Friday, 7 February 2025
Tom Lehrer is Still Alive - Joan Lennon
Friday, 31 January 2025
The Lesser Key of Solomon ... by Susan Stokes-Chapman
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The Secret Seal of Solomon |
The Lesser Key of Solomon is divided into five books: Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, Ars Notoria. Each detail different aspects of spiritual and supernatural interactions which reflect a blend of medieval demonology, Renaissance angelology, and astrological influences, all of which remained relevant in 18th-century esoteric circles.
Ars Theurgia-Goetia deals with a different class of spirits, often regarded as more neutral than those in the Ars Goetia. The spirits of the Ars Theurgia-Goetia were believed to inhabit the elements and could be summoned for guidance and assistance. While demonologists of the time such as Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672-1757) debated their exact nature, many viewed them as intermediaries between angels and demons.
It was Francis Barrett who became my first occultist inspiration for my sophomore novel THE SHADOW KEY, an idea I'd harboured since 2006. While Francis himself ultimately did not end up in the novel, his own occult text The Magus, (London, 1801) and his references to The Lesser Key of Solomon became imperative to the recasting of the occult aspects of my novel. It led me to creating an 18th century scholar of my own named Julian Tresilian, who has a copy of The Lesser Key of Solomon in his extensive bookcase, and though THE SHADOW KEY is of course fiction, collectors such as he typically had no qualms in keeping the Solomonic volume close at hand. Despite being viewed as a dangerous book of black magic or as a misunderstood spiritual text, its legacy endured throughout the 18th century and beyond; even today, this grimoire continues to inspire literature, art, and popular culture. In the 1700s, as now, the quest for hidden knowledge - whether divine or demonic - remained a powerful force in human history.
Friday, 24 January 2025
Rethinking history with the help of K-drama by Gillian Polack
I started watching K-drama because I realised that, when I watched US, UK, or Australian television or read most books, I sympathised with the hero. This was not because I had anything in common with the hero, or because the hero had earned my sympathies through their charming personality or sad circumstances. Even when the hero was intensely dislikable, I cheered them on. This is one of the results of the cultural acceptance of the chief protagonist as being someone who requires that level of audience support in our society. Because I live in a culture that looks for a hero to be the core of so many stories, I have been trained to support anyone who is positioned in a story as a hero.
My personal likes and dislikes were less important than where the character stood in the narrative. This centrality of the hero and the audience need to cheer them on, and our tendency to (also culturally) only allow some kinds of people – white and male, often young – to take that hero role are two of the reasons I have, myself, written heroes are are not male and white, and who manage illness or disability. Knowing that, why was I unable to stand back and decide, early on in a story, that this hero was hurting everyone around him or that hero should be replaced by another? Why did I fall into the path of cheering these heroes on, regardless?
I knew the theory: that it was the place in the story path the hero took. That I wasn't cheering that hero on, but accepting the validity of that narrative path. Given that the hero was seldom from any background resembling my own, it meant that I gave a privilege to that hero (normally, as I said, white and male and quite young but in many types of story also someone who would celebrate Christmas and who had a British or US accent) that I never give myself. I wanted to know what I was not seeing when I followed the hero’s path and cheered him along.
The hero path in K-drama is very similar to that in US television of related kinds. The stories use similar beats and plot points. The main difference is that the hero in K-drama is Korean, not from particular English-speaking countries. This is not a vast difference, but I did not need a vast difference to start to grapple with why I simply accepted heroes – I just needed to see that whenever I watched a TV show I automatically sympathised with the hero, regardless of whether this was a good idea or not. I needed to be able to choose when I cheered the hero on, and that small cultural distancing (Korean heroes rather than American or British) opened that choice up to me.
