The English Heretic Collection : Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography

"The English Heretic Collection' is a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep-vein travel to England's strangest landscapes - with a host of tragic players. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a nightmare terrain of ominous stones and abandoned military bases, transforming creative research into a surreal documentary. Horror B-movies haunt the East Anglian countryside. Winston Churchill is inaugurated into the Ancient Order of the Druids. The suburbs of West London are home to psychedelic covens. From the red clays of rural horror to the outer regions of occultism, from the forensic vision of J.G. Ballard to the cauldron of The White Goddess, if history is revealed as a paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild, new and imaginative geographies? Part countercultural history of England, part ghost story, and part magickal psychogeography, The English Heretic Collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making."--Back cover Andy Sharp delivers a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep vein creative research expeditions to England's strangest landscapes with a host of tragic players. From its inaugural Black Plaque in honour of Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves, this unique collection follows a veridical trajectory to the frontiers of belief. Reeves' film becomes a conspiratorial cauldron drawing in a host of tragic players in the end game of the Sixties. The Cornwall of Du Maurier's The Birds is ploughed to reveal the hidden psychic codes of our Blitz spirit. In a powerfully relevant occult rendering of a bruised Island, the myth of Churchill is dissected and re-animalised. New maps of hell are drawn by colliding the forensic vision of JG Ballard and Lovecraftian magic. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a nightmare terrain of murderous henges and abandoned military bases; conflating creative research into a surreal documentary, history as hallucination. Geography becomes an alchemical alembic, a vale of soul-making distilled by the lysergic psychobiology of Stanislav Grof, the alcoholic lyricism of Malcolm Lowry, and the convulsive travelogues of the Marquis de Sade. If history is revealed as paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild new imaginative geographies? The English Heretic collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making. **__The English Heretic Collection__ is a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep-vein travel to England’s strangest landscapes – with a host of tragic players.**__The White Goddess____The English Heretic Collection__