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| NEW FROM SKYLIGHT PRESS ... | See our blog, Through the Skylight, for news and updates |   |
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THE BOOK OF MELUSINE OF LUSIGNAN Considerable interest in faery tradition has grown up in recent years and not least in the story of Melusine of Lusignan, the subject of a prose romance by Jean d’Arras at the end of the 14th century, swiftly followed by one in verse by Couldrette. This book provides a collection of material from various sources to give an all round picture of the remarkable faery, her town, her church, her immediate family, and the great Lusignan dynasty she founded. An established authority on Melusine, Gareth Knight collects together all the best source material, which he translates from the French, and presents his own researches into the Lusignan family of the 12th century, whose dynasty included kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem, examining the possibility of a familiar spirit guiding the family in its destiny. 222 pages Published 18th April 2013 |
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THE GROUNDLINGS OF DIVINE WILL From the author of Weaver in the Sluices and Diddle comes this controversial, self-reflexive, ironic and humorous response to the way that Shakespeare is so often taught in contemporary academia. The works of ‘Divine Will,’ as he is referred to throughout, have been confined to a vacuum, and almost biblically so in how the scripts have become wilfully detached from their moorings of time and place. In this hybridised long ‘Proem,’ Staniforth goes to absurd lengths of reattachment, gladly playing havoc with the swirling dictums and counter-dictums of his time, gleefully seeking to subvert the tautological authority of the neck-frilled academicians over the historical groundlings of the pit. Elements of satire, parody and burlesque are interposed as hagiographical substitutions made for the purposes of irony and deconstruction. The reader will be initiated into the amalgamated and timeless world of the Groundlings to see how their invective gospel simply illustrates how discourse, rhetoric and that grandiloquent power of oration serves as the strongest definition for our collective place in history. Staniforth is not afraid to dip into the cosmic trough and find magical pearls among the swine; the flashing twists and barbs of his heretic wit had me going up and down for hours. The tension between the divine will and human self-will is a subject that pervades the book; to that subject the profoundest insights into the hidden activity of providence and into human nature are brought. 104 pages Published 26th March 2013 |
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ANTIPHONAL AIRS Antiphonal Airs is a mixilating series of poems from poet-musician Joseph Noble. Some are improvisational riffs on specific composers, their lives and work, and some imitate the sonic movement and aleatoric rhythm of music itself. Noble works between polyphony and monody, his poetic lines mirroring the development of the seconda practica of the Baroque, in which the form of vocal music was made reflect and fit the meaning of the words. He follows the Orphic muse through music’s different phases and stylings, from the primal to the ornate, always following Hazrat Inayat Khan’s dictum that the world and its language come to us through sound and vibrations. Antiphonal Airs follows An Ives Set, which explored mercurial compositions of Charles Ives. A sumptuous collection by poet-musician Joseph Noble. The certainty of his pitch & intonation reveals a distinct tender voice. Measured, graceful, his work sustains its depth throughout. The first section on "early music" is revelatory in its range & insight. Rich in historical acumen, musical heart, Antiphonal Airs an impressive body of work. 126 pages Published 7th March 2013 |
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KALEIDOSCOPIC OMNISCIENCE Kaleidoscopic Omniscience is a new collection from lingual contortionist and poetic sage Will Alexander, featuring his early works – Asia & Haiti, The Stratospheric Canticles, and Impulse & Nothingness. Alexander’s prismatic and oracular voice cascades around bi-geographic confrontations, painterly morphologies, and the cosmology of the void. “No subject seems alien to him: Who else would write a poem on the death of Enver Hoxha? Who else would attempt to inhabit the brain of an animal in ecological catastrophe? Who else could spin a book-length poem from the verb ‘to paint’? – a poem that not only ranges through the history of world art, but which is an extended meditation on the way seeing is transformed by the chemical compounds of paint into vision.” "... multiplicity, simultaneity, collapsing of interior/exterior boundaries, restless migratory intelligence ... An uncancelled wavering and a "brimstone fire" of focus, unflinchingly alert to the vast sentient suffering, also to the astonishing resourcefulness and the yet unimagined forms of life on this planet at the edge of the Milky Way." "[Alexander is] acutely conscious of the issue of poetic voice, and is unwilling to let poetry's potential for ventriloquizing or exploring the voices of others be subsumed in an impersonal écriture or ultimately homogenous montage. He seems as well interested in the spiritual dimension of poetry, especially in the degrees to which poetry can give us access to spiritual or emotional states beyond those we normally experience."
