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Tag Archives: Rosaleen Norton

Deluxe Spirits

29 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by Salamander and Sons in A.O. Spare, Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare, Magic Books, Rosaleen Norton

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Art, Austin Osman Spare, Book, Christopher Kramer, Dr. Nevill Drury, Magic, Magical Art, Qlipha, Rosaleen Norton, Werplon

The Deluxe Edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare – fully bound in black leather, and accompanied by Christopher Kramer’s limited edition print depicting the Werplon entity from Rosaleen Norton’s ‘Qlipha’ – has been shipping in small batches during this most festive of weeks. Copies will continue to ship into early 2013.

Many copies of the standard hardcover edition of Dark Spirits are also in transit to pre-order buyers, and only a few dozen copies remain available at the time of writing (36 copies, to be precise). Make Dark Spirits the final book you buy during 2012, and the first you read in 2013!

The Deluxe Edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare

The Deluxe Edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare

Christopher Kramer’s depiction of the Werplon entity from Rosaleen Norton’s ‘Qlipha’

Christopher Kramer’s depiction of the Werplon entity from Rosaleen Norton’s ‘Qlipha’

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Dark Spirits are with us!

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by Salamander and Sons in A.O. Spare, Magic Books, Rosaleen Norton

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Austin Osman Spare, Book, Dark Spirits, Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare, Dr. Nevill Drury, Magic, Rosaleen Norton, Witch of Kings Cross

In the poem accompanying the illustration ‘Black Magic’ in The Art of Rosaleen Norton, the Australian ‘Witch of Kings Cross’ wrote:

Panther of silence; god of Night; Lord of the wild inhuman stars:
You are my own; teeming soul of solitude.
Here is no loneliness, secret Master –
You, Dark Spirit are with me.

The welcome news for many admirers of the magical art of Rosaleen Norton and that of Austin Osman Spare – admirers who have patiently waited for many months – is that Dark Spirits is with us!

Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare

Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare

Small batches of the standard hardcover edition manifested on 05 December 2012 (the 33rd anniversary of Rosaleen Norton’s death), and have been arriving gradually since. The Deluxe Edition, fully bound in black leather, is due for delivery this day. As such, we happily anticipate shipping copies during the week of 17-21 December 2012.

Some (but not many) copies of the standard hardcover edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare remain available.

Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare

Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare

Dark Spirits, Part One: Rosaleen Norton

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by Salamander and Sons in A.O. Spare, Magic Books, Rosaleen Norton

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Art, Dark Spirits, Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare, Dr. Nevill Drury, Gavin Greenlees, Magic, Magical Art, Magical Cosmology, Magical Practice, Occult Visions, Pan, Rosaleen Norton, Trance Magic, Witch

Part One of Dr. Nevill Drury’s long-awaited Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare consists of three chapters elaborating upon the life, magical cosmology, trance magic, and occult visions the notorious (or, some might say, notoriously unknown) Australian visionary artist Rosaleen Norton (1917-1979).

Chapter One offers a thorough portrayal of the 62 years of life of Rosaleen Miriam Norton, known to her friends as ‘Roie’ – from her birth during a violent thunderstorm in Dunedin, New Zealand, on 02 October 1917, to her death at the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Hospice for the Dying at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, on 05 December 1979. Norton’s childhood and adolescence – including family life and school – are detailed and discussed, along with her love of animals (her many pets included “an assortment of cats, lizards, mice, guinea pigs, a possum, an echidna, a goat, tortoises, dogs, and various toads” – spiders too), her early creative urges, and eventual enrollment at East Sydney Technical College, where she studied art for two years under the tutelage of the noted sculptor and head of the art school, Rayner Hoff. In an article published in The Australasian Post during February 1957, Norton said of her mentor:

He [Hoff] freed me from routine and let me spend my time at figure drawing and composition … and since for the first time I was encouraged to work continuously at my own art form, I became an exemplary student.

