Often alchemy is seen as an example of medieval gullibility and the alchemists as a collection of eccentrics and superstitious fools.

In this Pocket Essential Sean Martin shows that nothing could be further from the truth. It is important to see the search for the philosopher’s stone and the attempts to turn base metal into gold as metaphors for the relation of man to nature and man to God as much as seriously held beliefs.

Alchemy had a self-consistent outlook on the natural world and man’s place in it. Alchemists like Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus were amongst the greatest minds of their time and the history of alchemy is both the history of a spiritual search and the history of a slowly developing scientific method. Sir Isaac Newton devoted as much time to his alchemical studies as he did to his mathematical ones.

This book traces the history of alchemy from ancient times to the 20th century, highlighting the interest of modern thinkers like Jung in the subject, and in the process covers a major, if neglected area of Western thought.

ISBN: 9781843446095

Comments:

I have always been interested in alchemy. As a child, I loved the idea of an alchemist in a flame and fume-filled lab, somewhere underground. The image was magical and exciting. As an adult, I’ve come to see alchemy as the art of transformation, the art of the possible. (Even if you don’t know what that is when you start your operations.)

Of course, alchemy is all things to all people. It has been seen as a proto-science, and ‘the history of an error’. But was it really? Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle were alchemists; Ernest Rutherford maintained a lifelong interest in the art. Once it gets its hooks into you, you are a student for life. Something happens. Some nameless process you are possibly not even aware of begins.

So this book is far from being the last word on the subject. It’s a short introduction that scratches the surface; the mysteries of alchemy are deep.

Two books I would recommend on the subject are both novels: Lindsay Clarke’s The Chymical Wedding and Patrick Harpur’s Mercurius. Interestingly, both novels feature the same basic premise: the protagonist in each book – a man and a woman respectively – leaves London after the end of a relationship, and attempts to rebuild their life in the country. They discover the work of an alchemist who had lived in the village in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries respectively which then becomes intertwined with their own rebirths. But the two books couldn’t be more different: The Chymical Wedding is allusive and poetic, Mercurius explicit and exegetical. In reading both, you will be entering the mystery.

The Black Death is the name most commonly given to the pandemic of bubonic plague that ravaged the medieval world in the late 1340s. From Central Asia the plague swept through Europe, leaving millions of dead in its wake. Between a quarter and a third of Europe’s population died. In England the population fell from nearly six million to just over three million. The Black Death was the greatest demographic disaster in European history.

In this Pocket Essential, Sean Martin looks at the origins of the disease and traces its terrible march through Europe from the Italian cities to the far-flung corners of Scandinavia. He describes contemporary responses to the plague and makes clear how helpless was the medicine of the day in the face of it. He examines the renewed persecution of the Jews, blamed by many Christians for the spread of the disease, and highlights the bizarre attempts by such groups as the Flagellants to ward off what they saw as the wrath of God. His book is a vivid and dramatic account of one of the great catastrophes of history.

ISBN: 9781843446040

Comments:

Blame it on TV adaptations of King Arthur I watched as a kid – The Legend of King Arthur made by the BBC in 1979, or the 1973 movie Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (still not on DVD as far as I know, which is a shame). Or perhaps even Disney’s Robin Hood from 1973, with Robin as a cunning fox and King John as a cowardly and rather daft lion (which seemed to me to be better characterisations than the 1938 Errol Flynn version with human actors!) Yes, you can blame these films and TV serials for getting me hooked on the Middle Ages. As an undergraduate I wanted to study mediaeval history, but couldn’t (my college didn’t run any courses), so was stuck with the Reformation.

The Middle Ages has always seemed more vivid to me than the present, which is I suppose why I came to be interested in the Black Death. The amount of suffering the pandemic wrought is unimaginable. Indeed, the fourteenth century is probably the worst century before the twentieth broke all the rules. Not just the Black Death, recurrences of the plague, multiple famines. Perhaps things only get a bit better by the time Chaucer starts writing in the 1370s (although plague would still be very much a feature of European life until the 18th century). And things are only ‘better’ if you have any appreciation for the fact that English literature really gets underway with Chaucer, and his great contemporary William Langland.