– Mark Scroggins, American Book Review
274 pages Published 7th February 2013 |
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THE FORGOTTEN FAITH Celtic spirituality is the "forgotten faith" of the West. It is essentially joyful and holistic and holds together the two human faculties of reason and intuition, taking joy in the beauty of the created world. The Celtic saints were intuitives whose feet were very firmly planted on the ground. It is their equilibrium as human beings that gives much of their appeal, and in this, as in the holiness their lives display, they are Christlike. This book by Anglican cleric Anthony Duncan examines the lives of the Celtic saints in the context of their time, along with the sacred places in the landscape that have become associated with them. It includes such figures as Patrick, Columba, Ninian, Dewi (St David), Kentigern, Maelrubha, Cadog, Padarn, Samson, Melangell, Teilo and St Paul Aurelian. 126 pages Published 5th February 2013
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| FORTHCOMING TITLES ... | ||||||||||||||||||||
COMING MAY 2013 Imagination is our inner vision, our human skill to see different realities. It can take us to the throne of God, it can connect us to the stream of infinity and allow us to see the universe for what it really is. Controlled use of the imagination is fundamental to magical practice, and this comprehensive study by an experienced practitioner provides the keys to understanding and using these powerful inner techniques. Based on Nick Farrell’s previous book Magical Pathworking, this greatly revised and expanded edition includes new chapters which further develop the techniques of pathworking for magical and spiritual purposes. It covers group work, divination, visiting other inner world dimensions and working towards what Farrell calls ‘objective pathworking.’ “Even if you think you know all about visualisation, pathworking and the magical key of imagination – even if you teach the subjects – this book will astound you. Nick Farrell explores magical imagination with depth and discernment, revealing principles and methods that will enrich and transform your magical and spiritual practice. Quite simply, this book is the best of its kind and extends the magical use of imagination to new heights and insights. It is an essential book for all magicians, Pagans and anyone who works with the inner realms.” — Peregrin Wildoak, author of By Names and Images ISBN: 978-1-908011-72-5 |
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COMING 2013 Ever wondered why supermarket potatoes are so bland and boring? In the Andes, where potatoes originate, there are thousands of varieties with bright colours, beautiful markings, unusual shapes and variations of flavour and cooking quality. In the modern world, industrialised monoculture has reduced all this diversity down to a handful of near identical varieties. However, it's incredibly easy to grow potatoes from seed, and every seed is full of unexplored diversity. Best known for her Daughter of the Soil blog, Rebsie Fairholm gives clear and practical instructions for how to make seeds from potato berries, how to cross different varieties, how to choose which ones to experiment with, and how to keep your newly created varieties growing into the future. She gives examples from her own experiences with all kinds of potatoes, from ordinary garden varieties to historic Scottish heirlooms and rare Andean landraces, and explores the different colour possibilities, from orange flesh to purple flesh. Our ancestors created their own vegetable varieties in their gardens and took it for granted as a completely normal thing to do; and then the commercial age came along and changed our habits, and so it became something of a lost art. This unique book is a small step towards changing that. ISBN: 978-1-908011-19-0 |
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COMING MAY 2013 Meet the aptly named Blytes in this delectable story full of Dickensian characterisation and black comedy. The Savoy Truffle is a witty, dramatic novel about life in Britain's richest, wildest Surrey suburb in the early 1960s, and comes to us from an acclaimed author best known for his philosophical works, including The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination and Mercurius: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth. Instead of the blissed-out revisionist nostalgia you get in most re-enactments of the 60s Harpur dares to portray the generational clashes and awkward transitioning from Britain’s post-war era. Passages of rip-roaring rompery are deftly infused with stark realisations pertaining to the gender and class issues of that time. The Savoy Truffle is a literary treat, choc full of historical anecdotes and cultural associations – a veritable truffle worth digging through the layers of our past for. ISBN: 978-1-908011-65-7 |
