On Nazism and the Magic of Belief

In a novel titled The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton describes a brigade of political police whose specialty was poetry.  A crime is forestalled because a policeman understands the meaning of a sonnet.  There is a great deal of truth behind Chesterton's whimsicalities.  Trends of thought which escape the notice of the trained observer; writings and works which the sociologist pays scant attention, together with social phenomena that he considers too insignificant or too 'odd' to worry about, are sometimes a surer indication of events to come than the facts that are there for all to see.
In 1896, an English author, M. P. Shiel, published a short story in which we read of a band of monstrous criminals ravaging Europe, slaughtering families which they considered inferior and impending the progress of humanity, and burning their corpses.  The story was entitled:  The S.S.

The atmosphere of terror under the Nazis, which nobody could forsee, was heralded in the horrible stories of the German writer Hans Heinz Ewers: The Mandragore and In Terror, who was destined to become the regime's official poet.  Goethe said: "Coming events cast their shadows before", and it may well be that these undercurrents in which the future is reflected may be detected and interpreted, not in events which attract general attention, but in works and human activities which have nothing to do and are far removed from what we call 'the stream of history'.

Germany, when National Socialism first made its appearance, was the home of the exact sciences.  German methods, German logic, and the strictness and integrity of German scientists were universally esteemed.  And yet it was in a society of this kind that an incoherent and patently crazy doctrine was introduced and spread like wildfire, starting from quite insignificant premisses.  In the country of Einstein and Planck there was talk of an 'Aryan physique'; in the homeland of Humboldt and Haeckel 'racial problems' began to be discussed seriously.  Such phenomena cannot be explained as being due solely to economic inflation.  There was something else at work here, a type of madness forseen in the poems and writings of a neglected few poets and authors.

"Love," said Jacques Chardonne, "is much more than love."  We have to wonder if history is also often much more than history.  In his analysis of the book Hitler Unmasked by Dr. Otto Dietrich, who was for years the Fuhrer's chief press officer, M. Pierre Cazenave writes as follows:

"...However, Dr. Dietrich is too easily satisfied with a word he often repeats and which, in our positivist age, is inadequate to explain Hitler.  'Hitler', he says, 'was a demoniac possessed by nationalist ideas to the point of madness.'  What does he mean by 'demoniac'?  And why 'madness'?  In the middle ages Hitler would have been described as a man possessed, but today?  Either the word 'demoniac' means nothing, or else it means possessed by a demon.  But what is a demon?  Does Dr. Dietrich believe in the existence of the devil?  We must be clear about this.  I, personally, am not satisfied with the word 'demoniac'.  Nor with the word 'madness', which suggests mental disorder...Was Hitler responsible?  In my opinion, yes.  And that is why I reject the word 'madness' just as I cannot accept the term 'demoniac'..."

I totally agree with Cazenave's critique and also find the use of words such as 'madness' and 'demoniac' wholly unsatisfactory.  But it still leaves us with an unresolved problem.  If Hitler was neither mad nor possessed the history of Nazism would still be inexplicable by the standards of a 'positivist age'.  Psychology in depth has shown that man's apparently rational actions are in reality governed by forces which he himself knows nothing, or which are closely linked with a symbolism having nothing in common with ordinary everyday logic.  In the history of Hitlerism, or rather is certain aspects of this history, everything happens as if the whole conception on which it was based has baffled the ordinary historian so that, if we want to understand, we will have to abandon our positive way of looking at things and enter a world where reason and reality are no longer valid.

"At bottom", said Rauschning, "every German has one foot in Atlantis, where he seeks a better Fatherland and a better patrimony.  The double nature of the Germans, this faculty they have of splitting their personality which enables them to live in the real world and at the same time to project themselves into an imaginary world, is especially noticeable in Hitler and provides the key to his magic socialism."

Rauschning I feel is certainly on solid footing in his explanation and he is quick to remind us that this affliction targets not only the Germans:

"whole nations have fallen into a state of inexplicable agitation.  They follow the flagellants' procession, or are seized by St. Vitus's Dance...National Socialism is the St. Vitus's Dance of the twentieth century."

But where does this strange malady come from? To this question he failed to find a satisfactory answer. "It's deepest roots are hidden in secret places."  It is these secret places that I feel we ought to explore.  And it is not a historian, but a poet, the magician and the artist who should be our guide.  As C.S. Lewis well remarked in his last book Till We Have Faces, "The gods will not speak to us face to face until we ourselves have a face."

What madness will we have to descend into to understand Nazism?  Quick examples will suffice.  The earth is hollow.  We are living inside it.  The stars are blocks of ice.  Several moons have already fallen on the Earth.  The whole history of humanity is contained in the struggle between ice and fire.

Man is not finished.  He is on the brink of formidable mutation which will confer on him the powers the ancients attributed to the gods.  A few specimens of the New Man exist in the world, who have perhaps come here from beyond the frontiers of time and space.

Alliances could be formed with the Master of the World or the King of Fear who reignes over a city hidden somewhere in the East.  Those who conclude a pact will change the surface of the Earth and window the human adventure with a new meaning for many thousands of years.

Such were the 'scientific' theories and 'religious' conceptions on which Nazism was originally based and in which Hitler and the members of his group believed - theories which have, to a large extent, dominated social and political trends and shaped recent history.  The fact that such ideas were irrational did not stop them from spreading and did not stop the true 'believers' from discarding the solid ground of rigorous investigation.

It is well known that the Nazi party was openly, and even flamboyantly anti-intellectual; that it burnt books and relegated the theoretical physicists among it's 'Judeo-Marxist' enemies.  Hitler used to say: "We are often abused for being enemies of the mind and spirit.  Well, that is what we are, but in a far deeper sense than bourgeois science could ever imagine."  As early as 1925 every scientist in Germany and Austria received a letter and an ultimatum:

"The time has come for you to choose - whether to be with us or against us.  While Hitler is cleaning up politics, Hans Horbiger will sweep out of the way the bogus sciences.  The doctrine of eternal ice will be a sign of the German people.  Beware!  Come over to our side before it is too late."

There was a fury to these beliefs.  Hitler was talking one day to Rauschning, the Governor of Danzig, about the problem of a mutation of the human race.  Rauschning, not possessing the key to such strange preoccupations, interpreted Hitler's remarks in terms of a stock-breeder.  This did not satisfy Hitler in the slightest and he screamed at the man: "The new man is living amongst us now!  He is here!  Isn't that enough for you?  I will tell you a secret.  I have seen the new man.  He is intrepid and cruel.  I was afraid of him. "

"In uttering these words,"  added Rausching, "Hitler was trembling in a kind of ecstasy."

It was Rauschning too who related the following episode:

"A person close to Hitler told me that he wakes up in the night screaming and in convulsions.  He calls for help, and appears to be half paralysed.  He is seized with a panic that makes him tremble until the bed shakes.  He utters confused and unintelligible sounds, gasping, as if on the point of suffocation.  The same person described to me one of these fits, with details that I would refuse to believe had I not complete confidence in my informant...Hitler was standing up in his room, swaying and looking all round him as if he were lost.   'It's he, it's he', he groaned; 'he's come for me!'  His lips were white; he was sweating profusely.  Suddenly he uttered a string of meaningless figures, then words and scraps of sentences.  It was terrifying.  He used strange expressions strung together in bizarre disorder.  Then he relapsed again into silence, but his lips still continued to move.  He was then given a friction and something to drink.  Then suddenly he screamed:  'There!  There!  Over in the corner!  He is there!' - all the time stamping with his feet and shouting.  To quieten him he was assured that nothing extraordinary had happened, and finally he gradually calmed down.  After that he slept for a long time and became normal again..." (Source:  Hermann Rauschning: Hitler m'a dit. Ed. Co-operation, Paris, 1939)

It may be thought that such ridiculous notions and such orgiastic lust for disaster and such disdain for academia and science are things we have learned from and will not repeat.  I fear such thoughts are utterly absurd if we merely look at the state of the world today and the sudden emergence of equally ridiculous ideas and the equal shunning of modern science and academia.  If the internet has taught us something it's that the absurd can find followers.  One need only look at the rise of conspiracy theories and the cult which has emerged around these since September 11, 2001.  Only a trigger is necessary and the rest will propel itself.

