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.
[This is an informal item I wrote for my Livejournal in 2008. I went looking for it recently and discovered it was still out there. ]
Marie Eaton: [moves to the altar with Peggy lying on it] Peggy, get up. Repeat after me, the words of the Susamma Ritual. Oriel Seraphim. Peggy Eaton: Oriel Seraphim Marie Eaton: Eo Potesta Peggy Eaton: Eo Potesta Marie Eaton: Zati, Zata Peggy Eaton: Zati, Zata Marie Eaton: Galatim, Galatah Peggy Eaton: Galatim, Galatah!
I had a lot of trouble sleeping last night, and during the hours of not sleeping I tried to recall the novels of Dennis Wheatley. I think it was in 1966 when my scout group had a jumble sale, and I was out collecting – bringing in box after box of books and bric-a-brac. I succeeded in purloining most of Dennis Wheatley’s occult novels, and kept The Satanist, The Devil Rides Out, and To The Devil a Daughter in a secret place in the garage, reading them when my parents weren’t around. I also made off with a complete multi-volume set of Gibbon\’s Decline & Fall (which shows the kind of 15 year old I was). It was cut-leaf, and I can still recall the musty smell.
I saw The Devil Rides Out on release in 1968 when I was 17, but it was released as The Devil\’s Bride in Australia (same as the US), so I experienced a huge delight when I parked my bum on the seat and realised what I was watching. It was the first time I’d seen “proper” ceremonial magic in a film (which is still a rara avis).
The principal protagonist is the Duc de Richlieu (Christopher Lee), who appears in several of Wheatley\’s novels as a member of a group of four adventurers loosely based on the Musketeers of Dumas. Most of the stories are ripping yarns, but at some point in his life (in between saving European princesses from Johnny Foreigner) the Duc has found the time to become an adept in the occult arts.
The book and film feature three pieces of authentic ritual. The first comes when the Duc creates a classic Solomonic circle to protect the friends from Mocata’s demonic sendings. It is a long time since I read the book, and I lost my copy many years ago, but I have a memory of the Duc telling his friends to wear clean underpants because shit attracts evil entities. This piece of anal claptrap amused me even at 15 years old. I would have suggested brown trousers – a lot more sensible when being menaced by giant tarantulas and a ride-on cameo role by Azriel, the angel of death.
The second piece of ritual is the piece from an invented Susamma ritual that alters the fabric of time and space. I didn’t know it at the time, but the words are not made up, and come from an obscure grimoiric ritual used to trap a spirit in a bottle of water:
Uriel Seraphim, potesta, Io, Zati, Zata, Abbati, Abbata, Agla, Cailo, Caila, I pray thee and conjure thee in the name of the Living God and by him, thy Master and mine; by all the might of the Holy Trinity; by the virginity of the Holy Virgin; by the four sacred words which the great Agla said with his own mouth to Moses, Io, Zati, Zata, Abbata, by the nine heavens in which thou dwellest; and by virtue of the characters said before, that thou appear to me visibly and without delay in a fair human form, not terrifying, within or without this phial, which holds water prepared to receive thee, in order that thou mayest answer what I desire to ask thee, and fetch and bring the book of Moses, open it, put they hand upon it, and swear truth while making me see and know clearly all that I desire to know; appear then, I conjure you in the name of the Great God, Almighty Alpha, and be thou welcome in galatim, galata, cailo,caila.
This conjuration, it can be found in the Grimoire of Armadel. I didn’t find it in the Mathers translation, but it can be found in the original French Ms.
The third piece of ritual in the film occurs when the Duc attempts to draw the spirit of the dead Tanith back into her body. He uses a very condensed version of the Golden Dawn Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, which in turn owes a great deal to a traditional Jewish bedtime prayer that protects the sleeper from bumps in the night. An original is preserved in cuniform on Mesopotamian clay tablets and is probably about 3000-4000 years old (see The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia by Campbell-Thompson). Memory of this ritual is preserved in the nursery rhyme
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless the bed that I lie on. Four corners to my bed, Four angels round my head. One to watch and one to pray, And two to bear my fears away.
In the Jewish night-time prayer the four angels at the four corners are Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael.
Although most people assume Mocata was modelled after Crowley, he is a dastardly foreigner in the book (Wheatley was an imperialist, a xenophobe and a tremendous snob). However, the fiendish Canon Copely-Syle (To the Devil a Daughter) was definitely drawn from Montague Summers, a man Wheatley found genuinely frightening.