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COMING JUNE 2013 This classic text has in recent times been fused to its contemporaneous volume, Lud Heat, but very much deserves to stand on its own. Suicide Bridge was originally published by Albion Village Press in 1979 with the sub-title A Book of the Furies, A Mythology of the South & East – Autumn 1973 to Spring 1978. As elsewhere, Sinclair saunters into the shadowy city underworld with his ever-watchful eye and roving syntax, this time probing the mythic figures from William Blake's Jerusalem and the mythical king Bladud. Previously text-bound entities such as Hand, Hyle and Kotope are made flesh and and given to foggy breath in the contemporary landscape. Addressed to “the enemy” the reader is precariously perched on the teetering bridge while the author kicks at the mythic spindles that hold it up. Sinclair’s alternating, inter-penetrating prose and poetry become the uneven struts and pylons of a new concrete/abstract literary edifice. ISBN: 978-1-908011-61-9 |
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COMING SUMMER 2013 ...And Egypt Is the River is a collection of mystical prose-poems which the author describes as an attempt, based on the linguistic theories of R.W. Emerson, Ernest Fenollosa, and Hugh Kenner, among others, to trace the evolution of cosmology and myth as derived from a people's immediate sensory experience. In one sense it is an exploration of the genesis of language, the primal utterances that transcend from the physical world of sound denoting object to how images come to bring about self-awareness and fuse shared mythologies; or as the poet would say – “impact that compels words, that collect in fossil tidepools of the skull.” Explore the world of Hibou, the experiential, Klang, the experienced, and the 3rd, who oscillates somewhere in between. The reader will embark upon a brave and exploratory work in which he or she will have to embrace a new language, one that evolves as a physiological outgrowth of such a world. In good literary company, Michael S. Judge deftly manages to dispense with the cloying parameters of time and place and send the reader into a world of strange amalgamated scopes and scapes. Of his work he says coyly – “you could say it takes place in the pharaohs' Egypt, though it doesn't; or in Pisistratian Greece, though it doesn't; or for that matter in Missouri, say around 2666, which it might.” "Riffs of heightened prose pleasure the senses, with auditory, tactile, and hallucinatory provocations. To endure such a rigorous and sustained assault on the essential poetic metaphors is a fierce initiation. This Egypt of the Mental Traveller is a dream of the true path, subtle and dangerous and undeceived."
— Iain Sinclair
ISBN: 978-1-908011-27-5 |
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COMING JULY 2013 By the time we met, he was a newly ordained curate and I was scratching a living in the esoteric world, had written a book on the Qabalah (about to be published) and ran an occult magazine. We were thus inhabitants of two worlds that were never supposed to meet – at least by popular convention – of if they did, to be diametrically opposed to each other. The catalyst for such a meeting of the minds was the provocative poetry of Anthony Duncan, hitherto little known to the world but privately praised by the likes of Kathleen Raine. Following on from the “Lord of the Dance” chapter in his recent autobiography, I Called it Magic, and various entries in his book of collected letters, Yours Very Truly, Gareth Knight muses on the esoteric resonances resulting from his unlikely friendship with the Reverend Anthony Duncan. Their intellectual sharing of ideas led to Duncan’s The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic and Knight’s Experience of Inner Worlds, which have become companion texts of esoteric Christianity often read and taught together. The pair had planned to co-author a book before Duncan’s untimely passing in 2003 so Christ & Qabalah comes as a fulfilment of a long-held promise. The book will delight admirers of both authors with its intertextual interplay as well as a fresh exploration of the differences and similarities between a cleric and an occultist. Knight has described the book as an “organic process, almost an initiation, that has left me with a somewhat expanded consciousness.” Readers are invited to share in the various machinations that sparked this dynamic relationship – one that keeps on giving. ISBN: 978-1-908011-68-8 |