Right now, I’m working on both fiction and non-fiction that includes Jewish history in ways we are not used to including them. We have structures for putting Jews in novels, and… I’m breaking those structures. When I began my research (as an historian, initially, and about the same time I started watching K-drama) I saw the use of a set of simple structures informing us that, historically, Jews were mainly money lenders, or were only recent part of European history, or were never fully settled in this place or that, or had earned expulsions, or didn’t exist for hundreds of years in places where they had clearly lived for hundreds before. There were set dates and event by which most popular accounts of Jews in Europe swore as accurate… and very little evidence used to back those opinions. I saw many amazingly good historians simply ignoring European Jews, or giving the same descriptions of European Jewish history and that these same descriptions could be traced back to a single author who themselves had not done any significant research. I saw vast amounts of nineteenth century research ignored. I saw, also, that hate rested comfortably on these same ‘facts’ and narratives. I also saw that most novels reflected this and that Jews were seldom in the novels at all, much less acting as protagonists. The big exception to this was Holocaust novels. It was OK for Jews to be protagonists if they suffered more than any human should have to suffer. This, the fiction and the non-fiction alike, informed the way we see Jews discussed in the press, and in cafes. For me, because I’m Jewish, it’s affected my whole life. Right now, it’s a bit scary to be Jewish in Australia. For twenty-five years I worked with other people to help a whole range of folks to emerge from discrimination and to be treated fairly. I had to leave that environment because of Molotov cocktails and related events. I wrote a little of my experience into The Wizardry of Jewish Women – I was living the history at that point. It’s ironic that what I spent twenty-five years working with others to improve is the exact knowledge I need for my own everyday. This is why I decided to use fraction of my work for the non-fiction book here (with a few modifications, like this sentence) and share it with all of you.
Fiction writers and historians have useful perspectives at times like this and I count myself very fortunate to be both. When I realised that I needed to know why all this was so and what wood we were missing by looking at three trees out of an entire forest ,I had the tools to work it out. At that point K-drama merged with popular history. I went to Germany and, thanks to Deakin University and Heinrich Heine University, was able to spend five weeks asking all the questions. I began climbing out of a deep and unhappy hole.
What did I find out? Some of it was blindingly obvious. For instance, the patterns others see or fail to see rest on certain historical understandings, for instance, which gave Christian dominance over interpretations of the past, or that did not see how who knew whom and how dominates the evidence we have and whose past it actually reveals. For some aspects of history this Christian dominance lay at the heart of how a given historian might interpret Jewish history. In these cases, often the focus is on what happened to Christians, without any questions about whether this applied only to Christians or whether minority cultures and religions were also considered. Then the explanation talked about “history of the Rhineland” for example, when it really should have said “Christian culture in the Rhineland” or “Christian history in the Rhineland.”
Other historians focus on written sources (which is most certainly the simplest approach to our complex pasts) without considering who had access to the culture in these sources. Close-knit Jewish communities were influenced by the work of the rabbis and Talmud scholars. But what of Jewish farmers? What of those working in trade or craft who traveled to other countries and even hallway across the world? What of those Jews who were not literate or who turned up to synagogue but led an everyday life where they did not connect with the learned who give us most of our sources? What of those Jews who do not appear in records of customs and tariffs, of law and of politics?
What
I learned from this was bleedingly obvious: knowledge
is not universal and it is fairer to track it from its source and to
see how it spread than to assume a universal similarity of all lives.
The
concept of a ‘universal Jew’ blinds too many people from seeing
the uniqueness and interest in the personal lives of historical Jews. Just as there is no single model for a hero in real life, Jews are as diverse as other humans. They are simply not often depicted this way in historical fiction.
Inherent in this ‘universal Jew’ and other constructs that blind us from seeing the bleedingly obvious is how culture and knowledge are shared. Who we know matters to how we share culture and how we live our lives now, but it mattered far more before the intense communication we assume is standard today. Even printing and affordable books were not available prior to the latter part of the fifteenth century. K-drama was not available in Australia until the rise of streaming services. If we look at broadsheets and chapbooks from the early sixteenth century we can begin to see shared culture and know that it cut across more boundaries, but even then, most people lived in small communities and only some of these communities are visible to twenty-first century folks. Sharing of knowledge usually operated more like chatrooms that contain a few friends than like social media.
Christian-based sources are those most commonly used to interpret western European history. They influence how we describe Europe’s past in general. The fact that only a part of society had been explained is missing from so much of what we think we know. Did you know, for instance, that Charlemagne’s confessor converted to Judaism but still remained close to Charlemagne? Jews are usually invisible unless there is a pogrom, persecution, or a particularly notable individual that not even Christian-origin sources can ignore. It’s a bit like histories that are all about the doings of the good and great and forget that without peasants, most of the Medieval good and great do not have the income or even the food to do the things they do.Peasants also have interesting lives and also are difficult to find out about.
In some regions of Germany, where the Christian majority excluded the Jewish minority from everything important, it may be that the overall stories we tell of those places are as we read them. However… we cannot assume that this is the case. We cannot assume that the story of any majority culture or dominant gender in any place or time is the story of that place and time.