Not convinced?  Find the ideas of a hollow earth, eternal ice and the King of the World too strange to be acceptable today?  How different really are the ideas of David Icke today who proposes that there is an elite ruling the earth who are in fact descendents of a reptilian race?  How strange is it really that there is a virulent anti Semitism embedded in these conspiracy theorists?  How different from the madness of Nazism is it that many of these 'believers' will readily cry out for the gallows to be used on those they call 'traitors'?  Or how different is it that pathetic theories such 'ancient aliens' - which have been thoroughly debunked and which we know are connected to ideas of an alien race of men and eventually evolves into more anti Semitism - find ground in mainstream media such as the 'History' Channel?  The Nazis will always be with us and the horror of fascism, disguised in whatever form, is always there, keeping us - as Kafka well noted - "a breath away from the ice age."

On Reality and Mysticism

The world as we know it is one of appearances.  We do not know it as it really is; we know it only as it is represented in our consciousness, and this must be the starting point for any philosophizing.  Struck by the unreliability of the senses, Descartes doubted the existence of everything but resolved that, since he was contemplating the world, the act of thinking is the one thing he could be certain of and from that the rest could be deduced. This insight was similar to that of Schopenhauer, who insisted that only our own consciousness is known immediately: everything else is mediated through our consciousness and is therefore dependent on it.

But can reality be nothing more than our representations of it? Is it possible that nothing exists as such? Kant argued that if the world is one of appearances there must be something that appears, 'an object independent of sensibility'.  He referred to this as the 'thing considered as it is in itself', or the 'thing-in-itself' for short. The thing-in-itself must be neither object nor subject.  And if it transcends the distinction between subject and object it must transcend consciousness and the knowledge that attends consciousness.

If this is so, in addition to being an object of consciousness, everything is also a thing-in-itself. This 'existence in itself' stands outside the subject – object relationship and has a metaphysical existence that has its being in an unknowable world beyond consciousness; it is a 'metaphysical being'.  We can know nothing about it because all we know are appearances, and those appearances are structured by our given forms of understanding.

At this stage of the argument it seems reasonable to imagine that the world exists twice—once as an 'objective fact' independent of us and once in our representations as a set of images projected onto some sort of screen in our head. As the argument develops, though, it will become apparent that there is just one world but there are two distinct ways of apprehending it.

The main argument for the existence of the thing-in-itself is that without it we are left with a view of the world as nothing more than the illusion created by human consciousness. Although we know everything we know through our consciousness—including our senses and our cognition—this is not to say there is nothing we cannot know. Our awareness has limits. It is this that allows for the possibility of things existing beyond their appearances, as the thing-in-itself.We can think about the world 'beyond' the world of appearances, but that does not mean we know it.  To use a theistic analogy, the idea of God can never be God.

The approach of transcendental idealism—which considers the problem of reality not from the starting point of object or subject but through the inseparability of the two—differs from other philosophical approaches, including the commonsense realist one.  Most philosophical approaches, at least in the Western tradition, recognize only the subject or the object. In particular, realists (or 'materialists') recognized only the object, and the idealists who preceded Kant recognised only the subject.  Realists take matter as having absolute existence, independent of consciousness, but they are then confronted with the problem of perception: if I see an object as green but my colour-blind friend sees it as red we are compelled to admit we cannot do without the perceiving subject.  As Schopenhauer wrote, "For 'No object without subject' is the principle that renders all materialism for ever impossible".

Realism, which coincides with the working assumption of everyday life, is therefore based on nothing more than a supposition—the absolute existence of the world beyond our senses—since we can never test the supposition by stepping outside ourselves to see whether it is true. Such a world is not conceivable. Thus, despite its intuitive obviousness, realism is "the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself. "

Mysticism has been called 'a doctrine of epistemological modesty': it recognises the limits of our knowledge.  This might seem odd at first, but on reflection we see that realism imagines there is a world outside us which is then mirrored by a world within us that represents the 'objective' world.  In this view we imagine, if only by implication, an all-seeing God above who observes his creation, a God who exists independently of our consciousness. This is implicitly a theocentric model, and Kant's revolution was to make our understanding of the world human-centered instead of God-centred—perhaps the crucial philosophical insight of the European Enlightenment.  The world as we see it is as we see it, rather than as it really is; it is conditioned by our perception; it is a world of appearances. This is the meaning of the often-quoted observation in the Talmud: "We do not see things as they are, but as we are."

Kant did not turn man into God but took away from man the god-like insight the realists had unwittingly assigned to him. This is why Kant's idealism is modest and why Kant himself was suspected of holding heretical views. Kant's intervention followed a long and intense debate in the Catholic church over the nature of reality, the theologians being divided between nominalists, realists and conceptualists. As the Enlightenment dawned the consensus converged on what was known as 'moderate realism' (especially as formulated by Thomas Aquinas), which allowed the church's teachings to coexist with the new science. Kant's assertion of a form of conceptualism laid the groundwork for the emergence of humanism. In particular, the anthropocentric model gave humans responsibility for their moral laws and their destiny, rather than these things being handed down by God, with the clerics acting as middlemen.

Kant adopted the terms phenomenon and noumenon to distinguish between the thing as it appears to us and the thing as it is in itself.  Thus 'phenomenon' applies to the world of appearances, the phenomena that inhabit our consciousness, and 'noumenon' describes the world that 'lies behind' the world of appearances.  For Kant, the difficulty lay in establishing the need for the existence of something about which we can know nothing.  Positing the existence of the noumenon was pivotal because if the world were nothing but appearances it would be indistinguishable from a dream. But if there is another side to the world we can know nothing about it, since anything we do know takes the form of a representation, a phenomenon.

Appearances however must be appearances of something. Then the noumenon is a thing 'so far as it is not an object of our sensible intuition'. But there could be a positive reason for establishing the existence of the noumenon.  At one point Kant entertained the idea that there might be a special kind of awareness, beyond our ordinary consciousness, that allows us special knowledge of the noumenon. He suggested "a peculiar mode of intuition . . . the very possibility of which we have no notion" that would allow us to understand the noumenon
positively, as "an object of a non-sensible intuition".  But he then rejected such a notion and reverted to negative arguments for the noumenon.

Although declaring that "we are not entitled to maintain that sensibility is the only possible mode of intuition", Kant became known, adopted a position of philosophical humility, shying away from this postulated form of non-sensible intuition because such a notion "lies absolutely beyond what we could know". He conceded the possibility of a form of intuition beyond everyday senses and cognition but argued that since our faculties can know nothing of this it is legitimate to motivate the existence of the noumenon only in the negative sense.  Kant's 'distinctive concern was to vindicate the authority of reason' after centuries of superstition and ecclesiastical dogma. He was determined to stay true to the Enlightenment value of stringent rationality and resisted the temptation to resort to notions that seemed dangerously close to theology. So, despite professing to be a Christian throughout his life, he used the existence of the noumenon to structure the void left by the boundedness of the world of appearances—as if to prevent theists from filling it with God.  Thus, in the end he insisted that the division between phenomenon and noumenon can be supported only in the negative sense. The willingness to argue for the existence of a form of 'nonsensible intuition' was the decisive break from Kant that Schopenhauer made.

If we cannot know the world as it is in itself but can know it only through our perceptions, how is it that our perceptions are so uniform we can communicate with each other effectively through a shared view of the world? Kant maintained that humans' capacity to perceive the outside world and thus form representations of it depends on certain 'conditions of sensibility' that exist before the experiences themselves, notably the forms of space, time and causality. These are inbuilt forms of the human mind, and they provide the structure that allows us to receive in an intelligible way the sensory data of the outside world.  They are a priori—that is, present before experience. As a result, instead of learning the forms of space, time and causality through experience of the world,we in fact impose them on the world.

This is a mind-bending idea. Putting causality aside for the moment, in this view space and time are the two pure forms of sensory intuition. Space is the property of the mind by which we represent objects outside ourselves, whereas we represent everything that relates to our inward mental or sensory consideration in terms of time. Space and time thus provide the pure forms by which we apprehend the world; they do not belong to things in themselves. In the case of space, we do not learn by experience to understand and use the concept because it already structures our capacity to perceive the world. It is 'the foundation of all external intuitions' or appearances. Indeed, the priori form of space makes all external appearances possible. Geometry is the science of space that developed wholly independently of any real object and does no more than apply intelligence to the form of space. If we imagine an object from which we progressively strip away all features—colour, hardness, weight, and so on—we would still be left with the space it occupies, 'and this it is utterly impossible to annihilate in thought'.

