Reality and surreality intertwined

This truly mind-bending work, says Marcus Williamson, is a tour-de-force trip through contemporary occult and popular culture, a madly spinning windmill of the mind

The English Heretic Collection

Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography

Andy Sharp

Repeater Books 2020

Pb, £12.99, 427pp, ISBN 9781913462093

Andy Sharp is best known as the musician who creates aural collages from a heady blend of electronica and sampled spokenword esoterica. The English Heretic Collection is his latest creative manifestation, a collection of essays reflecting 15 years of research into wyrd culture.

Just as with Sharp’s musical collages, the literary English Heretic conflates Sixties and Seventies horror B-movies with esoterica, pulp fiction with folklore and the occult, WWII plane wreckage with surrealism. He revels in subverting our rulebased, linear, chronological and mono-topographical view of the world, suspending disbelief on his mission “to make meaning in search of imaginal truth”.

In reading his accounts, we become witness to the dark underbelly of popular counterculture, the intertwining of reality and surreality, where past, present and future are confounded. He speaks of “place as a means of fecundating the imagination”, of using locations as talismans, such as at Orford Ness in Suffolk, an atomic research and testing station close to Rendlesham Forest, famed for its UFO sightings and for Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian rituals. Or Boleskine House on Loch Ness, once the domain of the occultist Aleister Crowley and later acquired by Led Zeppelin founder, Jimmy Page.

Amongst the myriad of novel concepts to be found, like coruscating fragments of jet amongst these texts, is the concept of nuclear semiotics: how to convey the danger of atomic waste to future generations, a task beyond the epoch-constrained limits of written language. As Sharp notes presciently, “our current language and symbols will lose their ability to deter human intrusion to radioactive storage sites”.

Sharp conjures with two kinds of magic in these essays: a mimetic magic, whereby situations, people and places become irrevocably and inextricably associated; and a contagious magic, whose spells he invokes through his numerous site visits, field recordings and documentation, bringing new significance to remnants that might otherwise be discarded or ignored.

English Heretic is also the spiritual home of the Black Plaque – that countercultural antidote

Diving deep and getting lost in the neural network of Sharp’s fecund imagination

to the Blue Plaque of English Heritage. Instead of an “entirely dry rendering of history”, as commemorated by the official markers, Sharp’s plaques celebrate the misfits, magicians and anti-heroes, such as their first awardee, Michael Reeves, the director of the Sixties historical horror film, Witchfinder General. The act of placing the plaque finds its origins in the terma tradition of Tibetan Bon Buddhism, where an object holding hidden teachings is secreted so that it can be found and rediscovered by a searcher in the future.

Black Plaque recipients, Sharp says, “have a curative aspect” and their “irrational programmes and my obsession with them must in some way represent my own self-destructive tendencies”. Yet, from his personal act of selfdestruction comes creation, like the alchemical transformation of base metal into gold.

The actor Charles McKeown once said that watching Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil was a bit like lifting the top off Gilliam’s head, looking in and replacing it very quickly. By contrast, reading The English Heretic Collection is like lifting the top off Andy Sharp’s head, diving deep and getting lost in the neural network of his fecund imagination. The author even ponders whether the circumstances of his own birth could be the cause of his fractal thinking: “Perhaps my rather hasty labour has been echoed in my creative delivery, distinctly overloaded and crammed with interconnections – a rather exhausting process.”

If there’s a fault in all of this it’s that Sharp’s tantalising factual snippets in so many cases demand more explanation and references, so that the reader may continue the adventure where he has left off. A work so replete with obscure cultural and occult references cries out for an appendix, footnotes or endnotes or, paradoxically, its own discrete guidebook – an A to Z map or even a concordance – to help the psychic geographer on their way through the dreamlike matrix.

Sharp’s journeys thus become powerful inspirational stimulants for the reader to trace their own magickal path. In following his meanderings through place and time, the reader becomes enmeshed in this rich mind web that Sharp weaves. And then, triggered by his liberally sprinkled messages to the subconscious, finds oneself darting off onto altogether unexpected byways. This is a truly mindbending work, in the most positive sense.

As Sharp himself says: “The imagination is no fool, it’s very much an imp of the perverse, it will bleed across the margins of any tightly defined borders. Its spores will scatter to neighbouring fields...” And writing of the inspirations for his adventures, with a nod to one of the wyrdest works by a master of surrealism, he continues “the clown demons of the Black Plaques refuse to remain quiet, they lurch – like Max Ernst’s Angel of Hearth and Home – across the chapters of someone else’s tragedy and trajectory, they usurp other plots and terrains”.

The English Heretic Collection is a tour de force through contemporary occult and popular culture, a madly spinning windmill of the mind. It’s a work that leaves the reader haunted by the multitude of interconnections that cram its pages, forcing a stark re-evaluation of former certainties. ★★★★★