Occult London (Pocket Essential series)
Merlin Coverley
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 1904048889
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
More than any other city London has a secret history concealed from view. Unearthing the secret city and its forgotten inhabitants, this rediscovery encompasses a historical panorama from the Elizabethan age to the present day, introducing the magic of Dr. Dee and Simon Forman, the rise of the Kabbalah, and the occult designs of Wren and Hawksmoor. Elsewhere figures such as Spring-Heeled Jack and the Highgate Vampyre, and occult organizations from the Invisible College to the Golden Dawn are explained and explored. Also included are instructions for a series of four walks covering features of occult significance for the Elizabethan, 18th-century, Fin de Siécle, and contemporary periods; as well as an A-to-Z geographic dictionary of London's most resonant occult locations.
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Conducted alongside more pleasurable experiments, such as the development of a respiratory technique that could induce an orgasmic trance.23 For Falk was no amateur, but rather a Ba’al Shem, a designation applied to certain masters of the Cabbala who could supposedly perform miracles through their knowledge of the secret names of God.24 For good measure, he was also an alchemist who had allegedly mastered the art of transforming base metals into gold, as well as a high-ranking Freemason. Not.
Science. Central to this ideological flood was the occult, elements of which reached from the dim, primeval past to the unimagined future… Yoga, meditation, vegetarianism; multiculturalism, homeopathy, and higher consciousness; visions of an alternative society, anti-capitalism, and an interest in primitive beliefs; a fascination with ancient stone monuments, religious cults, and communes; progressive education, free love, feminism, and openness to homosexuality and lesbianism; experimentation.
Society was harvesting the benefits of industrial progress, the Enlightenment rationalism that had produced these achievements was now under threat from this emerging tide of irrational beliefs. At the forefront of this challenge to the old orthodoxies were those societies that were formed towards the end of the century, as millennial anxieties and newborn pseudo-sciences gave birth to the fin de Siècle, an unprecedented flowering of occult activity that continued until the outbreak of the First.
Delirious also, ran wrapped in blankets or rags and threw themselves in and expired there’.4 Lacking any church buildings of its own but with the founder of Methodism, John Wesley’s chapel just opposite, funerals could be conducted here without reference to the Book of Common Prayer. Indeed, when Susanna Wesley was buried here in 1742, it was her son, John, who conducted the service. From 1657 to the final internment in 1854, the remains of some 120,000 individual were crammed into barely four.
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