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The Fenris Wolf 1-3 – Carl Abrahamsson (2020)

“Occulture” author Abrahamsson used to have a journal which are now made available again. Here we have the first three volumes original published between 1989 and 1993. The total number of pages is well over 300.

Within the pages you can find texts of Abrahamsson and range of author authors, but also interviews. There are a lot of noticeable name. Genesis P-Orridge, William Buroughs, Kenneth Anger, Freya Asswyn, the Order of Nine Angles, Anton LaVey and more.

There is too much satanism here for my liking, especially towards the end, but ironically it are a few of the texts of LaVey that I found most amusing. Much of the other texts are too serious. The background information about people such as P-Orridge and Anger is interesting though.

There are short texts, poems, but also very long essays. Overall, there was not a whole lot that I found very interesting, so I do not think I am going to catch up with the next reissued issues. At least not any time soon.

2020 Trapart Books, isbn 9198624253

Aristokratia IV – K. Deva (editor) (2017)

I think I am about back up-to-date with the Manticore journal publications. Contrary to the previous two reviews of this publisher “Aristokratia IV” is indeed a journal with an editor and essays of different authors.

Being a Manticore publication there is a lot of Nietzsche of Evola. Being an “Aristokratia” this journal is of a more political / sociological nature. The texts are about a variety of subjects. The opening article is about revolutions in Russia. Then follows Gwendolyn Taunton with a text about the “more Nietzschian than Nietzsche” Italian author Gabriele D’Unnunzio; an interesting text about Nietzsche’s philosophy in practice. Other more biographical texts are about Max Stirner, Emile Zola and Neville Goddard. Further there are sociological and philosophical texts that usually have a slight Traditionalist undertone.

The book ends with a collection of quotes (or so it seems, aphorisms at least) and a couple of book reviews.

The “Aristokratia” series of Manticore is not my preferred line of books, but they usually have a couple of nice texts and going a bit off the paths of my usual literature does not hurt.

2017 Manticore Press, isbn 0994595859

Acta Macionica volume 27 (6017)

Even though the latest volume has been available or a couple of months, it took some effort to get hold of a copy. #27 Is again a massive journal of almost 400 pages with 21 essays. As we grew used to, the first texts are written-out talks held at the Ars Macionica research lodge. This includes the only text in English, one of David Harrison about Lord Byron.

The opening text in in Dutch and from the hand of the current Worshipful Master of the study lodge Koenraad Logghe. The author investigates how Freemasonry fits in the research of esotericism of scholars such as Antoine Faivre, Kocku von Stuckrad and Wouter Hanegraaff. Logghe ends his lengthy text with a very interesting Traditionalistic take on Freemasonry which is not entirely unlike the books of Fabio Venzi that I recently reviewed.

After this we alternately get a text in French and Dutch (and one in English), but towards the end the texts in French start to prevail. As I said before, I can read French, but not too well, so I simply tried to see how interesting the French texts were to see if I should put in some effort. One of the more interesting of these is about Paulus Riccius, the Christian Cabalist (hence the cover of the book) which seems to contain mostly fairly common information about (Christian) Cabala but with some links to Freemasonry. I would not mind a translation of this text!

Other texts contain one about doors and inside versus outside, 18th century Freemasonry, Der Zauberberg of Thomas Mann, women in (adoptive) Freemasonry by the Dutch scholar Jan Snoek who wrote in French, again some texts about Freemasonry during WWII and other subjects.

As always Acta Macionica makes a nice read, but only the texts in languages that I master I read attentively. The publication is not too expensive, so that is not too bad. Many of the 27 volumes are still available, so just have a look at the tables of content to see if any of them might interest you.

2017 Ars Macionica

Aristokratia III – K. Deva (editor) (2015)

I guess I am quite at a loss trying to follow Primordial Tradition, erm… Numen Books, or was it Manticore Press? Also the website changed a couple of times and there are several channels on Facebook. So by the time I heard of Gwendolyn Taunton’s latest book called Tantric Traditions, I discovered that by then I had missed two volumes in the Aristokratia series and a book called Operative Traditions. Time to catch up!

Aristokratia is the more political branch of the series of journals. This third volume is subtitled “Hellas”, so in most essays you will run into Plato and Greek democracy, but there is also a lot of Evola, Nietzsche and a few texts that have nothing to do with either Greece or politics, probably texts that fitted better in this journal than in any of the others.

Politics, not entirely my subject. As expected there is a lot of criticism towards democracy, contemporary culture and society and, as the title of the journal suggests, a (new) aristocracy that has to be built in order for the world to survive.

The most interesting article is one of the ‘out of place’ texts and speaks about how Mircea Eliade actually saw Traditionalism, Guénon and Coomaraswamy. Eliade is often seen as a Traditionalist (light), but this is a bit of a one-sided view on the man it seems.