So, rather than being properties inherent in the 'object' (the material world outside us), these priori forms are brought by the subject to the world and used to structure representations of it. Indeed, these forms are essential to allow communication between subject and object—that is, the opportunity for the subject to structure the world in a useful way.  This is a radical and counter-intuitive position since Kant is arguing that, instead of assuming that 'our knowledge must conform to the objects' as they are actually given outside of us, 'the objects must conform to our knowledge'.   Although this might seem a monstrous idea, because humans are seen to 'create' the world, the opposite is the case. Instead of humans being able to capture reality as it is, we are captives of our representations of the world and cannot know it as it really is.

According to Kant, humans provide the rules by which we understand the world. Kant called these rules we bring to the world the 'legislation for nature'. They allow us to order our perceptions.  And they make possible pure understanding—cognition that depends on concepts alone, such as pure mathematics.  The rules we bring to the outside world are common to all of us and therefore give our understanding objectivity.  Realists, on the other hand, do not recognize these rules as priori conditions; instead, they attribute them to the outside world as inherent qualities of it that each human must learn anew through experience.

The properties of the world as we perceive it do not belong inherently to the world but are 'imposed' on the world by our perception of it. This does not mean the only reality is the world of appearances; rather, it means that, to the extent that we perceive and think, we do so only in terms of appearances. There is a reality 'behind' appearances, or at least it is necessary to posit such a world because appearances presuppose things that appear.

Now you may notice that many of these concepts have a similarity with Eastern Mysticism.  Schopenhauer was the first Western philosopher to appreciate the deep insights of the East, where it has been understood for millennia that the world as we experience it has no real being but is instead 'a ceaseless becoming'.  In the Hindu Vedas—the oldest books in the world—the idea can be found in the doctrine of Maya, the chimera of the everyday world, 'an unstable and inconstant illusion without substance . . . a veil enveloping human consciousness'. These ideas, Schopenhauer noted, were produced not from philosophising by the sages but from 'the direct utterance of their consciousness'.

As with time, so with space: both are forms that inhere not in the world itself but rather in our representations of it. Thus in the Upanishads (a later distillation of the Vedas), space is, in addition to being a property of things, the 'creator' of things, and all things are contained within space as Brahman: "Space, as it is called, is the bringer into being of name and form.  That which contains them is brahman, the immortal."  All phenomenal forms exist 'inside' the boundless and timeless ground. When the subject brings the form of space to the world, differentiation is created since the spatial coordinates of a thing distinguish it from another thing. In the Kantian view, the phenomenon is characterised by multiplicity but the noumenon is undifferentiated; in Schopenhauer's words, "only the one and identical essence can manifest itself in all those phenomena."  This idea reappeared across the ancient and modern worlds, in the writings of the Platonists and the Sufis and the works of Spinoza and various Christian mystics, before Kant took it up and argued it using the rules of logic rather than direct realisation.

In the Upanishads the idea of oneness from which all else is manifest is explicit in the idea of Brahman. The unifying or subtle essence can be interpreted as the sacred power of the whole universe—that is, the universal 'energy' that is the essence of the noumenon. It is the source of creation yet is uncreated. Thus Brahman is said to be 'self-born'. In Buddhist teaching, which is atheistic, this is captured in the notion of the 'suchness' of the world, the essential quality that infuses all things and reflects the oneness of the whole creation: "When the Ten Thousand things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been."

Aldous Huxley summarised the insight of the sages of all traditions by describing a hierarchy of the real:

"The manifold world of our everyday experience is real with a relative reality that is, on its own level, unquestionable; but this relative reality has its being within and because of the absolute Reality, which, on account of the incommensurable otherness of its eternal nature, we can never hope to describe, even though it is possible for us directly to apprehend it."

Coil ::: Black Antlers

This album has quite a lot to recommend it. "The Gimp (Sometimes)" is a spooked, melancholic lament by Balance, set against an eerie backdrop of distorted synthesizers and scattered percussive elements. "Sex With Sun Ra (Part 1 - Saturnalia)" is the best song on the album, Balance narrating an erotic fantasy partly based on Sun Ra's "black folks in space" prophecies as explicated in John Coney's film Space is the Place: "He dreamt of color music and the machines that make it possible/He took me for a ride on a space ship powered by natural music." The music bears no resemblance to the cosmic free jazz of Sun Ra, veering closer to Musick to Play in the Dark-era Coil: gurgling synthscapes with slow, percolating rhythms. "All The Pretty Little Horses" is an unexpected cover of the traditional British folk song made famous (to Brainwashed readers) by Current 93. Coil's version is quite lovely, with expertly played marimba as accompaniment for Balance's best attempt at crooning. "Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)" resurrects and expands the LSD track, giving it a more open-ended, organic feel than the original. "Black Antlers (Where's Your Child)" ends the disc on a high note, a druggy rave-up full of queasy samples and chopped, distended vocal samples. With a little finessing, this album has the potential to be one of Coil's finest.

Tracklist:
1. "The Gimp (Sometimes)" – 11:26
2. "Sex With Sun Ra (Part One - Saturnalia)" – 9:22
3. "The Wraiths And Strays Of Paris" – 8:44
4. "All The Pretty Little Horses" – 4:45
5. "Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)" – 9:15
6. "Black Antler's (Where's Your Child?)" – 7:10
7. "Sex With Sun Ra (Part Two - Sigillaricia)" – 5:11

Download:

 https://mega.nz/#!VVxzFZaB!T1RaHVuBkbJAB1SZaxkarLUVefXrwsa_XNsEmuAJfCk

Coil ::: Astral Disaster

Some tones, some drones, beautiful soundscapes and even a guitar bit on here. Most unmistakably Coil, however, this is the CD release of an LP originally recorded back around Halloween 1998. The recordings took place outside Coil's studio however, and were produced in part by Gary Ramon of the Prescription label. The LPs were made in a quantity of 99 and only given to those who had subscribed to this series released on Prescription. The original recordings seemed rather different from Coil's work, almost without the absolute quality control work that Coil put into everything. Coil have rearranged the running order, reworked most of the songs, added one song, and left a couple untouched on this release - stretching the 45 minute-long LP into a 72 minute-long CD. The electro-glitchy looped bits "The Avatars" and "2nd Sun Syndrome" along with the haunting epic, "The Mothership and the Fatherland" remain almost completely untouched, while in "I Don't Want to Be The One," the song gets extended about 3 minutes, Peter's voice gets added subtly and an unrecognizable voice (could it be Thighpaulsandra?) appears in a brand new part tagged on at the end. The new track "MU-UR" sounds like altered takes from "The Mothership & the Fatherland" with the pulsing tympani, mesmerising scapes and Maggot Brain-era Funkadelic organ. Also added is a vocal whose effects echo those of "Amethyst Deceiver." Perhaps the most drastically changed tune is "The Sea Priestess," where a droney sitar has been completely removed. Beautiful choral voices are added along with brilliant droning Tibetan vocal samples. Pretty chimes paint an aural picture of the water glistening in the moonlight and the vocals are mixed much better and prominent sounding.

Tracklist:
1. "The Avatars" – 3:02
2. "The Mothership & The Fatherland" – 22:24
3. "2nd Sun Syndrome" – 4:16
4. "The Sea Priestess" – 14:10
5. "I Don't Want To Be The One" – 4:47
6. "MÜ-ÜR" – 22:40

Download:
https://mega.nz/#!dEghFbCA!P0s1Ks8AzEKeiVt3vqpPT3LJOWpYpio9XGQ2XkGNbDg

Coil ::: Time Machines

"We attempted to dissolve time." That's how the late John Balance, half of the now disbanded British experimental musical duo Coil, described the aim of their 1998 release Time Machines (Eskaton). Balance said this with such matter-of-factness that you hardly notice the ludicrousness of his claim. No mere sensation-hungry dabblers when it came to tearing down the doors of perception, Coil certainly had reason to stand behind their assertion. Having logged countless hours drifting in the lapping tides of Time Machine's slowly unraveling synthesizer drones, I can tell you that Balance and musical partner Peter Christopherson definitely succeeded in their attempt. Coil's m.o. with Time Machines can be best summed up by the title of Spacemen 3's 1990 demos compilation Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To (Bomp). Starting from the premise that hallucinogens can remove oneself from one's temporal reality, Balance and former Throbbing Gristle member Christopherson (with assistance from William Breeze and Drew MacDowell), set out to synthesize music that would catalyze and tease out the temporally-disruptive effects of specific chemical compounds. If that sounds a bit dry, there is indeed an aura of scientific self-seriousness to the release. Each composition is titled with the chemical name of the substance it has been designed for - track one, "Telepathine" (an earlier term for the compound found in Ayahuasca or yage, popularized by Burroughs and Ginsberg); track two, "DOET/hecate"; track three, "5-Me0-DMT"; and track four, "Psilocybin." But for Coil, science was another form of magic, something driven home by the album's cover design: a black, glossy oval that alludes to the obsidian "scrying mirror" of Renaissance magician and astronomer John Dee, who supposedly used the stone to conjure spirits. (A limited number of albums also came with a set of stickers that when placed on top of each other depicted Dee's sigil, the Hieroglyphic Monad). I should confess, with much embarrassment, that for the many times and many different contexts in which I have listened to Time Machines, I have yet to experience any of the tracks while on the substances for which they were specifically engineered. That said, the album's transportive effects are noticeable even while listening sober (and are certainly heightened by strong doses of THC). My experience has largely been subtractive: it is hard to do anything or to think about anything with much success, or even "actively listen," while Time Machines is playing. It is the aural equivalent of an isolation tank, in that you don't even notice the vessel falling away, you're so immersed. Turn it on, tune in, and dissolve.

