On the edge of the beyond

Part two: Cecil Williamson and the cult of Tanat in Cornwall

The young woman lies spreadeagled on the altar in a split red viscose dress. A chalice is balanced on her belly, her arms reach out towards the heavy brass candlesticks whilst her feet dangle white as lilies. The set is dressed with fresh flowers, bottles of perfume and unguent. She seems weightless, abandoned in her star stretched body. Her face, pillowed on a mane of flowing hair, is hidden from us, as are her thoughts. Her exposed neck swans back, and pitches those unseen eyes into the picture hung behind her which depicts a flaming vesica from which a figure steps forth. On the ground between her feet is a beehive shaped container above a brazier, clearly a cultic object and, given its position, of central importance to the rite.

A second celebrant stands off to one side, this black masked woman is dressed in white with a demi-cape that is tied to her wrists. Her raised arms allow the cape to drape into a half moon, and between them she holds a patterned sash or veil as she officiates the rite. Perhaps this sash is the veil of the fallen goddess? Certainly the veil is a central image in Flaubert’s 1862 novel Salammbô, the orientalist telling of Carthage and the Punic Wars, whose lush prose made the eroticised Tanit a subject for artists from Mucha to Rodin. Both women adopt the glyphic attitude of Tanit, embodying the Goddess for those with eyes to see.

But it is a third figure who interests us here, as much as the pliant posed mannequins of this erotic tableau. They are the obsessional image, a phantasm which has emerged from his imagination onto this intimate stage. He watches us with an enquiring eye, for it is his spider’s web that we have been drawn into. He listens, attentive to the whispers.

Responsible for the mise-en-scène, staged with such exactitude, is Cecil Williamson. The eccentric MI5 / MI6 operative and filmmaker has entered into the third stage of his life. He is now incarnated as a museum proprietor, both sentry and entry point to the shadow world of witchcraft. What was a Phoenician footprint on the sand of Mount’s Bay drifted away by the tide, a bronze bull in a Penwith hedge, a few worn Carthaginian coins on an ancient hillside, has coalesced into a Cult of Tanit – and what is more, we glimpse them mid rite.

If the persistent rumours of a Phoenician cult in the West are true, then witchcraft is staking its claim to have, not the broken phonemes of the revivalist Druids, but a direct lineal descent from a Bronze Age cult. A wild proposition.

It is the third time the set has changed location, the museum in which it is housed driven hither and thither by storms of outrage. And, of course, the murders. Cecil has long since marooned the unreliable Gerald Gardner, naturist founder of Wicca, in the Witches’ Mill on the Isle of Man; their joint venture gone sour. He represents the other strand of witchcraft, the one which operates under Walsingham rules.

Finally, after a raft of failed seashell and smuggling museums, and brief stints in Looe, Polperro and Tintagel, the collection reached the site of its final performance. Boscastle is sunk into the deep protective cleft of a valley, where a river cuts through the unsteady stacks of slate, and great bulls of white quartz guard the harbour mouth.

A higgledy-piggeldy collection of found items, house clearance steals, donations, creations and apports found their way to him. The objects are storyboarded by a series of cards, the descriptions of the exhibits punched out on a manual typewriter in insistent capitals and somewhat erratic spacing. The priestesses, mute in wordless wax, have their story told on one such card. It remains legible, but stained by the fingers of the flood that rushed through the town in 2004. They held it, poised as if to read, and set it down again as the waters boiled out onto the lonely coast.

THE TEMPLE OF TANAT

THE TANATS OR, AS THEY ARE COMMONLY CALLED “THE TROY PEOPLE”, ARE STILL TO BE FOUND IN THE SOUTH AND WEST OF ENGLAND.

THIS CULT BELIEVES IN ,AND PRACTISES ,ANCIENT FERTILITY MAGIC. THE FEMALE ELEMENT BEING THE KEYSTONE IN THEIR RITUALS.