Another feature of fourteenth century literature that fascinates me is the tradition of English mystics like Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle – who died in the Black Death – and the Cloud of Unknowing. It’s odd that such bad times produced such great poetry and thought. Or perhaps not so odd. They were spiritually certain times, but uncertain in just about every other aspect, with the Danse Macabre of plague hanging over everything like a pall.

Throughout history, disease has plagued human civilisations, claiming more lives than natural disasters and warfare combined. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death was responsible for taking the lives of one third of Europe’s population. In the modern day, physicians, scientists and historians continue to be challenged by new and resurgent diseases such as AIDS, malaria and Ebola, as they struggle to identify causes, antidotes and preventative measures to combat these epidemics.

A Short History of Disease chronicles the historical and geographical evolution of infectious and non-infectious diseases, from their prehistoric origins to the present day. It offers a comprehensive, accessible guide to ailments and the medical methods used to combat them. Analysing case studies including the Black Death, Spanish Flu, cholera, leprosy, syphilis, cancer and Ebola, Sean Martin maps the development of our understanding of disease into a thorough and enlightening timeline. The book offers a fascinating insight into an important area of social history, providing an easy-to-read introduction to all you need to know about disease and the ongoing quest to protect human health.

ISBN: 9781843444190

The Knights Templar were the most powerful military religious order of the Middle Ages. Formed to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land, they participated in the Crusades and rapidly gained wealth, lands and influence and were answerable to none save the Pope himself.

In addition to having a fearful military reputation, they were also Christendom’s first bankers, and played a large part in inventing the modern banking system. They were also involved in developments in navigation, architecture, medicine, and engineering, amongst others.

Seemingly untouchable for nearly two centuries, the Templars fell from grace spectacularly after the loss of the Holy Land. In 1307, all Templars in France were arrested on charges of heresy, homosexuality, denial of the cross and devil worship. The order was suppressed by the Pope in 1312, and Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master, was burnt at the stake as
a heretic two years later.

The myth of the Templars was born and in the ensuing centuries, they have occupied a unique position in European history. Orthodox historians see them as nothing more than soldier-monks whose arrogance was their ultimate undoing, while others see them as occultists of the first order, the founders of Freemasonry, possessors of the Holy Grail and the Turin Shroud.

Sean Martin considers both the orthodox and conspiratorial version of events, and includes the latest revelations from the Vatican Secret Archives.

ISBN: 9781842435632

Comments:

I originally wanted to tell the story of the Templars twice: the first half of the book would be the orthodox history, and the second half would be the unorthodox. I had originally come to the Templars through the latter, via books like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and the work of Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. But the more I read of the orthodox story, the more interested I became in it. The planned second half of the book shrank until it became simply the final chapter.

Speaking of the final chapter, I was tempted to use this quote from Umberto Eco (from Foucault’s Pendulum) as the epigraph to the chapter:

The lunatic… doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars…

Why didn’t I? Well, I suppose the approach I took in that chapter was to adopt an attitude of ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’ Everything I discuss could have some basis in fact. But life in the Middle Ages, and the history that has come after it, is like Chinese Whispers; things become distorted. I find those distortions quite fascinating. In some accounts, the Templars had their own navy. In others, it was merely a few boats. (I suspect this is nearer the truth.) And then there’s the whole can of worms that is the Templar heads, and the idol known as the Baphomet. This is a good illustration of why the Templars are so fascinating: ‘Baphomet’ could simply be a spelling mistake. Some have conjectured that it is a scribal error for ‘Mahomet’ (Mohammed). While the idea of a spelling mistake is very much like something out of Umberto Eco’s novel, there is another option: that Baphomet is indeed a spelling mistake, but the real name is not ‘Mohammed’, but ‘Abufihamat’, the Father of Understanding. In Sufi terms, this represents the fully realized seeker.

All of this is actually quite mediaeval: people hearing things, possibly getting the wrong end of the stick, but nevertheless developing it for their own purposes. Are they getting it ‘wrong’? Not as far as they are concerned. Out of these ‘mistakes’ new ways of looking at the world emerge – some of them might be interesting, some might be cranky, some might be repugnant and foolish – but the world, being infinitely malleable, plays along.

