Reality Check

“And the sad thing is we’re all in on the action
We’re all holding our breath, waiting for a reaction
You play your part, I’ll be playing with matches
And if you’d like a show, you can follow the ashes “
- Icon For Hire, Theatre

The world is changing. As free thinking adherents to any of the numerous modern Magickal Path’s our most die hard enemies, the Religions of old, may no longer have the right under law to punish us for our freedom of thought and deed. Yet they are increasingly finding other ways to infest our Zeitgeist, not least through the Mainstream Media that they infiltrated long before we even existed. Turn on any show made in the USA over the last thirty or so years and you will find numerous positive references, some obvious and some not, to the prevailing Christian faith. It is the same with the twenty four hour news channels and talk radio stations, news papers and commentators, Politicians and Presidents, all backed by Christ’s own money and told to tow God’s party line like good little pawns in some far reaching master plan of which the rest of us are not only oblivious, but also on the opposing side.

While the shadowy Muslim and Mexican hordes are the external ‘Other’ in the average American mind, it is the Goth, the Rocker, the Witch and the Satanist that they fear from within. Watching any of the numerous True Crime documentaries that hail from the Land of the Free is all that is required to see the bias in action; even those criminals that were in no way affiliated with the aforementioned lifestyles are regularly recast as Avatars of Satan replete with black trench-coats, dark eye-liner and an unhealthy interest in Heavy Metal. Yet it is jarring to see actual file footage of the same people later on in the episode, and realise that they were, in reality, anything but. Scratch the surface and it is easy to see that such ostensibly factual slices of American life are little better than modern morality plays, spoon fed food for thought for a Theocracy that has always seen things in stark black and white, Good and Evil, when the truth is actually very many shades of grey.

Perhaps it is to be expected. After all, the continued cohesion of any Regime, Theocratic or otherwise, directly relies upon both the manipulation of information and the existence of the ‘Other’ to maintain its power base, more so now in an age where geographical borders are increasingly irrelevant to daily life. While the sort of state controlled media that is tolerated in Muslim nations or outright censorship of free and open debate that we witness in less obviously Religious places like China would be vehemently resisted by the emancipated population of the ever widening Western World, we see the same tactics utilised by those few corporations that own the lion’s share of the indigenous media, albeit underpinned by the constant lie that all you have to do is change the channel to get an opposing point of view. All Governments realise the need to manipulate this data stream in such a way as to control the emotions of those experiencing it, to repress dissent and present a unified front behind their Deity or figurehead of choice on the Global Stage; America is no different.

In the UK, where the Church of England is slowly drowning under the weight of it’s own inability to evolve and the more fundamentalist voices from the Muslim Faith are thankfully only a minority, albeit one that seems to be given a disproportionate amount of airtime in the most negative of senses for no other reason than keeping the ‘Other’ front and centre in the mind of the population, it is a whole different line that the Media tows, and one that is equally threatening to our continued Spiritual freedom. Unlike the USA, a thoroughly modern Theocracy every bit as fundamentalist as the Muslim Nations that it continues to lead a war for oil against, Great Britain is far less concerned with matters of Church than State, instead breading the sort of Iconoclasts and Heretics that are more than willing to stand alone and watch both sides in that particular Twenty-First Century Crusade kill each other over whose Godform has the bigger crozier and bloodier hands.

Yet get enough Heretics together under a single banner, throw in a few outspoken pseudo-celebrities such as Brian Cox and Susan Blackmore, and you have a movement, and one that is every bit as dangerous to us Magickians as the Mainstream Religions that organised Skepticism was created to oppose. Despite recent opinion pieces in the daily Print Media claiming something of a failure for the so called Atheist Spring that typified the desire for social evolution in early Twenty-First Century Britain, Skepticism remains a very real threat to our right to think as we please. Add the influence of such unapologetically vocal Ultra-Skeptics as Richard Dawkins, who has recently become notorious for claiming that bringing a child up within a religion is in some ways more damaging to their continued mental well-being than sexual abuse, to the mix and you soon have a media juggernaut that consistently generates column inches in amounts second only to the mainstream Religions themselves, most of it positive due to the Pro-Skeptical slant of many of the UK newspapers.