YOU SEE THE WITCH MAIDEN IN THE ACT OF SUPPLICATION TO THE GOD OF LIGHT. TAN, THE SUN GOD,REPRESENTS THE MALE ELEMENT.  TANAT, THE MOON GODDESS, THE FEMALE ELEMENT.  - TOGETHER  - YOU HAVE LIFE.

IN ALL THE TANAT CEREMONIES, A WOMAN’S BODY IS USED AS THE ALTAR OR TABLE UPON WHICH THE OFFERINGS ARE MADE AND MAGIC WORKED.

THERE IS MUCH EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THE THEORY THAT DEBASED AND CHRISTIANISED VERSIONS OF THE TANAT RITUALS ARE THE TRUE SOURCE OF THE SO-CALLED BLACK MASS.

THE TROY PEOPLE ARE NOT A BLACK MAGIC CULT, RATHER THEY SHOULD BE CALLED WHITE WITCHES FOR,THROUGH NATURE THEY WORK FOR GOOD.

We have been given a new clue. By naming them as ‘The Troy People’ Cecil Williamson ties the exhibit to the land. The mysterious petroglyphs of Rocky Valley become evidence of long established cultic activity. The witches were here.

Three miles away from this spot you can find this pre-historic maze stone carved into a living rock face, proof that from ancient times man and his magic making with the world of spirit were active in this area. The centuries have passed and times have changed and yet all around us in this quiet corner of England there is a strange feeling that we are not alone and that the shades of persons passed on and over into the world of spirit are very close. That is why this Museum of Witchcraft is located here. One is standing on the edge of the beyond.

It must be said that Cecil told two other stories, one in which he credits the move to Cornwall to Ithell Colquhoun the surrealist. That comes in a correspondence between the two which dwindles out, perhaps because she asks repeatedly to be introduced to the Tanat Cult – a request that Williamson denies her – or she came to doubt his authority.

In the third story Cecil credits the move to the sea witches who, at Boscastle and elsewhere, sold wind to the sailors in the form of knotted cords, and danced with the storms. Give and take. The witches at Boscastle must have been sought after, because that’s a perilous small harbour to find in a sea of cliffs at night.

I note that all three aetiologies circle around the tale of the people from the sea, and are an alternative to the witchcraft origin story which Gerald Gardner is hawking about, with its heavy reliance on Leland and Murray.

Doreen Valiente visited Boscastle in 1961, the paint had finally dried on the suppurating walls but a salty dampness still hung in the air and the strip lights blinked and flickered. She confuses the location in her 1974 ABC of Witchcraft, where she merges it with talk of the museum when it was at Bourton-on-the-Water. Christians had charmingly hung a cat outside the museum door and attempted arson. Cecil moved on. The Cornish might mutter a bit, but witchcraft was still part of their world.

At 39, Doreen was no longer the ingenue whom Gardner initiated, having split with him in 1957 over his relentless publicity seeking. Nor was she the ‘myopic stalky nymph’ Austin Osman Spare remembers, but a veteran of several traditional witchcraft lineages and with the scars and disappointments to prove it. She observed what Cecil displayed through secretarial spectacles with her slightly raised, though perfectly plucked arches, and commits it to her diary.

The exhibit which aroused most controversy, however, was a life size wax figure of an almost nude witch-priestess lying upon an altar. She was described as a priestess of Tanat, the Phoenician moon goddess, whose worship, it was claimed, was still carried out in Cornwall and the West of England, being celebrated by ritual bonfires on the old pagan festival dates.

Not all those details are on the display, which suggests that Cecil had discussed it with her. The two had a friendship, and this was exactly the kind of survival she had sought out with the Cult of Athos, and would go on to with the doomed Robert Cochrane. Cecil will have dropped his dark hints, and imparted the ritual timing, which align with Conan Doyle’s ecstatic vision of the midsummer fire on Chapel Carn Brea.