Drury details Norton’s stint as a cadet journalist and art model; her marriage to Beresford Conroy and relationship with her frater philosophicus, the poet Gavin Greenlees; the controversial exhibition at the Rowden White Library at the University of Melbourne, and publication of Norton’s and Greenlees’ collaborative work, The Art of Rosaleen Norton; her run-ins with police and judiciary, including vagrancy charges, obscenity trials (one magistrate deemed Norton’s artworks “obscene and an offence to chastity and delicacy”) and censorship, and being falsely accused – on more than one occasion – of holding a ‘Black Mass’ at her flat in Sydney’s Kings Cross; her scandalous relationship with the English-born orchestral musician and conductor, Eugene Goossens, and flaunting of the popular image of herself as the ‘Witch of Kings Cross’ during the 1950s and 1960s; and her almost complete obscurity and physical decline during the 1970s.

Page spreads from Chapter One of Dark Spirits

Page spreads from Chapter One of Dark Spirits

Chapter Two delves into Norton’s magical cosmology, including how her assertion that she was born a witch – replete with a range of bodily peculiarities she equated with ‘witch marks’ – informed her personal and artistic development, magical practice, and her belief in Pan-as-All, the metaphysical being who, in her view, ruled the world. Of the development of her instinctual ritual desire, Norton once remarked:

If the Kingdom of Pan had always been with me, it had been mostly in the background, overlaid by what was called reality: Now it had begun to emerge and pervade the latter. Awareness grew stronger and stronger that the tedious world of childhood didn’t really matter, because this held the essence of all that called to my inmost being: Night and wild things and mystery; storms; being by myself, free of other people. The sense of some deep hidden knowledge stirring at the back of consciousness; and all about me the feeling of secret sentient life, that was in alliance with me, but that others were unaware, or afraid of, because it was unhuman. So my first act of ceremonial magic was in honour of the horned god, whose pipes are symbol of magic and mystery, and whose horns and hooves stand for natural energies and fleet-footed freedom: And this rite was also my oath of allegiance and my confirmation as a witch. I remember my feelings on that occasion well, and they are valid today: If Pan is the ‘Devil’ (and the joyous goat-god probably is from the orthodox viewpoint) then I am indeed a ‘Devil’ worshipper.

According to Drury:

Norton’s cosmology is based upon an understanding that Nature and the cosmos are innately sacred. Divinity is ‘divided’ into a number of gods and goddesses, and these ruling deities – headed by Pan – are able to exist and function in more than one dimension of reality. Norton’s concept of a hierarchy of spirits headed by Pan – ‘whose body … is the … Earth’ – is reminiscent of the ancient Gnostic archons who were thought to rule different regions of the heavens, while also maintaining governance of the Earth. Archons were celestial rulers – ‘gate-keepers’ guarding entry to the higher spheres – and their powers transcended and encompassed all aspects of human activity. In Norton’s conception, Pan equated with the totality of human experience and existence – although she expanded his reach to embrace the totality, or ‘ground’, of all being. In a sense Pan, for her, embodied and represented the furthest reaches of the sacred universe – extending to infinity in all directions. It is all the more remarkable that Norton began to develop this concept of Pan while she was still an adolescent …

Drury expounds upon the other ancient deities and supernatural entities that provided inspiration and guidance to Norton – prominent among them Hecate, Lilith and Lucifer, the latter in his role as ‘The Adversary’. The role that a number of other magical beings from different cultural traditions – such as Bucentauro, Eloi, Makalath, Fohat, Erzulie, the Dubouros, Val, Kephena, Borzorygmus, Mwystingel, and Trudgepig – played in Norton’s eclectic and idiosyncratic pantheon is discussed, as is her ‘Familiar Spirit-in-Chief’ Janicot (a being she knew by many different names, including the Monk, Frater Asmodeus and Brother Hilarian). Norton’s knowledge and experiences of the sephiroth and qliphoth – including her terrifying encounter with the Werplon entity – are considered alongside her experiments with self-hypnosis, trance states and magical techniques of invocation. Discussion of Norton’s concept of the magical universe also features prominently in the second chapter of Dark Spirits.

