Harry Smith‘s ashes were formally interred last week in Woodstock and a much-anticipated posthumous book on his work (that we alerted you to here), The Occult Harry Smith – The Magical & Alchemical Work of an Artist of the Extremes, appears, we’re thrilled to announce, next week (on Tuesday), edited by the indefatigable Peter Valente and published by Park Street Press
Composer John Zorn deftly summarizes it:
“Alchemist, magician, filmmaker, artist, mystic, anthropologist, collector, rebel, eternal omnivore, and 20th-century Renaissance man, Harry Smith was many things to many people, and this outstanding collection of lovingly written testimonies pays tribute to Harry with wit, respect, love, and laser-like precision. It is absolutely impossible to forget any interaction you had with Harry—and the beautiful tales in this remarkably readable and heartfelt book will have you awestruck, laughing out loud, and hungry for more. Perhaps the best collection of writings about one of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures the world has ever known.”
As John Klacsmann, archivist at Anthology Film Archives, writes:
“This invaluable collection comes at the right time, as interest in Harry Smith’s life expands and his manifold work reaches new and ever-growing audiences. Offered up by the people who knew him best, this volume provides new and nuanced perspectives on Harry Smith: the man, the polymath, the sage.”
“Presenting the most diverse collection of writings about Harry Smith”, the publishers announce, “this volume explores the far-ranging esoteric themes that run throughout his art and career. The book includes never-before-seen photos, rare interviews, personal letters, and an unpublished text by Harry, The 96 Apparitions of the 96 Alchemical Formulae (1 to 36), as well as personal reminiscences from (his) friends and former students.”
Among the contributors who take up that notion of “polymath” and what it means to our understanding of magic, (indeed, what it means to our understanding of understanding), Charles Stein, who in his essay, “Harry Smith’s Alchemy and Magic”, writes:
“Harry Smith has been affectionately referred to as a polymath and a magus, two species of identity not presently believed possible for a 20th century intelligence. Magic is precisely what the sophisticate disavows. And anyone may study many things, but the term “polymath” denotes a degree of omniscience not available to the human intellect since some time in the 17th century. I wish to suggest that the use of these terms is nevertheless oddly apt when applied to Harry Smith. For if Harry’s work is assimilable as art and his knowledge commendable for its unconventional breadth, an uncomfortable implication may well be that rumors of the death of authentic magic have been grossly exaggerated, and that the ontological import of Harry’s studies may lend a meaning to “omniscience” not contradicted by the impossibility of any one person mastering there too-many fields of knowledge proliferating across our time..”
Read an excerpt from the book – here – (Raymond Foye’s – “Mystic Traveler – Thoughts on Harry Smith”) – (see also – elsewhere – Foye’s invaluable annotations to Harry Smith’s Cosmographies – The Naropa Lectures 1988-1990 and examinations and appreciations – here and here)
Among other contributions (with the central emphasis on the occult) – James Wasserman and Khem Caigan examine “Harry Smith’s Tree of Life in Four Worlds” (Allen’s copy of this, just fetched, last month, $17,160, far outstripping its estimated price, at auction)
Kathy Goss and Eliot Wolfson discuss Harry’s August 1960 Letter to Arthur M Young
In addition, there’s memories/insights/appreciation from a variety of acolytes and friends – M Henry Jones, Darrin Daniel, Brett Lunsford, Paola Igliori, Clayton Patterson, Bob Rosenthal (to cite just a few of them)
“lost” interviews too – with Ariella Ruth and Steven Taylor, with Dawn Michelle Baude, and (from back in 1974, an encounter, long-forgotten) with Cantrill’s Film Notes
Scholarship examining multiple components of the rhizome
“Like other alchemists, Smith’s life mission”, the publishers write, was to create a unified work from disparate elements, a synthesis of correspondences between seemingly unrelated topics”, – in Harry’s case, “from music, string figures, and Seminole patterns to the relationship between sound and film imagery”
Mike McGonigal writes here about the music
Marc Berger and Henry Adam Svec write on the string figures, Marc Berger on work with Native American culture, David Chapman on sound and film imagery. And there’s more.
The whole point of the book is to show how Harry’s remarkable and varied artistic efforts were part of a comprehensive and unifying practice, “fragments of a faith forgotten” (the phrase is of course Theosophist, G.R.S.Mead‘s). To that end, it succeeds admirably.