TagJohn Dee

Damon Albarn Is Going Ahead with the John Dee Opera Without Alan Moore

Damon Albarn

Damon Albarn has written and will star in a stage show about 16th Century alchemist, astrologer and spy John Dee.

A musical work based on Elizabeth I’s medical and scientific adviser, Doctor Dee will have its premiere in July at the Manchester International Festival.

It will then be staged at the home of the English National Opera as part of London’s Cultural Olympiad programme.

BBC: Damon Albarn to star in new stage show

(via John Reppion)

Previously: Alan Moore explains why he canceled his involvement in the opera.

Alan Moore Working with Mike Patton, and with the Gorillaz on Opera About John Dee

Mike Patton and Alan Moore

The project has finally been confirmed. Patton and Broadrick are both attached to Unearthing, “a bewitching story written and narrated by Moore set against an epic score”. Although the soundtrack is led by Crook&Flail, a partnership between Fog’s Andrew Broder and rapper Doseone, there are a slew of cameos, including Hella’s Zach Hill and Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite. “It is about, uh, a co-worker of Alan’s and somehow seemingly about Alan himself,” Doseone told Pitchfork last year. “And it’s about the comic industry, the world of magic, the world we live in, the world we don’t live in.”

Also, last I heard Moore said the Gorillaz project had been “overblown,” but now it appears to be moving ahead:

Moore presently has his fingers in another musical pie – a team-up with Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewitt. The trio are collaborating on an opera about John Dee, a mathematician and mystic who advised Queen Elizabeth I. In an interview this week, Albarn said he is doing his homework, reading “Euclid and Pythagoras and all of that stuff”. We hope Moore is holding up his end of the bargain, and is listening to Parklife and the Good, the Bad and the Queen.

Guardian: Alan Moore collaboration with Faith No More’s Mike Patton confirmed

Sir Francis Bacon and John Dee : the Original 007

Interesting, but how to explain the effectiveness of Enochian magick if this is true?

Dee has been defamed through the centuries as a necromancer, but it’s the opinion of many writers that his angelic-cabalistic- alchemical work, his Philosophers Stone, the”Monad Hieroglyphica”(1564) may have been a cover for covert operations carried on in the name of her majesty. The 007 was the insignia number that Elizabeth was to use for private communiques between her Court and Dee.

Link (via Mutato Nomine)

Old Alan Moore Interview Unearthed

Old but previously unpublished interview:

John Dee, for example, was one of the leading scientific lights of his age. Without John Dee, there wouldn’t have been an Isaac Newton. The science of navigation was practically invented by John Dee. He was a classic Renaissance man, and yet he seemed to spend the latter half of his life working upon this incomprehensible series of squiggles that he referred to as being Enochian language, which he seemed to believe literally was a form of language with which you could communicate with angels. Now, you look at this table of tiny squares full of little symbols, numbers, letters, and it looks like complete lunacy – and, indeed, most people have dismissed it as such, but given Dee’s undisputed, original intellect, I found it more difficult to dismiss it.

I also started looking at people like Jack Whiteside Parsons. There’s a crater on the moon named after him – the Parsons Crater. That’s because Jack Parsons invented solid rocket fuel, without which it would have been impossible to reach the moon. He was a distinguished scientist. He was also a member of the Golden Dawn – the Caliphate OTO; the Ordo Templi Orientist (OTO). Crowley had been the head of the order at one point. The more I started to look at it, the more it seemed that . . . most of the leading scientists, artists, musicians – most of the key thinkers in human cultural history, seemed to be blatantly and overtly involved in magical thinking of some sort. I mean nearly every artist that you would care to name … You’d think there’d be nothing more formal and scientific than those sort of divided rectangles and squares of Mondrian’s, but no, that was all based upon theosophy. Even baseball was created by a theosophist.

Link

(via New World Disorder)

John Dee and the Book of Soyga

The Book of Soyga is a medieval or early modern magical treatise, a copy of which is known to have been owned and (to some extent) studied by the mathematician and magician John Dee (1527 – 1608). The book itself was, to the frustration of generations of Dee scholars, not to be found. Quite recently, however, D. Harkness found copies in the Bodleian Library and in the British Library, filed under its alternate title, Aldaraia.

Read Jim Reed’s full essay

(via Obscurantist).

© 2024 Technoccult

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