Alchemisland

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The Astral Geographic

In the introduction to Astral Geographic, Andy Sharp says that magic can become a life enrichment tool. Something which enables one to enhance experience through creative engagement. Andy’s first book, The English Heretic Collection, arrived at just the right time for me, when my life was in dire need of enrichment. 

Couple months into lockdown and I’m in my room wondering whether the world is ending. In desperate need of distraction I flick through my new book, little knowing the profound effect its words will have on me. Inside this tome resides a world of profane strangeness which sets my mind on fire. This book single-handedly tears apart the drab, changeless interiors of the house in which I am gaoled, awakening in me additional freedom of mind; the stirring to life of some dormant chimera glistening with webbed amniotic fluid. 

I wasn’t familiar with English Heretic’s music or writing before buying the book but it entered my algorithm a day or two after publication – something I consider entirely auspicious and magical. The book’s bold red cover depicts its author in a blazer that wouldn’t look misplaced on the Lord of Summerisle, wearing a sort of sackcloth gimp mask somewhere between sado-zoidberg and a Thomas Hardy farmer’s idea of bondagewear. He looms inside a tear, a man stuck betwixt skulls and winged abominites. An appropriate calling card for an author who explores concepts like the self predicted ritual deaths of fashion icons, the omen-laden lives of presidents eventually subjected to ancient bog deaths, and the concept of the pig as the word of the Aeon.

For me the appeal of Andy’s guildless gospel is the sheer joyous anarchy of it all. We get no sense that occult knowledge is forbidden to us. Magical experience is taken out of the lodge, dusted off, and joyridden for all its worth, much to the chagrin of the grade-obsessed. Andy never pretends that he is a benefactor of ancient lore, attainable only through a paid subscription plan. In his inimitable guerilla style, he tells you how he has enriched his own experiences, and the depth thereof, through magical practice. Most importantly, he shows you that you can do it too.

Like the statue-still victim of a hit and run, English Heretic is now in the rearview. Astral Geographic represents new pastures, strange seeds. After a lifetime’s delving into occultism and psychogeography, engaging with landscape to lure out its liminality, Andy presents his Atlas of magic and witchcraft with a veteran craftsman’s deftness. The book is loosely an occult travel guide, a web of routes the examination of whose stations teases out a lineage of witchcraft, but it’s so much more than its conceit. Andy’s wide reading and linguistic dexterity, prosewise think Dukkornet and Ballard in a trench recounting ghost stories to the muddy redcoats of some future medieval war, allow him to condense entire cult’s worth of esoteric information into pithy, readable vignettes. It is in the connection of disparate dots that Sharp excels, revealing the checkmated chessboard you even didn’t know he’d set. 

Like a great southeast-moving river, Astral Geographic’s Orphic travels start in Egypt and conclude in Kenya, visiting everywhere in between. Meandering past the jungle centers of weird cults, stopping to strip them of louche exoticism and outmoded fashion. Little heed is paid to the implicitly imperial, that preferred flavor of the last new century’s magical corpus. Magic is recaptured as a lens and wand for radicalism, renewing historically maligned archetypes and imbuing them with animating astral light.

We visit the redoubt of a ram god bloated on the blood of Carthagian children, the wind-shorn faces of hillside hunting lodges in Ireland, and carnivalesque oracular caves in Greece, where gas-maddened sylphs pronounced sanguine tidings in the dawn age.

Not only will Andy expand your vocabulary with his deep time grammar, he’ll tell you where the best nosh is at, and where you can comfortably lay your head if you take a pilgrimage to one of these sites.

Gorgeous illustrations by the masterly Nick Taylor raise the text from mere treatise to vital occult document. Enabling astral travel, readers are sent on journeys across the hylic concepts of time and space, to the nightside of the tree of life. Bright colors bring to mind cover illustrations by John Minton; geometric Milton and Minton meeting at last, in appropriately infernal surrounds.

Any sensible satanist or worthwhile wizard needs this and the English Heretic Collection on their shelves! Surprise your coven by planning a holiday to Hades next summer using one of the routes laid out in this book. Remember to send Andy postcards of the sandcastles you build in Sheol.