Tracklist:
1. "7-Methoxy-β-Carboline: (Telepathine)" – 23:10
2. "2,5-Dimethoxy-4-Ethyl-Amphetamine: (DOET/Hecate)" – 13:28
3. "5-Methoxy-N, N-Dimethyl: (5-MeO-DMT)" – 10:02
4. "4-Indolol, 3-[2-(Dimethylamino)Ethyl]' Phosphate Ester: (Psilocybin)" – 26:51

Download:
https://mega.nz/#!4UI3QKgY!AabJFfXq95ghsceupYcn9KrUaiu_vxLd8EuJoJB62NM

Coil ::: A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room

This like all coil recordings finds the coil people further exploring eschatology, and sounding unlike anything else and still with that quality of space that can only be coil. It is a world of high steel freeway tones and rhythm that change so subtly that is only at the end of the daydream lull that one finds the tune has almost passed. This is not to say it is boring rather that like the best film soundtracks there is a transparency to the film of your emotions, though those emotions are guided by coil's little hooks into their worldscape.

Black Light District sees the usual coil team helped out by some old and new friends and together they reach back to the elemental song structures of Scatology and Horse Rotorvator, and these constructions applied to the formless unwinding of textures and sound that has typified their incarnation as Elph. The result is enigmatic and furthers the deep listening experiments begun on Love's Secret Domain to such an extent that each play sounds like a different lp, it is different because with each turn we are different.

The fluidity of the tracks is parenthesised by the 2 opening tracks Unprepared Piano and Red Skeletons, and the final track Chalice. The opening two are an uncentred piano with bass weirdness and a scannerish set of phone samples between a couple who's relationship is over and in pain. These are threaded over a plunky disorienting gentle sound pattern. The other pieces leading from this discomfort to Chalice and a sense of peace are a journey over clanking distortions, half remembered bits of "Tubular Bells" and even some vocals. Chalice which could easily be the sister piece to Current 93's Where The Long Shadows Fall, is a spiritual arrival where delicate chanting and long shifting tones pierce some quiet part of the self into a fluttering. The circle (spiral) begun with the scatology lp closes and the darkness has never seemed so bright.

Tracklist:
1. "Unprepared Piano" – 1:44
2. "Red Skeletons" – 7:34
3. "Die Wölfe Kommen Zurück" – 10:26
4. "Refusal Of Leave To Land" – 7:29
5. "Stoned Circular I" – 4:30
6. "Stoned Circular II" – 6:45
7. "Green Water" – 5:28
8. "Cold Dream Of An Earth Star" – 9:01
9. "Blue Rats" – 3:10
10. "Scratches And Dust" – 0:55
11. "Chalice" - 8:15

Download:
https://mega.nz/#!sZZkFRAB!WHnIOh0AQ7tSA2UktRAsnRM_6XfXhzpuyKKxr_LAugU

Coil ::: Worship the Glitch

Coil confronts themselves once again, or rather the sometimes accidental results from their equipment (from Coil site at Brainwashed - "ELpH is the entity Coil use to describe what musical compositions come out of the equipment that are sometimes unrehearsed or consciously thought of." ) This album is essentially a collection of minimal instrumental sound pieces, not to say that the tracks are random noise, but rather snippets of "glitch" that Coil often use throughout their work. Bits and pieces of sound, some electronic/samples and some acoustic, but all often heavily effected and/or affected via computer. A few highlights: the 3 "Halliwell Hammers" tracks are the most structured and "song-like", with their beautiful echoing bell-like melodies and "Bism" is a minimal but roomy ambient track with a gentle white noise and a far away water and calling of birds. Subtle but relaxing, "Worship the Glitch" is not my favorite disc from Coil, but is a welcome addition to my Coil collection that will be listened to every now and then. Very cool mosaic artwork too. As always, this album is unique when compared to Coil's other work, but I'd say it's a first cousin of "Time Machines" and "Coil Presents Black Light District: A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room", and is similar to various segments of "Unnatural History II" and "Unnatural History III".

Tracklist:
1. "Dark Start" – 4:12
2. "Opium Hum" – 2:37
3. "Caged Birds" – 1:33
4. "The Halliwell Hammers" – 2:39
5. "Clorax Hurd" – 3:00
6. "The Halliwell Hammers (2)" – 3:43
7. "We Have Always Been Here" – 6:11
8. "Manunkind" – 1:23
9. "Bism" – 4:58
10. "Hydlepark" – 6:00
11. "Hysteron Proteron Jewel" – 2:18
12. "Decadent & Symmetrical" – 1:51
13. "Mono" – 5:27
14. "The Halliwell Hammers (3)" – 3:36
15. "Anything That Flies" – 3:09
16. "Ended" – 1:14

Download:
https://mega.nz/#!0YxilZAJ!JatlQim6BlmMDrjyJuhXi7qE1Rx0I4Fh2IPjc28qr-8

Coil ::: Horse Rotorvator

Coil were an English cross-genre, industrial experimental music group formed in 1982 by John Balance —later credited as "Jhonn Balance"— and his partner Peter Christopherson, aka "Sleazy". The duo worked together on a series of releases before Balance chose the name Coil, which he claimed to be inspired by the omnipresence of the coil's shape in nature. Today, Coil are one of the most influential and best known industrial music groups. Horse Rotorvator was their second LP.

Tracklist:
01. The Anal Staircase (3:57)
02. Slur (3:28)
03. Babylero (0:51)
04. Ostia (The Death of Pasolini) (6:21)
05. Herald (1:03)
06. Penetralia (6:05)
07. Ravenous (3:27)
08. Circles of Mania (4:58)
09. Blood From the Air (5:24)
10. Who By Fire (2:34)
11. The Golden Section (5:48)
12. The First Five Minutes After Death (4:43)

Download:
https://mega.nz/#!gABRzSJa!MqJpR11JHh7QWEh852rtBVguq8bVRLhk4dQb5CyS3pY

Sigillum S ::: Sigillum S (Order ov Wolves)

Since 1985, SIGILLUM S has been developing their own special brand of a post - industrial audio project of many different natures, where concepts have led the effort and employed sound as a tool for the exploration of the forbidden areas of the subconscious…the result has been a endless paradigm of alien electronic mutations, merging concrete noise research with acoustic transmigration, while visuals and many other forms of media have been also adopted, in order to achieve maximum interaction intensity.

This particular release resembles much of the material that was at the time being put out by Coil.  I really do recommend you give this a listen.

Tracklist:
A1   Purity 5:57  
A2   De-Control 13:19  
A3   Resh ‎ 4:43  
B1   Terminal 2:50  
B2   Incstant Of The Obsession 12:20  
B3   Eternal Part IV 4:15  
B4   Portrait 2:56

Download:
http://www12.zippyshare.com/v/49852450/file.html
mirror:
https://mega.co.nz/#!1hV2kKrR!zewMJLEj1J0lIZfuJmxsUN62vWQPXngbs2jeLXv8aaQ

A new beginning...

Well of course you no doubt noticed that most of the links were killed off by mediafire.  It is, I suppose, always a danger in this game that eventually copyright catches up with a blog and most of the 'good stuff' gets wiped.  So, after much deleting, I have decided to start this blog again, with a new file host and slightly different content.  I hope you enjoy it.

