My proudest achievement as a writer so far was a successful submission to Anathema Publishing’s exquisitely bound Pillars periodical back in 2021. The overarching conceit of the book was the idea of a tavern hearth around which many an occult wayfarer gathered to tell tales of the road, and it gave me the perfect opportunity to share my experiences growing up young and necromantic in a very different London to the one most will recognise. Truly an antihero’s journey, and like everything else I share from my magickal past, one hundred percent true.
Cockney Gothic
Spirits of Place in Old London Town
By Gavin Fox
Few who drift along the ever changing streets of the East End guess just how high the graves are piled beneath their feet. London is a city built upon the remains of those who trod those well worn flagstones in centuries prior, and no amount of urban regeneration can wash the memories from the soil. Nor should it be allowed to, for through interaction with that cold and brooding spirit of place anarchic and inventive magickians are made. This is a tale of a journey of self discovery, of abilities lost and skills found. And at the heart of it lies a very different city to the one most experience.
To the visitor London boasts a certain type of melancholy all its own, and this is especially true of the poorer boroughs that huddle together far to the east of the Square Mile. Most of these now geographically interwoven towns were little better than barren marshland prior to the 19th century, though of course how many lives were taken within the swampy boundaries of the area back before the earliest development was planned is anyone’s guess. Likely more than a few, through accidents or otherwise, though the presence of these unnumbered and unremembered souls is seldom felt in modern times.
No, for the real spiritual underworld of East London we need to look to far more recent developments. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries the sheer level of poverty and a local economy built upon backbreaking labour in the docks and factories that peppered the area left bloody trails running through the very soil itself, a layer that was disturbed time and time again by both bombs and building work alike. A maze of schools and shelters obliterated by wartime high explosives, the bodies so shattered that the ground was just turned over and buildings constructed upon the scarred earth below. Churchyards disturbed by the ever expanding Tube spitting forth their dead into the waiting hands of eager archaeologists. Bone meal and rot for all.
As a Cockney, someone who grew up in the shadow of the resulting urban regeneration within what nevertheless remained one of the poorest boroughs in the United Kingdom, my experiences with the dead was almost constant. While it lacks a similar two millenia of continued habitation, it is not difficult to see that in many ways the sorrow on display in the East End dwarfs that of the far more aged heart of London itself. So much suffering in so short an amount of time. The blitz, raw sewage and disease ridden tenements. No wonder the walls of the council estate corridors used to whisper coldly to me when I was a child.
My personal journey along the necromantic path began before I was even aware of magick as a discipline outside of video games and folklore. My odd way of seeing the city left me fascinated by ghosts and spirits, hauntings and poltergeists. Soon I greedily began devouring what little information was available in the pre internet age. Books on paranormal encounters littered my bedroom floor alongside other works of fiction that boasted a decidedly occult edge. But if pop culture was feeding my love of the weirder aspects of the universe, it was ever the city itself that kept me searching for more.
Something about the greasy grey concrete and muddy ditches that passed for gardens seemed to resonate with the idea of history as a living, non breathing entity that was capable of reaching out and snatching you away into the darkness at a moment’s notice. Tales of Jack the Ripper danced through my thoughts as I shuffled along streets largely unchanged since his razor sharp knife had played within them. I could all too easily taste the blood in the air, feel the spirits pass through me like cobwebs on the wind. And around the time that it became plane that London was an open grave, it also dawned upon me then that not everyone could see it as so.
As I wandered the derelict dockside that would eventually become one of London’s largest convention centres I could see the long rusted cranes moving, hear the bustling trade as ships were unloaded, deliveries haggled for, deals made. While In a newly refurbished trading warehouse turned failed shopping complex I had similar experiences, though of course by that point the area was already drastically modernised. Imagination, visualisation or some psychometric gift, it mattered little. I could read the tides of time as they flowed through the gutters and taste the miasma of death in the air.