But, while many view the Skeptical Movement as a harmless diversion, as someone who has moved in Skeptical Circles at Grass Roots level I can personally attest to the continued threat posed by those that flock to their banner to anyone that holds any form of Belief other than in their much quoted One Commandment, the suddenly staunchly Atheistic Scientific Method. In this case, the enemy of my enemy is far from my friend; the Skeptics view us all as opponents of reason, be we Occultists, Pagans, Christians or whatever else gets you through the day, and would gladly inoculate our children against the apparently irrational ideas that we carry within our collective psyche if given half the chance. Such Memetic Eugenics is exactly what they have in mind, working or studying within the higher education system as many of them do, and despite the best efforts of a few members of the modern Occult Community to get the message out that we have fallen into something of a stupor regarding the continued need to watch our backs and fight for our rights, nothing seems to change.

While we sit in Second Life and share ideas for Sigils, the Christians in the US Senate try to censor the internet. While the Pagans meet up in pubs and chew over the best places to buy candles, the Skeptics meet up on university campuses and plan entire multifaceted campaigns against those that do not think the same way that they do. There are Christian, Islamic, Jewish and Skeptical lobby groups all fighting over the scraps of Western Civilisation, while the Magickal refuse to stand together and make their voices heard on legislation that will one day matter to them. The James Randi Educational Foundation endorses groups that regularly undermine the validity, and in certain cases re-edit whole chunks of, Wikipedia entries on Paranormal subjects, while the Parapsychological Community looks the other way and refuses to mobilise to defend their borders. We allow the Celebrity Media to publish poorly researched slam pieces about Peaches Geldof and her supposed ties to the ‘Satanic’ O.T.O. without bringing them to task about their lies, yet we watch Skeptics and Christians descend like vultures to peck away at any Pro-Occult piece that somehow gets through the censors as if it is acceptable to hide our heads in the sand and take it up the ass.

The bottom line is a simple one: I can no longer sit by while my fellow Pagans, Witches and Occultists remain oblivious to the wolf at the door threatening to blow their house of cards down around their ears, yet there seems little that I or anyone else can actually do unless those around me also wake up to the reality of the situation that faces us all. We must unify as a Movement, even if is one that acknowledges out desperate Paths, for our continued survival in an increasingly hostile social environment. Because mark my words well, the world is indeed changing, and we who would strive to remain Free need to either drag those in positions of power within our Occult and Pagan Hierarchies kicking and screaming into the Twenty-First Century to lead us against the growing tide of anti-Occult sentiment, or make them stand aside so that the next generation can take up the mantle in their stead. Perhaps it is poignant to note, in closing, that we could learn a great deal from the way the Skeptical Activists approach their chosen target; they have shown great unity and indeed ingenuity in finding avenues to create genuine change in line with their Will. Yet the greatest shame is that said target is, in truth, all of us, and as such every victory for them is little better than a brick in our collective cell wall.

Highgate Hindsight

“The next action of the Judge is quite clear. For common justice demands that a witch should not be condemned to death unless she is convicted by her own confession. But here we are considering the case of one who is judged to be taken in manifest heresy for one of the other two reasons set down in the First Question, namely, direct or indirect evidence of the fact, or the legitimate production of witnesses; and in this case she is to be exposed to questions and torture to extort a confession of her crimes.”
- The Malleus Maleficarum

When you, Skeptic or Believer, Occultist or Layman, are asked to think of notorious cases relating to the Paranormal and Magickal Arts, what instantly springs to mind? The ‘pretty much true except for the majority of the details’ and best watched from behind the sofa story of the Amityville Horror perhaps? Or the tragic Anneliese Michel Exorcism that cost a young, and mentally ill, woman her life due to the Zealotry of her parents when faced with a mundane reason for her odd behaviour that they just could not Pray away? What about the Highgate Vampire, the shadowy black figure that struck such fear into the hearts of those living in that particular North London suburb that, thrill-seekers and drunkards aside, they avoided the place wholesale after dark? Ah yes, Gravehounds, that last one is nothing if not interesting, and the deeper you dig the more strange things get.

