Ecteiroglyphs of the Lorwolm
Paul Holman
1
These are the prophecies of the Lorwolm, the three angels: Ga-ukogomen, Nihr Avna-attu and Tsitao-utna.
The prophecies in question are the Ecteiroglyphs, seventeen poems cast in a distinctly hieratic tone, which were issued, along with a handful of prose texts that give some background to their reception, on four blogs on various days in April and May 2008. The blogs appear to have been created specifically for the purpose of hosting these writings, and are set up in the persona of the channel, who introduces herself as follows:
In 1953, on March 16, I was born as Irene Felicia Voloshtuk, daughter of Joseph Victor Voloshtuk and Zoe Kuzina Voloshtuk, Catholic immigrants from the Ukraine to Canada. I was born at Wellesley Hospital in Toronto at 6:09 PM, exactly seven years, seven months, seven days, seven hours and seven minutes after the atomic bomb was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan. The angel Ga-ukogomen revealed to me that in my previous life I was born on January 2, 1868 as Beatrice Yarbrough, daughter of Elliot Carroll Yarbrough and Ruth Bierly Yarbrough; I was born at 3:55 AM, seventy-seven years, seven months, seven days, seven hours and seven minutes before the Nagasaki explosion. Ga-ukogomen explained that my onaemeid, my true name, my endname, the name of my final incarnation, is and will be Eirene Kuanyin Skadhi.
Some months later, the sequence was made public on a fifth blog, which I take to be that of the real author. Although, as is common on the internet, there was some playful veiling of identity - ‘I inscribe myself as LCMT, and will answer readily to Lin, if that’s your preference’ - the Lorwolm material was presented in a context of ongoing cultural activity there. In spite of their deferred release, the entries had evidently been input back in the spring: the introductory statement given above is dated April 1 2008, the earliest post of all.
When I first encountered these texts, I wondered if their commencement on April Fool’s Day was a signal of the project being nothing more than a hoax: I do not think this is so, but consider it quite possible that the date might have provided a convenient exit if the enterprise had withered. There seems no reason to take the dates on which the texts were first posted as anything other than more or less those of their completion: this in itself indicates composition, however they were achieved, in a peak state, as does the manner in which the entries peter out. A merely episodic publication of previously completed material, even if it had not been more deliberately ordered than seems to be the case here, would surely have been more regularly paced.
There may also be some significance in the point at which the entries stop. A poem dated 8 May 2008 mentions ‘the last gray hour of Saint Dymphaena’s morning’: May 15, the day after the final poem is posted, is the feast of St. Dymphna, the patron of those who suffer from mental and nervous disorders.
2
The internet can still provide an unmediated space in which nothing is taught, nothing is set in order, nothing is scheduled: this openness was also very much a virtue of Fluxus and the Mail Art network, but in both cases, the enabling framework itself provided an easy definition for the work produced within it.
There is no reason for some wilfer coming upon one of the four main Lorwolm blogs to do anything other than take it at face value: such a reader is of course entirely likely to interpret the entries as a joke or as the work of a crazy woman, but they are not contextualised in the manner in which texts claiming to be angelic transmissions would be in a collection of poetry, where they would be understood to be a literary artefact, or in a book produced for the New Age market, where they would be received by an audience with some investment in accepting them as genuine.
The status of the Ecteiroglyphs as publications outside the managed flow of information evades the problem of classification by which, to give an obvious but appropriate example, many readers have come to accept Blake’s prophetic books as no more than poetry of a specific genre. In a secular culture, such products of human dealings with the supernatural world are viewed as artefacts to study rather than as instruments to use: this is turned around by the emphasis which contemporary occultists such as Michael Bertiaux, Kenneth Grant and Jan Fries place upon the importance of art of all kinds as a manifestation of magical activity.
3
As noted above, it is only in the author’s own blog that the Ecteiroglyphs appear in a literary context. There, Irene’s introductory paragraphs are preceded by this note:
Sometimes an act of creativity is a matter of simply getting out of the way and letting another speak.
In one of the other blogs, LCMT sets aside the persona of Irene to reply to a reader’s enquiry:
The first part is purely automatic: I collect a list of random words and phrases from various sources, by whatever method that occurs to me at the time. My methods are designed to disconnect the process from my own will and allow the influences of my muses, the Lorwolm, to be paramount. It produces a rather incoherent jumble, so then it becomes my job to find the coherence. But it’s not my job to dictate the meaning or purpose. I naturally gather my own impressions about what the ecteiroglyphs illustrate, but it’s not important that I know. Your guess is as good as mine, or maybe even better.