Page spreads from Chapter Two of Dark Spirits

Page spreads from Chapter Two of Dark Spirits

Chapter Three examines how Norton incorporated elements from her magical practice into her visionary art –from her early compositions which “drew more upon graphic styles associated with popular conceptions of ghouls, demons and disembodied spirits …” to her more artistically accomplished and ‘authentic’ (in the sense that her art drew increasingly upon her personal mystical and trance experiences) work of the late 1940s and early 1950s, to her “increasingly more lurid and garish” works “crudely executed in oils” during the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter alone features 15 of Norton’s artworks (including four in full colour) with extensive annotations, and Drury’s expertise as an author and publisher of books on contemporary art is apparent.

Page spreads from Chapter Three of Dark Spirits

Page spreads from Chapter Three of Dark Spirits

And where does Austin Osman Spare fit into all this? Part Two of Dark Spirits – consisting of three chapters devoted to Spare – will be described in a later post.

Some copies of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare remain available. Both the Deluxe Edition and the standard hardcover edition will be published on 05 December 2012 in order to coincide with the 33rd anniversary of Rosaleen Norton’s death.

Dark Spirits, creeping closer

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by Salamander and Sons in A.O. Spare, Magic Books, Rosaleen Norton

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Art, Austin Osman Spare, Books, Dark Spirits, Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare, Dr. Nevill Drury, Magic, Magical Art, Rosaleen Norton

By late April 2012, all pre-order copies of the Deluxe Edition of Dr. Nevill Drury’s Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare – strictly limited to 95 copies numbered by hand, fully bound in black leather with gilt title and device, silk bookmark ribbon, and accompanied by an exclusive hand numbered print of the terrible Werplon entity encountered by Rosaleen Norton – had been snapped up by a mix of dedicated esoteric practitioners, astute bibliographic investors and ‘curious readers’. Sincere gratitude to the fine individuals who subscribed to the Deluxe Edition:

Steven Doelan, Michael Thompson, Jesse A. Mantyh, Scott Madison, Thomas Karlsson, Robert Wallis, Maria Azambuja, Michael Gallant, Alan Kostrencic, Jonathan Davies, Angi Patton, Lutz Lemke, Paul Bisanti, Gary Owen, Simon Buxton, David Beth, Richard Kaczynski, Peter Oravetz, John Smith, Cameron Lindo, AJNA, Arild Stromsvag, Neil Graf, Mark Corcoran, David Kairis, Jesper Petersen, Adam McLean, Paul Prescott, Esoteric Source, Stanton Marlan, William Kiesel, Tim Hartridge, Melissa Reaburn-Jenkin, Allan Harrison, Mariusz Doering, Jacqueline Maher, Darcy Kuntz, Sue Cavanagh-Lang, William Morris, Matthew Ward, Amy Duncan, William Burkle, Paul Bland, Patrice Maleze, Michael Douglas, Gudni Gudnason, Jerusalem Press, Aron Clark, Robert Wyatt, Mitch Stargrove, Judith Illes, Andersen Andrews, David Heney, Orryelle Defenestrate Bascule, Greg Brown, Evelyn Hall, David Metcalfe, David Greenhill, Shellay Maughan, Brian Broadt, Kenneth Iverson, and Mark Mould.

Cover artwork for the Deluxe Edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare, fully bound in black leather

Cover artwork for the Deluxe Edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare, fully bound in black leather

Due to considerable demand from those who had missed out on a Deluxe Edition of Dark Spirits, we elected to publish a standard hardcover edition, also limited to just 95 copies. This edition will be bound simply in cloth with a dust jacket, unnumbered and without the Werplon print.