To return to my hero metaphor, heroes may follow similar paths in story, but that is the path of that type of story. It does not reflect other kinds of stories.
What’s more, the hero’s journey has a very curious and strange relationship to both history and to how we see history.Once upon a time, I attended a workshop at an Arthurian conference: it introduced the hero’s journey. All the key elements of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey were explained in detail. The participants were then given a list of the main attributes of the hero, and the core elements of their journey. The presenter walked us through major heroic characters (King Arthur was his favourite example) and ticked off all the places where the hero’s journey matched the story of Arthur as told by Mallory.
Quietly, I kept my own list. I checked the story of the medieval romance of Alexander, and what we know about the life of Queen Elizabeth I, the life of a famous saint, and two other major historical figures. Between the lecturer’s examples and my own, Elizabeth’s most closely followed the hero’s journey.This is, I suspect, one of the reasons she is so treasured in popular memory. We recognise the path her life followed and transcribe it into popular story.
It’s very difficult to do this for Jewish history, because very few Jewish lives are explained using that standard story. Even when, as with Elizabeth, the way we see a life might match the hero-journey narrative, very few writers or historians choose it for Jewish history or for the lives of historical Jews. We assume that Jewish stories should be told differently, in other words. Our most common stories about Jews are those of Shylock and Fagin and of victims murdered by hate. We carry these stories into our thoughts about the history of Jews. Every time Oliver! is played in Australia, I see an upsurge in antisemitism.
When friends of mine began to explore Jewish everyday life through looking at accounts and charters and many documents that have never been invisible but that were not looked at closely as sources of Jewish history for those places, I began to wonder about whether I needed to challenge my own view of Europe the way I’d challenged my own view of TV heroes.
And so we come full circle. I’m almost at the stage where I can look for a publisher for this book. I have a bunch more understanding of why we’re in such a mess right now, politically and socially. Thank you, K-drama, historical novels and Charlemagne’s confessor.
Friday, 17 January 2025
January Floods by Maggie Brookes
On Boxing Day it was 20 years since the terrible tsunami in the Indian ocean. Remembering our shock on hearing about that disaster, which killed 230,000 people, started me thinking about floods which have happened nearer to home, all of which occurred in January.
It was hardly an exaggeration. The great flood of the 20th Jan 1606 (or 30th January 1607 using the modern calendar) is thought by some to have been a tsunami, though others argue that it was a storm surge. At mid-day, a 'massive hill of sea' swept up the Bristol channel and poured into the low-lying farmland of Somerset and Wales, killing an estimated 2,000 people. About 200 square miles of farmland were destroyed. Whole villages and much livestock (perhaps 'infinite numbers!') were swept away. Puritan pamphleteer William Jones described the scene: 'so violent and swift were the outragiouse waves, that ... in lesse then five houres ... many hundreds of people both men women, and children were then quite devoured.'
Where they could, people climbed trees, ' Many there were which fled into the tops of high trees, and there were inforced to abide some three daies, some more, and some lesse, without any victuals at all, there suffring much colde besides many other calamities, and...through ever much hunger and cold, some of them fell down againe out of the Trees, and so were like to perish for want of succour...'
'... Othersame, sate in the tops of high Trees as aforesaid, beholding their wives, children, and servants, swimming (remediles of all succour) in the Waters. Other some sitting in the tops of Trees might behold their houses overflowne with the waters. some their houses caryed quite away: and no signe or token left there of them.'
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Plaque in Kingston Seamore Church, Somerset. |
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Hallsands in 1885, before the flood |
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The remains of Hallsands village |
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The ruined village of Hallsands (sea level) |
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Tide level at Tate gallery. |
Part of the problem was a lack of communication. When a high tide occurred at Kings Lynn, killing 36 people, it was assumed to be a local event, and no warnings were issued down the coast and more than 60 people died some hours later on Canvey Island. If they'd been warned, there would have been enough time to evacuate them. More than 900 miles of coastline were damaged at a total cost estimated at £50 million. But there was incredible bravery too. Four men were given the George medal for their courage in wading into the waters and rescuing people.
Following the 1953 storm, coastal defences were improved right along our North Sea coasts and a Storm Tide Warning service was created. But some people remained homeless for a long time. In March 1953 108 families were moved into these caravans in Harwich, where they lived until December 1954.
