City of the Alchemists – Magical Prague.

 

“It’s a fairytale town, isn’t it?” To misappropriate a quote from In Bruges.  Almost a year ago, the beloved Sheila and myself took a trip to Prague. It was very beautiful – the Christmas trees were all out and the market was in full swing. If you’ve never been to Prague, just go. It’s like a fairytale of a middle European city.  But I had ulterior motives. I am partway through my Alchemical Tour of Europe. Several years ago, I became very interested in alchemy (prompted by Jung’s work on it) , and I decided to tour alchemical spots.  The thread to this is mainly Edward Kelly and John Dee’s travels and travails in the 16th Century.

Their collaboration began in London in the early 1580s. Dee was a mathematician and magician and famously astrological adviser to Queen Elizabeth I of England. But Dee was hungry to speak to angels and learn the secrets of the Universe. There is much to know about all of this, and I’m not going to tell you. Google is your friend, if you’re interested, but many reading this will already know. Edward Talbot later Kelley was a world apart from the intellectual and credulous Dee. Kelley was Dee’s seer, who looked into Dee’s shewstone and reported back what the spirits showed and said to him.  This is documented in A True and Faithful Relation and   It has been said that Kelley was a charlatan.  Kelley and Dee are supposed to have found a red powder at Glastonbury, that famous sacred site in England. They used this red powder to turn base metal into gold. Of course, Jung says this is a metaphor for the transformation of the Ego into the Self, but most people believed that the transformation of lead into gold was the thing in itself.  The good people of Mortlake, now a suburb of London, turned on Dee and burned his house. It may also that he fell out of political favour. In any case, they took up with a Polish nobleman and moved to Krakow where they contacted angels and began to transcribe the language of the angels, named after the Biblical Book of Enoch – Enochian.  When that fell apart, they were on the run again and fled to the capital of the alchemists at that time – Prague.  There were visits from angels and the angels even told Kelley to tell Dee to have their wives in common. Dee returned to England, leaving Kelley who was apparently thrown from one of the castle towers. They were always throwing people out of windows in Prague of course.

I’ve been to Krakow before and am going again at the end of November.  My previous alchemical trip was to Heidelburg, which I will write up. I have yet to go to Chartres, to follow Fulcanelli and his Le Mystère des Cathédrales, though I will.

So, this is what happened. One day we took a tram up to the castle on the far side. It was a cold winter’s day and we walked up through some suburban streets past sinister looking military facilties with lots of cameras. We visited the castle and the Golden Alley where the alchemists had been housed.  Then we walked through the old town. Later we went to the Strahov Monastery on the Petrin Hills.  I wanted to go there because in 2000 I played Vampire the Masquerade – Redemption where the monastery is a nest of vampires and the Petrin Hills and woods are full of the bloodsuckers. The place was strangely quiet and it was possible to kid oneself that they were there asleep, merely waiting for night to fall. We walked back through the woods, getting strangely lost. We visited a mirror maze up near the Camera Obscura tower at the top of the hills and then came across the strangest little house where there was free wine and odd men with beards and long hair were very kind to us. Very kind. Too kind. One guy reminded me of Mr Tumnus. His house was like that.

We went to the nicely done Museum of Alchemists, in what was supposed to be Kelley’s house after Dee went home. There’s even a pub there called Pub Kellyxir (get it?).  Which reminds me of that song Drink the Elixir by Salad.

Just imagine walking down those cobbled streets with those magical houses. The air is cold and you stop to get a cinammon pastry from one of the shops. The Christmas lights are twinkling and people walk by, their breath coming in clouds. You just need a beer. So you get one. And everything is even better and suffused with that warm, fluffy beer haze.  That’s a kind of alchemy, though not the one I went to Prague for.

We also visited Dee and Kelley’s house, known as the Faust House because it is said that Faust, who like didn’t even exist, had lived there and made his famous pact with the Old Lad, Prince of the Air there.  There is a blue light that is supposed to mysteriously emanate from the cellar of the Faust House, but I never saw it. Nearby are great Czech pubs serving lovely dark beer (did I mention the beer?).

