Fantastic Metropolis

The Sigillum Dei Aemeth is a magical synthesis of ideas of a purely spiritual nature with regard to the divine, archangelic and angelic names associated with the celestial spheres wherein the planetary forces operate. The operation of the Sigillum occurs in the worlds of Yetzirah and Briah. Moreover, the four small sigils attributed to the Tablets of the Watchtowers receive their elucidation from this Sigillum, whence they are resolved into the names of the four.

—Thomas Head, as quoted by Israel Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn System of Magick

There is a basic Keatsian structure—a literally spatial conception of two realms in opposition and a mythlike set of actions involving characters shuttling back and forth between them-that appears in a great many of the poems and can usefully serve as a device for relating poems, passages and situations one to another in a view of what Keats work as a whole is preponderately “about.”

—Jack Stillinger, introduction to The Complete Poems of Keats

By 1795, the time John Keats was born, Walpole was only two years away from the grave, and the original pact with the elementals had ended in failure, disrupted by the very mortality that made the humans so irresistible to the elementals. The shewstone was packed away at Strawberry Hill, Sandwich was dead, and with the bonds between the elementals and man fraying, it was only a matter of time until unfortunate incidents would occur. The rampage of tuberculosis through the Keats family, striking down Keats’ mother, his younger brother Thomas, and eventually himself (as well as his father’s death in 1804, the year before Nelson’s death at Trafalgar) may merely be unfortunate luck, but it’s telling that George only escaped by moving to America, and that Fanny (his sister, not his love Fanny Brawne) is the only member of his family to have escaped an early death in England. As we know the elemental half-breeds follow the melded parent, is it possible that the instrument of their birth and all of them had to be purged by an agent of the divine? Was the Angel of Wrath, he who destroyed the Nephilim of Enoch and the dark cults of Sodom and Gomorrah and the half-divine offspring of Pharaoh, loose in England, destroying those who were aberrations in God’s sight? (Poor Edward Keats lived barely a year.) Throughout his work Keats has a sense of his own alienation, and perhaps there didn’t need to be an angel hunting his family… if they were magical crossbreeds as the cement lockstep Victorian era approached, perhaps the world was too much with them, late and soon, and the tide of conformity laid waste their powers.

Hard to say. But if we are the playthings of debauched elementals, we are also their masters. We should remember that, I think. The son of fire ultimately was cast down before the son of clay.

Matt Rossi, the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003), is entirely unexciting on first glance. His hair is a dirty blond color, his eyes a dull green that calls to mind beer bottles abraded by the ocean, and his demeanor mildly absent-minded. He has no dark secrets. He does not know the 72-fold Name of God, nor can he catalogue the mysterious hosts that populate the otherworld lying alongside this one. Any rumors that he raises young turtles to grow up and become Gamera are lies intended to smear him. His leather jacket does not hold the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the Yellow Sign, or the secret true path of the Otz Chaim, and he is certainly not Atlantean in any way. He’s from Rhode Island.