Maggie Brookes, novelist and poet. Author of historical novels The Prisoner's Wife and Acts of Love and War. As Maggie Brookes-Butt: Wish, New and Selected Poems, published January 27th 2025.
Instagram: Maggie __Brookes
Friday, 10 January 2025
Mattia Preti: Italian Baroque Artist by Kathryn Gauci
Mattia Preti: Italian Baroque Artist by Kathryn Gauci
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Having recently returned from Malta, I was inspired the work of Mattia Preti (24 February 1613 – 3 January 1699) whose art illustrates the exuberant style of the late Baroque. He was such a prolific artist and his work defines St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. Preti was born in the small town of Taverna in Calabria, Italy. He is called Il Cavalier Calabrese (the Calabrian Knight) after his appointment as a Knight of the Order of St. John (Knights of Malta) in 1660. His apprenticeship is said to have been with Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, a follower of Caravaggio. Sometime before 1630, he joined his brother Gregorio (also a painter), in Rome where he became familiar with the techniques of Caravaggio and his school as well as with the work of other masters at the time such as Rubens, Guido Reni, Giovanni Lanfranco, and other notable artists of the day.
In Rome, he painted fresco cycles in the Saint’Andrea della Valle and San Carlo ai Catinari Between 1644 and 1646, he spent time in Venice but remained based in Rome until 1653, returning later in 1660–61. He also painted frescoes for the church of San Biagio at Modena (1651–2) and participated in the fresco decoration of Palazzo Pamphilj in Valmontone (1660–61)
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Allegoria dell’Aria. Palazzo Pamphilj in Valmontone |
During most of 1653–1660, Preti worked in Naples and was influenced by another prominent painter of his era, Luca Giordano. His major works include a series of large fresco ex-votos depicting the Virgin or saints delivering people from the plague, which were painted on seven city gates and are now lost - two sketches for them are in the museum in Naples, including a bozzetto of the Virgin with the baby Jesus looming over the dying and their burial parties which envisions a Last Judgement presided over by a woman. Preti also won a commission to supervise the construction, carving, and gilding for the nave and transept of San Pietro a Maiella, along with producing a Judith and Holofernes and Saint John the Baptist, both still in Naples
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Saint Veronica with the Veil |
Such religious themes were prevalent in strong catholic countries like Italy and Malta at the time, and as a consequence he was made a Knight of Grace in the Order of St John when he visited the Order's headquarters in Malta in 1659. Preti was to spend most of the remainder of his life there. He was commissioned to paint the entire barrel-vaulted ceiling of St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta and transformed it into a luminous, airy space filled with angels and saints, together with a huge series of paintings on the life and martyrdom of St John the Baptist (1661–1666). His work displays the dramatic chiaroscuro – a feature that defines this period – with the colours of the Venetian and Neapolitan tradition.
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Ceiling in St John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta |
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Altarpiece. Cathedral. |
His work in the cathedral also has an unusual technique – oil on stone – and his scenes portray an immense vigour and dynamic power, almost unparalleled, even in Italy in the second half of the 17th-Century. He used quick, zigzag brush strokes and never made preparatory drawings, preferring to go over his work to correct it.
Preti certainly must have impressed his patrons so much that he was also given the task of designing the rich, gold decorations on the walls, along with several paintings in the Oratory where we see Caravaggio’s masterpiece, The Beheading of St John the Baptist.
Saint George and the Dragon - Chapel of the Tongue of Aragon, Catalonia and Navarre, Co-Cathedral of St. John, Valletta, Malta |
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Preti's largest painting in Malta in the Church of St Lawrence, Vittoriosa, is being restored thanks to BOV - the bank of Valletta. |
In his forty years in Malta, Preti left an impressive four hundred works. He not only painted for the Order, but for parish churches in the local communities too, leaving these small villages and hamlets with priceless works of arts. Other paintings are in private collections. His increased reputation led to an expanded circle of patrons, and he received commissions from all over Europe. Preti enjoyed a long career with a considerable artistic output. His paintings are held by many great museums, including important collections in Naples, Valletta, Palermo, and his hometown of Taverna in Calabria.
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Calling the Apostle Matthew c. 1630-1640, 104 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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The Concert 1630 The Hermitage Museum. |
Mattia Preti is buried in the Co-Cathedral in a magnificent vault alongside other Knights of the Order.