Sleep Chamber ::: Satanic Sanctions

Tracklist
1-prescription
2-presence of the magis
3-entre nous
4-ov this flesh
5-poison
6-consequence or commitment

Download:
https://mega.co.nz/#!sx9wDITI!4BI1x7MMcruJJ7_6AszJdLcoSsr1kHViim0q8-pdsUM

A Witch's Secret Letter

This is perhaps the most extraordinary and sad ‘witch’ source of them all. In 1628 Johannes Junius, aged fifty five, burgomaster of Bamberg was taken in by the local authorities as a witch. After days of interrogation he writes a secret letter to his daughter explaining his decision to confess to witchcraft. Here is the voice of the victim that is almost never heard in the witch trials.

Many hundred thousand times good night, my daughter Veronica so dear to my heart. Innocent I came to jail, innocent I was tortured, innocent I must die. For whoever comes to the house [where witches are examined] either must become a witch or be tortured for so long that he claims something pulled from his imagination, and, God have mercy, figures out something to say. I want to tell you how thing have gone for me…


Johannes describes being arraigned before witnesses who had named him after being tortured, a process that depressingly he would repeat.

Rather they said, I should confess voluntarily or the executioner would certainly force me to do so. I answered: ‘I have never renounced God, and did not plan to do so, and God should mercifully prevent me from doing so. I would rather endure what I had to’. And then came – God in highest heaven have mercy – the executioner, and put the thumbscrews on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from my writing. So I put myself in the care of God in his five sacred wounds and said, because this concerns God’s honour and name, which I have never denied, therefore I will commend my innocence and all the tortures and harm to his five wounds and he will lessen my pain, so that I can endure such pain. Thereafter they first stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the torture. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered horrible agony.

Dear child, six witnesses have testified at the same time against me: the chancellor, his son, Neudecker, Zaner, Hoffmaisters Ursel and Hopffens Else, all falsely, through cercion as they all have told me and begged me [to forgive them] for God’s sake before their sentences were executed… they knew nothing but good and nice things about me. They were forced to say it, just as I myself would experience…
After much torture.

When the executioner took me back to jail, he said to me: ‘Sir, I beg you, for God’s sake confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot bear the torture which you shall suffer; and even if you bear it all, you still shall not escape, not even if you were a count, but one torture will follow another until you say you are a witch. Not before that they will let you go, as you may see by their trials, for one is just like another’

Others gave similar sentiments.

So I made a plea, saying that I was in very bad shape, they should give me a day to think about it and send me a priest. They refused me a priest, but gave me the time to think. Now dearest daughter, can you imagine in what kind of danger I was and still am! I was supposed to renounce God for the first time, though I have never done so before. I worried myself sick day and night, and finally I hit upon a plan. I would not worry about it, as I had not been allowed to see a priest who could advise me whether I should think something up and say it. I would surely be better to say it with my mouth and with words, even though I had not really done it; and afterwards I would confess it to the priest, and let those answer for it who compel me to do it.

Now follows my statement which is pure lies, which I had to say under questioning accompanied by even greater tortures, and for which I must die. After that, I said that I was walking in a depressed state in my field near the Friedrichsbrunnen, and sat down there, and a wild girl came to me and said: ‘Sir, what are you doing, why are you so sad?’ I answered that I did not know, so she came closer. As soon as that happened, she became a billy goat and said to me: ‘See, now you see with whom you are dealing.’ It grabbed me by the throat and said ‘You must be mine or I will kill you!’ Then I said ‘God save me from that!’ So he disappeared and came back quickly, bringing two women and three men with him. I was to deny God, and I have confessed that I did so; I was to deny God and the heavenly host, and I have confessed that I did so; I have confessed that he then baptised me and the two women were the sponsors; and he gave me a ducat, but that it turned out to be a shard.

All this presumably came from the torturers’ witch book. It is instructive to see how useless ‘folklore’ evidence taken from investigated witnesses can be. There follows a heartbreaking passage in which he is forced, in turn, to name individuals: a pity he could not have named the torturer and all the rabble found there. Instead:

‘This rascal knows someone in the market place, spends time with him every day, and refuses to name him.’ Then they named Dietmeyer, and I was forced to name him too.’

And so evil begets evil. The letter ends, after advising his daughter to abscond:

Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you again.

Johannes Junius was executed with a sword (as became his rank) and then burnt. The source interestingly turned up in the judicial file. This means that it fell into the judges’ hands either during or after JJ was executed. His daughter may never have read it. We have no idea whether she survived those years or not: her mother had been tried and killed as a witch before her father.

Here is the PDF with the full letter as it was originally written:
http://www.malefiz-haus.de/english%20letter%20of%20johannes%20junius.pdf

Oh Ye Denver Birds

Good Ivy, the debut album from Brisbane's Oh Ye Denver Birds available online from April 16th.

http://ohyedenverbirds.bandcamp.com/

To celebrate they have shared another little treasure.  Check it out:

Citizen Useless!

New CITIZEN USELESS song. Check it out. Download it. Share it with the people you love. Share it with the people you hate too!

Graham Bond ::: Holy Magick

Popular success eluded Graham Bond but his influence on the creation of British Rock was subtle but profound. Brian Auger, Jon Lord and Keith Emerson are just some who claimed to be influenced by his aggressive organ playing.

Graham Bond was born in October 1937 and dumped in an orphanage. Adopted by caring parents, his love for music received great support with the hope he would become a concert pianist but instead he fell in love with Jazz and the sound of Charlie Parker.

Graham Bond died in May of 1974 and it seemed the world of music forgot about one of the most interesting and legendary artists to come out of the early 60's music scene. Graham was multi-talented, mastering the alto sax, piano and the organ. His vocals and phrasing are truely one of a kind. Graham experimented with various forms of R & B but these particular albums are totally spiritual and mystical.

Holy Magick was his strangest album, recorded at the peak of his interest in magick and Crowley, this was also a time when the man was already deteriorating under the influence of heavy drug use. It remains certainly one of the most original albums ever recorded. Long lost into obscurity, here is your chance to listen to it.

Bond's demise was more tragic than most: he developed serious drug and alcohol problems and an obsession with the occult, he also told anyone who would listen that he was the son of Aleister Crowley.  He committed suicide by throwing himself into the path of a London underground train in 1974.

Tracklist:
01. Meditation
02. Return Of Arthur
03. The Magician
04. The Judgement
05. My Archangel
06. Water Water (Single Version, Bonus track)
07. 12 Gates To The City (Single Version, Bonus track)

Download:
https://mega.nz/#!1RAk0BhL!l-KW9bNMYHvxTg3U5AueRSaRo6Rk0pImQAtheIFDNPM

Oh Ye Denver Birds

If you have any doubts about the incredible musical talent that is available in Australia then they are about to be dispelled.   Oh Ye Denver Birds is an example of this new talent.  It is a kind of rare bird.  You will only catch glimpses of it once in a while but every glimpse will leave you wanting more. 

Their debut album “Good Ivy” will be available for online purchase on March 20th.  For now we can only satisfy our thirst with a little sip of what promises to be something very special indeed.  Sit back, take your shoes off, make yourself comfortable and drift into this:

What is Fado?

General introduction

As a little kid growing up in the city of Vigo, in the northwest of Spain, my parents would now and then drive my sister and me across the border to the little town of Valença do Minho, in Portugal. It was merely a 25-minute trip, I know, but to me it meant much more than that. The landscape on the other side of the Minho river, the natural barrier that separates Spain and Portugal, was not really different, yet it was this awareness of being in another country, in contact with another language and another culture, that made all the difference to me. This regular contact with Portuguese life, less than half an hour away from my hometown, led me to develop an interest in the Portuguese language and culture in general. In time, it would lead me to the discovery of fado, at first through releases by Amalia Rodrigues and Carlos do Carmo that my father had in his extensive record collection, and later through those by great fadistas such as Alfredo Marceneiro, Fernando Farinha, Maria Teresa de Noronha, Carlos Ramos, Lucilia do Carmo, Tony de Matos, Joaquim Silveirinha, and Filipe Pinto, to mention but a few.

