sin-eater, often beggars, who, by eating food and drink placed on or over the body of a corpse, would consume/remove the sins of the corpse. They, along with other professions such as tanners, were pariahs, untouchables kept on the outskirts of society. 

Adam Dilwyn Vaughan was the last known Sin-eater, living in Hereford in the 1960s. Richard Munsloe, a Sin-eater in Shropshire, enjoyed as his payment warm cake and spiced ale.

Soul-caking(2), funeral biscuits in Shropshire, corpse-cakes in the Balkans, the Dutch dead-cakes, burial cakes (still made in Lincolnshire and Cumberland) all derive from Sin-eating. Similarly in Cornish custom, children were encouraged to kiss the corpse. In the Andes, we see Tlazolteotl, a purification goddess,"eat the filth" of a corpse.

Salt and smoke would be used in the ritual, denoting healing and absolution. Fire and candles feature heavily in funerals, and the word derives from the Latin 'funeralis' meaning torch. It is taboo to light anything from a corpse candle. All attendees must carry salt in their pockets.

Salt represents many things: 

• a symbol of Man's labour
• incorruptibility (it is extracted intact from nature)
• sterility (makes all living nature barren)
• friendship and wisdom. To eat another man's salt is to make a bond. To eat the salt of your King is to owe him fidelity.

Salt is used in all the higher magical orders. But it is rumoured that some witches reject salt.

Other techniques used include 'dry retching' into a cleared ground, to suck out energetic debris from places of congestion in the body, to get it out of the system. 'Corpse silver' is given over the body, silver being a powerful conductor. The face of the Sin-eater is covered in black ash.

At the end of the talk Shani rejected the idea that eating sins had any deleterious effect on the Sin-eaters health. 

"What is sin for you?" asked someone

"Sin is not following your purpose" replied Shani "Crowley said sin equals restriction".

(1)Doreen Valiente also believed that the future of paganism and the craft in "the age of Aquarius, lies in feminism and Green issues associated with the environment" (quote from http://www.controverscial.com/). It seems to me that Stawhawk et al, with their activities at the anti-G8 camp, are pursuing Valiente's legacy.

(2)"Soul-cakers would go to each house, singing either a begging song or a plea for prayers for the dead. They would put on a mummers play for the residents of the house, which would consist of a challenge, a battle, a death, and a magical revival. Specially-made cakes were given to the Soul-cakers at the conclusion of their performance. Soul-caking is still the custom at Antrobus, in Cheshire, but there has been a change or two. Instead of going house-to-house, the Soul-cakers go pub-to-pub, by car! Leaving cakes and wine out for visiting ancestors is also an old custom that has carried over into many British households, even today." From Cyberwitch.com

Gary Lachman 'Politics and the Occult'

Gary Lachman

Treadwells sells interesting magazines such as 'Dark Nights', a quarterly for vampires.

Along with Julian Cope and Andrew Collins, writing about the esoteric seems to be a popular career move for ex-pop stars. Gary Lachman, then known as Gary Valentine, used to be a guitarist with Blondie and Iggy Pop. 

Monday night he gave a short talk at the intimate bookshop 'Treadwells' in Covent Garden(1) (which looks like it's been there forever but is actually quite recent), to launch his latest book 'Politics and the Occult'.

Inspired by the occult historian James Webb's book 'The Occult Establishment', Lachman wanted to explore the impact of modernity on the occult revival of the 19th century.

The main trouble with the talk was Lachman's extensive and sometimes obscure knowledge. He gabbled out names which frankly I had never heard of before. Therefore I was too shy to ask questions but afterwards discovered that some other people were equally ignorant. 

He began by illustrating links between the occult and the Left in the 19th century:

"we had  Annie Besant, and the Fabian Society. After the Russian Revolution there were also Steiner groups. The English socialist Edward Carpenter, in the 1920's, was the pioneer of what became known in the 60's as 'dropping out' and also popularised sandals. Carpenter was a proponent of gay rights and a big influence on Ouspensky."

The link between the occult and politics moved generally rightwards after World War I. It became associated with the far Right and Anti-Semitism, a kind of "spiritual racism". In 1919 there began a French organisation called  Les Veilleurs 'The Watchers' led by René Schwaller de Lubicz, Egyptologist and alchemist. This underground esoteric group, interested in Aryans, heraldry and hierarchy, and with dodgy views on race, had a dress code, brown shirts and jodphurs. It is rumoured that Rudolf Hess was a member and that he got some of his ideas on haute couture from The Watchers.

An audience member quipped: "before Himmler got Hugo Boss involved..."

There is a fundamental clash between conservatism which values folklore, tradition and the occult and the Left which vaunts modernity and considers all unscientific belief to be 'the opiate of the people'.