Cover artwork for the standard hardcover edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare

Cover artwork for the standard hardcover edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare

Both the Deluxe Edition and the standard hardcover edition will be published on 05 December 2012 in order to coincide with the 33rd anniversary of Rosaleen Norton’s death – and with our profound apologies for the necessary revisions of publication dates. Later posts during October will feature more updates, excerpts and page spreads (the latter of which are currently being proofed by the author).

Double Visionary: Norton and Spare

19 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by Salamander and Sons in A.O. Spare, Magic Books, Rosaleen Norton

≈ 14 Comments

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Aleister Crowley, Art, Austin Osman Spare, Australian art, Dark Spirits, Dr. Nevill Drury, Magic, Occult, Pan, Rosaleen Norton, Western esoteric tradition, Western magical tradition, Witch of Kings Cross

Devil-worshipping harpy. Pagan rebel. ‘Wicked’ bohemian from Sydney’s red light district. The notorious, Pan-worshipping Witch of Kings Cross. Despite being widely portrayed in such sensationalist terms by the popular print media of the 1950s and 1960s, the Australian trance occultist and visionary artist Rosaleen Norton (1917-1979) remains largely unknown, even among contemporary devotees of Western magical traditions.

Australia’s first and most famous witch, Rosaleen Norton

Australia’s first and most famous witch, Rosaleen Norton

At a time when diversity was not celebrated (or tolerated) and the prevailing Australian social mentality was somewhat prudish (conservative, edging towards the puritanical), and when the appropriate place for a woman was perceived to be within the home, tending to the needs of husband and children, Rosaleen Norton flaunted accepted social conventions and instead utilised her extraordinary talent to portray the results of her visionary explorations of trance states, including:

… a wide range of supernatural beings … Norton depicted naked women wrestling with reptilian elementals or flying on the backs of winged griffins, gods who were both male and female, and demonic forms with menacing claw-tipped wings. But central to her magical cosmology was the figure of the Great God Pan, who for her was an essentially benign figure – the all-pervasive life-force of the Universe.

So says researcher and author Dr. Nevill Drury, one of Australia’s leading writers in the field of esoteric non-fiction (specialising in the Western magical tradition, shamanism and the history of New Age spirituality) and contemporary Australian art, and arguably the world’s leading scholar of the life, art and sex magic of Rosaleen Norton. Drury received his PhD from the University of Newcastle during 2008 for a dissertation on the art and magic of Rosaleen Norton and the Western esoteric tradition, some 31 years after having met Norton in her Sydney garret.

Nevill Drury: leading scholar of the life, art and sex magic of Rosaleen Norton

Nevill Drury: leading scholar of the life, art and sex magic of Rosaleen Norton

In his forthcoming Salamander and Sons title, Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare, Drury elaborates upon this meeting which precipitated a deep and personal connection with Norton and her work and strongly influenced his career as a writer:

I met Rosaleen Norton in Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Kings Cross in 1977, while researching my book Inner Visions: Explorations in Magical Consciousness. At that stage Roie [Norton] had already become a recluse but a friend of mine and I tracked down a person called Danny who knew her. Danny worked in a jeweller’s shop in Kings Cross and we explained to him that we were genuinely interested in magical techniques and practices and wanted to discuss both her personal view of magic and her perceptions of the world at large. The message filtered through and we were granted an interview. Roie was living then in a dark basement flat at the end of a long corridor in an old building in Roslyn Gardens, just down from the centre of Kings Cross in the direction of Rushcutters Bay. She was somewhat frail but still extremely mentally alert, with expressive eyes and a hearty laugh. She even invited us to share an LSD trip with her, but in the gloomy recesses of her basement flat we shuddered to think of the shadowy beings we might unleash through this powerful psychedelic, and we both politely declined.

Dark Spirits is the third of Drury’s many books to step into the dark, private life and visionary work of Australia’s first and most famous witch. His previous texts on Norton include Pan’s Daughter: The Strange World of Rosaleen Norton (1988 and 1993, later republished as The Witch of Kings Cross in 2002) and Homage to Pan: The life, art and sex magic of Rosaleen Norton (2009), both of which are highly recommended.

