When I first came upon them, they seemed exotic and different. They always smelt alluring because they sold joss sticks, incense and oils. Occultique in Northampton had a signboard that promised ‘Oils, Resins and Rare Gums’, which suggested an Alexandrian bazaar rather than a shop in a South Midlands shoemaking town. Patchouli, Sandalwood, Cedar or Old Rose often waft around you as you enter such shops.
They also sounded pleasing because there was usually drifting, dreamy New Age or ambient music, fostering a wistful, contemplative mood. Sometimes the recordings were enhanced by the sound of waves, or rippling streams, or the wind in the trees. There was also the gentle tinkling of the wind chimes invariably sold in the shop. And New Age shops sold strange and wonderful things you couldn’t then get elsewhere, especially tarot cards, amulets and minerals: moonstone, agate, onyx. What with the exotica, the aromas and the music, they felt like a completely different sort of space to the everyday world of the Eighties.
Such shops were also often fulcrums for groups and individuals interested in Pagan, Esoteric, Magical and Ancient Mysteries ideas, when these were very much minority interests: through notice boards, newsletters and chats with the proprietors you could find your way to like-minded souls. It may seem incongruous now, but in the early days they were often regarded with a certain wariness by the more conventional, as if they harboured sinister occult conspiracies out of a Dennis Wheatley thriller rather than pictures of unicorns and earrings of owls. Admittedly, this gave them a frisson of defiant difference too.
As I have recounted elsewhere, it was a notable New Age shop, Gothic Image in Glastonbury, that introduced me to a sheaf of pagan, Celtic, antiquarian and alternative magazines: Pendragon, Caerdroia, Wood & Water, Sangraal and so on, opening up a world which reminded me of the fiction of Machen and Blackwood and Fortune. This shop had opened, I now learn, in 1979, and I must have visited soon after, when it certainly seemed to me marvellously unusual.
It closed, alas, in 2019, when in an interview with The Bookseller, it was described as “[T]he UK’s first ‘alternative bookseller’” (‘Glastonbury’s Gothic Image shuts up shop after 40 years’, The Bookseller, Jan 14, 2019). By “alternative” the writer probably had in mind the broader Sixties counter-culture. There were certainly earlier occult and esoteric bookshops such as Watkins in London, founded in 1897, Atlantis in Museum Street, opened in 1922, and indeed Occultique in Northampton, opened in 1973.
After discovering Gothic Image, I began to look out for similar shops wherever I went on my book-collecting or ancient monument excursions. I never quite had the same wildly enriching set of finds in a New Age shop again, but there was usually something unusual, independent and eccentric. At first, there were not all that many: there was one at Avebury for a while, and something of the sort in Penzance.
I always thought of Malvern as a sort of second to Glastonbury as a mystic citadel in Britain, and have a fondness for it precisely because of this (my story ‘Armed for a Day of Glory’ is set there). I was an early member of the Green Party when it was called the Ecology Party (I still have the badges somewhere) and Malvern was one of its seed-beds, as it was also for several New Age healing, holistic and psychic groups.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Malvern had a New Age shop too. Aquarius opened in 1989, and the owner, Valerie de Heer, said that she then knew of only two others in the country: Arcania in Bath and Arcturus in Totnes. The Aquarius website notes: “Our aim was, and still is, to provide a shop that could offer spiritual teachings and guidance (which was hard to come by then) in the form of esoteric books, card sets, anything in fact that could help people in their spiritual search.”
Valerie de Heer said in a 2019 interview: “Malvern has a lot of healers, a lot of creative people and, of course, a lot of musicians, so the town really has a special atmosphere and it is a joy to be here . . . when we started out, these sort of things were considered a bit marginal, but aspects of this type of thinking are more or less mainstream these days . . . People tell us that they like to come to the shop because it has a very calming, relaxing atmosphere.” (‘New Age shop Aquarius is now old favourite’, Malvern Gazette, 21 February, 2019).
One such shop that I didn’t discover then but is still thriving now was opened slightly earlier than Aquarius. Inanna's Festival at 2, St Andrew’s Hill, Norwich, has been open since 1988, and their stock list is a useful epitome of what New Age shops sell: “silver, bronze & gemstone jewellery; statuary in resin, ceramics and pewter; hand-blended fragrant incenses (powders, granules and sticks) and magical oils; crystals, fossils, shells, mineral specimens; relaxation, healing and world-music albums; books, including blank Books of Shadows/Journals; tarot cards and oracle sets, runes, pendulums, I Ching, Crystal Balls, dowsing rods and scrying mirrors; greetings cards, posters and prints, calendars and diaries; special pieces such as Tibetan Bowls, Native American ceremonial pipes, dreamcatchers and smudge sticks.”
There are now many more such emporia and now some proudly call themselves “witchy” shops, often with a cross-over into Hallowe’en, Goth and Steampunk culture. In fairly recent excursions I’ve encountered one in a small Westmorland town of fewer than two thousand souls, another in a Shropshire spa town of five thousand, and a third in a market hall in a mid-Wales town of six thousand: and these are by no means exceptions. It’s interesting to see that such shops are supported even in fairly small communities. And they are still worth visiting, quite apart from their other qualities, just in case a few fantastical volumes might be found.