He will have wanted information of his own, and Doreen was ideally placed to bring him the kind of titbits his research was built from. Given his intelligence background, I cannot help but wonder if he was in fact her handler, and was compiling a dossier on the deep witchcraft groups as an extension of the work he did during the War. Once a spook, always a spook. Even Doreen’s late life membership of fascist groups might be evidence of her ongoing intelligence work, or they were an awful lapse of judgement. Graham King, the subsequent owner of the museum, saw MI6 stationery in Cecil’s possession, and after his death his daughters apparently burned the contents of four MI6 box files. We can never entirely divorce the shadowed worlds of espionage and the dark arts.

Perhaps she bought a postcard of the tableau before she left, tucked it into her capacious handbag. If what I have been told is true (and she had a collection of photographs of naked young ladies standing only in their shoes), it may have been a souvenir that appealed to her.

The reverse of the card told yet another story:

The scene as set shows a witch lying on the Altar of ‘The Living Dead’ prepared for the Act of Spiritual Conception. Namely the Act whereby a living person is able to step out of the mortal material body and so to enter the Spirit World Beyond the Grave.

As with all Cecil Williamson stories, we get caught in contradictions and half-truths. Is he playing to the camera and provoking outrage with a judicious show of flesh to procure ‘tourist gold’? Is he peddling satanic smut? Yet Williamson insisted in conversation with researcher Michael Howard, as late as the 1990s, that it was based on actual ceremonies of the Coven of Tanat. If that is true, he has put the mystery on a postcard in plain sight. He was both provocateur, and lived in the world of the witches.

But what is the significance of the orthographic shift, from TANIT to TANAT? As a Cornishman, I can say that if it was something he only heard from an informant, the pronunciation could go either way. I have hunted for a textual origin, but have found Cecil’s spelling only used once elsewhere; in the work of Doreen Valiente which I have already cited. The serpent eats its tale.

As occultists we might assume gematria to be behind his choice; but we have no Phoenician cypher or concordance to hand. The true explanation is to be found in the magic square at the heart of the final fragile artefact Cecil left to us.

For the brief stint when the museum was in Looe, Cecil advertised a triplicity of TANAT Charms, The Square of Tanat, The Moon Pool of Tanat and The Circle of Tan. Only the square is extant. It is a composite figure, typical of the kind that turn of the century cunning men and women would fabricate. The engine of the charm is the well-known, but still baffling, palindromic SATOR square.

However, Williamson has substituted TENET for TANAT. The cascade turns OPERA to OPARA and AREPO to ARAPO thus making the Latin gibberish. But no mind. The square is supported by an astrological array, and letters which may be notarikon. I simply don’t know. A recognisable pentagram taken from the Lemegeton is in the top right, a planetary hexagram in the bottom left. The triangle, top left with ‘777’ and ‘93’ is likely a Crowleyan influence. My solve for the quartered square at bottom right is that it is Elemental. ‘Abrasax’ and ‘Meitras’ (Meithras) with their number 365 and opposing svastikas, deosil and widdershins, expansion and contraction, introduce yet another mythic solar component.

Given the application form included below which asks for personal details, the charm will have been tailored to the individual. Is what we have a blank? Or does it contain Cecil’s coded particulars? Perhaps the two empty circles await those elements? Or are the letters outside the astrological square to be replaced in a substitution code? Until a further example of the charm is found, interleaved in a book, pasted on the back of a mirror, slipped in a crack of a fireplace, we cannot be sure. I leave that mystery to you.

As a magician, here’s my conjecture: Cecil recognised the SATOR square could be transformed with the insertion of the name Tanat, which was his preoccupation, given the literature cited in my previous essay. Then there were the rumours that were caught in the nets of gossip, hauled up and shared in the pubs of the fishing towns he passed through on his journey to Boscastle. These he added to stories, heard much much earlier in his life, of an ancient cultic survival.

Alternatively, it could be a folk derivation, one Cecil found or collected in the West Country. It is the kind of mistake someone unlettered could make whilst copying out or remembering the SATOR square, and still have it produce a palindrome. If so, it is not widespread as no other specimens survive, nor is there a record of him encountering it in any of his papers. It is an orphan, a stranger to these shores, impossible to classify. It looks like witchcraft to me.