Fado records were part of my luggage when I first came to the United States about five years ago: I play them constantly at home, and they are a regular part of my daily existence. However, I have found that the genre is largely unknown to English-speaking audiences; although it is possible to purchase fado recordings in the United States, not a great deal has been written about it in English. There are notable exceptions, such as Paul Vernon's A History of Portuguese Fado and Michael Colvin's The Reconstruction of Lisbon, yet for the most part, fado has not garnered major critical attention in English. As merely a collector of fado recordings and books about the style, it is not my intention to take a dry, serious critical approach to the intricacies of fado in this blog. I simply would like to present the music, its history, its foremost interpreters and composers, and its most important recordings to English-speaking audiences that may not be acquainted with them or with the Portuguese language. My area of scholarly research is mainly Spanish, English, and Portuguese literature; I am not a musicologist, and that is the reason why the articles published in All This Is Fado will deal mostly with the literary dimension of fado, as well as with specific songs, recordings, songwriters, and interpreters. I humbly submit these articles to the readers' scrutiny, hoping that they will be informative and interesting. If I succeed in getting people exposed to and interested in fado music, all my efforts will have been rewarded. Now, to the matter...

A Brief Sketch of the History of Fado

A Portuguese popular saying describes the essence of fado in the following fashion: "Fado can't be seen or heard; it simply happens" (“O fado não se vê nem se ouve; simplesmente acontece”). Like any sententious phrase, this is an extremely obscure utterance, but it is very much to the point, since fado has always defied a clear-cut definition, and its origins, in spite of the efforts of scholars, remain very much in the dark. In a recent message sent to me, Vitor Duarte, the grandson of the great fadista Alfredo Marceneiro, argues that the most important aspect of fado is that it is essentially Portuguese. Notwithstanding the fact that some musicologists have attempted to locate its birth in Brazil, these theories are not stronly sustained, and there is no doubt that throughout the twentieth century, fado became a musical symbol of Portugal, so much so that it has been described as "true expression of the Portuguese soul." Yet, like the saying above, this nationalist-laden description of the genre is not enough: fado does hail from and is mostly sung in Portugal, and so describing it merely as Portuguese does not seem to help very much.

The question of the musical/literary origins of fado, then, remains open to interpretation. Scholars have tried to document its birth with varying degrees of success, producing a number of theories about the subject, none of which are fully convincing. One of these theories traces the origins of the genre back to the traditional songs of the Arabic peoples that settled in Portugal during the Middle Ages. This theory, however, does not bear in mind the fact that fado only appeared in Portugal and not in the south of Spain, also populated by Arabic peoples around the same time period.

Another theory, beautifully developed in Pinto de Carvalho's classic study Historia do fado (1903), asserts that fado derives from a certain musical form known as lundum, brought to Portugal by sailors who used to cultivate it during their long sea journeys. Indeed, Portugal has always been a seafaring country, and this origin would explain the preponderance of sea-related themes in early fado lyrics. Yet, Pinto de Carvalho's explanation is not always consistent and convincing--although extremely poetic in its development--and so this theory is not widely accepted.

Other theories argue that fado harks back to the rich medieval tradition of troubadour love and satirical lyrics, themes that are still common in present-day fado. However, it could be argued that these are universal themes, and most important, fado did not take root in other parts of Spain that boasted medieval poetry traditions such as that of Portugal.

Whatever the origins of fado may be, Eduardo Sucena (1) divides its historical development into three different periods. First of all, fado appears in Lisbon toward 1822, and in these early years, instrumental compositions and dancing are more important than lyrics and singing. The second period begins around 1840, when the use of the guitar becomes more prominent and the popularity of fado singing overtakes that of dancing. Finally, by 1888, fado is taken to the university city of Coimbra, and it is gradually accepted across social classes and appropriated by the aristocracy. This tendency toward crossing social boundaries is a key element of fado from its earliest years, as the story of Maria Severa (1820-1846) amply proves. The figure of Severa, a Lisbon prostitute who played guitar and sang fado, has acquired a somewhat mythical dimension that makes it difficult to differentiate fact from fiction. Her love affair with the Count of Vimioso, a nobleman who appreciated fado, is widely seen as the first of many contacts between the nobility and the fado-singing working class, and as such, it is sung and remembered in many song lyrics. The pathos of Severa's story, brought to an abrupt end by her untimely death, as well as its iconographic importance within the universe of fado, calls for a separate article in this blog.

The advent of radio, phonographic records, and the cinema during the first half of the twentieth century changed fado forever, standardizing its sound and the image of its performers and creating an idea of genre. It was then that fado, originally synonymous with poverty, crime, roguery, and the lower social strata, acquired national and international exposure. Its interpreters, names such as Alfredo Marceneiro, Armandinho, Ercilia Costa, Berta Cardoso, Amalia Rodrigues, and Frutuoso França, among many others, also gained widespread recognition singing on radio, on records, in movies, in theaters, and in special establishments known as fado houses (casas de fado). The physical image, dress code, and stage presence of the fadista were also constructed around this time, with black as the predominant color of the performer's outfit, in sync with a half-lit stage and a serious, almost stoic countenance. These elements are so very much inscribed in the popular imaginary of the Portuguese people that even the new, more innovative stars of the genre (Mariza, Katia Guerreiro, Camane) respect these prescriptions to a great extent.

Instrumentation, Lyrical Dimension, and Styles

The typical musical accompaniment of fado is rather sparse, usually consisting solely of stringed instruments such as the classical guitar (known in Portuguese as viola), the bass guitar (viola-baixo) used to stress the rhythm, and the Portuguese guitar (guitarra). The latter is closely associated with the style, and its special tuning gives fado its recognizable tinkling sound. The Portuguese guitar is a very versatile instrument, and over the decades, great instrumentists like Armandinho, Raul Nery, António Chainho, and Artur Paredes have experimented with it and perfected its sound and devised innovative playing techniques. Even though fado singing is usually accompanied by these stringed instruments, there are many recordings on which the singer is backed by a whole orchestra, and Amália Rodrigues even cut a magnificent record accompanied by saxophone great Don Byas (2).

One of the most appealing aspects of fado lies in the lyrics of its songs, in which the poetic element becomes crucial. The best fado compositions are usually a perfect marriage of melody and lyrics, yet sometimes poetry prevails over the music, since many songwriters often create new lyrics for already existing tunes. The poetic universe of fado is dominated by the letmotif of saudade, a deeply nostalgic feeling of longing and yearning for love, for one's homeland, or for a past that will never be recovered. Being a mostly urban cultural expression, the city is another key element of fado, whose lyrics constantly reference the experience of the city (mostly Lisbon and Coimbra), describing its people, its neighborhoods, its festivities, its dark corners, and its grand avenues. More traditional lyrics hark back to fado's possible pre-urban existence, depicting country scenes, character types, and popular traditions. The theme of the sea is also quite recurrent, as is that of Portugal as the singer's motherland, an aspect that reveals how fado lyrics strive to come to terms with the idea of national identity. Just like other styles such as blues or country music, fado sometimes becomes self-referential, attempting to define its essence and generic boundaries, as well as celebrating some of its myths (Maria Severa, for instance) and foremost musical representatives (Armandinho, Alfredo Marceneiro, Amália Rodrigues, Ercília Costa). Finally, many poems by some of Portugal's great poets (Luís de Camões, Fernando Pessoa, Miguel Torga, José Carlos Ary dos Santos) have been set to music and entered the repertoire of fadistas.



Fado is cultivated mainly in two geographic areas of Portugal, Lisbon and Coimbra, which has given rise to two distinct styles of understanding and performing this kind of music. In Lisbon—as well as in Porto—fado is usually performed by fadistas dressed in black, and many of the songs touch upon the typical themes of unrequited love, the dark side of life, and popular urban traditions and characters. Most Lisbon fado compositions are actually story songs: they narrate a story that is sometimes more complex than others. In Coimbra, fado is closely related to its ancient university, performed only by male musicians and singers who don traditional student costumes for the occasion. The fado of Coimbra has more affinities with popular ballads and folksongs than that of Lisbon, and many of its performers (José Afonso, for instance) fully embraced this traditional folk element. Not as well-known as Lisbon fado, the Coimbra style boasts many important names such as Edmundo Bettencourt, Augusto Hilário, António Menano, and the guitarists Artur and Carlos Paredes.

Finally, as far as the nature of its melody and its lyrical structure, there are several different styles of fado. Frederico de Freitas (3) notes that fado is "an essentially syllabic kind of song, as are generally most Portuguese popular melodies," and that the poetic structure of most compositions consists of quatrains made out of seven, ten, or twelve syllables. Sometimes, fado melodies are uptempo (a style known as fado corrido), and in many cases, two or more fadistas improvise the lyrics in a contest sort of fashion (fado à desgarrada or fado ao desafio). According to de Freitas, there are many other recognizable styles of fado, namely fado balada, fado nocturno, fado serenata, and fado marcha, among many others.

