A couple of weeks ago the UK’s shores were invaded by a horde of Americans. Not only did we have the awesome Rev. Billy from the Church of Stop-Shopping.; but we also harboured a couple of stooges…of the occult. On the final day of their visit, accompanied by myself, our friend from Occulture: Kev, and fearless documenter (and girlfriend to Austin) Katie; we ventured into the very bowels of HELL!!…sort of. The Hell-Fire Caves were once the orgy-soaked, devil-worshipping digs of the infamous ‘Hellfire Club‘. Nowadays, even the lowliest of strangers and travellers can walk their halls, marvel at the strange symbols on the walls, and of course…eat their sandwiches! mwa hahaha…wait…what?? Austin Gandy reports from the scene:

Foiled!

Foiled!

We banged on the door of St. Lawrence’s Church for over a minute, but the vicar never came. Given the status of England’s churches as largely historical curiosities, I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised. Ken, our guide for the day, had gotten our hopes up with descriptions of a dimly-lit cloister adorned with mysterious masonic symbols, and I had played out a whole adventure in my head wherein we would decipher the cryptic emblems and discover the location of a hidden treasure that would make Dan Brown shit his pants. It was not to be. The vicar was out to lunch.

We consoled ourselves by wandering the grounds. Ken and I smoked a cigarette in consternation. Katie wandered wistfully among the tombstones in her black dress and Hepburn sunglasses, her tragic demeanor offset only slightly by the Diet Coke clutched in her pale hand. We circled the mausoleum of Sir Francis Dashwood that you saw at the end of To the Devil… A Daughter. Kev fantasized about breaking in and taking some intensely gothic glamor shots. We stared out over the rolling Chiltern Hills as sunlight glinted off the golden dome of the church, reveling in a beautiful outing, certain that the best was yet to come. We did not come here to see the church, mysterious though it was reported to be. We did not come to see the place where Sir Francis Dashwood and Hammer Films were both laid to rest. No, we came to see the Hellfire Caves, the satanic sanctuary three hundred feet below where we stood. Ken, Kev, Katie, and I wanted to walk the gloomy passages where the aristocracy of a bygone age had reveled in blasphemous orgies and infernal rites. It was time to descend into those mysterious depths. Just after we hit the gift shop.

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Opening to the caves...

The entrance to the caves was as impressive as one could hope. A teetering wall of pinnacled stone rose against the chalky cliff. A yawning tunnel cut straight into the cliff before being swallowed up suddenly by darkness. The eerie effect was nearly spoiled by the music that warped out over the courtyard — sinister as the plinkety tones of an ice cream truck. We stopped into the gift shop to pick up some last-minute souvenirs for the folks back home, and were appalled to see that they were selling “Hellfire Club Sandwiches.” I began to suspect that this site that was once witness to some truly epic flaunting of social and theological convention may have become a tad commercialized. Then again, when has that ever been a bad thing for the Dark Lord? Kev kindly payed our £5 admission (as our budget had been strained beyond all expectation) and, turnstile tokens in hand, we prepared to descend into the Underworld.

The tunnel suddenly narrowed around us, and the ceiling pressed in. The voice of the most recent Lord Dashwood piped out from a speaker on the wall to fill us in on some historical details. We breezed past, winding our way deeper into the cooling darkness. Every thirty feet or so there was a recessed light to keep us moving in the right general direction. My American sensibilities were momentarily stunned by the atmospherically appropriate lack of illumination. This place would never fly in the States with its lack of handrails, handicap ramps, and track lighting. The music followed us down the tunnel, bending and deforming around the flint and chalk walls in a spooky way. A tingle ran down my spine. I was pleased.

Then we came upon the first of them. Tucked within an arched recess sat a mannequin meant to represent one of the wealthy gentlemen who once descended into those depths, but whose general demeanor suggested nothing so much as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride. Down to the skeleton popping out of a chest next to him. I cringed so hard I hurt my face. I made a decision right then and there that I would ignore any other mannequins that we might come across. This, unfortunately, would prove quite difficult.

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A perfect representation of Benjamin Franklin....srsly

Benjamin Franklin is a personal hero of mine, for many reasons, foremost among them being the fact that he was wry, diplomatic, hedonistic, irreverent, and intelligent. He stands out in history like a glaring hole in the argument that the United States was ever a Christian nation. I remember the strange feeling of vindication when I first learned that Poor Richard had attended the wild orgies of the Hellfire Club. As I walked those cramped hallways I could almost hear his deep laughter booming down the twisting cavern. And then there he was, manifest in mannequin form, standing with the plaster eidolon of Sir Francis Dashwood himself. My face twitched as a looping tape played a dramatized “conversation” between the two in which Franklin (the voice actor doing his best Howard De Silva) pronounced that the caves were a “passing strange undertaking!”

