THE Rockwax Foundation

Author: Colin

  • The Smoking Mirror

    In the late-70s I was working in central London and living in a ground floor flat in Stamford Hill adjacent to the Lubavitch. There was almost no heating and ice formed in the toilet. One way to warm up was to drive into the British Museum on a Sunday afternoon, and spend a few hours in relative warmth.

    You could do that in those days … jump in the car, drive into London, and park at the back of the Museum. I doubt that it took more than 20 minutes each way. I would almost always go to the black obsidian mirror attributed to Dr. John Dee and spend some time scrying in it. You could do that too in those days … co-opt occult display items into private sessions without the formality of booking. I think Dion Fortune did something similar in the Assyrian section (see The Winged Bull).

    There is a handwritten note from Horace Walpole: “The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his spirits…”. Over the course of a few years I developed a detailed fantasy about this mirror. It was an Aztec scrying mirror dedicated to the dark god Tezcatlipoca. It was given to Dee as a gift by his friend Sir Walter Raleigh, and was probably looted from the Spanish.

    As it happens, it really is an Aztec mirror. Chemical analysis has identified the mine where the obsidian was found, and you can read about it in this Smithsonian article.

    However … (sadface) … the link to Dee is very circumstantial – see p.30 of John Dee’s Conversations with Angels by Deborah Harkness. According to Harkness, the mirror is never mentioned in the Conversations, while other crystals are. Other than Walpole’s catalogue, there is no evidence the mirror belonged to Dee.

    Nevertheless, obsidian mirrors are A Thing. They are an off-the-shelf item in Glastonbury. I have one myself.

    The post The Smoking Mirror appeared first on Hermetic Kabbalah.

  • The Search for the Perfect Language

    In the 1580s, John Dee and Edward Kelley conducted many remarkable conversations with several angels. Many of Dee’s original records and diaries survive and have been widely reproduced in editions and commentaries, from the famous 1659 A True and Faithful Relation … of Meric Causabon, to the fastidious textual analysis of Aaron Leitch in The Angelical Language. There is even a dictionary of the angelical speech in The Complete Enochian Dictionary by Donald Laycock.

    These conversations demand a meta-analysis. What was the cultural and social background that determined the specific form of the communications? What works, accessible to both Dee and Kelley, seem to have influenced the content of the angel’s concerns? Why do the angels communicate in good, everyday English but also have another language, a special language? An overview can be found in the excellent John Dee’s Conversations with Angels by Deborah Harkness

    Something that has always interested me is the presumption that the angels speak their own language. They can converse in English, but in private they would seem to converse in a speech called Enochian. Or perhaps they provide Enochian as an intermediate speech for us to use. Perhaps they have an even more recondite language.

    The Old Testament book of Genesis is filled with hints of ancient languages, languages that were spoken before human consciousness was degraded by disobedience. In the beginning, God created light and dark, night and day, with acts of speech. There was the conversation of Adam and Eve before the Fall, and their speech after the Fall. There was the speech before Babel, and the speech that survived Noah’s Flood. And of course there is the native speech of angels, who are privy to God’s intentions and instrumental in his acts and governance.

    The suspicion that common speech is degraded and utilitarian is ancient and enduring. What if there was a better language, a more perfect language, a language more closely aligned with the spiritual nature of the creation?

    A book that addresses this specific thought is Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language. Most people will know Eco as the novelist who wrote The Name of the Rose, and Foucault’s Pendulum. Although a capable novelist, he was principally a scholar of vast erudition, and this book is an example. It may task one’s endurance. I find I have to pick it up and put it down, read a chapter and come back to it when time has soothed my overload. It is an extraordinary achievement in its span and its depth. Every chapter is a shotgun blast of fascinating detail.

    A selection from the index of The Search for the Perfect Language

    Eco covers the entire history of the belief that language is handicapped by limitations, limitations that might (in some better world) be removed, taking us from the first chapters of Genesis to analytic philosophy. Would a better language remove the possibility of deception, of fake news? Would it cripple the Devil, who is the Father of Lies? Would it require a refinement of the soul, a dissolution of objective and subjective? There are no answers.

    The post The Search for the Perfect Language appeared first on Hermetic Kabbalah.

  • Backrooms

    John 14:2, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”

    At some point in the mid-90s I was in a convention centre in Belgium for a minor telecoms conference. I think the venue might have been Le Palais des Congrès de Liège. We were inventors. We were exhibiting a PTSN telecom switch hooked-up to a very new-fangled WWW server.

    Much of the convention space was shuttered and unused. I wandered off and discovered the Backrooms – halls, corridors, rooms, toilets, theatres – beige spaces empty of people, but still showing signs of occupation. Stacks of chairs, unused tables, display boards with old posters. Always, essentially, quintessentially, one flickering fluorescent light.