How like our fragmented, digital times.

Catharism was the most successful heresy of the Middle Ages. Flourishing principally in the Languedoc and Italy, the Cathars taught that the world is evil and must be transcended through a simple life of prayer, work, fasting and non-violence. They believed themselves to be the heirs of the true heritage of Christianity going back to apostolic times, and completely rejected the Catholic Church and all its trappings, regarding it as the Church of Satan; Cathar services and ceremonies, by contrast, were held in fields, barns and in people’s homes.

Finding support from the nobility in the fractious political situation in southern France, the Cathars also found widespread popularity among peasants and artisans. And again unlike the Church, the Cathars respected women, and women played a major role in the movement. Alarmed at the success of Catharism, the Church founded the Inquisition and launched the Albigensian Crusade to exterminate the heresy. While previous Crusades had been directed against Muslims in the Middle East, the Albigensian Crusade was the first Crusade to be directed against fellow Christians, and was also the first European genocide. With the fall of the Cathar fortress of Montsegur in 1244, Catharism was largely obliterated, although the faith survived into the early fourteenth century.

Today, the mystique surrounding the Cathars is as strong as ever, and Sean Martin recounts their story and the myths associated with them in this lively and gripping book.

ISBN: 9781843443360

Comments:

People come to the Cathars quite often from the Templars; the two subjects are linked by a shared history (the Templars accepted Cathars into their ranks, for instance). I suppose I am no exception. I certainly initially became interested in them via alternative and speculative histories, but, as with the Templars, once I began to read the orthodox history, I became even more interested and sympathetic.

I’m not convinced by the absolute dualist argument that matter is evil (as the more fanatical Cathars argued); I think it’s probably neutral. (Perhaps I am a moderate Cathar!) But something about that mindset finds an echo in quantum physics. A few years ago I was working on a documentary and one of the people we interviewed was a Russian scientist who believed that consciousness doesn’t come from this universe. That immediately made me think of the Cathar belief that the True God is as far removed from this world as it’s possible to conceive. (Assuming, of course, that you want to equate what Aldous Huxley called the Divine Ground of Being with consciousness; I personally feel there might be a link.) Perhaps modern physics is catching up with mediaeval heresy after all…

Anyway, that’s the sort of connection that interest me. I don’t think the mediaevals and the ancients were as ignorant as they are often made out to be. They had superstition and what to our eyes are unfounded beliefs, but if we look carefully around us, we will see that our own times are just as replete with equally unfounded beliefs. From dubious alternative medicines to conspiracy theories to the neoliberal economics and its ‘wealth will trickle down’ stories (it doesn’t – it goes offshore). These are the modern equivalent of superstitions. There isn’t much to back them up other than spin. Me, I think I’d rather stick with the Middle Ages…

NB: The third edition (2018, retitled A Short History of the Cathars and given a new jacket) is almost identical to the second (2014) edition. I think there are merely a few corrections – no actual new or revised sections.

Gnosticism – derived from the Greek word gnosis, to know – is the name given to various religious schools that proliferated in the first centuries after Christ and, at one time, it almost became the dominant form of Christianity. Yet some Gnostic beliefs derive from the older Mystery traditions of Greece and Rome, and the various Gnostic schools came to be branded as heretical by the emerging Christian church. Indeed, although some Gnostic beliefs are close to mainstream Christianity Gnosticism also held that the world is imperfect as it was created by an evil god who was constantly at war with the true, good God; that Christ and Satan were brothers; that reincarnation exists; and that women were the equal of men As a result, the Gnostics held the Feminine Aspect of God – whom they addressed as Sophia, or Wisdom – in very high regard. They also stressed that we each have a spark of the Divine inside us which, when recognised and developed, will ultimately liberate us from the prison of the material world.

