XVI: Bringing down the House of God

XVI is bound in natural linen cloth.
280pp comprising sixteen (and one) original and significant essays.
The cover is impressed with a sunken panel holding a striking letterpress rendering of the tower by occult artist Kyle Fite. XVI is printed throughout in red and black ink on heavy paper stock.

The babel edition of XVI comes in a strict edition of 700 copies and can be yours for forty four english pounds.

Our civilisation is in crisis.
As we confront ecological collapse, political control, wars of terror, and wars on consciousness, we are seeking emergence from this state of emergency.

XVI proposes gnostic strategies for liberation.
Some will consider this a dangerous and inflammatory book.
It is.
These provocative essays from the most radical contemporary occult thinkers reveal a creative and passionate engagement with the world.

Attacks on our freedoms can lead to freedom, the sudden enlightenment, the lightning path and the initiatory crisis that the tower also represents.

XVI seeks to raise magickal awareness of the unique times we find ourselves in, whilst being open to the resourcefulness and indominatable nature of the human spirit to find solutions and responses to it.
This is magick attuned to the zeitgeist.

Sex, drugs, art, initiation rites, calls to arms, ritual actions, aeonic plans, revolutionary witchcraft and apocalypse converge in our new title, XVI.

XVI contains these essays:

John Michael Greer - Magic and the End of History
The shape of time, the myth of progress and the fall of civilisation

Ramsey Dukes - XXXII - Not One Tower But Two
The forbidden pleasures of 9/11 and the fight for freedom

Carl Abrahamsson - Everything Must Go...On!
Metaprogramming the future through art

Eric K Lerner - The Tower
Shango, santeria, phallic magick and the tarot

Raven Caldera - Being the Change
The path of a trans-gender plant shaman, from permaculture to bdsm

Michael Idehall - The Tower of Babel
Qliphothic initiation on the averse path and the astral realm

Peter Grey - Seeing Through Apocalypse
John Dee, Babalon, brain chemistry and apocalypse denial

Dr George J Sieg - Occult War for the Aeon
Aeonic warfare from iot, oto, ona, to evola and the church, as civilisations clash

James Wasserman - Defeating a Vile Threat
Advocating patriotic thelemic resistance to attacks on our liberty

Hafiz Batin - Orgy in Matter
The spiritual warfare of an ismaili gnostic in the west

Dr Dave Evans/Francis Breakspear - Twin Infinities
Chaote on crowley, car crashes and identity crises

Stephen Grasso - Things Fall Apart
Fighting dystopian doomsayers with vodou

Kyle Fite - Falling into Fire
An initiates journey through the labyrinth of Burroughs, Blake, Hesse, Crowley and Bertiaux

Julian Vayne - The Ecstatic State
The war against some drugs and the ritual use of ketamine, toad venom and foxy methoxy

Orryelle Defenestrate Bascule - The Tower Crashes
Direct artistic intervention, babble babel, and both theatrical and ecological action

Peter J Carroll - Eschaton
The godfather of chaos magic enchants for the eschaton

Alkistis Dimech - Coup de Foudre
Woman and revolutionary witchcraft from the sabbat to collapse, from Michelet to Jack Parsons to now

The text is riven by images from:

Stafford Stone
Kyle Fite
Fredrik Soderberg
Orryelle Defenestrate Bascule
Hafiz Batin
Michael Idehall
Eric k Lerner

XVI can be ordered here:

http://www.scarletimprint.com/xvi.htm

XVI Launch Party

XVI Launch Party

Watkins Books
21 Cecil Court
London

Friday May 28
18.30-20.00

Join us for molotov cocktails and caviar in Watkins Books to immanentise our new title XVI.

http://www.scarletimprint.com/xvi.htm

A radical collection of writers confronting what it means to practice magick in the shadow of the Tower. From Peter Carroll and Ramsey Dukes to John Michael Greer and Carl Abrahamsson. This is a book of modern magick.

A reading, a fierce bout of vodka and we will spill out to a central London drinking establishment to further fuel the Occult revolution.

Please note, this event starts at 18:30 sharp and concludes at 20:00.

RSVP to: marketing.watkins@googlemail.com

We look forward to seeing you there.

In Nomine Babalon

Scarlet Imprint x

Datura: First Review

First extensive review of Scarlet Imprint's Datura from Plutonica.net:

To be honest, I’ve dodged a serious bullet with Datura. When its editor, Ruby Sara, put out a call for submissions on Scarlet Imprints last year, I almost submitted a handful of poems for inclusion. The thought of an anthology of occult-themed poetic work and essays on the mystical aspects of the creative process struck quite a nerve with me, and I was eager to contribute. Luckily a combination of a busy life at the time and a creative dry spell prevented me from sending Sara anything by the deadline, and after reading through Datura, I’m deeply thankful that the few pieces I was able to conjure up never got sent her way. For even if they were accepted and published in the pages of Datura, the quality of the content is so high my work would have looked like utter shit next to everything else between its covers.

Datura contains the work of 26 poets, that work being a mix of 6 essays and 47 poems. When I picked up Datura, I was really eager to read the essays. Scarlet Imprint has published three other anthologies in the past – Howlings, Devoted, and Diabolical - and their occult essays were absolutely stellar. While I do love poetry, and have a deep fondness for the Pagan and fortean realms, I’ve read enough awful odes to Odin and tree-spirits (and composed quite a few myself, to be fair) that the thought of a book devoted to such poetry might be a risky gamble. I figured that six good essays could make up for some lousy astral-poetics. Thankfully while the essay-work is every bit as good as I hoped it would be, the poetry in Datura manages to keep its nimble-feet from stepping into the bear-trap of twee Pagan cliches.

The book has a mix of pieces by established poets like Penelope Shuttle and posthumous work by Peter Redgrove, and work by new writers like Ariel, whose poem “EGRE-GORE” reads like William Burroughs composing a cut-up at the Renaissance Fair, and I mean that in the best possible way. There are so many evocative fragments and resonant lines strewn through Datura’s pages: “her voice in my ear sounded like a pomegranate seed tastes / Ah, the earth, always turning up like a bad penny / the swift boat that turns around the island is a signal in the fibers of his skin”.

The poetry is very visceral, and while some of it is fairly esoteric and will probably baffle people who don’t have the slightest clue what names like Abraxas and Inanna could mean, most of Datura does come across as an accessible read for someone who cares not a whit about the occult but loves some good poetry.

As for the essays: if the rest of Datura was the literary equivalent of a toppled-over port-a-potty, “The Poetry Of Magic” by Paul Newman alone would have justified the books existence. It’s a wonderful piece that discusses animism and occult currents that sweep through so much of poetic history, discussing Coleridge, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, “Hymn To Pan” by Crowley, the “nightmare collage” of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, and Ted Hughes. Newman’s piece does what all great pieces of cultural commentary should do: it immediately instills in the reader a burning desire to dive into the depths of work that the commentator casts a light on.....

The rest of the review can be read here: http://plutonica.net/2010/05/12/creatures-flight-burrowing-both-magick-poetry-datura/