The Traveller in the Evening Andy Wilson

The fourth wall between the human subject and everything else evaporates. How to see global warming as part of the human drama, not as the end of it? How to rebuild the play when there is a fourth wall collapse, and when this collapse coincides with the actual theatre on fire? When being on fire is what causes this collapse, what happens? The play was s**t. We need another play.Timothy Morton, Hell
Hell on earth is here. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can yet fathom. As Timothy Morton’s new book, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, shows, escaping global warming hell requires a radical mystical marriage of Christianity and biology to awaken a future beyond white male savagery.
On 17th April 2024, Timothy Morton was interviewed by Andy Wilson for The Blake Society and The Traveller in the Evening. This podcast captures the interview and resulting discussion.
Timothy Morton
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appeared in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges, and is the author of Being Ecological (2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), ten other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.
Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology is published on Earth Day (22 April) 2024.
The Traveller in the Evening
Andy Wilson lived in Sunderland, Seaham Harbour, Peterlee, Hartlepool, Kings Lynn, Coventry, Torpoint, Eastleigh, Lee-on-Solent, Portland, Weymouth, Loughborough, York and Liverpool before dropping anchor in London. He runs the blog The Traveller in the Evening: Reflections on William Blake, Radical Theology, Politics and Surrealism, founded Reservists Against War and co-founded the Association of Musical Marxists (AMM). He is the author of Faust: Stretch Out Time 1970-75 (2006), Cosmic Orgasm: The Music of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram (2013), and The Brilliant New Hercules: A Blake Reader (2015). With Michael Tencer he edited The Assassin (2014), and with Jules Alford, Khiyana: Daesh, the Left and the Unmaking of the Syrian Revolution (2015).
Join the Blake Society here.
Download the Meeting Slides
https://travellerintheevening.substack.com/api/v1/file/a544634a-29fe-4a0c-9f53-c504c2d38017.pdf



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These are the Sons of Los, & these the Labourers of the VintageThou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summerUpon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the danceKnows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave:Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance,To touch each other & recede; to cross & change & returnThese are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountainsThe wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro' the darksom skyUttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sonsOf men: These are the Sons of Los! These the Visions of EternityBut we see only as it were the hem of their garmentsWhen with our vegetable eyes we view these wond'rous VisionsWilliam Blake, Milton I 26:1-12, [E123]
Conor Kostick leads a discussion with Andy Wilson about panpsychism, a philosophy gaining popularity with its account of how awareness is baked into matter as a fundamental property from the outset. Conor and Andy discuss:
* the current popularity of panpsychism
* what its basic idea is
* the ‘composition problem’ in explaining consciousness
* Galileo’s idea of science
* hierarchies of consciousness
* animal consciousness
* the possibility of higher forms of consciousness
* cultural resistance to panpsychism


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In 1786 the United States signed the Treaty of Marrakesh with Morocco, creating trade and diplomatic agreements but, crucially, also guaranteeing that no Moroccan would ever be taken as a slave in the US. In the following decades, several Black Muslim groups grew up in the US. Among these were the Moorish Science Temple and, later, the Moorish Orthodox Church (MOC), who seized on the treaty as a secular guarantee of their essential freedom, a freedom itself rooted metaphysically in Islam as the ancestral religion of the Moors, a tradition stolen from them through slavery and exile, which they now intend to recover.
In the 1960s the Moorish Orthodox Church developed into a free-thinking, avant-grade spiritual and artistic movement, with a Dadaistic, Prankster style of communication and a parallel commitment to spiritual insight. Church members were in contact at times with Timothy Leary, and included Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), author of works such as CHAOS: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism (1984), TAZ / The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1985) and a stream of other books exploring esoteric Islam, anarchism, ecology, alchemy, pirate utopias, and other matters of vital interest.
It is through Hakim Bey that I first heard of the Moorish Orthodox Church, but the church has moved beyond him of late. In this instalment of the Traveller in the Evening podcast, I interview comrade Theophrastus El about the origins, history and beliefs of this radical spiritual group, united around the ‘five pillars of Moorish Science’; love, truth, peace, freedom and justice (while some add: beauty.)
Contact Theophrastus El.
Theophrastus al-Razi El: The Straight Balance: Islamic Alchemy and Moorish Science
Download the pamphlet, The Straight Balance: Islamic Alchemy and Moorish Science, by Theophrastus al-Razi El, originally published by the Aurora Consergens Lodge of the Moorish Orthodox Church, Albion 2020.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank a number of people who have assisted in bringing this MOC pamphlet into being; Brother Ishraq El of Lodge Al Buraq, who provided important source material and, most importantly, feedback and encouragement, Brother El-Imran Arif of Lodge Aurora Consurgens, who read an earlier draft of this document and suggested a number of key improvements, and Brother Mustafa Al Laylah Bey, who deemed this worthy of publishing as a Moorish Orthodox Church pamphlet, and who worked on the layout and graphics. Brother Andy Wilson also stepped in for post-production  /  re-editing duties.
An earlier version of this paper was delivered as part of the MOC-UK online seminar series. I’d like to thank the attendees for their incisive questions and comments. Any errors and shortcomings in what follows are of course entirely my own.
Alchemy as Moorish Science
We are told that alchemy arrived in ‘Latin Europe’ on Friday, the 11th February 1144, when Robert of Chester completed his translation of De Compositione Alchemiae. This manuscript allegedly consists of the teachings of the monk ‘Morienus’, as given to the Umayyid Prince Khalid ibn Yazid. According to legend, this shadowy figure assists Khalid in deciphering a cryptic manuscript describing the making of the philosopher’s stone, and then disappears into the desert.
As the inhabitants of Western Christendom came into contact with Islamic civilisation from the C 10th CE, they found libraries full of works by Ptolemy, Galen and Aristotle, as well as manuscripts describing entirely new sciences – including alchemy. Scholars travelled to Sicily and Jerusalem in search of new knowledge, and manuscripts to translate. But most of all, as in the case of Robert of Chester and his colleague Herman the Dalmatian, they travelled to the Moorish Kingdom of Al Andalus. According to Sharif Anaël-Bey, the Caliphate of Cordoba was established in the C 8th by Moors from Mauritania, who ‘were the recipi

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The recent discussion of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job led me to think about the role of chaos, first in the Book of Job itself, then in the Bible generally, and then across the Near and Middle East and beyond. On this podcast, I’m joined by Sam Hamad to talk about Baal and Leviathan, and how their struggles entered the Old Testament via the traditions of the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. Sam discusses similar ancient Egyptian traditions, in which Apophis / Apep and Set are cast in the role of chaos gods. Join us to hear about Isis’s plan to revive the dead Osiris while disguised as a cat with a knife for a tail, and Set’s creation of the Egyptian deserts through his ejaculation.


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An interview with Jason Wright, author of a new book, Blake's Job: Adventures in Becoming – taking in Blake's Leviathan, gender, Jung, addiction, the singer Jackie Leven, and more on the way.


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