View from the Big Hills

London. The year is 1977 and the Sex Pistols, Damned and The Clash are taking on the disco, pop and rock establishment. Bowie is across the Channel in Berlin recording Heroes with Brian Eno. One person seems fairly much oblivious to the noise in the bedsits, pubs and clubs. Zachary Cox is frustrated. His love of good poetry has taken him on a quest for more published works from Swinburne yet he becomes increasingly dismayed at what he finds some 70 years after the poet's death. His thinking at the time is summarised in his own words within the foreward of “Swinburne 77,” a little book he subsequently publishes that year:- “It is a sobering fact that ….there is no complete edition of the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne in print nor even an edition of any one of his complete volumes of verse. All that can be found are 'selections' – selections made by lesser and later poets, who appear to be determined to select only those works which match up to the em...

In this time of fast technology and data overload it is easy to forget or at least overlook the importance of oral tradition in music and magic. Folk musicians on these Isles have a long tradition of learning songs and music from others on the road, in the club, pub and home. I suspect it is the same for folk music around the globe generally. Listening, learning and playing to explain and remember the past or customizing for a new era and changing needs.   The Celts had a rich tradition of orally transmitting their insights and culture called in Gaelic “beul aithris.” Similarly t he Jewish people had a long tradition of only verbally teaching key elements of their Kabalistic Tradition, particularly the practical or magical side of it. What many modern day practitioners and writers on Western magical traditions often seem to miss is the importance attached to the transmission of magical knowledge and wisdom through oral methods only, and, of course through song too. ...