From ancient politics to more recent ones and even a manifesto to build a new form of society, these are the subject that you will find in this journal. The more ‘practical’ side of contemporary Traditionalism so to say.

As I said, not the most interesting of the Manticore journal series to me, but it is always nice to read newly written texts of living persons with unpopular ideas. Volume IV lays ready to be read, so await a review of that one later on.

2015 Manticore Press, isbn 0994252536

Aristokratia II * K. Deva (editor) (2014)

It is good that Amazon recommended me this book, because I do not recall having heard of it before they did. It becomes a bit blurry. Like the first Aristokratia, this journal is published by Manticore Press. Since it looks like the journals that are nowadays published under the name of Numen Books, I simply ‘tagged’ this book ‘Primordial Traditions’, the precursor of Numen Books. But, Numen Books will remain Numen Books and Primordial Traditions seems to come rising from its ashes, so I might have to divide them afterall.
In any case, “Aristokratia” forms the more political arm of Primordial Traditions. The journal comes with 320 pages consisting of 17 essays and 7 book reviews. Three articles are from the hand of Gwendolyn Taunton (another reason to see the link) who delivered some very nice texts. Especially her “Emperor Of The Sun” is an interesting read. Taunton takes the theories of Dumézil a step further and more practically (in contast to Dumézil’s theoretical approach) applies it to far Eastern polics in the past. In another article Taunton aims to portray Julius Evola’s actual ideas by going beyond the characterisations of supporters and opposers. Some other authors we know from the first volume of this journal. Like I said, “Aristokratia” is a more political journal and some essays not only describe the state of contemporary politics, but also offer new insights and ideas. Not all essays are political though. Some are more philosophical and/or tradionalistic.
The journal starts off wonderfully, but in the last third there are a couple of texts that I did not find too appealing and did not read them very attentively.
All in all another interesting journal though and a good addition to the ‘Primordial Traditions series’.
2014 Manticore Press, isbn 0987559834, Aristokratia website

Heidens Jaarboek 2013

The 11th ‘heathen yearbook’ is again around a 100 pages, but to reach this, a large part is printed in a smaller font. This large part is a translation (into Dutch, the language of this publication) of several paragraphs of Jan de Vries’ Altgermanische Relgionsgeschichte. Indeed, not every Dutchman likes to read German. Besides, the books of De Vries are not easy to find (or expensive) and there are some Dutch heathens who like make translations. Their current project is the massive Altgermanische. The paragraphs printed are about giants, ghosts, goblins and the like.
The next text is a heavily illustrated investigation of the heart symbol by Gerard. He found the symbol in two forms all over the world and reaches some surprising conclusions.
Editor Boppo Grimmsma wrote a text called Runes In Frisia or ‘Frisian runes’. Not many rune-inscriptions have been found in Frisia, but Grimmsma argues that the Frisian ‘Futhorc’ is not entirely the same as the often compared Anglo-Saxon ‘Futhorc’. Some investigators even distinguish between the two and speak about Frisian runes found in the UK. Grimmsma tells us about the development of the runes and the differences between the two mentioned Futhorcs.
Now follow three very different stories of 999 words that were based on the same photo and read at the Friday-night of the 2012 Yule weekend.
A nice peek into the daily, heathen lives of previous king Gerard and (by now also previous) queen Weorþan is granted in the form of an interview with the two.
The last article is of Axnot van Fivelgo. He initially intended to write an article about his investigations into faerytales, but when he found out that most people have to background whatsoever in this subject, he turned his article into an introduction into this field of investigation. His nice text refers to authors and methods that I have come accross in the comparable field of comparitive myth. Lots has been catalogued and structured in both fields in the past century. The author also gives a few faerytales to illustrate his search, starting with a Dutch faerytale that is older than the books of the brothers Grimm.
As always the ‘heathen yearbook’ is a nice publication with scientific and lighter material. It comes nicely printed and is not expensive. The availability is limited though, so if you want your copy, click on the cover and order it rapidly.

Aristokratia * K. Deva (editor) (2013)

