‘Nazarth: Pillars of Gladness’ by Alexander Cummins
Review: Alexander Cummins, Nazarth: Pillars of Gladness, or, A Geomancer’s Angelical Psalter of Calls, containing vessels 19 with which to water the Earth, West Yorkshire: Hadean Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781914166440
Nazarth: The Pillars of Gladness is described by its author Dr. Alexander Cummins, as “A Geomancer’s Angelical Psalter.” What does this mean? Is our academically trained historian and occult practitioner just stringing together fancy words? Is it some kind of pseudo-religious aid to liturgy in the form of this pocketbook-sized volume? Or somehow involving the spirits that Dee and Kelly called angels? Some sort of Enochian order of service in the peculiar Anglo-Catholic High Church-cum-Folk Magic tradition of the British Christian milieu?
What is he even doing?
Dear reader, it’s difficult to state an answer baldly without seeming to confine this lovely book to a dry description. Dryness is certainly not what seems to be desired by “the delivering angels [who] consider the Angelical tongue – and its formulated calls – as both water and the vessels by which to hold and pour forth.” (p.8) As the author points out, the Archangel Raphael, Healer of God, who supposedly taught Dee the tongue, refers to the knowledge of Enochian as an elixir.
So, let us get this out of the way: Enochian arises from spirit contact. Whether these spirits are ‘“true” angels in the Christian sense, or tricksy spirits messing with credulous magicians, or even manipulative scryers taking advantage of an upper-class patron isn’t particularly germane to this review. This book takes its title from a versicle of the Fifth Enochian key, and each of the nineteen pieces contains a page of Enochian script, a transliteration into Latin alphabet, and then an English translation, coming to 96 pages. Included in these pages is the introduction by Dr. Cummins. It is this introduction which frankly excited and scratched several itches of this reviewer – who was, it must be admitted, cautious over reviewing a text when he is no sort of scholar of Enochian, or anything other than a sometime practitioner of Geomancy.
I went back and forth on how I was going to approach this: Having watched Hadean Press’ promotional video for the book after the review request, I wondered what I was getting into. After all, Paralibrum prides itself ongoing beyond the book, by having reviewers who know of what they write, to perhaps provide another angle of experience. When it finally arrived, I took the small volume in hand and the first thing I noticed was the wonderful texture of the cover; soft suede and velvety to the touch, bearing the silvery artwork created by S. Aldarnay, with its nineteen vessels ready to pour.
Reader, we all know the wonders of new-book smell, but there is something about this one that smelt different to me. As I opened the covers, I became aware that I was having an aesthetic experience. Now, I’m no naïf, to go weak at the knees at mere aesthesis. The occult publishing market is well known for producing absolutely beautiful books, after all. But as I began this little book, I felt I was holding something special in this hardback. As I read and came across the reference to it as a psalter, I stopped dead.
Once, long ago, you see, I was a choirboy. Then, I held a lovely but functional psalter, and sang the Psalms. In doing so, I was taking part in a tradition which had existed for thousands of years, raising my voice to call out the words mythically attributed to David. Harpist, giant-slayer, adulterer, King and servant to his God. While modern scholarship disputes this frame, instead attributing the texts to various authors between the fifth and ninth centuries BCE, the fact remains that the Psalms are the words to the instrumental music which lifts the heart and mind, the awareness of divinity, if you like. They are poems designed to evoke and recount those things described; to call and bring them forth as recitations, but also as manifestations brought forth every time they are performed. There have been plenty of books, writings, and practices discussed in many other places about the magical uses of the Psalms – all easily discoverable by a few minutes’ focused internet search – so we shall not dive into that with both feet here.
Suffice to say that the Psalms have been used magically for several centuries at the very least. That Dr. Cummins has consciously used the term is telling, as is the first line of the book:
Poetry requires no explanation, and these calls will speak for themselves with tongues ag cormpo, “which none hath yet numbered.” (p.1)
I should like to add to the author’s conjuring here: Poetry requires no explanation, except itself. That is, poetry-as-act is enough, a self-sufficient worlding which conjures-as-needful. What do I mean by this? Quite simply, that poetry is an expression that brings-a-world-with it. Any metaphor implies an entire universe. To quote Carl Sagan: “To bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Indeed, the fact that poetry is conjuring can be easily illustrated etymologically, given that the word comes from the Latin coniurare, which is translated as to swear together or conspire.