Although largely stamped out by the Church by the sixth century, Gnosticism survived underground through groups such as the Bogomils and the Cathars, and influenced the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the psychologist Carl Jung, the Existentialists, the New Age movement and writers as diverse as William Blake, W. B. Yeats, Albert Camus and Philip K. Dick. In this book, Sean Martin recounts the long and diverse history of Gnosticism, and argues for its continued relevance today.

ISBN: 9781842433393

Andrei Tarkovsky is the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein, and one of the most important directors to have emerged during the 1960s and 70s.

Although he made only seven features, each one was a major landmark in cinema, the most well-known of them being the mediaeval epic Andrei Rublev – widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time – and the autobiographical Mirror, set during the Russia of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s and the years of stagnation under Brezhnev. Both films landed Tarkovsky in considerable trouble with the authorities, and he gained a reputation for being a tortured – and ultimately martyred – filmmaker. Despite the harshness of the conditions under which he worked, Tarkovsky built up a remarkable body of work.

He burst upon the international scene in 1962 with his debut feature Ivan’s Childhood, which won the Golden Lion at Venice and immediately established him as a major filmmaker. During the 1970s, he made two classic ventures into science-fiction, Solaris, regarded at the time as being the Soviet reply to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and later remade by Steven Soderbergh, and Stalker, which was thought to have predicted the Chernobyl disaster. Harassed at home, Tarkovsky went into exile and made his last two films in the West, where he also published his classic work of film and artistic theory, Sculpting in Time. Since his death in Paris in 1986, his reputation continued – and continues – to grow.

Sean Martin considers the whole of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, from the classic student film The Steamroller and the Violin, across the full-length films, to the later stage works and Tarkovsky’s writings, paintings and photographs. Martin also seeks to demystify Tarkovsky as a ‘difficult’ director, whilst also celebrating his radical aesthetic of long takes and tracking shots, which Tarkovsky was to dub ‘imprinted’ or ‘sculpted’ time, and to make a case for Tarkovsky’s position not just as an important filmmaker, but also as an artist who speaks directly about the most important spiritual issues of our time.

ISBN: 9781842433669

Comments:

I was an undergraduate film student when I first heard about Tarkovsky. I think I saw a back cover ad for The Sacrifice on Sight and Sound (or a similar publication). It had that quote from Ingmar Bergman saying that, for him, Tarkovsky was the greatest director of all time. I wondered who this man might be, to receive praise from one such as Bergman. I think I read somewhere that Tarkovsky was very ill, and soon after, he died.

I remember watching Andrei Rublev on television. It was late at night, and I remember nodding off. But I woke up in time for the final episode, ‘The Bell’. And the way the camera moved haunted me – especially in the conversation between Rublev and Foma in the wood. It was a film that I couldn’t get out of my head, and I wasn’t sure why. A month later, Nostalgia was on Channel 4. I borrowed a portable TV and set it up at the foot of my bed. Again, late night, and again, I nodded off. But I woke up in time for the final 20 minutes, Domenico’s speech in Rome, and Gorchakov carrying the candle across the pool. Whatever else the film might be about, this final sequence was stunning. I still regard it as one of Tarkovsky’s greatest achievements. I was becoming converted.

The Sacrifice, then on its first UK run, appeared at our local arthouse cinema, Plymouth Arts Centre. It was on for two nights, and I booked tickets for both screenings. Seeing Tarkovsky on the big screen really converted me, without any shadow of a doubt. He was showing me the world in a new way; it was as if there was a whole realm or aspect of existence that I had only dimly intuited but now here it was on screen. I found the story very moving – this was the height of the Cold War, don’t forget, and only a year after the Chernobyl disaster. But what really struck me about the film was the colour, the light, the use of space, the sense of dream. This is really what The Sacrifice is ‘about’. And I liked the rant against consumerism – this sort of thing appeals to my inner mediaeval heretic: Alexander in the copse of trees, Little Man off exploring. And Alexander is monologuing about how if sin is that which is inessential, then our entire civilization is built on sin from beginning to end. And all we see on screen is the wind in the grass.