You probably heard the story before, but in case you do not, once upon a time there was a magazine called Primordial Traditions. The best articles were published in a book with the same name and later Primordial Traditions became a series of journals, intially all with the word “tradition” in the title. The publisher changed names to Numen Books and now publishes both journals and ‘normal’ books. Besides Northern, occult, etc. traditions there was initially the plan to make a really Traditionalistic issue. This idea was later taken into a larger subject so now we have “Aristokratia”. Also it is presented as a journal of its own, not published by Numen books and not under the name of Gwendolyn Toynton/Taunton, however her hand in the project is clear. Aristokratia, that rings Nietzsche does it not? Indeed, the German philosopher is present in virtually every essay in this journal. Taunton opens the journal with ‘the real Nietzsche’ and his “aristocratic radicalism”. The article also clearly shows how aristocracy is looked at in this journal. There is a variety of essays to be found. Articles about philosophers such as Emil Cioran and Azsacra Zarathurstra (of the Shunya revolution), (of course) a text about Evola and some about Guénon, anti-modernists and writing not about someone, but of someone such as the amusing aphorism-style (and therefor very ‘quotable’) “Confrontation with nothingness” by Brett Stevens. Especially towards the end the texts are more Traditionalistic than philosophical or political, like my own “Traditionalism vs Traditionalism”.
All in all the journal became twice the size of earlier journal in these series and it again became a nice collection of texts, some of which are more interesting than others, but like its predecessors, “Aristokratia” is a good buy if you like not too academic, but also not too loose a book about subjects that matter to only a few of us.
2013 Manticore Press, isbn 9780987158185, Aristokratia website

Luvah Journal volume four

The first three volumes suggested that Luvah would be a journal with issues, so year 1, issue 3, etc., but then online. The previous issues where published somewhat as a journal, for example in one PDF with a cover and all. Luvah Journal volume 4 is ‘just’ a page on the website with links to the articles in PDF and html (no longer Epub unfortunately). A bit like I also said about issue 1/3, Luvah does not seem very much Traditionalistic. There is academia, philosophy and poetry. Nonethess there are, like in the previous issues, interesting articles. The article about William Blake was less interesting than it seemed initially, but the article about feminism and “queer theories” in Judaism is something you do not hear a whole lot about. Keith Doubt wonders if ‘reading e’ is the same as reading a book. His article is too psychological for me and he seems to largely miss a big development in digital reading, but he does raise a few interesting questions. For the rest you can read poetry, prose, a book review and another few texts.
Click on the cover to go to the Luvah website.

Luvah Journal 1/1 and 1/3

I read volumes 1/1 and 1/3 so short after eachother that I decided to make a combined review. I am glad that I (accidentally) first read volume 1/2. Volume 1/1 seems more Platonic and 1/3 more focussed on poetry than on Traditionalism. Volume 1/2 certainly is the more interesting of the three that are now available. Not that the other two do not contain interesting articles though. Farasha Euker’s opening article is a nice ‘against the modern world’ piece of writing and 1/3 contains an interesting text on Iamblichus (and, less interestingly, Ostad Elahi) also by Euker. I am not much for philosophy, especially not on the academic level, but Euker makes Iamblichus worth looking at. Both volumes futher mostly have texts about elements of writers and poets which sometimes leads to nice ideas, but which are mostly not much of my interest. Also again the last part is filled with poetry and prose.
“Luvah” remains a laudable initiative, but now that I read three volumes, I guess I would have preferred more focus on Traditionalism, religion, mythology, that sort of things. But of course something different never hurts and since the journal is free, there is no harm done when only a part of the volumes are interesting.

Luvah Journal 1/2

“Luvah” is a new Traditionalistic journal, but there is a big difference between Luvah and its sisters Sophia and Sacred Web: Luvah is not hard and expensive to get, but free to read online or to download. There are authors that have also published in the other journals that I mentioned, so Luvah is very likely supposed to be a more low-threshold publication from the same corner. There does seem to be another difference though. I have the idea that Luvah is less “hardline” (as I jokingly call it) Traditionalistic as the other publications. It was just chance that I read issue 2 first by the way. When I heard of Luvah issue 2 was already available. I downloaded both issues, put them on my tablet and when I wanted to start to read it, I could only find issue 2. Now that I finished that, I noticed that issue 3 is also available, so it is going to be something to keep up with Luvah. It being an online publication does not make it an easier read or an effortless and thin journal. What you get are 170 pages filled with six essays and 70 pages of poetry and prose (the amount of the latter also makes Luvah different from the other publications). I am mostly interested in the articles myself. They are about ecology, “Śri Ramakrishna and Muhyi al-Din ibn ‘Arabi” (a nice article of Zachary Markwith whom we have run into before), “The Dervish, Death, and Qur’anic Hermeneutics” (of the editor Farasha Euker), “Buddhist Mind, Western Literature”, “A More Poetical Character Than Satan” and … Arthur C. Clarke? Yes indeed, even this sci-fi writer is seriously treated in a Traditionalistic publication and the man actually had something to say too. The last part is filled with poems and texts about poems and poetry. Luvah makes a nice addition to the available Traditionalistic publications and being more easily available, I hope it will attract a larger audience. Click on the cover to download your own copy. Now that it seems that I will be reading more digital material, I replaced my tablet by an ereader, but reading on that device would be more easier if Luvah was also made available as ebook since scaling a PDF and paging though it is not all that easy on my ereader…