Short Film. 2020. Length, 6 min.11 sec. Shot on various locations with a Pixel 4a camera. Edited in Adobe Premier.

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       Between 1583-1587, the Elizabethan magus Dr John Dee and the clairvoyant Edward Kelley used a collection of crystals, mirrors or ‘shew stones’ to talk to angels and uncover the secrets of nature. The angels they contacted provided a set of teachings, including a large, complex grid of symbols which segmented our planet into a series of zones or ‘parts of earth’ which have a corresponding network of spiritual intelligences which mediate between the Earth and the cosmos. They also encountered a series of heretical, transgressive female angels who predicted an apocalypse. They described a time of reckoning for humanity to be followed by an age of peace and harmony in which the religious taboos against women’s sexuality and human sexuality overall would be removed as part of a new covenant with God. The ninety-two symbols which set out the ‘parts of earth‘ ruled by the spirits come tantalisingly close to the number of naturally occurring elements discovered by modern science.

       This film explores how the angelic ‘parts of earth’ can be used as an analogy for the building blocks of the cosmos, the infinitely fluid atomic world.  The piece is part of a series of works entitled ‘Geogamicas’ (Latin: Earth Marriage) which investigate how the body can be used to communicate with non-human sentience and atomic infinities.  The symbol for the sixty-first ‘part of earth’ Chirzpa (which corresponds to Britain in Dee and Kelley’s system) is used as a way to explore modalities of ‘bio-gnostic’ communion with one’s environment. Rather than looking into crystals, the stones are used as tools to cultivate altered states of consciousness which enable one to see into the body in order to sense multi-dimensional layers of reality. The glitchy, fragmented textures in the scenes evoke how the boundaries of the body break down when immersed in trance states and other forms of altered states of consciousness as the barriers between the body and its surrounding environment become blurred. The skin becomes a screen which reveals the hidden realities of matter and spirit. This ongoing project is concerned with developing models of feminine, esoteric embodiment that resonate both with the work of present-day feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and the predictions of the feminine spirits in Dee and Kelley’s Enochian corpus.