Eight fascinating topics that should be in the next Dan Brown book

Dan Brown and his publishers have released a limited amount of information about his upcoming novel Inferno, most notably that it will be set in the Italian city of Florence, and that it will involve one of the great pieces of literature, the Inferno by Dante Alighieri (the first part of his Divine Comedy). Florence is a fantastic location for a novel: Dante, Michelangelo, Galileo, da Vinci and Machiavelli all hailed from the city, and as the 'birthplace of the Renaissance' under the patronage of the Medici family, it is filled with architectural and artistic treasures. But beyond some of the obvious locations, such as the great cathedral that dominates the city sky-line, the Duomo, a little detective work can unveil some other fantastic elements that would make great topics to explore in a Brownian type novel. I've done exactly that in my ebook, Inside Dan Brown's Inferno, from which I've selected just eight topics below that I think Dan Brown will likely feature in his book – if he doesn't, you'd almost have to feel that he hasn't done his homework…

Galileo's Fingers

Dan Brown's novels are often seen as 'giving the bird' to the Catholic Church, and in Inferno he has the opportunity to use the middle finger of one of the greatest scientists in history. If Dan Brown's main character Robert Langdon ends up at the Galileo Museum, bordering the Arno River, he could point out a number of historical treasures, including Galileo's telescope, through which the genius Florentine discovered the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, both of which offered support for the (at the time) heretical Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun. But perhaps more fitting of a Dan Brown novel are the three fingers of the great man, preserved within elegant egg-shaped glass containers, that are on display in the museum. Will Galileo point the way for Langdon to solve a puzzle?

Sacred Geometry

The publication date for Dan Brown's Inferno is May 14, 2013, or 5.14.13. Turn that around, and you get 3.14.15, the first five digits of pi.* Add to that the fact that a cryptic clue on Dan Brown's website is comprised of the words 'Tarty Sect' and we definitely start wondering whether Pythagoras and sacred geometry are going to feature in some way: 'Tarty Sect' could be rewritten Pie Sect, a pun suggesting the Pythagorean cult, and what's more 'Tarty Sect' is an anagram of 'Tectractys' - the symbol of the Pythagoreans, a triangle made of subsequent lines of 1 point, 2 points, 3 points and 4 points.* A number of the great Renaissance minds of Florence held Pythagoras in great esteem, so there's definitely a link worth exploiting there for Dan Brown. Additionally, the number 33, often linked to the Pythagoreans, ... Read More »

Apocalyptic Witchcraft by Peter Grey (Scarlet Imprint, 2013.)

In recent years, the Scarlet Imprint press has staked a valid claim for being one of the most significant modern occult publishing imprints. Their reputation for challenging, passionate and exquisitely crafted books is well-deserved. Of these, perhaps the most impactful was their founder Peter Grey’s work The Red Goddess - a personal, heartfelt, deeply-researched and truly magical work about the origin, worship and power of the whore-goddess known as Babalon. It’s one of my favourite magical texts of all time - and so getting a copy of Grey’s second book Apocalyptic Witchcraft was something I looked forward to.

It’s certainly as passionate, literate, sincere and powerful a book as The Red Goddess... but overall, I have reservations.

First, as to the physical book itself: I bought the Of The Doves regular edition (cloth-bound, archive-grade paper, limited numbered edition of 1000, £40) as the £200 for the no-doubt gorgeous Of The Crows version (Moroccan leather, edition of 81) was out of my price range, and I wasn’t prepared to wait for the coming-soon paperback or ebook. And it’s lovely - a striking cover design of flocking doves revealing the face of the Devil in relief. Sadly, the pure white doves soon became black-speckled due to colour flaking within a few days of receipt, and that the cover (perhaps aptly, given the subject matter) is a veritable magnet to cat hair! Also, I noticed quite a few typos in the text.

(I must note here that Scarlet Imprint took impressively swift action when they heard about the cover flaking issue, which was not isolated to my copy. The issued an immediate explanation and apology and sent free dust covers to anyone who wanted one.)

The book itself is not a sequel to The Red Goddess as such - Grey calls it "its secret heart." He also calls it a polemic, which it certainly is. Grey’s stated intention is to find a new interpretation of witchcraft as both a concept and a practice, in the face of the turmoil and natural disruption of the modern world.