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COMING AUGUST 2013 “Windleroot was permanently a wasps’ nest of rumour and scandal. Gobbets of gossip continually dripped from the awnings of the establishments in Lowe Street. An innocent remark made at the top end became a slanderous accusation by the time it arrived at the horse trough at the bottom. Making the most trivial observation about anyone in the town was like playing hopscotch in a minefield.” Dick Symes leads a cast of Dickensian characters in this rollicking esoterically-tinged tale. After cavorting with strange beings from the 27th Dimension and inheriting an empowering object, the hero leads a campy caper to the town of Windleroot and its various peculiar environs such as the Nob, the Isle of Teflon, and the Crumpled Horn. Gordon Strong, a multifarious author, delivers a sumptuous modern phantasmagoria full of dithering magi, musty grimoires, chortling gods and dodgy magick – sprinkled evenly with wit, irony, allegory and pastiche. Laughs to be had a plenty but readers will discern deeper meanings undulating beneath the lithe narrative. This book will appeal to those that enjoyed Alan Richardson’s The Fat Git. ISBN: 978-1-908011-70-1 |
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COMING 2013 Dion Fortune encoded much practical magical lore within her novels, leaving it up to the reader to work out how to make use of it. Now for the first time, her original Rite of Isis and Rite of Pan have been released from her society's archive, with previously unpublished commentary on how to make use of them. Edited and explained by Gareth Knight, this book contains the full text of the magical workings which formed the basis for Dion Fortune's Moon Magic, The Goat-Foot God, and others "The clearest, simplest - and best - analysis and explanation of what magic is and how it works that I have ever come across. Gareth Knight shows that DF's novels are initiatory and were intended to be so. He supplements his exposition with DF's own commentaries on her work and reveals the secret methods she employed in her art to link the reader's imagination to spiritual and cosmic realities in order to activate the powers of the soul."
— Society of the Inner LightISBN: 978-1-908011-77-0 |
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COMING 2013 A new and previously unpublished book by the late Anthony Duncan, author of The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic. In this extraordinary work Duncan openly and frankly examines the experience of psychic communication with "extra-terrestrial" contacts, and the leaps of faith and mutual acceptance on which such contact depends. Incorporating many of his own personal experiences, the book represents a sane and sensible discussion of a controversial subject by a Christian priest and mystic who has never been afraid to think and minister beyond conventional boundaries. ISBN: 978-1-908011-63-3 |
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COMING 2013 The Arayana are an indigenous people descended from an ancient empire living contentedly in the remote mountain forests. With scant knowledge of the outside modernising world they cling to their ancestral traditions and seek to pass on the wisdom of their elders undisturbed. Before the Dawn is their story, a story of drama, intrigue, foreboding, and the painful invasion of a group consciousness, beautifully rendered by landscape painter Rupert Copping. Although told entirely from their point of view this is no patronising post-colonial ‘innocence to experience’ yarn nor is their world an idyllic Eden in some virginal state before the Fall. Copping explores the complexities of tribal life through four main characters; a chief, his wife, his mistress, and a disgraced elder. Much of what they seek to protect seems no less dark and cruel than the ways of the outside world – but it is their sphere. The forces that swirl around and seep into their isolated enclave are complicated and circuitous, pitting native, invader, revolutionary and reactionary against each other. Copping takes the reader from the dark cave of ancient ritual to the mindless carnage of the ‘Radiant War’ - mirroring the psychological journey that the Arayana must take. With stark guerrilla brushstrokes and fresh environmental impetus he tells the age-old story of conquest and loss. ISBN: 978-1-908011-29-9 |
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COMING 2013 Written by one of the world's foremost experts on Western Esoteric Traditions, this book is full of wisdom and insights that will help readers apply spiritual, magical and Qabalistic principles to their everyday life. A collection of essays covering a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience, whose underlying theme is to show how our daily lives can be made a training ground for adepthood. It brings together strands of Qabalah, psychology and the philosophy of Coleridge with practical methods of meditation. ISBN: 978-1-908011-34-3 |