The driest form of description of this book would be “a book of Enochian poetry related to the geomantic figures”. But, as we have said, this is a book of water, and thus we must dive deeper yet. So, down we go.
Is it possible to hold one’s breath when we swim in such waters? I would argue not – and do so once again on etymological grounds, for conspiring requires a sharing of breath. All speech acts, all languages, are conspiracies – whether they be secret or public. They all require a “True and Faithful Relation”, if you will excuse the pun, based on the opening epigraph from Causabon’s 1659 text.
So, we must learn to breathe these waters then, to come to terms with their relationalities, and how they relate to us. This is the heart, after all, of geomancy – all the figures relate to each other. They do not exist alone, any more than any metaphor in a poem exists alone. Cummins is explicit in this:
Prayers and other divinely-charged magical speech acts are poetries of the numinous articulated into, out of, and simply as the world. And to consider speaking-the-world and worlding-speech is of course, also to consider divining. (p. 3)
This divining is at the heart of geomancy and other systems – and it is directly akin to manteia as an oracle, divination, from mantis as one who divines, a seer, prophet, one touched by divine madness, which again derives frommainesthai, to be inspired, which is related to menos, passion, spirit (from PIE *mnyo-, suffixed form of root *men- to think, with derivatives referring to qualities and states of mind or thought).
The oracular is, in a sense, a speaking of, with, and into relation rather than prediction, a kind of second-sight, or heterodox perception which renders the experiential quality of the mantis into that of divinity. So, when it is argued that Enochian is Adamical, or pre-lapsarian, it is not simply an ur-speech, or seeing with a God’s-eye view. Rather, its apparent universality is not to suggest that the calls given to Dee and Kelly are literally what is linguistically “readable” by all Creation in the sense of “sameness” or even a lingua franca, but that it allows experiential responsiveness.
So, the standard notion of divination as “seeing the future”, is rather the ability to trace-and-participate-in the relations of all Creation, thereby to discover what might be commonly considered a revelation. By revelation I refer to the notion of revealing, or uncovering – the rendering of what was previously present but occulted and imperceptible in ordinary experience. It is perfectly possible to “see” how assemblages are relating to each other and speak-to-them-while-being-spoken-to, in order to discover how they may be in differing conditions. This is the Adamical Naming; it is not a “trussing togethe” (p.1) in the sense of binding, or limitation. Adam is not laying a yoke of restriction, distinction, or separation upon all things. This is not a top-down enforcement hierarchy as some Christians may believe – indeed, as Cummins recounts, Gabriel tells Dee this explicitly, in saying that Adam:
[N]ot only did know all things under his Creation and spoke of them properly, naming them as they were, but also was a partaker of our presence and society, yea a speaker of the mysteries of God, yea, with God Himself. (p.2)
Consider this deeply for a second: Adam spoke of them properly, naming them as they were. As he spoke, he did so with the angels and God. Nor does Gabriel imply that Adam chose those names – only that he spoke of them properly. We might argue that Creation in all its multiplicity related-itself to Adam, that it/they spoke of, and with, and in him, conspiring together to conjure, to swear, to bring forth that relationality through oracular speech.
Could we argue then, that Adam is the first poet? The breath of God enlivening the earth itself, to speak-with and conjure-with all Creation itself? Is it any wonder that this speech is called Enochian – Adam’s descendant and angelic communicator to Moses?
Cummins makes it quite clear that Geomancy is about relationality, not mere static ideas of pattern recognition:
Geomancy […] rather directly charts the inter-relational alchemies of these lots of fate’s interactional syntheses […]. These are the empiricisms of energetic exchanges – simply how these patterns play out – mapped in the singled and doubled starry points of the earth that make up geomancy’s sixteen-fold conceptions and articulations of the cosmos and its unfoldings. (p.4)
Manteia then, is the participatory bringing-forth-and-with of these patterns. But this is not passive, instead it is an exercise in responsivity, for the mantis cannot speak without being spoken-of, or, more properly, the act of divination is not “from outside”, instead, it is deeply embedded amidst the “presence and society” of spirits. That is, it is impossible to be a passive reading, since it is also we who are read-with.
