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Regular readers will know that in recent years I have written reviews of medical museums in both the Netherlands and Pennsylvania…

At the risk of appearing obsessed… I have just seen another, and recommend anyone who has a spare hour in London tomorrow to go and view it on  its final day.

Exquisite Bodies, at the Welcomme Trust in Euston Street, is a fascinating exploration of phenomenon of medical models, usually made out of wax, that existed from 16th century Florence until the Victorian Period.

Designed to get around the practicality and often the legality of dissecting real bodies for medical study. These figures are frequently highly artistic and have uncanny resonances with religious icons.

While this exhibition does not feature any real specimens (except a two-headed cow), they represent real medical conditions in a real and graphic way.

Highly recommended and FREE… catch it if you can, the final day is Sunday October 18.

A Satan-Shaped hole – does Trickster Makes This World have a missing chapter?

Trickster figures feature in mythologies and religions around the world: Hermes (Greece); Coyote, Raven (North America); Ananse (Africa); Monkey (China) and Loki (Northern European). These figures represent the anarchic and chaotic aspect of nature.

Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World is an analysis of these characters and what they tell us about creativity and culture. However, missing from his pantheon of Trickster characters is Satan, who is relegated to a couple of brief mentions. Hyde explains why: “The Devil is an agent of evil, but Trickster is amoral, not immoral… one does not usually hear said of the Christian devil what the anthropologist Paul Rachel says of the North American Trickster: Trickster is at one and the same time creator…he who dupes others and who is always duped himself…”

Despite growing up in England, Hyde is apparently not aware of folk tales in Europe where the Devil come to earth to steal a soul, but gets duped by some wily peasant. Or does Hyde in some way think that these familiar European Trickster stories about Satan are in some way less important than ‘ethnic’ myths from North America, Africa or even ancient Greece?

What Hyde also fails to take account of, is that before the later forms of Christianity turned all of creation into a Manichean struggle between light and dark, the relationship between Satan and Jehovah was much more ambiguous – witness hapless Job’s torment to settle a wager between God and Satan. That is to say, Satan was not always as evil as he has been painted lately.

There are other parallels – Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and the Serpent stealing the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge to give to man. Also, Coyote being credited with the creation of the first lie, and the name ‘Father of Lies’ sometimes given to Satan. Hyde does not see the Satan figure as being part of the tradition of these characters which represent to us the disruptive force in nature.

When Hyde describes Trickster’s behaviour: “when someone’s sense of honourable behaviour has left him unable to act, Trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox” – does this not sound like the spirit that many modern Satanists would recognise as Satanic?

Maybe Trickster has been at work here and stole a chapter, leaving a Satan-shaped hole in Mr Hyde’s work. While the omission of Satan as Trickster makes this a flawed book, it is still a worthwhile for those interested Trickster characters and “how disruptive imagination creates culture”. Hyde links the urge in nature we call Trickster to the world of art and poetry, using figures such as Ginsburg, Picasso and Duchamp, who used Trickster methods to change the way we looked at the world. What raises this book out of the ordinary survey of different myths is that this is not a dry anthropological catalogue of stories, but a deep meditation on the creative urge and our ambivalent relationship with it.

Trickster Makes This World – How disruptive imagination creates culture, By Lewis Hyde, is published by Canongate.

If you created a fictional character that was a rocket scientist by day, but an acolyte of Aleister Crowley and leader of a Thelemite order by night, you might well be accused of stretching the imagination too far. John Whiteside Parsons was both of these things, and spent his (too short) life stretching his imagination in every conceivable direction.
In the 21st century the combination of occultism and rocket science seems to be a profane mix… surely science and the occult haven’t mixed since Newton’s time?

But in pre-WW2 America when there was considerable interest in the occult, both were considered outsider pursuits. Rocketry was considered a foolish interest at best: in 1941 an unnamed amateur scientist was mocked in congress as a “crackpot with mental delusions that we can fly to the moon”. The congressmen roared with laughter, but a scant 20 years later when JF Kennedy said exactly the same thing to congress no-one laughed.

The change in the esteem in which rocketry was held was, of course, greatly caused by the Nazi use of V2 rockets to devastating effect in the war in Europe. But it was also in part due to the work of Parsons and his extraordinary ambitions toward rocketry (despite never having a formal science degree). Strange Angel, by George Pendle, is a brilliant account of the life and times of ‘Jack’ Parsons.

Not many men can sustain two obsessions of this magnitude, but Parsons did, combining his ambitions to conquer outer space with an equal drive towards the mysteries of inner space through the use of magic.

He joined and then quickly moved up the ranks to lead the Californian Agape lodge of the OTO and set up a proto-60s style commune where free love and Crowleyan magic was practised. As well as corresponding with Crowley, Parsons was also friends with L. Ron Hubbard, who at that time was still writing science fiction. Never unambitious, Parsons sought out no feat less than the creation of a magical child – the Babalon working that would bring into the world the woman that would ride the great beast of revelation.

Like many who followed Crowley, Parsons did not come to a happy end, but Pendle describes Parsons’ life as one led to the full and without compromise. The book will be as interesting to those seeking facts about the early days of rocketry as well as an important footnote in the history of the OTO and Crowley. Written in an easy narrative style, Strange Angel has a full listing of sources and is indexed.
Strange Angel, by George Pendle is published by Harcourt.
To see other recent reading matter, visit the Opus Diaboli bookshelf