Highly recommended: Nevill Drury’s earlier works on Rosaleen Norton

Highly recommended: Nevill Drury’s earlier works on Rosaleen Norton

Drury elevates Norton beyond the tawdry tales of the cheap, sensationalistic tabloids and offers insights into the life of a remarkable individual whose:

… personal beliefs were a strange mix of magic, mythology and fantasy, but derived substantially from mystical experiences which, for her, were completely real … Roie was very much an adventurer – a free spirit – and she liked to fly through the worlds opened to her by her imagination. Her art, of course, reflected this. It was her main passion, her main reason for living. She had no career ambitions other than to reflect on the forces within her essential being, and to manifest these psychic and magical energies in the only way she knew how … art was the very centre of her life, and Roie took great pride in the brief recognition she received when the English critic and landscape artist John Sackville-West described her in 1970 as one of Australia’s finest artists, alongside Norman Lindsay … she [Norton] felt that at last someone had understood her art and had responded to it positively. All too often her critics had responded only to her outer veneer – focusing on her bizarre media persona in particular – and this was not the ‘real’ Roie at all.

In Dark Spirits, the wonderful visionary universe of this artistic outsider and dweller of the social margins is considered and contextualised alongside the life and work of the British visionary artist Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) whose major self-published works – Earth Inferno (1905), A Book of Satyrs (1907) and The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy (1909-1913) – are increasingly acknowledged as the works of a creative genius, and their creator one of the key figures in the 20th century Western magical revival and one of its most original thinkers.

Austin Osman Spare’s 1909 self-portrait

Austin Osman Spare’s 1909 self-portrait

Although these two artists never met or even knew that the other existed, Drury says that Norton and Spare:

… resemble each other as innovative esoteric practitioners. Numerous comparisons can be made in relation to the two artist-magicians … The most intriguing similarity between the two artists relates to their visionary exploration of magical imagery through techniques of self-hypnosis, and there are several parallels in their personal lives and artistic careers as well. Within their respective individual contexts both Spare and Norton regarded themselves as artistic outsiders, largely alienated from the mainstream cultural trends of the day, and both spent most of their lives in squalid circumstances. Both were skilled figurative artists whose art school training contributed substantially to their graphic style, both exhibited their work extensively in popular meeting places like pubs or coffee shops in order to reach an appreciative audience, and both had a strong love for animals, especially cats. However, there are more specific parallels between Spare and Norton that suggest they should be regarded as visionary artists within the same esoteric genre. As occult practitioners, both considered themselves pantheists; both were well versed in the literature of the Western esoteric tradition, Theosophy, Eastern mysticism, and modern psychoanalysis (especially the works of Freud and Jung); both were attracted to the practice of sex magic and were familiar with the magical writings of Aleister Crowley – Spare knew Crowley personally. Both magicians explored magical grimoires like the Goetia and were fascinated by the sigils or ‘seals’ associated with elemental spirit-beings, and both were familiar with the philosophy and magical significance of the kabbalah. Both artists also developed and utilised their own, personal techniques of self-hypnosis and trance in order to produce their distinctive visionary artworks as a direct result of their magical methods. There is a clear parallel between the trance-based ‘otherworld’ consciousness explored by Norton and the Zos / Kia cosmology of Spare and this in turn draws attention to the unique contributions of the two artist-magicians operating as ‘visionary outsiders’ in the Western magical tradition.

Featuring more than 120 colour and black and white images, fully bound in black leather with gilt title and device and silk bookmark ribbon, and strictly limited to 95 copies numbered by hand, Dark Spirits is Drury’s superb tribute to Norton and Spare.

Although the limited edition of Dark Spirits was originally scheduled to manifest at the time of the Northern Summer Solstice 2012, the publication timeframe has been revised to late August 2012. As we edge closer to publication, updates regarding, and excerpts from, Dark Spirits will appear in later posts.

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