This may seem strange, but as Cummins elucidates:
In understanding the arising and affectivity of the [geomantic] figures, we may not only chart transfigurations, but actually shepherd intentional changes through operational changes through operative geomantic sorcery […]. For from these forms – these haunted doorways of possibility and the sigil nets that bind what is called forth from them – what new coherences of reality may be ushered forth? (p.5)
Nor is the author a stranger to such things: Dr. Cummins is an academic expert in the occult philosophy and practical magical applications of humoral theory and early modern sorcerous approaches to the passions. Far from being solely a “primitive” attempt at medicine, humoral theory and practice is the study of the interrelation of the humoral presences and potentialities within the human body, the world, and the cosmos at large.
Considering this it becomes obvious that our recent ancestors understood relationality as essential and were deeply conscious of the patterns of call and response, pathicity, and wholeness in a way we might find strange in today’s industrial, extractive world. Eschewing any particular emanationist cosmology as Cummins does, we find again and again a kind of living embeddedness previously only thought to exist in exoticised, othered, or indigenous cultures which continue to survive the ravages of extractivist colonialism.
To perceive the cosmos as a living web of constantly relating, inter and intra-acting in pulsing, rhythmic call and response, we find ourselves consistently considering our own position. Often, we end up not realising that we are already embedded and enmeshed within it. In a sense, this is the myth of disenchantment which makes us pine for a pre-lapsarian Eden; a time when we were more “in tune” or “connected” with the world.
It is perhaps ironic that John Dee was the man said to have coined the term The British Empire. One of the key colonial industrialisers and committer of crimes against indigenous peoples – many of whom perceived (and still perceive) that ecological, social, material, and spiritual embeddedness – was given the bare bones of the Angelical tongue. For bare they are. And however they were received, what Dr. Cummins has given us here is, quite precisely, a psalter which allows us to once again enflesh them – to water the dry bones with divine speech.
One might argue that this was absolutely necessary. That in order to have their embeddedness revealed, a practitioner of Enochian might need to study the occulted nature of that tongue in in order bring forth the poetic calls necessary to rediscover and re-cognise (to think, to mentate again) their own position. As such, the healing elixir spoken of by Raphael is that which nourishes the practitioner, restoring their faculty for inspired relation with and through the world.
That the calls Cummins presents us with have repetitions and recurring turns of phrase is no coincidence. Poetry often has as much rhythm as music and ritual, and yet as I outlined in a previous review, these repetitions are not actually identical repeats, but are part of a participatory inter-relation and lineage. Indeed, language and stories are never repeated, though they may re-occur again and again.
Even if I were to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary aloud a hundred times, each repetition would not be the same due to the others in the world. Time will have passed, bodies moved. Bacteria will have eaten and excreted internally and externally; the world outside my window will be different, the sun may be higher or lower, the hour more or less conducive to particular action.
The recurring refrains are prime elements in the conspiracy of shared-breath I mentioned earlier. They are meeting points, coalescences and gathering places for seemingly disparate presences – think of how a group may utter a refrain in unison during a period of call-and-response. These portions then, are points at which influences may gather, intimately related to the geomantic figures which are called and expressed through the angelical calls.
As Cummins suggests, the calls and figures as a whole might be deployed for various sorcerous reasons. Yet if there is one thing that remains constant with poetry, it is the ardency with which it is performed that makes it so evocative – even spoken softly, gently, soothingly, in tones of intimacy and friendship, there must be enthusiasm. Like Adam, we must embrace entheos, the society and presence of the divine.
That there is a call for each geomantic figure in this psalter makes obvious sense for each figure can be encountered as a manifestation of the whole – its individual meaning formed from-and-with the others. So, each call, each psalm, each poem also calls forth the Adamic in the practitioner. Eden never went away, in a sense. Our role as living embodiment of our ancestors renders us glad amongst the company of angels, once again realising our place amongst the poetry of creation. That the good doctor Cummins has brought us bones to sing with is a deeply kind act– and indeed demonstrates that the supposed line between Dee and Kelly being magi on one hand and charlatans on the other may be of less import than most presume – particularly if we think of David’s antics.
So, the question is, as ever, who and what are we? I’m not so fond of angels, but in my view, Nazarth could get you singing, if you let it.