So, did I find what I was looking for in those lovely streets? Yes and no. Prague is a Box of Delights. As for finding the True Gold, the Elixir of Life, the Stone of the Alchemists – well as the Irish say – if you go to Rome but don’t take Jesus with you, you won’t find him there.

Ain’t that the truth. And then there’s Bruges…

Cockney Rebel: Austin Osman Spare — cakeordeathsite

Phil Baker’s excellent 2011 biography of the gloriously eccentric artist/magician Austin Osman Spare should hopefully revive interest in an unjustly neglected London artist. Hailed as the new Aubrey Beardsley at the tender age of 17 he fell into obscurity and lived in Dickensian squalor when the satyrs and general air of Yellow Book decadence that […]

via Cockney Rebel: Austin Osman Spare — cakeordeathsite

The Ghost of a Place

I notice that in my writing I am often very specific about places. The train stops at Craven Arms; he navigates from Glasgow Central to Glasgow Queen Street station; his office is on Bedford Square; he lives in St John’s Wood and drives down past Point Lobos on the Pacific Coast Highway. Places are important to me.

In fact, I have often wondered whether places have souls. This year, the beloved Sheila and I travelled to Great Malvern to climb the Malvern Hills  (from the Welsh Moelfryn – bald hill – I’m interested in words too, but you knew that.)

Then we went through Gloucestershire (see I’m at it again) Worcestershire, with a brief dip into Herefordshire before hitting Somerset and Glastonbury. As part of the trip we went to Stonehenge and Avebury before coming back through the Cotswolds on a sad and rainy Brexit day in Stow on the Wold then up to Cumbria and across into Scotland for a weekend in Kirkcubright.   Some of these places breathe when we’re not looking. I’m sure of it.

In a previous career, not wholly unrelated to my writing, I was a tour leader for ghost tours. And from the age of a kid right up to dotage, I’ve stood by lakes and watched the snow come in, or on mountains feeling the wind, or in the middle of a marsh calf deep in peat,  or by the sea when the waves are breaking from Ireland (or even in Ireland watching the phosphorescence off the coast of Connemara).  But the feeling I get in these places, where does it arise?

Is it from the places themselves – so Glastonbury, or Tara or Whitby (or Jerusalem when woken by the call to prayer) – is it in the places – the dragon energy – that we feel. Does this cause the shiver in the haunted house, or do we take the haunting there ourselves?  My rational brain tells me the haunting is all our own, but my heart tells me the world breathes. I’m heart over head every time. Except when I’m not. What about you?

Places to Spend Halloween in UK or Ireland.

A word of warning – don’t go!  Well, don’t go on your own at night.  And don’t go without reading this first.

1) Highgate Cemetery, London: N6 6PJ  Tel: 20 8340 1834

Highgate Cemetary is a wonderful Victorian graveyard straight out of a Gothic dream. It’s overgrown, it has ornate tombs and lots of stories. It is also the haunt of a vampire – at least it was in the 1970s. But the people who run the cemetery got understandably upset at would be vampire hunters (and vampire brides) breaking into the cemetery and desecrating the graves.  They look dimly on such people, so when you go, be interested in the history and enjoy the tombology, but don’t mention Halloween.  I’ve been many times and once I went with a group of American tourists. Our guide was a mysterious Albino, who guessed our true interests. Above the catacombs (there are glass bricks in the pavement above that let you look down) he said he had never been allowed in there. It was a place reserved for special people. He was also extremely anxious that none of us straggled off into the undergrowth and that we were clear of the place by nightfall. I’ll leave you to your own conclusions. Don’t upset anyone, but please go.

 

2) Chillingham Castle, Northumberland, NE66 5NJ Tel: 01668 215359

Is Chillingham the most haunted castle in England? It’s certainly up there.  It’s one of the places that freaked me out. When I used to stay there, I’d get a room to myself and it was unnaturally cold. There is a story that a previous night watchman used to look forward to his chats with the ghostly lady who walked the place in the winter nights when the family were in London. Then there’s the blue boy.  I saw a door slamming on its own.  I heard ghostly engines of WW2 army vehicles outside the Stable Block and a friend staying in the stable block saw a woman walk through a wall (she hurled a mug of coffee at it).