An audience member asked: "Where would you class modern American neo-paganism?". I assume he was talking about people like Starhawk, an American witch who is heavily involved with the ecological and anti-capitalist movement whom I met at the Gleneagles Anti-G8 camp. (2).

Lachman did not have the space to deal with that in his book:

"You mean the yippies, Jerry Rubin, 'Just do it'? Did you know that during the 1967 anti-war march, they tried to levitate the Pentagon?"

Lachman admitted that despite his own interest in the occult, he is a product of modernity

"I buy cheap paperbacks at chain stores, only available because of modern mass production".

Today the 'bible belt' in the U.S. continues this link between the occult and politics; Lachman remarked:

"with the departure of Bush, we now have Palin. It is occult belief the idea that angels will descend...the whole American cult about the apocalypse 'The Rapture' and The Order of Archangel Michael (which originally came from Roumania in the 1920's)."

"The extremes of Left and Right meet and hate the modern world. The elite school of intellectuals such as Adorno on the Left called the gnostic world the 'nadir of sterility'. 

Scientific meaning is always pitted against religious meaning and neither work."

There is a neurotic need for the occult in it's widest sense, that is anything 'supernatural'.

The modern view, states Lachman, which is

"you are on your own, there's nobody out there, as Nietzche (who has been variously adopted by the Left as well as the Right) describes, it is troubling to us. "

Lastly Lachman mentioned occultism in the context of feminism, citing the interesting example with reference to recent events, of Victoria Woodhull, an American spiritualist, who in 1872, ran for president with a black man, Frederick Douglass, as her running mate. She spent election night in jail. Lachman remarks that:

"the powers that be were not too happy with 'Mrs Satan' as she was known."

(1) Treadwells is around the corner from the divine perfumier 'Penhaligon'. (Steve Wilson of the O.T.O remarked at the event  that the creation of perfume originated within alchemy.) That small section of London, not far from the British Museum, contains many esoteric bookshops: Atlantis, the Astrology Shop, Watkins, Mysteries, New World.

(2) Starhawk and her 'sisters' protected the camp and protestors with invisibility spells.

Anti G8 camp in Stirling, Scotland.

Another of my newsletter emails to the samba list.
hi was gonna use this morning to give y'all an update but then bombing news (7/7) from London came out during a mass camp meeting and everybody dispersed to find out if their loved ones were OK.
We are currently under siege by the riot police and were trying to decide our response.
Options included:

• Peaceful, slow noisy push out.
  
• March to Stirling prison negotiated with police.
  

A few Spanish 'black block' wanted to bust out violently (little support for this option but it meant no consensus was achieved during 4 a.m meeting this morning which was initially called to discuss an early morning wake-up call action to disturb the arrival of the American delegation at a hotel).
The last three nights there has been panic in the camp as people bang drums and scream

"Everybody up! We are being taken over. The police are coming, go down to the gate"

The first night this happened I thought, what will that achieve? Especially for those of us with kids, we want to avoid putting them in a violent situation. It was pretty scary and so I went to the media tent to discuss putting out a more positive message. I felt that a daily press release would be a good idea and so did most others, unfortunately some organisations (the Wombles in particular) in the camp are categorically against any interaction with mainstream media therefore consensus cannot be reached on this subject. This means however that the mainstream media are in total control: we do not rebut their inaccuracies. As a result myself and other parents decided to do a media friendly protest, the baby block, to show the outside world that this camp contains a wide variety of people. We also wanted to protect ourselves from having a Genoa style raid in which the police come in and start bashing up
sleeping people.
Yesterday was incredibly successful considering the difficulty of our situation when faced with the resources that the police and establishment possess. Many groups left during the day on Tuesday, during the night and early Wednesday morning. There were hill walkers and samba contingents hiding out in the undergrowth all night in the rain in order to set up the road blocks.
We awoke to torrential rain and the news that the 'stragglers walkout' planned for 3 a.m were for the most part not allowed out although some pushed through police lines. Unfortunately some hot-heads started to smash up the local industrial estate in reaction, smashing Band Q, Burger king, and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
The call came through at about 5 a.m. that the M9 had been taken by us. Big cheer. This was the least likely blockade to succeed. By 7 a.m. the A9 was blocked and many B roads. I was standing next to the medics as they received news: Lancaster have taken the b2499, Nottingham have taken this other road and on and on. It was like the War of the Roses!
The camp was formed into barrios representing different regions of Britain. The international samba contingent were in the Manchester camp.
I formed part of the baby block along with 11 other members of the samba band including my daughter of course. We managed to commandeer use of a double decker red bus and head the convoy. We were stopped at the exit of the camp by police but then people from the convoy drove through...
We were then escorted to Gleneagles, encountering a lock-on road block held by two solitary activists, they were locked onto and underneath a car parked across the road. We supported them with music then moved ahead. Finally we ended up about 3/4 mile away from the Gleneagles hotel surrounded by riot police. We then descended from the bus and had a street party on the bridge overlooking the A9.