While I am not particularly bothered over the question of whether the Ecteiroglyphs were received, written as a deliberate exercise, or assembled from found sources, I am very much interested in the willed suspension of the author’s internal editor which their production implies: my assumption about the project as a whole is that it was primarily an exercise in defamiliarisation, carried out in order to achieve text that the writer’s established practice would not admit.
Often the removal of self-imposed critical restraint, the habits of practice which have displaced the equally hobbling self-consciousness of the amateur, makes a writer’s most characteristic style more, rather than less, evident. If we think in terms of texts being transmitted, what is shown is the difference between one instrument and another; if we think in more general literary terms, it is apparent that all attempts to suspend conscious intervention in the text push the author back, further from the written surface into the hidden workshops where the real business of creating poetry takes place. The most receptive poets, those who seem to exclude nothing, are also the most distinctive: one could mention Tom Raworth or John M. Bennett (although there is, of course, far more of the demiurge than the channel about either of them).
4
The benchmark for angelic communication in English is set by the 49 Claves Angelicae (nineteen core texts) received by John Dee and Edward Kelley in Krakow between 13 April and 13 July 1584. These were delivered both in a consistent but otherwise unknown language and in English. Although, unlike Blake’s prophecies, they have never been absorbed into the canon (for whatever that’s worth) they are of high literary quality:
The Midday the first is as the third heaven made of Hiacynth Pillers 26 in whome the Elders are become strong which I have prepared for my own righteousnes sayth the Lord whose long contynuance shall be as bucklers to the stowping Dragons and like unto the Harvest of a wyddow. How many are there which remayn in the glorie of the earth which are and shall not see death untyll this howse fall and the Dragon synck. Come away, for the Thunders have spoken: Come away, for the Crownes of the Temple and the coat of him that is, was, and shall be crowned are divided Come Appeare to the terror of the earth and to our comfort and of such as are prepared.
It is still unclear to what, if any degree, Kelley faked these transmissions. The possibility that he did so is comforting to those who wish to lift Dee’s reputation clear of the occult, though the safeguards put in place before these texts were received would have made deception extraordinarily difficult. Aleister Crowley, whose own Liber AL vel Legis presents a particularly lush and complex example of the kind of literature we are looking at here, remarked of Kelley: ‘If he invented Enochian and composed this superb prose, he was at worst a Chatterton with fifty times that poet’s ingenuity and five hundred times his poetical genius.’
5
Each of the Ecteiroglyphs has a regular form of three stanzas (one for each of the Lorwolm?) of five, four and three lines respectively:
From a summer’s marriage-feast despoiled in reel and rout,
The knight stands aloof; he wears upon his shield the puppet crown
And slays with his sword fifteen long-suffering captives.
In thirty long years he will defeat twelve generals,
Burn ten churches, demolish ten temples, and build ten cities.
His denatured bride, widely praised and most closely guarded,
Arises with his silver-bedecked allies to supplant him.
The perfect cavalier cannot comprehend this opportunity for ambush;
In the absence of the sun, fountains spring like a cloud of fire.
In a great arc she brings down the cursed hilt of his saber,
Forged in witch’s oils burnt green, blue and white,
Which fractures his unwary skull but does not kill him.
This confers a welcome degree of control and definition: one is reminded of Jack Spicer’s ‘dictated’ poems, apparently unmediated work which is precise and closely ordered.
6
In contrast to the ‘grand vatic lyrics’ (to quote a comment which quite understandably appears to have pleased the blogger) the prose sections, which offer some commentary, in Irene’s voice, upon their genesis, are related in a naïve, personal tone: with their references to household objects and old TV adverts, they perform the valuable function of setting the baffling richness of the Ecteiroglyphs in the context of the everyday. In an entry posted on the last day of April, LCMT herself is introduced as ‘the Friendly Skeptic’ who ‘is helping me put the ecteiroglyphs on the computer and on the internet’. I find myself thinking that she comes altogether too close to jumping the shark at this point, and it is perhaps a token of the author’s diffidence about this text that it only appears on two of the blogs.
So we have three layers of transmission: LCMT editing the raw texts and putting them online; Irene both as the channel and as historian of the reception of the Ecteiroglyphs; and the three Lorwolm, angels who take shape as a kinglet or miniature crow, ‘a warm, white mist’ and a disembodied voice above a small blue bowl. The poems they deliver are a set of prophecies that, by their nature, cannot be of any relevance to ourselves: they are to be left to be recovered, as terma, by ‘the true prophets of the Lorwolm’ in a presumably distant future, adding a fourth layer to the process.
Unlike Dee and Kelley’s angels, the Lorwolm have no language of their own, but intersperse the Ecteiroglyphs with words from ‘Bruyeil-Pacifican’ and ‘Uru-nauwi’ which will be spoken by their future readers. The question of why, then, the transmissions do not take the form of some impenetrable Voynich ms. or Liber Loagaeth is addressed, but resoundingly not answered, in one of the prose sections.
