Alchemisland

Dublionysus, Mangan’s lurid epic penned in an absinthopium haze. The poet’s correspondence highlights a mysterious redheaded bedmate who tended his fleshly pangs during the tract’s 23 day construction period but her name, like Mangan’s manuscript, is lost. 

Themes of national and personal confination abound in Mangan’s work and seem to reify thematically as assignments in his waking life. Locked in a room until his task is done. Locked in himself, by addiction. Locked in place, by debt, and debt of heart.

He worked feverishly and produced prodigiously, loosened by stupor. Each time he sank below the poppy’s florid trance he penned words by the thousand, prose and poetry both. Upon his katabatic re-emergence grave news awaited the poet, who reported to have stirred awake and instantaneously sensed an uncommon blankness of mind. Every idle thought gone; worrisome given poet’s minds harbour little save for idles. Perhaps by such concentration he had exorcised his spirit of its art; maybe that ability had never been his to celebrate and was mere shadowry, some daimonic pursuit.

Alone in the room he searched first for bedmate then for book and when he found neither grew perturbed. He willed it otherwise. She will return and walk through the door manuscript one hand, hot loaf in the other. From his inside pocket he fetched a timepiece, flicked it open, stared hard at it, wondered when it had stopped short never to go again.

He waited another while, judging time by the procession of sliced light along the floor. Before long allowed his mind to entertain gnawing doubts. He stared toward his opium pipe black with use and silently consented that yes, he may have imagined for himself a kindly female figure who cared for him in the last nauseous spins of his twirl on the spiral slide. A woman of this nature, in his life.. surely a thing too good to be true. 

However, his memories of the literature and the creation thereof were potent and tangible. He could not believe that he imagined this whole feat. All 23 days’ labour lost, a notion which he could not acknowledge for pain. Yet, neither book nor bedmate produced so supernatural anecdote was made suffice. 

In later years Mangan publicly told this version of the story. However, close friends said Mangan privately told a different version. That when Mangan woke to his smiling bedmate and enquired as to his manuscripts whereabouts she revealed it had been sold on no less than his own orders. 

its contents were bartered. Chapters torn off in fistfuls and hawked to low bidders to keep the poet’s pipe stocked with his favored blend of Eastern dream. In total, the manuscript fetched 23 shillings, 22 spent on labor, opium, absinthe and fine deli sandwiches. 

Graim Graim Graim upon Mangan, degenerate outsider whose soft heart ill bore life’s scrapes. It was said that Mangan never wrote another word. He was always found in his cups. When eager throngs approached to ask was he the great poet Mangan who some called Ireland’s Poe, he spat the ground near them and said no, that he was an illiterate fishmonger who could no more left than write. 

A compilation of erotic verse, ancient even to the Phrygians

A chronicle of the names of the world’s great stones, in their original tongues

The book of the names of Gods

Stele with scenes from antique mystery plays, some of which bear striking resemblance to Shakespeare plots 

The books of the cities of the giants

Sheets of thinly beaten gold from an old Aztec capital, its script the rude ancestor of high Aztec, containing instructions for the summoning of a drake. The corresponding banishment scripts are lost to time

Archimedes’ book of correspondences. Written by the divinely inspired hand of this greater antique mind, containing sketches, dialogues, ideas, scraps of poetry, celebrated satiric drawings, and his person historical timeline 

The equestrian manuals of Diomedes 

John Dee’s watercolour illustrating the birth ex nihilo of a star 

Hyperborean maps showing man made eyries of dizzying height and mast forested coastlines long since eaten by snow

Codex Rapunzalis. A book made from human hair, bound for moonday celebrations of Princess Gwayshayde of Saxon Hungary

Extracanonical gospel of two thieves, wherein the men crucified alongside Christ Jesus are decoded through gnostic analysis, allegories of realities usurpation by Urizen

The book of the fangs, reportedly the only text which contains a detailed analysis of the inner workings of classical vampires, and eyewitness accounts of the dissection of a vampire’s corpse in a masonic lodge near Dusseldorf, said to be a direct son of Cain who had seen the shadow spires of Nod

Nodian Leys. Fifty sheets of vampiric choral music. Songs of sadness and exile. Written in blood by those whose father’s father dwelled inside the walls of Eden