Where others blindly strode between current location and eventual destination paying little heed to the history clawing its way up from beneath the concrete, my younger journeys were always more furtive. Many a time I found myself quickening in step as night descended, hoping to make it back home before the long dead realised that I was walking those alleyways alone. While it was expected that we should fear the actions of other people while surrounded by such poverty and crime, the dead too were always on my mind. Though it would be foolish to argue that they seemed more real than the living, they definitely felt more permanent than the gangs huddled together on cold street corners selling contraband after nightfall.
Of course the city held its fair share of actual bodies too, and more than once during my aimless wandering around abandoned buildings and seldom travelled trackways I stumbled upon those who had lost themselves to the Reaper. The body of a homeless man under a blanket in a derelict church, partly decayed and unrecognisable apart from the twig like hands clasped around a beer can. A dead junky on a dockside bridle path, the belt still around their arm. There were more of them than I care to remember, though thankfully none of those seemed to follow me back home.
As I grew old enough to stand among the shadows that presented themselves I began to actually enjoy the solitude afforded by long walks through streets and alleyways that others would shun. I became drawn to graveyards and cemeteries, wandering from nowhere in particular to an equally unknown goal and lost in a haze of voices and feelings that my fellow travellers just could not experience. But this interest in the darker side of reality would come at a terrible cost, because around my mid teens the nightmares began, and nothing was ever the same.
The assault on my psyche was relentless. The dead called to me when I was awake and their images terrified me when I slept. And oh, what nightmares they were. The strain of seeing familiar landmarks turned into charnel houses by groups of what can only be described as reanimated corpses eventually shattered my will, and at that point I lost the ability to remember my dreams entirely. Be it insomnia induced fatigue or a failed initiation for a spiritual journey that I was in no way ready to face, my very soul broke. Worse still, the voices of those who had once inhabited the city were suddenly quiet, and I was alone.
Sadly, those voices have never truly returned. Even now as I enter middle age and can claim to have a far deeper knowledge of magick and occultism than in my youth I still cannot hear them whisper as clear as I once did. The words are there, but they are foreign, garbled, underwater. What they are trying to tell me is unclear, their shadows indistinct and motives unknown. Something important and special burned out in my psyche, overloaded by fear and horror. Though my normal dreams returned some ten years later, allowing my insomnia to ease as well, I remain partly deaf and blind to the ever present dead as a result of my failure.
Of course my previous interest in folklore and magick has served me well as I attempt to recapture what was lost. I now actively strive to make up for that failed initiation by looking into the deeper mysteries of death itself, and in doing so found a catalyst that pushed me towards many an esoteric milestone. I lost what had made me special long before I cast my first circle or charged a single sigil in anger, and lamented that difference in perception as I sought to reconnect with the spirits of yesteryear. I built my concentration, steeled my will and focused on forcing the very same contact that once came as second nature. I have learned the hard way that growth of any kind is a slow process, but should I be called I refuse to fail again.
Yes, I realise that my story is far from normal. Few who become magickians have such a connection to the spirit of place, but London lends itself to those who can carry the current that flows through streets once walked by billions of others. More so than any location I have visited the essence of the capitol is an amalgam of the unnamed voices who call out to the few who can hear them, a mighty and seemingly insane tulpa mumbling its Schizophrenic life story from every tree, paving slab and burned out car. And though it is hundreds of miles to the east of my new home I can still hear it whisper on the wind year in, year out, and I miss it so.
I often sit and wonder, now that I live in a completely different city and rarely get to walk the cobbled streets of old London town with the reverence of bygone days, as to how different my life would have been growing up somewhere else. Perhaps if the sheer weight of history was not present in my formative years, leaving its damp fingerprints on my skin as I struggled with my ability to feel it doing so, I would have walked a very different path. We are all children of our respective hometowns, with histories as diverse as the weeds forcing their way between the well worn flagstones. And as my experience shows, sometimes the hardest journey of all can be taken within a few miles of home.
The Accelerated Chaote 