    It was spooky and unsettling. I was abnormally disturbed, and I made note of that. I began to take an interest in similar spaces, such as large underground car parks, and the concept of liminality.

    In 1991 the 3D version of Castle Wolfenstein was released, and because of technical limitations it featured a small palette of spaces and visual elements. These were combined to create (for the time) a satisfying experience of novelty. In retrospect we can recognise how much these early games reproduced the experience of the Backrooms. Various game-level editors were created for Doom, and it was possible to create and navigate spaces that were visually congruent to the Backrooms (as the concept stabilised into a definite spatial theme).

    Another idea culled from early games was clip-out and :no-clip. A developer who wanted to inspect the geometry of the game from the outside could set an option that would enable their first-person view to move through walls and other boundaries. Sometimes this would happen during gameplay, and the player would find themselves outside the game. For the gnostic, :noclip is the ultimate liberation from reality.

    I forget how I discovered references to the original Backrooms creepypasta. I was probably searching the Web for various ideas around the concept of liminality. I recognised instantly the canonical image, a photo from a claimed genuine furniture warehouse in Wisconsin. I was shocked to recognise something I thought private to myself. Wow. It was clear that many people had experienced a moment of recognition.

    I began to think about what I now term “low-entropy spaces” – that is, spaces that can be generated from a small number of simple rules. The Mandlebrot and Julia sets are a good example, as are spaces in early games like Wolfenstein. Crystalline structures, mazes …

    Where does the horror come in? Why are the Backrooms so creepy? The prototype might be the Cretan labyrinth with the Minotaur at its heart, but consider The Willows, a famous 1907 horror short story by Algernon Blackwood. Two adventurers are canoeing down the Danube and enter a vast delta-like area with innumerable small channels, and sandbanks covered with stunted willows. As far as the eye can see: channels, sandbanks, stunted willows, an archetypal low-entropy landscape. Thin ingredients for an acclaimed horror story, but H.P. Lovecraft, master of cosmic horror, dubbed it “the finest supernatural tale in English literature”. Many of the ideas were repurposed for T. Kingfisher’s 2020 novel, The Hollow Places.

    We experience much of the inherent spookiness of the Backrooms in The Shining, as Danny pedals his tricycle around the corridors of the Overlook Hotel. It’s the repetition, the elongated perspectives, the sense that the space is ontologically unsound and “we’re not in Kansas anymore”.

    Low-entropy spaces are creepy. I’ve experienced something akin to The Willows in the interior of Western Australia – the land as flat as a drafting table, the road a straight line that runs from horizon to horizon, and a single low bush replicated a near-infinite number of times. Inhuman. Disturbing.

    So what did I think of the 2026 movie? It follows the core ideas of the creepypasta at the beginning, but it goes off the rails. An opportunity for genuine ontological horror turns into the most generic cliche imaginable. I was hoping for something more like the Navidson House in the House of Leaves. A big fail IMO. There is another, far more disturbing film waiting to be made.

    The post Backrooms appeared first on Hermetic Kabbalah.

  • New Site

    If you are new to making a website, then you will find so many hosting providers offering wizard tools to help you get up and running. Making a new site is relatively easy compared with ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago.

    But are you locked in? What control do you have over the framework you are using, all these clever click-button tools? What happens when the provider goes out of business (or more likely) is absorbed into another company with a different approach?

    Making the site may be easy, but keeping it going for 10 years in the face of constant technical updates and infrastructure replacements is another matter. Keeping it going for 31 years is an achievement, and I’m going to brag about it. This site is 31 years old.

    I began this site in 1995, and it was carved out of a solid block of HTML using copper chisels and a grinding paste made of sand and bitter tears. Despite being a thing of consummate ugliness, it was popular.

    In 2011 I obtained a solid block of PHP and Javascript and began again. I’m a one-man band who does this for love, not money, and it sufficed … for the day. It wasn’t pretty. I wrote a large quantity of new content which eventually found its way into a book. Check out my publications.

    Now it is 2026 and the 2011 site was looking pathetic. Network Solutions was charging me an arm and a leg for hosting it. I had to migrate the domain, the content, and throw it all into WordPress. I’d never used WordPress.

    It is not a thing of beauty … but it will suffice. There will be bugs and broken links, but I will catch them. I see that many items are far too long and TLDR – I need to condense. Navigation needs work – I’ll fix it.

    A lot has happened in my life (four books, grandchildren, turning seventy-five). I have things to say. I expect to post new content.

    Please look in from time to time – I promise it won’t be boring.

    The post New Site appeared first on Hermetic Kabbalah.