He writes, by way of explanation:

This written charm has been compounded in accordance with the secret magical teachings of the ‘TROY PEOPLE’ a name given to the wandering charmers of the Mediterranean sea board.

Cecil believed that the Mycenean and Cretans came here before the Phoenicians, exactly as Gerald Gardner says in the introduction to his 1959 The Meaning of Witchcraft. I would suggest that Cecil knows that this is true because of the petroglyphs in Rocky Valley, which he has traced on the slate with his soft fingertips.

The incursion of the foreign woman, the lunar TANAT, is greeted by a god, whom Cecil has already named on the exhibit card, ‘TAN, THE SUN GOD.’ Yet, there is no figure in the Levant with a similar name. Typically, Tanit (or Tīnnīt, 𐤕𐤍𐤕) is paired with ram-horned Baal-Hamon, the vegetation and storm god. This bemused me, that is, until I returned to Doreen Valiente.    

Valiente takes up the story of TAN in her ABC of Witchcraft, by its nature a text gathered over time, not written straight through. Not only does it contain the Museum anecdote and description of the Tanat rite from her visit in 1961, in an earlier chapter she gives us the answer to who TAN is; and in my estimation it must tally with Cecil’s understanding. It has to be something they discussed, or that she first learned from him. It provides the key to the Tanat cult as it is encoded in the SATOR square. She writes,

Old place-names often recall the sites of pagan bonfires. There are quite a number of Tan Hills or Tain Hills in Britain, deriving their name from the old Celtic teinne, meaning ‘fire’… [I]n Cornwall we find Lantinney, meaning ‘the enclosure of the fire.’ The great time for bonfire festivals in Cornwall was Midsummer Eve, the second ‘Beltane’ in the Celtic year. Fires were lit from one end of the Duchy of Cornwall to the other, and the country people, young and old, danced merrily round them. Midsummer Eve was called ‘Witches’ Night’; but the pagan nature of the celebration was disguised  by saying that the fires were built to protect against evil.

Tan is indeed an old word, both Cornish and Breton for ‘fire,’ and descends from the proto-Brythonic ‘teɸnets.’ When Cecil writes out his palindromic square, it is formed of fire, TAN. The word reads both way because as god of light he has two aspects, TAN and NAT, Meithras and Abraxas, expansion to Midsummer and contraction to Midwinter as glyphed in the svastikas and the solar 365. The revealed cosmology is dyadic: a native Brythonic god, the god of light, celebrated in Cornwall as Michael by the Christians and Lucifer by the witches, is mated to a Mediterranean goddess of the Moon, sea and stars. The native tin impregnates the Levantine copper. The sacred date of their union is midsummer, which the Cornish celebrate with fire on the holy hills. Such is the teaching of the Cult of Tanat.

Postscript

In 1996, the bewhiskered adventurer Graham King encounters the Dongas Tribe, a group of early eco-radicals and road protestors which included Paul Kingsnorth. They are, coincidentally, celebrating the Tan Hill fair. It is that meeting which prompts Graham to walk some 200 miles to Boscastle, where, at midnight on 31st October he becomes the new custodian of the Museum. Tan has guided him to his destiny. But the wax figures of the Tanat tableau are soon quietly removed, a relic of an earlier eros, no longer in keeping with the times or the new historical truths. But Steve Patterson, mindful of the museum as spiderweb, has his own Tanit statue displayed in its stead. It is one of hundreds salvaged from the great scattered seabed deposit, which has made its miraculous way to Cornwall. An echo returns in 2010 with the arrival of a pewter talisman to the museum in an anonymous envelope. There amongst a clutter of astrological symbols is the symbol of Tanit. Something is out there, if you know where to look. And now the hunt begins in earnest.

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I am now working on a third part to this series, and welcome any comments or correspondence regarding this tale, either below or by email. Discretion is assured.