Monday 29 October 2012

Psychopathia Esoterica: the Beauties of Bath’s Masonic Hall III







English Heretic has now published the minutes of the October 2012 AGM - an extraordinary AGM if ever there was one, and his insightful comments are most welcome. While professing all due reverence to my most worshipful colleagues, Ruth Calland, Haunted Shoreline, Dean Kenning, John Cussans, Sarah Sparkes, Tony Clayton, Eerie Anglia and The Blue Tree, I am afraid that modesty permits me to mention only EH’s comments regarding my own small offering, which are as follows:

Ken's talk was a rollicking tragicomedy session of decadent psychoanalysis, but also it has to be said, a profoundly cogent argument illustrating the inevitable self-destruction of the child-king. Taking in the lives and  tacky luxuries of Prince Rudolph, King Ludwig, Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley, Ken demonstrated a reverse alchemy in their demises. The Kings may not die, but they do gradually decay into the empires of their excess. They do, also, like the angels of some lurid occult system display a common set of correspondences - a love of artifice, an asexualisation to the point of infantilism, retreat, military fetishism and the power to indulge every parameter of their self-disgust.

It is hoped that some kind of ritual enactment of this conference will be staged at a major London academic location in the not-too-distant future. Watch out for further details. In the meantime: see, hear and, above all, keep silent.

Pictured above:  ‘RESURGAM’; the ceiling as seen from behind the hall’s hanging heraldic devices; KH prepares to speak; two glimpses of KH in action, presenting ‘The Psychoanalysis of Trash’, note the splendid brass lectern and interior views of Ludwig II’s Venus Grotto on the screen; English Heretic and KH during the Q&A session with Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein castle projected behind them.

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