My daughter led the band which was appropriate as it was a baby block. There was a 'terrorist toddlers picnic' in front of the police lines, a sound system, us, clowns, bubbles, rain, banners, colour and an enormous umbrella under which we played. We played crap cos we were all so tired but not as tired as Andrea and her small contingent of sambistas who had been on the move in the rain since 10 p.m. the previous night. I bet they were glad to find us and finally relax on the bus.
We then went up to Auchternardy (can never spell this), and joined the big street party there. However there were reports of clowns (from the Clown Army) being arrested. It's amazing how the Clown Army have been turned into this sinister organisation by the press when their stated purpose is to diffuse tension with humour.
Another activist band managed to get through the barricades surrounding the Gleneagles hotel which put the police into a huge panic. The army were called in to back them up later as a result.
The baby block had some press embedded. I was in contact with a journalist from the Scottish Daily Post. He seemed sympathetic to our cause and we gave him good access and interviews. I was dismayed the next day when the story that appeared in the paper was wholly negative and painted us as bad parents for taking our children to this protest. I called him to complain and he said that he had written a positive story but that the editor of the paper had changed it. However it was worth challenging him because he then wrote and got published a sympathetic story about the camps reaction to the London bombings, a subject which would have been easy for the press to go to town on and paint us as sympathisers with the terrorists. (I have to say that the general feeling around the camp and I felt this way too, that the 7/7 bombing was incredibly convenient timing wise for the Government in that it took all of the attention away from our camps protest against the G8. Also took the attention away from the agreement to drop the debt to Africa.)
This protest has been very colour coded. Some sambistas were arrested in Edinburgh on Monday and it was people who were wearing black who were picked on. One of the French women is charged with leading a riot and breach of the peace and is held for seven days. She could receive a maximum sentence of 120 days. While those sambistas were in Edinburgh on Monday, the rest of us were in Faslane, at the peace camp, doing the annual protest against the nuclear submarines. The countryside was very beautiful, lochs, hills, heather, granite stone
architecture, and midges. This protest passed peacefully.

George did an impromptu samba workshop to motivate the people who were locked to each other in front of a gate. The clowns arrived. The geishas of gaiety arrived and bowed politely to the police. There were radical cheer leaders. Lots of creative 'fluffy' responses to the situation. One protester, Johnny, was staging a sit-in on the fence and we surrounded and encouraged him. He was arrested but we managed to make sure that he was allowed to return to the camp with us and not removed.
Going backwards in time: Saturdays' Make Poverty History march was for me rather crap. It was very hot. The march was badly organised and so were we.
It was the first musical encounter of this event between the European sambistas and the British and the different signs render a decent set practically impossible. Frequently we British sambistas ground to a halt in confusion. It took us hours to meet, poor communications were to blame, and then hours to decide what to do. I was exhausted before we did the bloody march. Then, as younger fitter and non-surdo playing people wanted to stay in Edinburgh, my daughter and I had to walk 40 mins carrying the surdo and caixa to the mini-bus stop to return to the camp. Never been so knackered in my life.
I got back and found that the tent I had been lent was broken and collapsed. We found another empty tent and squatted it as my daughter was asleep standing up but then I got in trouble for that. Childless protestors (most of them) have little understanding of the issues for parents.
Note to self: cannot rely 100 per cent on others to help carry drum therefore must learn lighter instrument for protests and marches, especially with a kid to keep an eye on too.
Camp very interesting in itself. Lots of autonomous organisation. Pretty impressive. I cooked for our barrio on Sunday and will again tonight.
Anarchist teapot and Rampanplan (a Dutch field kitchen) are working together to supply us with food and are massively in debt as a result. So we have to get more donations from people for meals.
Findhorn community also have a barrio kitchen.
Starhawk and some other American witches have been casting spells over the campsite to protect it from the police. They have also been doing invisibility spells for the walkers that blockaded the roads. These spells seem to be working very well.
Have attended more meetings in a week than ever before in life. Am actually going for some kind of 'Guinness book of records' of how many meetings I can fit in. Am also working out how to find out maximum info from a meeting in shortest space of time then scarper.
The toilets are full and haven't had a wash since I got here. Have also got nappy rash from walking with damp thighs. Have eaten mucho vegan slop. My daughter not eaten in days of course.
Lots of interesting people here, people that are charismatic, energetic, self motivated, dynamic and and responsible. If they wanted to compete in the mainstream world they would probably end up running the country!
I suggest we do a fundraiser to buy our own plane or helicopter. Not having our own transport has been very difficult to make us effective as a London affinity group.