But this article is not about the vandalised and overgrown cemetery, frightened locals, dead Foxes drained of blood or the small number of Paranormal Investigators and Vampirologists sparring over the identity, or otherwise, of the creature supposedly responsible during the early 1970′s. Nor does it focus much attention on the Satanic Cults and local teenagers desecrating the remains of the dead for shit and giggles, burned out candles, broken coffins, chalk-drawn Sigils and all. What this article highlights is the eventual fallout from the events at the Cemetery, and the resulting Witchcraft Trial in all but name that saw a miscarriage of justice claim nearly three years of an almost innocent man’s life for nothing more than expressing his Wiccan Beliefs during a period when the establishment was downright hostile to those that dared to be openly different.

If David Farrant, Paranormal Investigator and according to the police of the period a public nuisance due to his frequent trespassing in areas that had a reputation for being Spiritually Active, made any mistake it was to take people at face value, especially those working in the mass media of the time. The whole sorry affair reads much like something directly out of a Dennis Wheatley novel, if not at least twice as trashy in places, cast into the grimy spotlight by the local press and national news agencies for reasons no more altruistic than filling column inches and program hours with the most lurid and fantastical trash available; little better than a concerted effort by all involved to take the minds of the general population off of the growing social problems brewing just beneath the surface of the post 1960′s UK. Someone was going to have to pay the price for the damage and hysteria caused by the continued events at Highgate, and unfortunately for Farrant, that person was him.

Just as it had been in the Middle Ages, those in the Establishment decreed that a Witch had to be burned to alleviate the stresses of the villagers who had been so pained by the ongoing media circus surrounding the case; and despite the fact that the actual Witchcraft Act of 1735 had been repealed and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951, which no longer criminalised the actual claim to possess Magickal Powers but instead punished people for deceiving others for profit while professing Supernatural Abilities, the State demanded it’s pound of flesh in any way it could get it. Farrant was arrested and officially charged with a laundry list of minor crimes when nothing more serious could be made to stick; multiple counts of interfering with remains in tombs, conspiracy to damage property in the cemetery between 1971 and 1974, unlawful and malicious damage to a memorial to the dead, theft of sheets from Barnet General Hospital, possession of his father’s old service revolver and the sending of Voodoo Dolls to two police officers involved in the case.

Farrant was found not guilty of the majority of the charges relating to interfering with remains, including one supposedly involving a corpse in a car, but he received two years in prison for a final count of this, and two more for using his spooky Voodoo Doll based Powers to scare officers of the law who should, frankly, have grown the hell up and known better than to take it all so seriously. He received a further six months for the malicious damage charge, itself involving nothing more destructive than chalk used to draw a Magickal Symbol on the floor of a vault, a month for the revolver and eight months for the sheets, both of which were eventually made concurrent with the other sentences.

When one takes in to account both the lack of evidence presented by the prosecution and the almost Inquisitorial Zeal expressed by an already embattled police force straining under the weight of external bureaucracy and internal corruption who seemed determined to get their man no matter how many falsified statements they had to throw at him to do so, it is painfully obvious that Farrant’s charges were are little better than a smokescreen for the real accusation being made; that he dared to be open about the fact that he was far from a good little Christian and flip the establishment the bird while living his life as he chose. The fact that he saw nothing evil about the pleasures of the flesh and the inherent beauty of the female form no doubt enraged his detractors further, especially when certain photographs taken in the Cemetery itself later came to light, much to the delight of the press.

Considering that the maximum penalty for performing supposedly Magickal Acts proscribed by law under the earlier Witchcraft Act was only a single year in prison, it is bizarre to think that Farrant was faced with almost five times that for offences that were a direct result of his desire to explore Fortean Phenomena that fell well outside the remit of any Governmental body to investigate, and that any court in the land would find him guilty in the first place. It is worth reiterating here that while he was convicted of some of the offences listed above, at no point was Farrant actually found guilty of handling human remains, so what we eventually end up with are charges relating to trespassing in a Cemetery after hours, a minor offence usually dealt with by the administering of a not unreasonable fine, dressed up as something darker to put a nail the troublesome Occult Adventurer’s coffin once and for all.