On the very first page, Grey says;

This is a perilous book, and one that does not aim to please.

This is certainly true. Grey sets out to explicate a perspective on the familiar symbols and stories of witchcraft in the West which has little truck with the formalities of scholarship, the sensibilities of the Wiccan paths or the white-light Newage perspective. His is a witchcraft both messy and impudent, one that stinks of mud, blood and spunk - in a good way. One where the oft-ignored or sidelined aspects - the legends of human sacrifice, poisons, curses and The Devil Himself - are both represented and, on some level, embraced.

Within its sixteen chapters, Grey sets out a poetic history/mythology of the witch as outsider, mirror and opponent to the status quo... and poetry forms the heart of its telling. He draws heavily here from the works of Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle (whose remarkable books The Wise Wound and The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense are far too often neglected) and, especially, Ted Hughes. He also intersperses the text with ten poems in praise of Inanna, whose worship is both his deep personal work and whose archetype his nominee for the prime ancestor of the witch Goddess.

The majority of these chapters focus on various parts of the witchcraft myth - the Devil, the Sabbat, the Wolf, child sacrifice - and reinterprets these with a piercing combination of deep research and personal gnosis. The overall effect is of a coherent new version of the story of witchcraft - as Grey puts it;

"What I am describing is an ideal abstraction, a myth which is within my remit as a storyteller."

One chapter which especially moved and interested me is Grey telling of his visit to the Greek isle of Patmos, and his entering the tiny cave where the Apocalypse of Saint John was written. His encounter with the spirit of that place, and his sense of the perspective John may have brought to his end-times vision, felt weighted with purpose.

For, make no mistake, Grey has a purpose. He sets out clearly his feeling that witchcraft is a necessary, and Goddess-blessed, opposition to the forces which have poisoned Nature and caused the turmoil of the modern world. He sets his response out clearly, in his 33-statement Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft (in Chapter 2) and many times in the text - this is a War, and the enemy the hierarchies and technologies of our modern world.

His later chapters reinforce the proposition made in The Red Goddess, that the primary Goddess of witchcraft, and the direct source of the entity now named Babalon, is the Babylonian deity Inanna - a proposition I have no problem with at all. (The chapters on this are best read in conjunction with this article by his partner Alkistis Dimech, especially in reference to the other-world or kur which is Her realm - and which bears to my eyes a striking resemblance to Alan Moore’s theories about Idea-Space.)

The book ends with providing a working perspective for the reader who wishes to take the model presented into personal praxis. Grey is smart enough to eschew the idea of forming a new cult or religion - rather, he provides a set of tools and perspectives, combined with a small but potent symbol-set for an Apocalyptic Witch to use.

I have no doubt that this book will inspire many, will possibly be for some that book - the one which shifts their perspective, forms the new core of their belief.

But not for me.

Grey specifically rejects the modern world many times in the text, treating it solely as a blight and a defilement of Nature Herself. He says, for example, that in order to fully free one's dreaming potential,

…get rid of your television. Next step, delete yourself from the digital.

Later, he refers to

...the myth of myths, that of the healing quest, which is in direct conflict with technology and Christianity which only destroy
(emphasis mine)

...and then quotes favourably from perhaps our most notorious living Luddite, Ted Kaczynski.

To my mind, and from my perspective, Grey seems to be simplifying the problems of modernity in a needlessly dualistic fashion, fleeing, Future-Shocked, to a mythic, simpler past - despite his own insistence that

Witchcraft is meaningless if we use it to retreat into an imagined past and play at being the very different people who inhabited it.

Grey clearly has his biases: the rural over the urban, the poem over the comic book. But there’s a difference between following the path one’s perspective sets and ignoring the consequences of privileging them above all other perspectives.

There’s also a tendency for Grey’s thought to be restricted to simple dualism - male and female, war and peace, nature and artifice - which leaves out the excluded middle. It also tends to push aside the gay & bisexual, the trans* and many others who don’t fit the tribal structure he espouses. (Grey does refer to “the queer” as fellow-travellers a couple of times, but the male/penetrating, female/menstruating deep symbolism he considers the root of witchcraft leaves little room for them within his system.) Grey’s only methods of dealing with these dualisms are by either opposition or simple inversion - a system of black and white solutions, aching for some colour, for the possibility of resolution.

