A mock-up cover illustrating how Pagan Magazine might look
in 2024 based on a recent post on Torpedo the Ark
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of Pagan: The Magazine of Blood-Knowledge (1983-1992).
And, whilst I have discussed the origins of this obscure publication previously on Torpedo the Ark and provided a full index of issues - click here - I think this might be an opportune moment to offer a few further remarks in response to a suggestion that Pagan be digitised and made available online and in answer to the following questions asked by this same person:
1. Can you explain why you chose the title Pagan for the magazine?
As far as I recall, this was inspired by D. H. Lawrence; not just his religious and occult writings, but the fact that he and his close friends belonged to a literary society as adolescents referred to by some as 'the Pagans' [1].
This small group would discuss all kinds of ideas and read authors including Marx, Nietzsche, and Darwin and I wanted the magazine to reflect the same degree of intellectual curiosity. My readings of Nietzsche in the mid-1980s only reinforced my view that this was the perfect name for the magazine and although I never used the following section from The Will to Power, it very much reflects the kind of thing that fired my imagination at the time:
"We few or many who again dare to live in a dismoralised world, we pagans in faith: we are probably also the first to grasp what a pagan faith is: - to have to imagine higher creatures than man, but beyond good and evil; to have to consider all being higher as also being immoral. We believe in Olympus - and not in the 'Crucified'." [2]
I still think it's a nice title, although that's partly due to the fact that I'm strongly inclined towards auto-descriptive words beginning with the letter P: punk, pirate, poet, pagan, etc. However, I would almost certainly change the subtitle - if it ever was the subtitle and not merely a strapline - as the irrationalist concept of blood-knowledge is one I have come to find problematic [3]. I think now I would be tempted to go with Pagan: the Magazine of Dark Enlightenment.
2. Can you remember the circumstances surrounding the production of the early issues?
Not very well. I was twenty at the time and studying for a degree in Leeds. That period is very much like a dream now and I don't remember much about it.
Fortunately, however, I kept a diary and, apparently, it was on Thursday 7 April, 1983, that I suddenly had the idea of putting together a magazine that would reflect my new philosophy - a post-punk primitivism partly inspired by D. H. Lawrence and a second-hand copy of the Larousse Encyclopedia of World Mythology.
I designed a front cover - which, to be honest, is a complete dog's dinner - and began writing the text that evening. The first issue wasn't completed, however, until the middle of the following month, when I was in London at Charisma Records.
It was there that I made a hundred photocopies of the ten-side issue on 16 May. Don't ask what happened to them, but I know that one was sent to Malcolm McLaren's office at 25 Denmark Street and it might be noted that the woman's face featured on the cover with a thick black band of makeup across her eyes was inspired by the dancers in the 'Buffalo Gals' video (a look McLaren borrowed from Ridley Scott's Bladerunner (1982)).
The image of Priapus which also featured on the cover was intended to be a kind of logo, but, sadly, it didn't appear on any future issues and I think Pan became the presiding deity for the most part.
The superior second issue, with original artwork by Gillian Hall - my on-off (mostly off) partner at the time - came out in July and was quickly followed by issue three, which was a poetry issue with a picture of Jordan (Pamela Rooke) on the cover. The magazine didn't really come into its own until the period 1986-89, which is when the vast bulk of issues were produced (on A3 paper).
3. Were you part of the pagan/esoteric/occult scene in the 1980s?
No, not at all.
My interests were very much to do with art, politics, and popular culture, rather than magic or witchcraft. I read books about the latter and had a T-shirt with a picture of Aleister Crowley on, but that was about it.
Having said that, there were issues of Pagan on subjects including alchemy, astrology, and tarot, so it would be a little disingenuous to say I had no interest in (or knowledge of) these things. Further, I was a regular reader of Pagan News, edited by Phil Hine, who has since become an internationally respected author on chaos magic and related topics and we occasionally cross paths in London.
However, my attempt to garner support for the magazine from Leonora James, the Gardnerian High Priestess who was then serving as President of the Pagan Federation, ended badly after she decided that images I had used by German Expressionist painters had paedophile undertones. She warned me that if I were to send her any future copies of Pagan Magazine she would immediately report me to the police!
After that, I had no further contact with people on the pagan scene until I met Christina Harrington, in 2004, and became involved with things happening at her magical little bookshop, Treadwell's [4].
4. Finally, do you still identify as a pagan and do you see Torpedo the Ark as a continuation of the project you began with Pagan Magazine forty years ago?
I don't really identify as anything to be honest and, whilst there are certainly posts on TTA that might be interpreted as pagan in character, the blog is ultimately a very different kettle of fish and has a radically different philosophy and perspective. I found it fun doing the mockup cover for an imaginary issue of Pagan Magazine published in 2024, but don't think my heart would really be in it if asked to produce an entire new issue. Some things are very much of their time and Pagan belongs in the 1980s like a fish belongs in water.
But again, having said that, I obviously still read Lawrence and Nietzsche and I have presented two papers at Treadwell's recently - one on the magical allure of objects and the other on occultism in the age of transparency [5] - so, who knows, perhaps for the 50th anniversary I might be tempted to reboot the magazine. But I doubt it.
Artwork for Pagan Magazine, Issue 2 (1983),
by Gillian Hall
Notes
[1] See John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 170.
[2] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1968), section 1034 (1888), p. 533.
[3] I have twice discussed Lawrence's concept of blood-knowledge on Torpedo the Ark: click here and here.
[4] See the post dated 4 December 2012 entitled 'The Treadwell's Papers' - click here.
[5] Details of both these events can be found on the TTA Events page: click here.
