Light the Jack-o-Lanterns and set up the bowls full of candy in your neighborhood, Halloween is upon us. Your city or town, in just a few days will be filled with little ghosts, goblins and ghouls, giving your community a spooky, if kitschy, feel.
What if your city was truly esoteric, occult and supernatural to its foundations, say like the city of London? Today we tackle one such city with a review of Occult London by Dr. Merlin Coverley.
Occult London is a luminary tour of London, from dimmest history to the closeness of the 20th century, all centered on the mysterious and eccentric.
Coverley methodically picks through the strange or little known history of London, finding interesting figures to punctuate each chapter of the story of the city on the Thames.
One of the most fascinating citizens of London for us was Dr. John Dee. We’ve read a whole historical bio of esoteric leader of the Elizabethan age, and he serves as a sort of keystone to the occult narrative that is Occult London.
Coverley interstingly points out that as the City boomed during the 16th and 17th century, it became a haven for “occult professionals” ranging from wise men to straight up witches, with Dee at the lead. How important is Dee for mystic London and the British Empire? Well, Coverely notes that to many the spiritual center of the empire was in fact the Isle of Dogs, where Dee applied dark arts to raise the potency of the British, creating a unified state whose powers would spill far beyond its physical borders.
Also, if you are looking for witches hovels and places of mysterious rites, London has them too. Like the cottage of a Mother Damnable, which was reportedly located at the site of the Camden Town Tube station.
However, when it comes to the mystic architecture of London, the distinction as designer of Occult London goes to Christopher Wren. His fingerprints are all over the London after the great fire of 1666. Coverely writes that Wren’s expansion and organization of London have more esoteric blueprint than simple grids and geometric patterns.
“For the rational outlook espoused by Wren was rooted less in the prevailing fashion for emperical science than in the unacknowledged traditions of Freemasonry, the Cabbala and the ‘sacred measurements’ of the Bible,” writes Coverely in Occult London. Wren was the architect of New Jerusalem, laid out using 2,000 cubits (a Biblical-age unit of measure) as the length radiating out from Saint Paul’s Cathedral to mark this mystic new center of the world.
Actual building of this new city fell upon a protégé of Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, a man who would come to be known as “the Devil’s architect.” But we’ll let you read all about that gent.
Occult London has a great blend of facts, intertwined with long whispered superstitions and rumors, coupled with buried history that is not so easily explained by the rational writings of traditional non-fiction.
You can read up on sex cults, Theosophists, Jack the Ripper, the mysterious creature known as Spring Heeled Jack and the Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, all in Occult London.
Seek out a copy of this strange tour of London and it’s residents, you won’t be disappointed.
Occult London by Merlin Coverley was purchased for review by Boston Book Bums
Tags: merlin coverley, Occult London, Occult London by Merlin Coverley, Occult London review