Love and jealousy
Ashes and fire
Pain and sin
All this exists
All this is sad
All this is fado

Notes

(1) Eduardo Sucena. Lisboa, o fado e os fadistas. Lisbon: Edições Vega, 1992: 9-16.
(2) Amália Rodrigues and Don Byas. Encontro. Valentim de Carvalho, 1973.
(3) Frederico de Freitas. O fado, canção da cidade de Lisboa. Lisbon, 1973: 233-4.

The Fascination of Time

by Raoul Vaneigem   

People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away. Time is the work of attrition of that adaptation to which people must resign themselves so long as they fail to change the world. Age is a role, an acceleration of "lived" time on the plane of appearances, an attachment to things.

The growth of civilization's discontents is now forcing every branch of therapeutics towards a new demonology. Just as, formerly, invocation, sorcery, possession, exorcism, black sabbaths, metamorphoses, talismans and all the rest were bound up with the suspect capacity for healing and hurting, so today (and more effectively) the apparatus for offering consolation to the oppressed—medicine, ideology, compensatory roles, consumer gadgetry, movements for social change—serves the oppressor and the oppressor alone. The order of things is sick: this is what our leaders would conceal at all costs. In a fine passage of The Function of the Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich relates how after long months of psychoanalytic treatment he managed to cure a young Viennese working woman. She was suffering from depression brought on by the conditions of her life and work. When she was recovered Reich sent her back home. A fortnight later she killed herself. Reich's intransigent honesty condemned him, as everyone knows, to exclusion from the psychoanalytic establishment, to isolation, delusion and death in prison: the duplicity of our neo-demonologists cannot be exposed with impunity.

Those who organize the world organize both suffering and the anaesthetics for dealing with it; this much is common knowledge. Most people live like sleepwalkers, torn between the gratification of neurosis and the traumatic prospect of a return to real life. Things are now reaching the point, however, where the maintenance of survival calls for so many analgesics that the organism ap- proaches saturation point. But the magical analogy is more apt here than the medical: practitioners of magic fully expect a backlash effect in such circumstances, and we should expect the same. It is because of the imminence of this upheaval that I compare the present conditioning of human beings to a massive bewitchment.

Bewitching of this kind presupposes a spatial network which links up the most distant objects sympathetically, according to specific laws: formal analogy, organic coexistence, functional symmetry, symbolic affiliation, etc. Such correspondences are established through the infinitely frequent association of given forms of behaviour with appropriate signals. In other words, through a generalized system of conditioning. The present vogue for loudly condemning the role of conditioning, propaganda, advertising and the mass media in modern society may be assumed to be a form of partial exorcism designed to reinforce a vaster and more essential mystification by distracting attention from it. Outrage at the gutter press goes hand in hand with subservience to the more elegant lies of posh journalism. Media, language, time—these are the giant claws with which Power manipulates humanity and moulds it brutally to its own perspective. These claws are not very adept, admittedly, but their effectiveness is enormously increased by the fact that people are not aware that they can resist them, and often do not even know the extent to which they are already spontaneously doing so.

Stalin's show trials proved that it only takes a little patience and perseverance to get a man to accuse himself of every imaginable crime and appear in public begging to be executed. Now that we are aware of such techniques, and on our guard against them, how can we fail to see that the set of mechanisms controlling us uses the very same insidious persuasiveness—though with more powerful means at its disposal, and with greater persistence—when it lays down the law: "You are weak, you must grow old, you must die." Consciousness acquiesces, and the body follows suit. I am fond of a remark of Artaud's, though it must be set in a materialist light: "We do not die because we have to die: we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary."

Plants transplanted to an unfavourable soil die. Animals adapt to their environment. Human beings transform theirs. Thus death is not the same thing for plants, animals and humans. In favourable soil, the plant lives like an animal: it can adapt. Where man fails to change his surroundings, he too is in the situation of an animal. Adaptation is the law of the animal world.

According to Hans Selye, the theoretician of "stress", the general syndrome of adaptation has three phases: the alarm reaction, the phase of resistance and the phase of exhaustion. In terms of real life he is still at the level of animal adaptation: spontaneous reactions in childhood, consolidation in maturity, exhaustion in old age. And today, the harder people try to find salvation in appearances, the more vigorously is it borne in upon them by the ephemeral and inconsistent nature of the spectacle that they live like dogs and die like bundles of hay. The day cannot be far off when men will have to face the fact that the social organization they have constructed to change the world according to their wishes no longer serves this purpose. For all this organization amounts to is a system of prohibitions preventing the creation of a higher form of organization and the use therein of the techniques of liberation and individual self-realization which have evolved throughout the history of privative appropriation, of exploitation of man by man, of hierarchical authority.

We live in a closed, suffocating system. Whatever we gain in one sphere we lose in another. Death, for instance, though quantitatively defeated by modern medicine, has re-emerged qualitatively on the plane of survival. Adaptation has been democratized, made easier for everyone, at the price of abandoning the essential project, which is the adaptation of the world to human needs.

A struggle against death exists, of course, but it takes place within the limits set by the adaptation syndrome: death is part of the cure for death. Significantly, therapeutic efforts concentrate mainly on the exhaustion phase, as though the main aim were to extend the stage of resistance as far as possible into old age. Thus the big guns are brought out only once the body is old and weak, because, as Reich understood well, any all-out attack on the attrition wreaked by the demands of adaptation would inevitably mean a direct onslaught on social organization—i.e., on that which stands opposed to any transcendence of the principle of adaptation. Partial cures are preferred because they leave the overall social pathology untouched. But what will happen when the proliferation of such partial cures ends up spreading the malaise of inauthenticity to every corner of daily life? And when the essential role of exorcism and bewitchment in the maintenance of a sick society becomes plain for all to see?

The question "How old are you?" inevitably contains a reference to power. Dates themselves serve to pigeonhole and circumscribe us. Is not the passage of time always measured by reference to the establishment of some authority or other—in terms of the years accumulated since the installation of a god, messiah, leader or conquering city? To the aristocratic mind, moreover, such accumulated time was a measure of authority: the prepotency of the lord was increased both by his own age and by the antiquity of his lineage. At his death the noble bequeathed a vitality to his heirs which drew vigour from the past. By contrast, the bourgeoisie has no past; or at any rate it recognizes none inasmuch as its fragmented power no longer depends on any hereditary principle. The bourgeoisie is thus reduced to aping the nobility: identification with forebears is sought in nostalgic fashion via the photos in the family album; identification with cyclical time, with the time of the eternal return, is feebly emulated by blind identification with a staccato succession of short spans of linear time.

This link between age and the starting-post of measurable time is not the only thing which betrays age's kinship with power. I am convinced that people's measured age is nothing but a role. It involves a speeding up of lived time in the mode of non-life—on the plane, therefore, of appearances, and in accordance with the dictates of adaptation. To acquire power is to acquire "age". In earlier times only the "aged" or "elders", those old either in nobility or in experience, exercised power. Today even the young enjoy the dubious privilege of age. In fact consumer society, which invented the teenager as a new class of consumer, fosters premature senility: to consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing appearance to the advantage of the spectacle and to the detriment of real life. The consumer is killed by the things he becomes attached to, because these things (commodities, roles) are dead.

Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things—makes you old. Time-which-slips-away is what fills the void created by the absence of the self. The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of consumption. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily. Time has to be caught on the wing, in the present—but the present has yet to be constructed.

We were born never to grow old, never to die. All we can hope for, however, is an awareness of having come too soon. And a healthy contempt for the future can at least ensure us a rich portion of life.

Igbo spirituallity

by Onyi Anyiwo

The spiritual system of Ndi Igbo (the Igbo people) is one of the oldest on Earth. The roots of Igbo spirituality is the same as the roots of every other African one; that is, in Africa. Igbo spirituality predates Islam, Christianity, Judaism and every other -ism that one can think of. If there are any similarities between the traditional practices of the Igbo and those of other religions, it is because they were borrowed from our ancestors, and not the other way around.

The ancient spirituality of the Ndi Igbo, like most other traditional African spiritual systems, has been misunderstood and demonized unjustly. Evangelical churches, with the help of Nollywood movies, have helped to paint a negative picture of traditional Igbo spirituality that dates back to the arrival of the Europeans in Alaigbo (Igboland). It is quite unfortunate that most of the people who condemn Igbo spirituality do not know much about it, and base their most of their information from the lies of the very same people who wanted to destroy it and everything about our culture. While all the misconceptions about the traditional practices cannot be corrected in one article, this introduction to Igbo Spirituality will help clear a few things up.