I then would go up to London to see Tarkovsky’s work when it appeared at the National Film Theatre. I saw Mirror, Solaris and Stalker there. Each time I would come out of the NFT and look into the Thames for what seemed like ages, completely overwhelmed by what I had just seen. It was not common or garden overwhelmed either, in the way that, say, Apocalypse Now had overwhelmed me. This was different. When Natassia Synessios wrote in her book of being ‘Tarkovsky-marked’, I know exactly what she means. Tarkovsky was different. It was a liberation, a homecoming. (Indeed, almost literally: where I grew up in the Mendip Hills in Somerset looks just like the countryside around the woodland dacha in Mirror.) I was seeing things that I had never seen before; I was being shown a secret room.

Bergman was correct when he said that Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. I think Bergman had exactly the same experience as I did – as we all do – coming to Tarkovsky for the first time. Bergman wrote that Tarkovsky was moving freely and at ease in a room that he had always wanted to enter, but did not know how. The room of dreams.

NB: If Tarkovsky ever goes to a third edition (we can but hope), there are a few errors I would like to correct. The main one is the statement that a double for Alisa Freindlich was used in the ‘power station’ shot near the end of Stalker. I have since learned that this is not the case: this was the only exterior scene in the film that was shot in Russia, not Estonia. It was shot in Moscow. The power station is, to the best of my knowledge, still there and still active (details can be found here: You’ll need to scroll quite a way down the page to see the photo).

The term ‘New Wave’ conjures up images of Paris in the early 1960s: Jean Seberg and Jean Paul Belmondo, the young Jean-Pierre Leaud, the three protagonists of Jules and Jim capering across a bridge, all from the films of French filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

The impact of the French New Wave continues to be felt, and its ethos of shooting in real places, with non-professional actors and small crews would influence filmmakers as diverse as John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese to Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement, all of whom sought to challenge the dominance of traditional Hollywood methods of both filmmaking and storytelling.

But the French were not the only new wave, and they were not even the first. In New Waves in Cinema, Sean Martin explores the history of the many New Waves that have appeared since the birth of cinema, including their great forebears the German Expressionists, the Soviet Formalists and the Italian Neorealists. In addition, Martin looks at the movements traditionally seen as the French New Wave’s contemporaries and heirs, such as the Czech New Wave, the British New Wave, the New German Cinema, the Hollywood Movie Brats and Brazilian Cinema Novo. The book also covers other new waves, such as those of Greece, Hungary, documentary – Cinema Verité and Direct Cinema – animation, avant garde and the so-called No Wave filmmakers.

New Waves in Cinema also explores the differences – and similarities – between the concept of a ‘new wave’ and a national cinema, citing, among others, the example of the new Iranian cinema, which has given us directors as important as Abbas Kiarostami and the Makhmalbaf family, examines resurgent trends in the national cinemas of Mexico, Japan, American independent cinema and concludes with an examination of the most celebrated movement of the 1990s and 2000s, Dogme 95.

New Waves in Cinema makes a convincing case for the necessity for the continued existence of new waves and national cinemas in the face of Hollywood and American cultural imperialism.

ISBN: 9781842432549

Comments:

The Czechs have a lot to answer for. As an undergraduate in Plymouth, we did a whole month of the Czech New Wave (one film a week) – The Shop on the High Street, A Blonde in Love, Closely Observed Trains (what was the fourth one? I can’t remember. Although I do remember we watched Forman’s Taking Off, the first film he made after emigrating to the U.S.) I loved the poetry, the slight surrealism, the lyricism of these films. And the emotion: the ability to look horror in the face (in The Shop on the High Street) and the humour (Closely Observed Trains). Much later I discovered the remarkable first two features by Jan Němec, Diamonds of the Night and The Party and the Guests, a film the Czechoslovak authorities hated so much they banned it ‘forever’ in 1973. (Luckily forever only lasted 16 years. Anyone who can enrage a government so much deserves our eternal respect.) The world was never quite the same again…

Jacques Rivette – another hero – once said that if cinema had any social function, it was to make us confront systems of thought and ways of life that we are not familiar with. To enlarge our sense of the possible. Of the human. I suppose that is why I have always loved new waves – they see things differently, tell different stories. They honour the marginalised, those who’ve been written out of history, or who are in danger of being written out.