Eccentric Circles: Machine Age London

Stephanie and Fred head to the pub in Fitzrovia to carry out the post mortem on the series. Amongst other pressing matters, they ask how our subjects hold up against their more famous Bloomsbury contemporaries. How much should individuals be forgiven for being products of their time? And, is anyone too important to be cancelled?

We wrap things up by returning to conversations with several academics we heard from earlier.  We ask them why it is that our subjects are so much less known than their Bloomsbury Set contemporaries. We focus on the end of the Machine Age and its anticipation of the Space Age to come, and ask how our subjects fared in the run up to World War 2 when there was a choice of mostly totalitarian futures. In particular, we return to the artist and writer Wyndham-Lewis and his short-lived sympathy… for Hitler.

We peer into the work of writer Arthur Machen, one of the godfathers of what later came to be known as “weird fiction.” Machen was a great influence on HP Lovecraft, and the development of the fantasy and horror genres. Stephen King is a fan.  There is a direct line from Machen's writing to Dungeons and Dragons, grail quests such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Game of Thrones.  Machen bemoaned modernity, the mechanised slaughter of the Great War and especially the dreary Church of England, which had lost all sense of magic. Instead he took refuge in the past, a fantastic and eternal realm of changelings, fairies and monstrous beings.

Immensely talented and good looking,  Augustus John might today have been as well known as Picasso, but his artworks failed to live up to their promise. All save one: the singular, Bohemian lifestyle that was his true magnum opus.

We look at two men whose Christian faith was central to their being and work: engraver, painter, printer, and poet, David Jones, and the painter, Stanley Spencer.

Completing our investigation into the ways the occult has impacted the present, we look at yoga’s journey from exotic pastime to billion dollar industry and ask what the modern sense of “self” owes to Aleister Crowley’s dictum: “Every man and woman is a star.”

The legal situation around drugs was very different in London at the turn of the 20th century from what it is now. Opium was a go-to painkiller. And cocaine and cannabis products were also very widely available. In 1896, London hosted its first hallucinogenic trip when Havelock Ellis boiled up some peyote buttons in his flat. For Bohemian London, the time was ripe for experimentation. Later on, drug taking became a less socially acceptable pastime. But that didn’t stop Aleister Crowley who relished the notoriety. He took every drug going and wrote about it. In so doing, he set the scene for the drug cultures that followed.

Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare are partially responsible for the development of what is known as sex magic.  Crowley was, among other things, an occultist, an important figure in the propagation of yoga in the West, a conjurer of demons, and a heroin addict. His sexuality was licentious, all encompassing. Crowley's law, “Do What Thou Wilt,” has arguably become the dominant way of seeing relationships between consenting adults today. Spare began his career as a child prodigy, an incredibly talented artist who as a teenager was exhibited in the Royal Academy. Yet he claimed to have been sexually initiated by a South London witch, a descendant of the Salem witch trials.

Watch out for new episodes in the next couple of weeks. We'll be covering the modern holy trinity of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, along with other more traditional religious devotion. We'll look into the popularity of the occult and its lasting legacy. And we'll be asking: "Where better to escape to: the future, full of progress and space travel, or to the comfort of the past?"

WARNING: this podcast contains explicit language. Better sex makes for a better "breed." In 1918, the year that the First World War ended, a slim little book was published. Its title was Married Love, and it was going to change the course of Western sexuality forever.   Its author was Marie Stopes. She believed that mutual orgasm was an essential component of a successful marriage. This was a radical, progressive view, at a time when many doctors and scientists ignored or denied altogether the existence of the female orgasm. And yet much of Stopes’ motivation was decidely reactionary: orgasms made women healthy, and healthy women conceived healthy babies…. and healthy babies were needed to defend and administer the British Empire. The very social fabric of the Empire itself depended on what happened between the sheets.