The bizarre ill treatment meted out to him by the powers that be did not end there, however. Farrant continued to fight his corner from inside the prison system, eventually resorting to a hunger strike in an effort to make his jailers treat him with the same basic human dignity as the other, Non-Magickal inmates. His requests to see his High Priestess in the same capacity that any other inmate would see their own Priest was denied, outgoing letters were censored and eventually stopped, and his calls for appeals were quashed at every opportunity by the grey suits in the Home Office. At one point he was even placed in a cell with a man who had killed his wife with an axe because she had supposedly been a Witch; it is hard to see the prison authorities getting away with putting a prisoner in danger in the same manner if the issue was one relating to a clash of two more readily accepted Religious Practices such as Judaism and Islam, yet Witchcraft was not a recognised Religion at the time and as such was not protected in the same manner.

Seven weeks into his hunger strike, and some two years and eight months in to his sentence he was finally released, and began a mildly successful campaign at his own expense to clear his once relatively good name. Yet there has been no admission by the authorities that they had falsified evidence and embarked upon a blatant overreaction to the actual crimes committed in a concerted effort to remove a far too vocal, and perhaps in some ways notorious, public figure from the limelight while they continued their enquiries. Yet even while Farrant was in prison the vandalism at Highgate Cemetery, both Satanic and otherwise, continued, and it became increasingly clear to anyone that thought of themselves as an impartial observer that the police had indeed got the wrong man. Upon his release, however, few rallied to his cause, no doubt because of the continued hate campaign waged against the supposed King of Black Magick by the press.

So why, you may ask, has this Old Fox decided to resurrect a court case that was over and done with, albeit with a definite miscarriage of justice as it’s ultimate conclusion, a few years before I was even born? What is my motivation for getting involved in a situation that has spawned so much enmity between those few interested people that are still discussing the events of the early 1970′s in Highgate that it may well have been far better for my own good to leave it all alone and just watch those involved from afar? Why have I popped my head over the top of the trenches and chosen a side in a conflict that has very little to offer me as an individual so long after the fact?

Frankly, it all boils down to the last promise that I made to my father, that his children would change the World, and in my case I have been doing just that, one mind at a time, since his passing a year ago through my writings here at Rebel Without A Soul and a select few other places both online and off. This Old Fox intensely dislikes injustice you see, and doubly so when it revolves around the persecution of my fellow Occultists for little more than the nature of their Beliefs. Farrant may not have been an Angel; he certainly played up to the cameras where possible, not only because he liked the attention, as I am sure that anyone would in his place, but also in a somewhat misguided attempt to stick two fingers up at an establishment that was very much out to silence the outspoken youth of the period any way they could, especially those in the Counter Culture that dared to openly profess alternative Spiritual Beliefs. None of that should have earned him the sentence he ultimately received, however, or the continued mistrust of the British public.

Was there an element of thrill seeking in his actions? Possibly, but throughout the case David comes across as a person far more inquisitive than hedonistic, a fact that seems to be lost on his more vocal detractors both then and now, and as such fuelled by an all consuming need to know and tenacity in the face of adversity that would have won him the respect of his fellow Occultists and Paranormal Investigators had the Highgate Case happened a mere twenty years later. Many in the UK credit the show Most Haunted with being the first to push the boundaries of social acceptability in this regard, providing as they did neatly packaged Table Tapping for entertainment purposes only, yet this is a fallacy; without the actions of a few usually unsung heroes living in the early days of the Modern Occult Era, Farrant included, Yvette Fielding and Derek Acorah would have never dared do what they did, albeit spuriously, for the cameras throughout the early years of the 21st Century.

Indeed it is worth remembering the often overlooked fact that in many ways Farrant’s conviction and subsequent media campaign to clear his name upon his release set the stage for the grudging public acknowledgement of the rights of the many Ghost Hunting and Magickal Groups that would follow his lead during the 1980′s and 1990′s to practice in the open, albeit guardedly. This Old Fox, for example, has his Spiritual roots in one such Current, that of Chaos Magick, the core ideas of which may never have got as widely disseminated in the years that followed had Farrant not blazed his at times self undermining trail through the media of the 1970′s. Whether we realise it or not, all of us in the UK Magickal Community owe him in some small way for his sacrifice, and the fact that we all sit idly by and allow him to continue to be vilified for a past that is more speculation than reality is a true testament to just how little has changed in the world of the Weird, and just how fragmented we remain as a Movement.