To be sure, there are many aspects of modern life which are in need of criticism, are problematic, even toxic - but in my view, any solution to these wicked problems must also be complex, considered and respectful of the lives of those involved.

I cannot help but think; just how much technology is Grey willing to lose to see his vision enacted? For, make no doubt, the cost of dropping the modern world back to anything close to the pre-agricultural level Grey seems to wish for would be the deaths of billions.

I have my biases too. I’m an urban kid, a Cunning Man self-raised with fiction, Forteana, comics and movies and the telly. I live in this world and, though I dream of a better one, it’s not one of the past. My magic embraces the modern, the digital, the connected. My hero figure is not the poet, but the cyborg, the Technomage. Grey’s witchcraft specifically rejects me and my kind... but I worship that same Whore-Goddess. And I also see her as Inanna; but I see the one who descended to the Underworld to bring back the me, the techne... the mental technologies that the first city sprang from and are her power as the Goddess of Cities. And, generally, whores are not noted for their rejection of artifice...

...and, like another urban working class magician, I do not reject artifice either - and I see our times not as a war, but a rescue mission.

This is a challenging and significant book - and for all that I reject its core premise, there is much of note here and I have no regrets about reading it.

EDIT:
As this went to post, I found my colleague and fellow Grinder Damien Williams had posted a very timely piece at The Breaking Time of the problems inherent with violent opposition to the modern technological state. It fits here nicely.

This week saw an online shouting match erupt between entrepreneur Elon Musk and the New York Times, in the wake of that publication's negative review of the Tesla Model S electric car. In a number of back and forth blog posts and Twitter statements, both sides in the argument posted their claim to the moral high ground. But the interesting part for me, watching on, was how those arguments filtered out to, and were represented by, the general public. People I follow on Twitter who are generally left-leaning in their politics would retweet Musk's statements only, sometimes throwing in some words of support. Right-leaning folk, on the other hand, covered only the NYT's side of the story, sometimes with the addition of pointed barbs at Musk's expense.

It was a perfect example of the ways in which we continually reinforce our own beliefs and biases, by selecting/trusting sources that confirm them, and discarding or disparaging those that undercut their foundations. It's a topic that has fascinating me personally throughout my life, and one that has now been explored beautifully by journalist Will Storr in his newly-released book The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science. In the book, the well-traveled British journalist goes in search of an answer to why people can believe strange - sometimes outrageously strange - things without batting an eyelid.

Storr is no stranger to adventures with outliers - his previous book, Will Storr vs the Supernatural, had him hanging out with paranormal investigators and demonologists as they went about their (rather odd) business. The Heretics is written in a similar, gonzo journalist manner, allowing Storr to place the reader in the room with these 'fascinating' (a catch-all I'm using to describe everything from intriguing to downright dangerous) people, to hear their opinions from their own mouths, and have Storr ask them the questions that are on the lips of us all as we read along.

The Heretics moves beyond the supernatural topic of the last book to encompass all manner of modern-day heresy:

In his fantastic new book on the British band The KLF, KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money (available from Amazon US, and Amazon UK), J.M.R. Higgs notes that "synchronicities seem to prefer some stories more than others, and this is one that they flock to." As if to emphasise the point, I asked Higgs earlier this week if I could reprint (on the Friday release date) some of the material from the book about coincidences involving The KLF and the legendary British sci-fi series Doctor Who, as I thought readers would enjoy it. I didn't realise when I asked this that Friday was the 49th anniversary of the first airing of Doctor Who…

I should have been aware of this though, because in the book Higgs mentions that November 22-23 is somewhat of a temporal confluence for a number of the historical tributaries that his book explores in mapping the career of the KLF. Not only the Doctor Who anniversary, but also November 23rd is a 'holy day' for Discordians, being the birthday of Harpo Marx, and the 22nd was the day that JFK was assassinated (an event whose coincidental links to Discordianism are worthy of a complete book themselves).