7
It is difficult not to look for references: the mind is tempted to find traces of what it knows within a deliberately alien text, but the results are tenuous. One could identify a knot of alchemical and tarot imagery, by no means inappropriate to the world of the Lorwolm, in the stanza below, although I do not believe that such a correspondence represents any consistent symbolism from which the poem is generated.
A red branch and a white branch act for the unawed nations
Exiled to the farther coast of the female pope called Salt.
The male pope known by his peacock dagger and graffiti
Demands that they return a great relic they stole.
The two popes occur in most tarot variants, the female presumed to represent either Pope Joan, who supposedly reigned in the 850s, or Sister Manfreda of the Gugliemite sect, elected first of a projected line of Papesses: this lady, burnt in 1300, was connected to the Visconti family, for whom the earliest surviving decks were made. The red and white imagery reinforces this sexual dualism: in alchemy, the white eagle and red lion are the Queen and King in sacred marriage; salt and sulphur (which occurs in the following stanza) are their gluten and blood. This pair correspond to the Empress and Emperor, secular counterparts of the Papess and Pope: to those who played Trionfi, the game of Triumphs, all four were known as papi, popes.
Of course, there are other strands, even in this excerpt: the red branch suggests Cúchullain and the other warriors of Conchobar in the Ulster Cycle; the great stolen relic could send us down any number of blind trails. The peacock is one of eight kinds of bird to which reference is made in the Ecteiroglyphs (more occur in the prose texts), a signal perhaps that we should be aware of the possibility of their being cast in the Language of the Birds, which cannot be understood without initiation.
8
Both the complex frame and much of the equipment of the poems brings us to the author’s evident debt to classic fantasy. The carefully stacked manner in which the main texts are presented is reminiscent of, for instance, M. P. Shiel’s trilogy of future histories delivered through a subject in hypnotic trance, or of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, which relays its vision of the Last Redoubt of humanity through the device of a 17th Century narrator.
The Ecteiroglyphs, assuming that their terminology is not entirely symbolic, imply a distinctly retrograde future: earlier in the poem given above, a ‘transport vessel cross[es] the waves of the air realm’, but there is no indication whether this occurs by means of science or sorcery - the craft is, after all, attacked by a ‘fire griffin’. The prospect of a more ancient culture, not dead while it is still dreamed of, rising to supplant our own, was elegantly formulated by Clark Ashton Smith:
The peoples of Zothique, one might say, have rounded the circle and have returned to the conditions of what we of the present era might regard as antiquity. The idea of this last continent was suggested by the ‘occult’ traditions regarding Pushkara, which will allegedly become the home of the 7th root race, the last race of mankind.
The implication that human societies do not follow some teleological progression toward a goal in history, but loop through time, is underlined by the chronology of the Ecteiroglyphs being measured by ‘gyre’, with its echo of Yeats’ system.
When elements of fantasy are utilised in writing that would otherwise fall outside the genre, the result often does little justice to what is invoked: the alien is admitted merely to illuminate the values of the everyday. The Ecteiroglyphs avoid such a trap: they are texts in which the relationship between things is evident, but the things themselves are inexpressible because they are not (yet) in our culture. There is no real difficulty in following the sense of any of the poems, but it is impossible to understand the significance of what they describe: the texts are in plain view, but sealed to us. The problem, which I find more interesting than mere surface disruption, is that we can have no idea of what the poems actually refer to beyond the very general explanation provided by their supposed channel, which we are at liberty to find bizarre and untenable.
The Ecteiroglyphs deal in concepts which may not be transferred: they offer no comfort to a reader who wishes to look at anything other than the poems themselves. Their only gloss is provided by the prose texts that accompany them: these explain nothing, but locate the poems within the game of the Lorwolm, in which even the possibility of revelation is made the subject of prophecy.
The Blogs
http://zinc-tart.livejournal.com/2008/04/01/
Lorwolm entries from 1 April – 24 August 2008.
http://lorwolm.blogspot.com/
2 April – 14 May.
http://lorwolm.livejournal.com/
3 April – 14 May. Includes ‘The Friendly Skeptic’.
http://members.diaryland.com/edit/view.phtml?user=lorwolm
6 April – 14 May.
http://lorwolm.wordpress.com/
15 April – 14 May. Includes ‘The Friendly Skeptic’.
PAUL HOLMAN is the author of The Memory of the Drift. Much of this ongoing serial text has been collected in book form by Shearsman. A new section is due to appear online at the Great Works website. Read Peter Philpott’s profile of Paul Holman in Geometer here.