In the earliest creation stories of London, Brutus the Trojan was caught in a storm on his voyages from Troy, and amid the wreckage of his ship was witness to a vision of the Goddess Diana, the virgin huntress of The Moon. Radiant on the waters like so many incarnations of Our Lady from the Stella Maris to the Virgin Caridad del Cobre, each appearing to those in distress at sea. Diana saved his life, and told him to build her a temple at the place where he struck land. He founded a city and dedicated it to her. Luan-Dun, the city of The Moon, and built her sacred temple upon the hill where St Paul’s Cathedral now stands.

London partakes of the nature of its mother. The Moon is both radiant and treacherous. Often obscured by cloud, it looms into view upon occasion offering a glimpse of the infinite. Moonlight and music and love and romance are all on offer, and we stare transfixed by the possibilities and potential. Moonstruck, our gaze is held by the promise of London, its cold hard paving slabs reflect the gold majesty of the Sun and we’re taken in by its glamour. The city is akin to a hall of mirrors, it offers all you can imagine, but its tableaus can be deceptive and distorted.

Trace the ghost of the Roman Wall eastwards and it erupts into physical manifestation, its brickwork unveiled by falling German bombs. Lost fragments of ancient London excavated by shell and shrapnel. The site of Cripplegate obliterated during the war and replaced with the concrete wasteland of the Barbican complex. Knock on the Cripplegate and it opens to the dead. Maimed ghosts and mutilated souls endlessly follow the thread of coloured lines painted on the ground, an inadvertent spirit trap that amps up the toxicity of the brutalist estate. The chasm of London Wall cuts through the haunted desolation and its disembodied traffic settles at Moorgate, a medieval gateway that was not a part of the original Roman edifice. Moorgate is the backdoor of the city, an escape hatch for a quick getaway or a secret entrance by which undesirables may slip in unnoticed to carry out their shady deeds.

The Moorfields were one of the last remaining areas of open land around the City of London. The now-subterraenian Walbrook River bubbled up from the Moorfields and flowed towards the Thames, giving the area its marshy liquid character. After the Great Fire of 1666, those made destitute and impoverished by the blaze settled within the Moorfields on the outskirts of the city, and the area became known as a haunt of prostitutes, outlaws and deviants. Today it houses some of the shabbier office spaces of the financial district, cheaper rents off the beaten track. When it comes to its Stews and Rookeries, the City has a long memory. Dreary concrete rules, and the iron steps of Moorgate tube are weathered by the heavy footfall of generations bred to open letters, answer phones and enter numbers in the new feudalism of financial services serfdom.

To the right of the Moorgate crossroads is the birthplace of John Keats, the lodging house where the sensory flush of English Romanticism drew an infant breath. To the left is Bedlam, the second location for the notorious Bethlehem Hospital. The original Bedlam was constructed in 1247 at the location now occupied by Liverpool St Station, and relocated to the Moorfields in 1675. Today, following another relocation, the centuries of misery and suffering that took place at the asylum are commemorated with a blue plaque above a branch of Pret-a-manger. City workers unwittingly sup their skinny Bedlam-mochas and bite into Bedlam breakfast croissants, oblivious to the history of cruelty that pervades the psychic fabric of the site.

Just north of the crossroads is Bunhill Fields, originally a Saxon burial ground, its modern name is a corruption of its historic appellation “The Bone Hill”. In the mid-16th century, more than a thousand cartloads of human bones were removed from the overcrowded charnel house of St Paul’s Cathedral and deposited at the site – a thin layer of soil spread over the fragmented remains to form a new gruesome point of elevation in the landscape. A century later, the site was used as a mass burial ground for victims of the plague, and later became a popular cemetery for dissenters and religious non-conformists. William Blake and his wife Catherine are interred upon the Bone Hill, their exact resting place is lost, but there is a memorial stone in the boneyard that overflows with offerings left by admirer’s of Blake’s visionary magic.

Yet perhaps the most striking element of the Bone Hill are its trees. Avenues of tall, spindly London Planes that claw at the sky like bony tendrils, mighty oaks and sycamores with roots that run deep through the ancient hill of bones, and sparsely scattered willows that seem to bend and weep for the departed like daughters of Our Lady of the Cemetery. It is a true bone orchard, under the patronage of Gran Bwa, who rules the island below the sea where the dead reside. At dusk, after libations of black coffee have been poured to the earth, it is as if the trees themselves are possessed by the ancestors. Great branches vivified by the wind, stark presences made of twisted bark, creaking figures of wood silhouetted against the night sky. The London dead make their voices heard to the living and speak of older cities subtly embedded behind the pulse and charge of our familiar streets.

Step south of the Moorgate crossroads and you enter the City proper. Trace the course of the buried Walbrook as she floods invisibly towards the Thames and you can almost feel her coursing beneath your feet, the true lifeblood of the city. London’s undine, shackled underground and all but forgotten like her imprisoned sisters. The daughters of the Thames, sunk under concrete and tarmac, wiped from the life of the city like victims of a Mafia hit. The Walbrook, the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Efra, the Ravensbourne. Brutalised mermaids buried alive, scorned and clapped in iron. But blessed water is an irresistible force, and though it may be bound and culverted, where there is a river, it will always remain. Press your ear close to certain grills and grates in the city and you can hear the siren song of the Walbrook. A bitter, plaintive lament echoing upwards from the gloomy sewers of her rotten dungeon. Seductive, beckoning, the rhythm of her waters entices any who can hear it to her embrace. At the sound of her voice, it is hard not to stop in your tracks, try to kick up the curb, rip up the streets to free the nymph cast in concrete.

Just in case anyone wants to read these early efforts, I’ve posted them on mediafire as a small zip file.