(Mark Valentine)
Image: Aquarius, Malvern (aquariusmalvern.co.uk)
Back in the late 1980s or so, the magazine Gnosis published an interview with an abbot of a tiny monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (something like that), which was situated in the Yolla Bolly wilderness area of northern California. Interestingly, he said that the New Age bookstores were places that could put people into touch with the real thing because they might offer books such as were issued by the St. Herman of Alaska Press -- located at this monastery, but I think I should it a skete. The St. Herman's people issued books about the Optina Elders. The article was "The Living Tradition of Catacomb Christianity." The abbot also said that the New Age bookstores would "serve Antichrist when he comes."
ReplyDeleteAs a Christian, I used to visit a New Age bookstore in Ashland, Oregon, that offered books like Hilton's The Scale of Perfection, and The Cloud of Unknowing, and Mesiter Eckhart, and so on, also books by Thomas Merton. The store was called The Golden Mean. I loved it when a specifically Christian indie bookstore opened up across the street and I learned that they thought of calling the store The Golden Nice. (They went with Bread of Life.)
Dale Nelson
Occult bookstores in the US in the 80s were much as you describe. There was one in Chicago when I arrived there for undergrad in 1988, and I investigated it with interest, only to be disappointed by the vagueness of the nonsense in the books (I'd hoped for bold, forthright nonsense) and eventually repelled by the heavy pall of incense.
ReplyDeleteAlec, yes, the Incense Years.... I bought a book online, one of the volumes in the Collected Coleridge. It was in fine shape when it arrived but it smelled strongly of incense. I kept it rather than sending it back; but I keep it packaged up so that it won't contaminate adjacent books. The lingering smell reminds me of hippie girls in peasant blouses. How the book came to be thus impregnated with that odor I don't know.
DeleteIn the Los Angeles area, where I grew up, metaphysical and occult bookshops were quite prevalent, with names like Eye of the Cat, The Cauldron, The Psychic Eye and many others. The best was The Bodhi Tree and it consisted of a large shop that sold new items and an annex in the back that was exclusively for used books. I spent many, many hours over the years (and probably spent hundreds of dollars on books) until it finally closed. During that period I had a mail order business where I sold books, incense and oils (of course!), handmade runes and such. The allure of these shops has fascinated me ever since I walked into the first one in the late 60's. There I bought a book and it too, was permeated with the aroma of incense, which lasted for literally years until time and the acids from the paper finally took over.
ReplyDeleteI also love those small shops that sell unearthed Roman coins, dinosaur teeth, fossils and the like, that one occasionally comes across in rural towns.
ReplyDeleteI think I know just the sort of shop you mean, Sandy and yes they are also worth discovering.
Delete(As a small correction, please note "Ecology Pary").
ReplyDeleteAnother nostalgic entry. I used to love visiting my local version of these shops, which was really a full-on bookshop, which also carried tarot cards, crystals (quite a fad there for a while) and other misc. The incense and new age music were also staples. In spite of the obvious mercantile motives, these places actually did have a calming effect, and upon leaving I am afraid I always imagined myself to be just a bit more enlightened than the other people outside. My first introduction to certain topics like Hindu texts, spirit photography and Stonehenge all took place there when I was a young man. Not bad for a boy who was mainly interested, at first, in finding books on vampires- believe it or not, there weren't all that many back then!
As a "hippy girl in a peasant blouse"of the 60s I moved into a sort of New Age vibe in the 70s and onwards. I am a Devonian so well remember Glastonbury, but also Totnes, which then had a "esoteric" shop, and lots of secondhand bookshops. I lived and worked in London for 20 years so all the bookshops were familiar to me, even the non-London ones as my journalist partner was always up for a book seeking trip. I wish I had the set of Madam Blavatsky's "The Secret Doctrine" still, it would be fun to reread. I was a avid reader of Colin Wilson then, and found many obscure books through him and the aforementioned bookshops. Happy days, now where is my cheesecloth shirt and Indian skirt?
ReplyDeleteClare, I read a fair bit of Colin Wilson's work back in the day, and honestly he doesn't seem to hold up all that well. But a passage from The Philosopher's Stone is one of my favorite passages from 60 years as a reader (p. 128 of the edition I borrowed):
DeleteA character goes for a walk on a grey Christmas morning in the English countryside:
"Even the greyness of the sky seemed inexpressibly beautiful, as if it were a benediction. I saw cottages across the fields with smoke rising from their chimneys, and heard the distant hoot of a train. Then I was suddenly aware that all over England, at this moment, kitchens were full of the smell of baked potatoes and stuffing and turkey, and pubs were full of men drinking unaccustomed spirits and feeling glad that life occasionally declares a truce. Then there was the thought that this world is probably one of the most beautiful in the solar system. Mercury is all white-hot rock; Venus is all heavy cloud, and the surface is too hot to support organic life. (Oddly enough, I had a clear intuition that there is life on Venus, but that it somehow floats in the atmosphere.) Mars is an icy desert with almost no atmosphere, and Jupiter is little more than a strange ball of gas. All barren – metallic, meteor-pitted rocks, revolving around the blank sun. And here we have trees and grass and rivers, and frost on cold mornings and dew on hot ones. And meanwhile, we live in a dirty, narrow claustrophobic life-world, arguing about politics and sexual freedom and the race problem."
That's an example of what I like to describe as "news from the real world."
Dale Nelson