“Not at ALL, old chap!” replied the sniveling voice of Dashwood. The mystique was in serious danger of being permanently dispelled, so we fled deeper into the caves. We started to come across little faces carved into the damp walls. Once we saw the first one we started to see them everywhere. Little demons, imps, devils, skulls were carved in the most crude of forms and worn eerily smooth by two hundred years of visitors. The dark atmosphere gradually returned. We emerged into the banquet hall. Kev gasped with wonder. Ken nodded appreciatively at the immense dome that vaulted above us. Katie snapped pictures of the statuary. Kev and I commiserated about the absolute necessity of throwing a Satanic bacchanal down there. Visions of his band playing in black robes and masks swam before his eyes and made his whiskers twitch with excitement. Next year, we told ourselves.

The River Styx was once much higher than it is today. In the heyday of the Hellfire Club it was an actual subterranean moat that had to be crossed in a tiny boat to reach the Inner Sanctum, where the dread and mysterious initiations were supposed to take place. Today it is little more than a bridged creek, but something liminal and evocative nevertheless remains. Any psychic sensitivity I might have was tingling. If any of the reports of ghostly activity in those caves, that was where I would expect them to hover. Ahead of us lay the final chamber, fabled to lie exactly three hundred feet below the altar of St. Lawrence’s Church. What mysteries awaited us within that shadowed gallery?

More fucking mannequins.

A momentary digression, if I may: Let me tell you about Rock City. Situated on Lookout Mountain in Northern Georgia, Rock City is a place of intense natural beauty that was systematically transformed into what may be the single greatest example of American kitsch in existence. Garden gnomes peer at you from within narrow rock corridors, bizarre dioramas of children’s fairytales line cave walls,black lights assail the senses, and of course, all the grotesque architectures of miniature golf await the curious visitor. In all ways it is a work of outsider “art”, which is to say aesthetically offensive in extremis, yet by virtue of its childlike ingenuousness, it manages to express something deeply charming.

The road to Satan?...or at least a doll of him

The road to Satan?...or at least a doll of him

I did not expect the Hellfire Caves, of all places, to remind me so very much of Rock City. When I imagined walking in to that historic tunnel into the earth I expected to find a dark reflection of hallowed ground, a sinister shrine to the infernal. To some degree no amount of tacky decoration or cheezy voice over can rob those galleries of their strange atmosphere. But boy if they don’t try. I’m no ghosthunter, but I am relatively certain that the best way to banish a spirit is to put up a hokey diorama.We stood there for a few minutes, trying to imagine the mannequins out of existence, breathing in whatever residual aura remained of the diabolical revelries of the Hellfire Club. Finally, we turned and retraced our steps, leaving the dank, slick walls of the cold cavern behind us.

Katie, Ken, and I lit cigarettes simultaneously as we emerged blinking into the sunlight. Kev chuckled about the rubbery bats and witch hats for sale in the giftshop. Ken devoured a jacket potato piled half-a-foot high with tuna and sweetcorn. Katie expressed equal parts confusion and disgust.

Hail Satan.

Austin Gandy is the only man I know that can wear a long black coat in the middle of summer, and not look like an obsessed fan-boy of ‘The Crow’. He’s also a practising magician of the highest calibre; some would say the leading Occult expert in the South-East. You can hear his ominous tones resounding through our own podcast, as well as his Invisible College™ segments on OutThere Radio and The Disinformation Podcast

Austin Gandy is the only man I know that can wear a long black coat in the middle of summer, and not look like an obsessed fan-boy of ‘The Crow’. He’s also a practising magician of the highest calibre; some would say the leading Occult expert in the South-East. You can hear his ominous tones resounding through our own podcast, as well as his Invisible College™ segments on OutThere Radio and The Disinformation Podcast

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Hoodoo Voodoo?

For better or for worse, Freemasonic and Rosicrucian orders have boasted members at all echelons of political power since the birth of the nation, and Illuminist ideology forms the invisible backbone of our countries most fundamental principles. But despite its pervasiveness, these influences remain a part of the secret history of America, as historians continue to idly ponder whether we were conceived as a christian nation or a republic of secular humanism.