Booking details

http://www.mediafire.com/?03bxcf7e4eknny4

Watkins had struggled to keep going for the last few years – yet another example of an independent bookshop hit by the collapse of the Net Book Agreement which allowed supermarkets to take over the bestseller market and demand huge discounts from publishers. Watkins Review editor Stephen Gawtry recently gave a good example of how this affected the shop: When “The Da Vinci Code” first came out in paperback, Watkins was buying copies from the wholesaler at around £4.50, while up the road Tescos in Covent Garden was selling it for around £3.50. I heard of one independent bookseller who drove to his supermarket and filled up a trolley with the latest Jamie Oliver book, as it was far cheaper than getting it from his regular supplier. Since the withdrawal of the NBA in 1997, over 500 independent bookshops in the UK have closed. The rise of online booksellers such as Amazon also impacted on Waktins’ business, and the current owners had inherited a £500,000 tax bill from the previous administration, which they are said to have struggled to contest for two years with HM Revenue and Customs, but to no avail.

This is a sad day for London’s esoteric community. Watkins will be sorely missed. So, please, where you can – support your local esoteric bookshop!

Regrettably Pat Robertson is in some company. When New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Austrian Catholic bishop Gerhard Wagner said it was God’s punishment for homosexuality in the city. Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church agreed, referring to “fag-semen-rancid waters”. Perhaps not coincidentally, New Orleans is also a major locale for the practice of Voudou, which was brought to Louisiana by the slave trade when that state, like Haiti, was a French colony. Voudou is regarded askance by some varieties of Christian precisely because of the “dark” image it was imbued with by colonialism, a result of its link to insurrectionary politics.

The unfortunate native Taino (Arawak Indians) of the “Island of Mountains” were invaded by Columbus in 1492, and Haiti was a Spanish colony before it was a French one. Slaves from Africa were imported in large numbers to turn the country into a coffee and sugar-producing gold mine for its European owners. Life on the plantations was so brutal that the average number of years a slave survived after their transportation was ten, and because the death rate exceeded the birth rate the importation of slaves continued. Voudou arose in the melting pot of different African nations and their religious beliefs created by that trade, together with the slaves’ encounters both with the Taino and with the Roman Catholicism of their masters. The beliefs of the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin and Togo) and the Yoruba of what is now Nigeria were particularly prominent.

The best book on Haitian Vodou probably remains Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen (1953). Vodou is a fascinating syncretic religion. Its spirit intercessors, the Lwa, communicate by possessing their believers, and they are involved, passionate, proud and funny, imbued with distinctive personalities, likes and dislikes. The Ghede, whom it now seems sadly apposite to mention, are spirits of the ancestral dead. They are ruled by the Lwa Baron, (one of whose forms is Baron Samedi), together with Maman Brigitte, (a diasporic form of the Catholic Saint Brigid). The Ghede love black and purple and, as spirits both of death and fertility, they also enjoy lewd joking and dancing.

Haiti is the only nation in the world whose independence from colonial rule was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion. And it is for its defiant insurrection, in which Voudou played a unifying part, that it has been punished since. Not by God, but by vengeful capitalists. The slave revolution, which took place between 1791 and 1803, was apocryphally initiated by a Vodou Hougan (priest) known as Dutty Boukman in a night ceremony at a place called Bois Caiman in the northern mountains of the island (this is the origin of Pat Robertson’s “devil pact” story). In the early 1800s the United States, still a slave owning nation itself at that point, imposed a trade embargo on Haiti, in concert with France and Spain, fearful that Haiti’s revolution might inspire other enslaved Africans. Haiti won its freedom, but in order to receive official recognition (and much needed bank loans) from its erstwhile colonist, it was forced to pay reparations to France for its “loss of property”. It took over one hundred years, from 1825 to 1947, to clear this “debt”, which someone has calculated amounted to 21 billion dollars in today’s money. Haiti has been hobbled by poverty, violence and corruption ever since.

The post-colonial poverty of Haiti has led to a dreadful deforestation of the country (from 60% forest coverage in the 1920s to less than 2% coverage today) as people have cleared the land for cooking firewood. And that deforestation makes the severe weather events to which the country is increasingly prone (Haiti suffered four hurricanes in 2008) much worse, because there are no longer tree roots to stop the top-soil from being washed away. Land suitable for cultivation is diminished and Haiti imports 40% of its food, with many of its people, even before Tuesday’s earthquake, dependent on food aid.

Haitian Voudou is a resilient faith. It was born in times of great endurance. Indeed, when the Lwa Erzulie Dantor rides a human “horse” in possession, she makes only sounds. There are no words, it is said, because her tongue was cut out during the slave rebellion. Dantor is a fierce protectress, particularly of women who have suffered domestic or sexual violence. Lesbians are also particularly associated with her (as gay men are with her sister, the perfumed Erzulie Freda). Vodou possession is also rather gender interesting, as female Lwa happily possess men as well as women and vice versa.

Vodou is also, in its roots, a voyaging faith, and in a new wave of syncretism (approved of by some “orthodox” practitioners and disdained by others) it has become popular amongst a variety of Western pagans; undoubtedly initially because of its “dark” reputation, propagated by Hollywood movies such as White Zombie (1932) with Bella Lugosi and Roger Moore’s Live and Let Die (1973) then, of course, by its later re-working in Grant Morrison’s celebrated graphic novel series The Invisibles.

To give thanks for the personal delight I have had in encountering the Lwa, I will be listening to Wyclef Jean’s wonderful album Welcome to Haiti, Creole 101 tonight, lighting a candle for the people of Haiti, and donating to the present relief effort on www.dec.org.uk. Hopefully many other UK pagans will be joining me.