Very first impressions.
To get what TV Tropes will call "administrivia" out of the way first: after a little browsing, a separate insert sheet fell out of the magazine, A5 or A6 sized, urging me to "get a one year direct debit subscription to Fortean Times" and setting out all the advantages of doing this.
The thing is, I opened one of these three years ago during the lockdown, and it's still going strong, or I wouldn't have had a delivery this morning.
It occurs to me that my annual sub should renew about now, so there should in theory be no need to act on this; but it's interesting I should have got this generic (unpersonalised) prompt in the month where my sub is renewed. So the question is - do I need to actually do anything, or should I just treat this as one of those interesting coincidences and ignore it? It'd be ironic, given the usual (deliberately planned?) difficulty in cancelling any sort of redundant DD, if the one direct debit I really DO want to keep ends up becoming time-expired and cancels itself!
(Also - could I trade up from the original For Tean Mug to claim a set of the ear-buds, as a loyal long term reader?)
Secondly, the book reviews.
RC McNeff's Aleister Crowley: The Hess Solution.(review on p55) Reviewer David V Barrett describes this novel as a discontinuous narrative leaping backwards and forwards across three decades and lots of geographically separate locations, noting that this makes for difficulty in keeping track of it all. It could be noted here that this is very reminiscent of another literary work in which Crowley is an occasional character - Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus!. S&W use the same unstructure, so that anyone coming to Illuminatus! either gives up in despair or feels compelled to read and re-read it, so as to get a notion of how all the disparate episodes and locations fit together. I'm suspecting that there may be Homage going on here. I also predict that if I picked up this book and opened it at random, the first thing I'd see would be the number 23.
The Reverend's Review (page 57). Peter Laws reviews horror movies with a defined Christian Church setting. He notes one is kicked off by a priest hanging himself in a graveyard, an act so vile, we're told, that it opens the Gates of Hell.
Now I'm not the one who wears the clerical collar and far be it for me to lecture the Reverend Laws about the Bible.... honestly.... but it does occur to me this is a very neat way to open a horror movie, and you can even quote chapter and verse and context as to why, as well as presupposing the original Biblical context then sparked off two millennia of associated folklore, reinforced by input from other religions. (Odin hanging himself on a tree for nine days so as to gain wisdom, for instance).
Matthew 27 1:10 (also in Mark 15 and Luke 23). In which Judas, former disciple of Jesus, hangs himself, the thirty pieces of silver are reclaimed by the priests, and used to buy the field in which Judas hanged himself so as to use it as a graveyard in perpetuity....
We see one of the Twelve, men recruited by Jesus to go out and preach the Word (the first Christian priests? Definitely the start-point for the Apostolic Succession that defines priesthood), falling into despair, desolation and self loathing and killing himself in a graveyard. And in a variant of the story, Judas disembowels himself - various stomach horrors are described by the Rev Laws as the film progresses....