Sacrum Regnum I

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Our premiere issue opens with what is both a celebration and an invitation, an aesthetic epistle to this fallen century. 'Beauty shall save the World' as Dostoyevsky once wrote nearly two centuries ago.

To begin the volume proper we have a select array of fiction. In The Phantasmagorical Imperative a theatrical performance brings about the disintegration of the everyday world into harlequin colours while in Mark Samuels' The Ruins of Reality, a piece that is at once a homage to the works of Thomas Ligotti and the dire warnings of René Guénon, we witness the final corruption of the world itself as reflected in a glass darkly. Moving from the sinister to the numinous we present An Officer of the Reserve, a sepia requiem from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire courtesy of Mark Valentine and finally Colin Insole leaves us with The Candles of Wildondorf, a story of terrible and holy awe and of remembrance for a lost world behind the Iron Curtain.

The rest of the issue is dedicated to translations and critical material, two formats that have been somewhat neglected and which we are most keen to renew in the interests of encouraging others to explore this mood of literature. Here Mark Valentine gives a much needed examination of the life and work of Mary Butts, an unjustly forgotten Modernist mystical writer whose avant-garde style leaves behind shards in which the light of higher realms maybe reflected, and Adam S. Cantwell's provides an article on Gustav Meyrink which, though ostensibly focusing on one specific volume, is in itself a fine miniature overview of that Austrian occultist and dandy's work. To round things off we have reviews of seemingly promising volumes, both contemporary and in translation, and a number of other rarefied asides.

CONTENTS:

Renovatio Imperii - Editorial

Fiction:
I. The Phantasmagorical Imperative by D. P. Watt
II. The Ruins of Reality by Mark Samuels
III. ‘An Officer of the Reserve’ by Mark Valentine
IV. The Candles of Wildondorf by Colin Insole

Poetry & Translations:
Selected Prose Poems of Hugo von Hofmannsthal trans. Claus Laufenburg Poems, both original & translations, from Daniel Mills, Brendan Connell & others

Essays:
The Cavalier of the Blue Rose: An overview of the prose & lyric poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal by Daniel Corrick
Inner Bohemia: The Mystical Fiction of Mary Butts by Mark Valentine
An Overview of the Dedalus Meyrink Reader by Adam S. Cantwell

Reviews - including but not limited to reviews of the following volumes:
Glorious Nemesis by Ladislav Klima
The Stranger by Alexander Blok
Strange Epiphanies by Peter Bell
Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories by Georges Rodenbach

In the Days to Come - recently released & forthcoming titles column