The KLF's main link to Doctor Who is a fairly obvious one: they had their first hit single (selling a million plus copies) under the name 'The Timelords', with the novelty single "Doctorin' The Tardis" (video above). But the story begins much earlier, with the respective encounters the two members of The KLF, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, had with Robert Anton Wilson's Discordian classic, Illuminatus!, in particular a certain stage version. In 1976 the British actor/director Ken Campbell adapted Illuminatus! after coming across the book in an esoteric bookshop in Camden. He cast Bill Nighy in the play after bumping into the well-known actor in a pub, as Nighy was toting a copy of the book himself, as well as other (now) big-name actors such as Jim Broadbent.

Bill Drummond himself was intimately involved in the production, being hired to produce the sets for the show. This was no easy task, because Campbell was asking for something off the chart. But, in the words of Bill Nighy, "f**k me, did he deliver!". Higgs explains:

Drummond's solution was to build the sets in strange scales, utilising tricks such as foreshortening and strange angles, all of which perfectly suited the disorienting style of the play. Tables or beds were stood upwards and stuck to the rear wall, giving the audience the impression that they were looking down on the action from the ceiling. Given the seemingly contradictory scales of the story and the cafe stage, Drummond took Campbell's advice, assumed that the impossible would be possible, and just knuckled down and did it.

The success of Campbell's play led to a sold-out run at the National Theatre in London, though Drummond was no longer a part of the show. After completing the construction of his 'impossible' sets, shortly before the premiere he announced that he was popping out to get some glue, and never returned. But among the audience watching the show in London was a young Jimmy Cauty, the other half of the (future) KLF.

These earlier chance encounters came together a decade later, when actors were being short-listed to replace the sixth Doctor, Colin Baker in a time of crisis for Doctor Who:

It is here that our Discordian threads return to the show. A number of actors were auditioned to replace Baker, but it very quickly came down to a choice between two: our good friend Ken Campbell, and Sylvester McCoy (whose first job in showbiz involved sticking ferrets down his trousers as part of the Ken Campbell Road Show.) Campbell auditioned by performing a speech about the nature of time modelled on Alan Moore's Dr. Manhattan character, wearing a long coat, sleeveless cartoon t-shirt and wide-brimmed hat. The producer thought that he was too weird, an opinion probably enforced by the strange message that had been left on the answer phone the previous day and which he suspected was from Campbell. The message was actually a quote from Charles Fort's book Lo!, and begins 'A naked man in a city street – the track of a horse in volcanic mud – the mystery of the reindeer's ears – a huge, black form, like a whale, in the sky, and it drips red drops as if attacked by celestial swordfishes – an appalling cherub appears in the sea – Confusions.'

The production team were unaware that this quote was Campbell's personal mantra, which he would recite in the wings before any performance as a centring exercise, and finding it on the answering machine was deeply unsettling.

As McCoy remembers, "the executive producer of the BBC Series and Serials wanted Ken, but the producer of Doctor Who wanted me, and his argument was that he thought Ken would frighten the children, and I think he was right. The producer in fact threatened to resign if Ken got the job. So I got it."

Campbell may have been too weird for Doctor Who, but that didn't mean our Discordian synchronicities would leave the show behind. With the money they made from their Doctor Who record Drummond and Cauty made a film called The White Room, as will be discussed later. There was one major role in the film that required a 'name' actor, and for this role they cast Paul McGann, then well known for his roles in the The Monocled Mutineer and Withnail and I. A few years after this McGann took over from Sylvester McCoy and became the eighth Doctor Who. There was only one person in the entire world who would be cast as the next Doctor Who, and for Drummond and Cauty to select that very same man for their Doctor Who-funded film is…well, the odds are pretty high. Clearly this is a story that the synchronicities can't get enough of.

But beyond exploring the many funny coincidences that occur throughout the story of The KLF (such as Drummond and Robert Anton Wilson both having 'encounters' with a giant invisible rabbit spirit, as well as a link to the movie about a giant rabbit spirit, Donnie Darko), Higgs also has some wonderful discussion of Alan Moore's notion of 'Ideaspace', and the evolution of Doctor Who as the product of many creative minds. ... Read More »