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I heard an interview with Ramsey Dukes last week on the Strange Attractor show on the excellent Resonance FM. It inspired me to pull my copies of his books off my shelf, including a copy of Thudersqueak which (much to my shame) has been languishing unread since I picked it up second hand a year or two ago. I cracked the cover and have been gulping it whole over the last two days and this thread is to spread my enthusiasm. Why haven’t I read this before? There’s ten times more imagination in a single page of this book than most of the tedious tomes of occult dreck that befoul the bookstores. It’s an uncategorisible book, in that it isn’t really your stereotyped “occult” book at all – the subtitle is “Confessions of a Right Wing Anarchist” and it touches on politics, economics and science (amongst other things), all with a light-heartedness which serves to deflate the pomposity of these disciplines' defenders - thus it’s perhaps a lot more “chaotic” than most of the Chaos manuals on the market.
He does in fact bear some indirect responsibility for the Chaos current. He published he influential SSOTBME (Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed!) in the late seventies, as well as the essay “Spare Parts” back in 1972. Although I wasn’t much more than a zygote at that time, I imagine that the latter helped to stimulate the revival of interest in Spare that eventually led to Chaos magic.
I think he‘s a hugely under-rated author – possibly because people like their occultism bite sized, easily digestible, and don’t like having to think and there aren’t any programmes of exercises or promises of easy power and quick enlightenment in his books. Neither do his books hide in the shadow of things cold, mysterious and black, so they won’t get you off with goth chicks (unless they’re particularly cool goth chicks) – he’s much more like your genial eccentric uncle than a rock hard black magician. Very "English" as well, in that quietly bonkers way we're so good at - I had images of vicars sipping tea, cricket matches on the village green, and so on come to mind while reading the book.
He strikes me as someone who’s really internalised the ideas of Austin Spare – in particular, the “neither-neither”, the smashing of opposing ideas against each other repeatedly until you come up with something new. And rather than simply repeat or try to re-flog Spare’s ideas he’s taken them and done something new. And also - perhaps most importantly, he’s really bloody funny.
So, anyone else read his stuff? If not, why not? Remedy the situation immediately. Any thoughts, comments and so forth? |
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