 

3) Greyfriars Kirkyard, Candlemaker Row, Edinburgh, Scotland  : EH1 2QQ  Tel 0131 664 4314

Famously haunted and it has the ghost tours to prove it. Visitors claim to often see things or sense frightening presences. My dad was brought up in a house that adjoins the kirkyard on Grassmarket and he told me about a ball of fire that proceeded through the bedroom while he had a Navy friend staying while they were in their 20s. Lot of weird things happened in the house, confirmed by my uncle independently – and they all came through from the Kirkyard!

 

4) Charleville Castle, Tullamore, Co. Offaly, Ireland. Tel: 057 9323040

This is a half ruined castle in the process of restoration. I used to take groups here and we stayed in the delightfully restored parts. The facilities are consistent with a half ruined castle in the middle of Ireland, so don’t expect a Marriott Inn. One misty Halloween I stayed in the circular room high up in the tower, complete with a real log fire, a bottle of wine and a black dog called Bob. He really was a black dog. I had a strange experience in the cellars when I thought I was contacted by a female spirit long dead and I saw a ghostly black kitten. Strange but true. The place is supposed to be built on a site sacred to the druids. It’s a must visit place.

 

5) The Ancient Ram Inn, Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire GL12 7HF.

I’ve never stayed here (surprising) but I used to get lots of stories back from people who had. The place has been investigated and been on TV lots but what always struck me was the malevolence of the spirits. I had people telling me stories of ghosts pushing wardrobes onto them and tripping them downstairs. I had one guy tell me how lights came on and off and his ipad switched itself on in the night. When the lights were on they weren’t even plugged in, so he said.

 

5) Pluckley Village, Ashford, Kent, England, TN27

This pretty English rural village has featured on TV shows both as a country idyll but also because of its ghosts. It has tons of ghosts wandering the streets which have been much photographed.  It even features in the Guinness Book of Records as the most haunted village in England. There’s a screaming man in the brickworks, A highwayman at Fright Corner (yup), a schoolmaster found hanging by her pupils and an old woman smoking a pipe on the bridge. If you go on Halloween, you might even get photographed yourself. Don’t dress up too weird.

 

6) The Crown Inn, High Street, Bildeston, Suffolk, IP7 7EB Tel:  01449 740510

A pretty thatched country inn in a pretty village. But it’s built on a plague pit! The place has an atmosphere as soon as you walk in. I stayed there one hot night in June. It was very hot. Then I woke up in the middle of the night freezing cold. I pulled my bedclothes round me and thought it was just cold and then when I woke up in the morning, it was warm again.  Then they told me that was the room that a servant boy had hanged himself in the long ago. One of our party claimed to get coherent and strange messages through by automatic writing.

 

7) Yorkgate Railway Station,  303 York Street, Belfast, BT15 1JA

A haunted railway station! They’re the best. Ever since I saw Sapphire and Steel’s The Railway Station, I’ve been a sucker for these.  Here a ghost sits at night in the station’s canteen, another (or is it the same one got a bit bored of sitting?) lurks in the stations running sheds. Apparently he is the ghost of a murdered railway employee beaten and left to die in a robbery. Night staff hear footsteps going all night long.

 

8) Jamaica Inn, Bolventor, Launceston, Cornwall PL15 7TS.  Tel: 01566 86250

You can stay here. Supposed to be the most haunted inn in England, never mind Cornwall. It sits by the main A30 road, but in the heart of the desolate Bodmin Moor.  The Hound of The Baskervilles may have been set on Dartmoor, but Bodmin Moor would have served just as well for atmosphere.  The Inn featured in the TV series Most Haunted as did many of the places, I’ve just listed.  People hear disembodied spirits muttering in a foreign language, which is probably Cornish (Bodmin means Stone House in Cornish).  You can hear stagecoaches clattering on the long gone cobbles outside, feel unnatural waves of cold and see figures in Tricorn hats – just like pirates.

 

But if you go to any of these places on Halloween, remember your etiquette. There will be normal people nearby and the owners have to make a living, so be courteous and buy something.

 

 

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