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COMING 2013 This is the story of one man who served throughout the Great War, at the very front of the Fronts in the most brutal battles in history, and achieved that most astonishing feat of all – he survived. His name was George Matthew Richardson. He won the Military Medal and Bar and was nominated for the Distinguished Conduct Medal, yet was completely forgotten by his country, his clan, his hometown and – almost – his own family. Thus begins Geordie's War, a new intertextual memoir from Alan Richardson, biographer of Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley and author of On Winsley Hill and The Fat Git. Full of the wonderful wit and charm we’ve come to expect from this author, a lingering memory that starts with a grandfather’s watch commences a journey to the Western Front to offer what Richardson terms “A Plain Man’s Guide to the Great War.” A must for Geordies everywhere and for anyone whose family has been touched by the Great War, with a foreword by Sting no less, Geordie’s War scintillates with over-the-top historical, cultural and regional resonances that will leave the reader longing for more. ISBN: 978-1-908011-74-9 |
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COMING 2013 …Fiona Macleod was clearly a gentlelady of breeding and intellect. She could be trusted. She was almost ‘one of us’ - but not quite. It was this slight difference that allowed her to deal with dark and frightening characters and subjects in a way that gave them the glamour of the Celtic Otherworld in an intriguing and believable manner. She was not threatening or dangerous in herself and she opened up a whole new world of language, ancient songs, poems and proverbs that had never before been presented to the English-speaking peoples south of the Scottish Highlands. Her subjects were taboo for other writers but she dealt with them in such a matter-of-fact way they came across as completely normal and routine. This somewhat disturbing treatment gave them an edge, an excitement, which was captured in her eloquence and strong use of dialogue. Who better to present a new anthology of Fiona Macleod’s writings than Steve Blamires, author of The Little Book of Great Enchantment, a wonderful biography of William Sharp, and The Chronicles of the Sidhe, a ground-breaking analysis of Fiona Macleod’s entire oeuvre? Foam of the Past is the ‘selected writings’ of Sharp’s channelled pseudonym, who became a darling of Victorian readers and one earnestly courted by the fin-de-siècle ‘Celtic Twilight’ movement. Both writers, whether flesh or spirit, can be said to be prolific and Blamires collates a unique selection that mines a rich seam of popular work as well as previously unpublished material. This collection, not to be missed, includes provocative dark tales, early church musings, mystical ecritures, reveries of nature, political polemics, and various delightful vignettes. A gleaming new jewel for Scottish literature and Gaelic culture. ISBN: 978-1-908011-73-2 |
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FICTION The ever-enigmatic Hugh Fox explores the inner sanctum of an LA-based Irish priest revisiting his hometown of Athenry, Ireland. This homecoming manifests both psychologically and metaphysically, not only showing the conflicts in the psyche of a Roman Catholic priest but also taking on the wider issue of the social sea change that has been taking place in the last few decades with the secularisation of society. As with previous novels, Fox shows both depth and subtlety in the agonising of his eponymous hero, artfully portraying conflicts that have a resonance with contemporary society. He presents this in his accustomed and very vivid way through the conversations between characters and his acute and amusing observation of them. Portrait of Sweeney could be read as a doff of the cap to James Joyce’s Irish portrait in that it also shows some Modernist éclat. The deeper psychological and philosophical concerns of the priest fittingly called Joseph are transmuted to the reader through Notebook entries that intertextually weave with the larger narrative, which in the author’s own words present a “primitive existentialist entirely in love with The Now, caught between Catholic theology and the idiot materialism/superficiality of the contemporary world.” Although principally known as a poet, Hugh Fox has amassed an invigorating body of fiction and it’s no wonder that Bill Ryan likens him to the “Paul Bunyan of American Letters, part myth, part monster, and, myself-as-subject, a magnificent non-stop storyteller.” ISBN: 978-1-908011-40-4 |
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