Avalon Working
a landscape grimoire
by Mark Nemglan
Avalon Working is equal parts grimoire and devotional, gazeteer and visionary journey. In a journey to the heart of Albion, the work passionately argues for Glastonbury as a centre of emergence and initiation, a latter-day Eleusis. The work invites readers to actively participate in the Holy Island’s unfolding destiny, in partnership with its guardians and powers, to co-create its mythopoeia and, in doing so, forge a new Avalonian covenant.
Glastonbury’s role and status in the tapestry of Britain’s magickal history is significant and undeniable, from Edward Kelley to Dion Fortune. Yet it has also come to embody the worst traits of the New Age, which commodifies and trivialises the sacred. In Avalon Working, Mark Nemglan restores the Holy Island’s reputation as a locus and fountainhead of extraordinary magickal power for a new generation of practitioners and seekers. Writing in a progressive occult idiom, Nemglan evokes the multiple threads of Celtic, Arthurian, Druidic and Faerie currents and braids these with alchemical, geomantic, witchcraft, Thelemic, Typhonian and Draconian traditions.
In doing so he has created a comprehensive ritual framework, a workable system of operative magick and a language for interfacing with the presiding powers of the Holy Island, its numina and geomythologies. He elucidates parallels between Glastonbury’s sorcerous topography and our wider mythic heritage. As such, the book is a potent key for those seeking to develop or deepen their work in whatever landscape they stand in or make pilgrimage to, and regardless of tradition.
Avalon is ‘a wellspring of deity, a nexus of power, a terrestrial otherworld, and a place of mythopoetic emergence.’ The Tor functions as the axis mundi of this ritual landscape, the land around it quartered by solstice sunrise and sunset, each quadrant ruled by a Queen. The Red and White Springs flowing forth from the base of the Tor are used to lustrate, consecrate and ensorcel, their polarising powers brought into alchemical unity by the practitioner who is sincere in their quest. An initiatory circuit is undertaken through the four realms of the Glastonbury landscape, the practitioner imbibing an elixir from four Graals, transforming his or her self into the four alchemical bodies. The practitioner returns from the initiatory circuit, including a visionary descent to Annwn, the underworld, and is transmuted by the trials undertaken into a lapis exilis or charged Graal.
Avalon Working situates the reader in the history and myths of the land, evokes with immersive photography, and details rituals which conform to the edict ’simple magic in powerful places.’ It offers a return to the haunted island of the ennead and the undertaking of the Great Quest which is coded in the ritual landscape and the coursing of the twin serpent currents that still animate the body of Albion.
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Table of Contents (abridged)
EXORDIUM
On Celtic and Other Traditions
On Brythonic
On the Avalonian Powers
On the Magick of Avalon
On Dowsing
On Sex and Gender
On the Scope of this Work
On Drug Consumption
On the Duration of the Quest
LIBER PRINCIPIA
I THE SUPERFICIES OF THE HOLY ISLAND
Summarium
Glastonbury, Avalon and New Age Eschatology
II THE NUMEN OF THE HOLY ISLAND
The Red and the White
The Springs and the Serpents
Intermissio: Sacred Directionality
The Gates of the Sun
Sky Lore
The Avalonian Otherworld
The Draoidhean
De Sororitas Avalonis
The Graal
The Vesica Piscis
Sovereignty and the Sacral Cycle
The Arthurian Archetypes
Intermissio: Magicko-Religious Continuity
III THE QUATERNITIES OF THE HOLY ISLAND
The Sorcerous Geographies
The Four Initiatory Queens
The Lineaments of the Ennead
The Four Graals of the Holy Island
The Four Bodies of the Quest
LIBER MYSTERIA
I THE OUTER PRECINCTS
Summerium
Intermissio: The Umbra Animae
Theoria
Parousia
Cultivating the Oculi Magicka
The Numen of the Outer Precincts
Acquiring Spirit Allies
II THE INNER PRECINCTS
Acquiring the Sacramentalia
The Sacrament of the Waters
The Sacra Via of the Oaken Path
The Rites of Adjuration
III THE TEMPLE AND THE ADYTUM
The Rites of Lustration
The Ophidian Rite
The Epiphanic Rites
Intermissio: Divinity and Duality
The Stations of the Sun
IV THE GREAT QUEST
Consecration of the Graal Hypostasis
The First Station
Intermissio: The Sol Niger
The Second Station
The Third Station
The Fourth Station
The Great Synaxis
Posta Sacra
POSTSCRIBO
IN ELYSIUM
The Outer Precincts
Selected bibliography & further reading
Index
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Illustrated with 44 black & white photographs / maps & diagrams.
Standard Hardcover Edition - Limited to 900 copies
304 pages. Bound in verdant green cloth, blind debossed and stamped in gold on front cover and spine. Dark red endpapers, red & yellow head and tail bands, and two ribbon bookmarks; red and white. Printed in black and green on 150 gsm paper.
ISBN: 978-1-912316-91-5
Paperback Edition
304 pages. Sewn paperback printed on 100 gsm paper, with full colour card cover.
ISBN: 978-1-912316-88-5
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Press, reviews, endorsements
Interview with Mark Nemglan on the Spirit Box podcast - watch on YouTube here
Interview with Mark Nemglan on the Star Revelations podcast - watch on YouTube here
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About the Author
Mark Nemglan is an author, poet, publisher, researcher and esotericist. Through Nemglan Press, and a variety of pseudonyms, he has published works of poetry, a study of the Old Norse seiðrmaðr in relation to the cult of Yngvi-freyr, and the acclaimed and much sought-after work of occult fiction Shalat.
His current interests are concerned with the interpretation of, and engagement with, so-called ritual landscapes by means well beyond the purview of orthodox scientific disciplines. This is based on the not unreasonable position that, in order to fully understand landscapes deemed sacred or numinous by cultures where interaction with the otherworld was a preeminent concern, congress with its still-present genii locorum, deities and ancestors is absolutely necessary. By marshalling a variety of magickal technologies, interpolated with historical, mythographic, folkloric and archaeological insights, the land is transfigured in the eye of the beholder into something beyond the material, becoming a nexus of the symbolic, imaginal and sorcerous, and yielding a form of geognosis.