The basis of Igbo Spirituality is the concept of “Chi.” Similar to the “Ori” of the Yoruba, and the “Ka” of Ancient Egyptians, Chi was the fundamental force of creation. Everyone and everything has a Chi. Ndi Igbo, like other Africans, worshiped one Creator, who is known by many names: Obasi Dielu (The Supreme God), Chi di ebere (God the merciful), Odenigwe (The Ruler of Heavens), etc. The two most popular names for Supreme Being used in Alaigbo were Chukwu and Chineke. The dominant name, Chukwu, which is a combination of the Igbo words “Chi” and “Ukwu”, literally means “The Big Chi”, and shows that Igbos believed that the Supreme Being was omnipresent and all-pervading. Chineke, which most people translate as “God the Creator” actually has a deeper meaning. Chi is the masculine aspect of God and Eke is the feminine aspect. Ndi Igbo knew that it took male and female to create life, so the Creator of everything would have to encompass both parts.

Because Ndi Igbo believed that everything in it had a chi, they also gave names to the Chi found in nature (the Alusi). The Alusi of the sky was known as Igwe. The Alusi of the yams (the most important crop of Ndi Igbo) was called Ahiajoku. The Alusi of the Sun was called Anyanwu. The most important of the forces of Nature was Ani, which was the feminine force that presided over the Earth. The Alusi were not limited to natural forces; metaphysical and supernatural forces and principles also had their own names and attributes. Ikenga was the Alusi of strength and Agwu was the Alusi of wisdom and healing. Each Alusi had its invididual personality and function, but they all were still parts of Chukwu.

The Ndiichie (esteemed ancestor spirits) also held a high place in traditional Igbo society. Elders have always been revered in Igbo society, and even more so after they passed onto Be Mmuo (the land of the spirits). The Nddichie would often be consulted to offer advice to their descendants and appeal to the Alusi on their behalf. Ndi Igbo have never worshiped their ancestors, only venerated them, which is no different then what Catholics do to their saints or what every country does to its national heroes. Respect and honor for the Nddichie was shown in one way by pouring of libations while chanting incantations. Ndi Igbo believed in the concept of reincarnation, and felt that the Nddiichie often reincarnated back on Earth. In fact, all Mmadu (human beings) were believed to reincarnate seven or eight times, and that depending on your karma, one either ascends or descends into another spiritual plane.

The personal relationship between God and Man in Igbo spirituality is as close as it can get. Ndi Igbo did not believe that they were separate from their Creator, and felt that the Chi that resided within them kept them connected. Igbo felt that their Chi was unique and personal and served as a guide and protector to them. A person’s destiny was also guided by their Chi. Those with a strong Chi would have prosperity, good health and good fortune, while those with a weak Chi would be prone to sickness, poverty and bad luck.

Even though the Igbo are largely Christian now, their traditional spiritual beliefs still live on. Along with these beliefs, a fundamental part of Igbo philosophy was “Biri Ka'm Biri” (live and let live). Ndi Igbo did not believe in fighting wars over religion. In their view, everybody should be able to worship God as they see fit. If there is any lesson from Igbo spirituality that we must not forget, it is this one.

The Fool

"The Knower of truth should go about the world outwardly stupid like a child, a madman or a fool." - The Mahavakyaratnamala 6.9.12

Reincarnation and the Ancestors

by Louis Martinie

Its Mardi Gras soon in New Orleans and I can hear what Mishlen and I call “parade signs.” Brass instruments and police sirens announce beads and fun and blocked streets.  Carnival is a good time to think about the ancestors and their strong place in New Orleans Voodoo. I honor my ancestors. I have a morning rite in which they get their coffee before I drink mine. It ends with the words, “To you from the living.” I also look to the Tibetans and their spirituality to compliment the Voodoo I practice. I am not alone in this kind of pairing. Sam Webster wrote a paper suggesting the same type of coupling with Wicca (circa 1988). Owen Knight , a bard and a Druid, has told me any number of times that a big  strength of his spirituality is that it readily accepts any spirit that may add to its completeness. Peoples of the Pacific Rim have long brought what we call “Buddhism” into the service of their local Gods and Goddesses.

This brings in the whole subject of reincarnation; a bedrock of the Tibetan’s beliefs. So is it incompatible to honor the ancestors and believe in reincarnation? Does one of these practices/beliefs necessarily exclude the other?

I have heard that here is more power in questions than in answers. Questions roam the mind freely, grazing on diverse and often disparate bites of information. The mix, after even a rudimentary digestion, can be amazing.  Answers hold one a bit closer to the solidity of home. Sureness is nice when you are building a levee but can be confining in spiritual exploration. What follows is a beginning attempt, for me at least, to bring direction to this question. The purpose is not to find or construct some answer but to bring power to the question by exposing its more obtuse angles or angels.

Working Definitions:

Reincarnation – The rebirth of a particular consciousness into another form.
Ancestors – Particular consciousnesses who have died and who have influenced you in an important way.

Angles / Angels of Exploration:

1. A particular consciousness can not be dead and reborn at the same time. The conditions are mutually exclusive. The ancestors are particular consciousnesses who have, in the main, been reborn. They are no longer among the dead. The voodooist can not bring benefit to reincarnated consciousnesses by making offerings them. However, the Voodooist could receive benefit from the intention involved.
My mom is reincarnated; she has another name, another personality. Offerings to her past self do not bring benefit to the self which I knew and is now reborn.

2. The confusion lies with our perception of time.  We perceive time is a way that most allows for our survival. Seeing what is truly there and seeing in a way that helps us to survive can be two very different things. All that was…is now …and will be. Chose your point of reference. Time is a choice, not a given.

3. We live multiple lives all at once. What was is always present. That consciousness that is the ancestors is always there. The spirits are complex; their existence is not linear. We are linear in our perceptions. (conversation Rosalinda)

4. The ancestors are real no matter what we believe or do not believe. No matter what we do or do not do. Faith is not the issue here. It is irrelevant whether we validate or invalidate the ancestors. They exist. They do not need our approval to exist. 

5. There is a belief that you die and automatically become a ghost. A ghost is a sentient being of the Invisible World. The ancestors can be perceived as similar to ghosts.  It may be that we die and have the possibility of reincarnating as a ghost. At some point in time the ghost will die and the consciousness may then incarnate in human or some other form. Perhaps the ancestors are one of many forms into which we can incarnate.

6. We perceive ourselves as single beings; particular beings. Due to this perception we assume that we will reincarnate as single beings. Maybe our “I” is more properly a “we.” Certainly my body is not unitary but an environ supporting any number of sentient beings. Our mind stream may reincarnate as multiple beings one of which could be an ancestor. After a time, the ancestors will die and reincarnate in another form.

7. As we carry a number of forms in our physical DNA likewise we may carry a number of forms in a spiritual DNA. One of these forms is the ancestor.  It exists as long as the DNA exists. (conversation Mishlen Linden)

8. The soul can be likened to a pebble thrown into a stream. The ripples would be the personality, circumstances of birth, etc. As the ripples go in all directions in a circular manner, so time moves in a circular, all encompassing pattern. The ancestors would be one portion of this circular pattern.  (conversion Mishlen Linden)

9. The North Africans divided the being into a ba and the ka. The ba describes the portion of the being that goes on and is eternal. The ka relates to the life force which dissipates over time. The ancestors here would be within the ka and their feeding would extend their life after death.

The above nine threads in no way join to yield whole cloth. But they may act as an antidote to the compartmentalization that restrained at least my thinking on the subject for so many years. As priests, we can not be expected to have all of the answers but we can be expected to honestly question apparent contradictions in our liturgies. To say that such contradictions are mysteries to be taken on faith is a travesty matched only by blindly not caring.

The ancestors and their feeding is not symbolic any more than the feeding of the loa is symbolic. In each case, a sentient being comes from some realm to the rite to accept or decline the offering.

Mishlen Linden suggests the following rite for, among other things, contacting the ancestors. She received the rite from TC.

HOLDING HANDS

Close your eyes.
Raise one of your hands with the palm open.
Extend your aura to the person you want to contact.
Feel the warmth of their hand upon your hand.
Close your hand on theirs.

Beyond any searches fueled by the intellect; it may be wise to let success be your proof.

I have come to a new appreciation of this simple phrase from Liber Al.