To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

There’s no healing without clearing. Nor chanting. Spirits neither

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. This week: The Golden Bough by James George Frazer – new full edition

The forst full version of the Victorian pop-anthropology classic has all the most triggering ideas in one volume. The Golden Bough continues to outrage audiences, as it pricks the Western world’s lack of humility. Not only by illustrating how indigenous customs reflect timeless values, but also by suggesting rituals we label ‘savage’ are played out in cultures who consider themselves eminently more civilised.

It’s where Robert Graves found divine inspiration for The White Goddess, René Girard gave Fraser props in Things Unsaid Since the Beginning for the World. Lovecraft seized on its air of intefatigable, ancient ambivalence his mythos. Wittgenstein wrote a book deploring its colourfully gory naturalistic nihilism, and The Golden Bough appears on Colonel Kurtz’s bedside table in Apocalypse Now.

Fraser bottled it back in the day, but this collection features his punchline – Christ’s crucifixion was basically a human sacrifice.

Editor Robert Fraser’s based at my own alma mater, University of London’s Royal Holloway College (RHC) – described as “a party university” by one of my Vital tutors (yes indeed). Despite its non-intentional reputation RHC, nestled in leafy Surrey, attracts thrusting minds like sex and drugs researcher Alex Aldrydge plus Vital lecturer Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, joining the likes of Dystopia author Gregory Claeys (who taught me Victorian philosophy).