Hoodoo’s place in history suffers even worse than many other magickal practices; its value (or even existence!) is widely ignored by occultists and mainstream historians alike. As a young magician coming to my power in the States, I consider this a terrible shame. It is a sad fact that the vast majority of occult knowledge available to the modern student of the Mysteries comes to us from the pens of dead white englishmen. The libraries of even the Invisible College, woefully underrepresent anything but old english twats writing about the magickal systems of older english twats, unless you’re in the Comparative Literature section, in which case we get to read hamhanded attempts to explain magickal systems from the exotic Orient to old english twats. I’m sure this situation would be less of a personal problem if I was standing on a fog-swept moor or whatever the hell English magicians do for fun, but there is a certain incongruity in reciting a ritual that resorts to ‘Thee and Thouing” as I stand on a hill overlooking a dirt road and powerlines, traintracks, red clay, bait shack, shoggoth of kudzu winding its way over old farm equipment.

All Faulknerian romanticism aside, what I’m talking about here is the idea of a genius loci, the spirits of a place, and the class of spirits that linger around my neck of the woods are of a very distinctive character. Sure, there are the familiar angels and demons of the great western canon here, but down here the Devil’s less likely to show up in your Triangle of Manifestation, than he is to show up at the crossroads and teach you to play the blues. There are spirits in the dry riverbeds and poplar trees, and honeysuckle that remember a time not so long ago when a Conjureman would call on them to take the wart off a child, to bewitch a lover, to send an opponent off in style, to fix a mojo hand, or to hex someone good; and I’ll tell you what, they’re not impressed by: bossy white folk with entitlement issues. You just can’t talk to these guys like you do the same old pile of Solomonic lapdogs that we’re all so used to reading about.

I’m ranting at this point, so let me bring it back a bit. Hoodoo is an amalgam of Central-African traditions, Native American herbal lore, Pennsylvanian Dutch hexmeistery, and European folk remedies. But it is more than the mere sum of these parts. It is a robust magickal tradition whose focus is on intensely practical, effective, and applicable methods of achieveing worldly power. It’s not a religion, nor does it pretend to be, and many of its methods are shockingly amoral. It’s sorcery, pure and simple, and for a long time it was one of the only avenues of power at all for enslaved blacks in the American South. After Abolition, poor blacks and whites alike used the conjurer’s Arts to rise quickly to heights of power that they could not hope to reach by conventional means. It’s messy, and confusing, and sometimes involves getting your hands a good deal dirtier than many of us cerebral wizard-types are used to. But it is also immediate, and vital, empowering, free.

Let’s add to the painfully short list of great American magickians Doctor Buzzard, Doctor Jim Jordan, Aunt Caroline Dye, the Seven Sisters, and all the rootworkers and conjuremen whose names are lost to history, but who warded off an overseer’s whip, or threw a fix, or who gave his community hope out of his bag of tricks.

For more information and resources check out www.luckymojo.com, and visit their ongoing project on Hoodoo in Theory and Practice.

Austin Gandy

Podcast: Download

This week we mark the end of our holiday break by discussing some of our ‘favorite bits’ of 2008. Topics covered in this show include Anonymous, The end of Neo-Paganism as we know it?, Patriots and the Georgia Guidestones and of course Obama (or in this case OBAWWWWMA).

Joining me for this episodes banter is Sir Raymond Wiley and Lord Austin Gandy from ye olde Out There Radio and the all new Disinformation The Podcast.

Of course Lady Claire Lumiere delivers us the latest Weekly Weird News and the Nobleman that is Daddytank serves up another great MySpace Heroes in the shape of:

District Of Evolution - New Paper Crusader
Magnetic Stripper – set 5a
Zabutom – Leningrad Vodka Rush
A Boy And His Recorder – Ice Cream Chuck

The episode of Out There Radio that Raymond plugs with no shame throughout the show can be found at www.outthereradio.net

Join us weekly again from now, as we examine counterculture, the Occult, underground and all the usual good stuff…so you don’t have to.

Enjoy

Podcast: Download

Austin Gandy

Austin Gandy

In this weeks show we chat with the fantastic Austin Gandy about the basics of Magick. Austin knows his subject and delivers the goods this week in another great interview. Fans of our friends Out There Radio will know Mr Gandy from his work on the ‘Invisible College’ episode of the show, as well as being their guest for some of the best episodes. In this episode we look at the real basics of magick, as if the listener was a would-be adept, walking through their local occult bookstore, pondering where to get stuck in!

Claire delivers once again with her awesome Weekly Weird News, and we make a desperate plea for attention from our fans! Next week we’ll hopefully be heading back into the paranormal world with an interview about Crypto-Zoology!

Music this week comes in the shape of Kid606, you can download this track for free here, background music this week comes from Earth and Don Cab!

See you next time!