Past Errors

“Give me the sense to wonder, To wonder if I’m free
Give me a sense of wonder, To know I can believe
Give me the strength to hold my head up, Spit back in their face
Don’t need no key to unlock this door, Gonna break down the walls
Break out of this bad place”
- Iron Maiden, Can I Play With Madness

This Old Fox has never been one to do things the accepted way, especially with regards to the Realms of the Weird. Perhaps that is why I naturally gravitated towards Chaos Magick as a Paradigm; though I started my Practice, as many modern Occultists do, somewhere between Eclectic Witch and wannabe Grimoire Conjurer, I quickly found even the more fluid established systems to be too restrictive to be of any real use in my day to day life. There seemed to be something counter-intuitive about Lambskin and Chalk Circles, books of Fallen Angels and memorizing sequences of Barbaric Tongue accompanied movements that would put a Cirque du Soleil contortionist to shame, something old and musty that to this day has me eschewing mainstream Magick in favour of something far more experimental.

Unless we are lucky enough to have a window into some form of Hereditary Tradition, and the long suffering Teacher that comes with such a celluloid ideal, we have little option in the early days of our Journey but to fall back on the information contained in the many gaudily coloured and unapologetically overpriced handbooks on fake forgotten Lore published by a few of the more notable big budget Mystical outlets, endlessly recycled ideas reworded again and again for fun and profit ad infinitum while we all buy into the joke like good little Sheeple eager to trade our banal servitude for something, anything more interesting than the supposedly Real World.

We purchase more and more of the same old stories, duplicating the data like photocopiers on autopilot, our bookshelves groaning under the weight of information which would fit into a medium-sized ring binder if we cut away all the literary and Pseudo-Religious bullshit that comes with it and just got the the damn point for once. Yet we buy into this expensive lie because the cheaper truth is too mundane; Magick is not supposed to be about Medieval re-enactment and historical context, Magick is a force, a conceptual framework that is both intimately intertwined with, and yet distinctly parallel to the Zeitgeist of a given time and place.

The only reason that the authors of the Grimoires did things the way they claim is because no other way existed at the time, a situation that is no longer the case, and to argue that they would have continued to utilise that same long-winded and at times counter-productive methodology with our more modern tools at their eager disposal is at best faulty reasoning and at worst a blow against the idea of Magick as a whole. We are an increasingly Atheistic and Skeptical culture actively cutting away the Deities of old in favour of enlightened reasoning and personal empowerment, yet we still intone the ten thousand names of God and call on Archangels to protect us when we journey into the many Realms that sit alongside our own as if they hold exclusive dominion over our Fate.

What I am saying is simple. Restricting yourself to creating a Change in Reality in line with the desires of the Will by exclusively utilising the same techniques as those of previous civilisations or societies did out of a misguided Belief that there is no other, more modern, way of going about achieving your aims is like balancing on the tip of a blade while longing for the more personal understanding having it buried deep into your darkened heart would provide. Such personal interpretation is the key to a successful interface with the Magickal Current of your choice, be it Thought Forms masquerading as Gods and Fallen Angels or the gentle hum of the Nature Current as it flows through budding trees on a Spring afternoon, and hard won experience will win out over a well stocked Library every time.

Blinded by the past we, as a movement, are increasingly ceasing to innovate now that the heady days of truly free-form LSD and Ego fuelled Chaos Magick experimentation are long behind us all, and as such our Practice stagnates, dying in the womb of a coming age where we should, through the advent of increasingly complex technologies, become as Gods ourselves. The Magickal and Pagan Movements have embraced technology so far as it facilitates conversation and the exchange of the very same old-fashioned data that is the root of our evolutionary decline, yet seem to doggedly be resisting taking that final step into the Occult future that our modern way of life could provide. But old habits die hard I guess, and This Old Fox is happy to continue playing at the fringes of the Weird while he waits for others to catch him up.