the woodpecker is the phoenix of wit
the head heats up battering the trunk
then cools down again to pull out tidbits
from aleph to tau of cabbalist gunk
all would grab sovereignty’s fruit Malmuth
low-hung pistachios on the terebinth
isle of recorded voices- where Melmoth
was once Minotaur and dark labyrinth
where the Prince is master - Picus caries
the goetia of governance language
yanking utopias out the series
of rotten Law - judge to warlock sandwiched
till Thom More is Peake - Pico convinces
burning women to fire his Magus Prince
Castle Ditch
Lewes, Sussex
9 September 2018
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), an Italian nobleman and distinguished hebraist and classical scholar of his generation, founded the Western hermetic tradition and the ” Christian” Cabbala. Picus means a woodpecker in Latin. Poliziano hailed him as the ” Phoenix of Wit”. His “900 Theses” were condemned by Pope Innocent VIII. The biography by his nephew Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1498) was translated from Latin and published by Thomas More in 1504. More says that Pico was so attractive, women were ” on fire” for him.
The nephew like Shakespeare’s Prospero, ruled from his Italian state from his library until his own nephew a condottiere, overthrew him in 1511. This was the age of Machiavelli, whose manuscript of ” The Prince” was in circulation from 1513, and such were the origins of the English Utopic tradition with Pico and More that have arguably culminated with Mervyn Peake’s ” Gormenghast” novels.
For there to have been a Groan Law and Master of Ritual and ceremonial magic at Gomenghast, there should have been more, a Goetia, that involved the summoning and compelling of spirits. We sense this surely in the madness of Lord Sepulchrave the 76th Earl. A warlock in this context is what the word means etymologically, an oath-breaker.
The lowest of the eleven sefirot of the Cabbala is Malmuth, which is the sefirah of Sovereignty or the Kingdom. It is the most accessible to humanity. That sacred tree in the Old Testament, the terebinth is really a pistachio tree, belonging to the Pistacia family. Melmoth is the anti-hero of Charles Maturin’s Gothic novel ” Melmoth the Wanderer” (1820). David Bowie referred to the sefirot in the ” station to station” line of ” Station to Station”. By the way 10 ss in l. 11. Pronounce “governance” with two syllables.