By now my emphasis on solar myth and thematic is approaching a point where it can be considered a dominant element of my magical thinking and persona, and I have a mind to develop it as an underpinning element of praxis. So much of what I elaborate seems to be convering on solar myth and not to mention solar cult, both in Satanic and Pagan dimensions, and in terms of a great deal of aesthetic and psycho-personal logic over the course of my life, topped off by my exploration of the work of Georges Bataille and especially its erotic dimensions. With that in mind, I often turn quite naturally to Coil’s “solar era” as an obvious resonance with my own instincts.
It’s difficult to pin a single sound on Coil, but I would say that they started as an experimental industrial band before going on to explore different musical direction, particularly in different eras, including neofolk, noise, acid house, drone, ambient music, minimialism, to name a few. Indeed, the band tended to regard its albums as magickal rituals in their own right, which follows an idea that John Balance, one of Coil’s original founders, explored very early on with his interest in “sound as magick”. John Balance tended to divide his work with Coil into two distinct eras. The first was the “solar” era, which refer to Coil’s discography from the 1983 (or more particularly starting from Scatology) up until 1998. The second was the “lunar” era, which practically refers to everything from Musick to Play in the Dark (1998) onwards, or until Balance’s death in 2004. It is obviously the solar era that I’m focusing on.
In The Golden Age of Bloodsports, Balance also separates between the “Sun” phase of Coil, beginning in 1983, and a “Mars” phase of his own life preceding it. This “Mars” phase seems to have begun in 1975, when Balance arrived in London, and ends with 1983, when John Balance and his partner Peter Christophersen (who was also in Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV) left Zos Kia to concentrate on Coil. But it seems to me that the “Mars” energy is also deeply fundamental to Coil’s “solar” era as a whole. In fact, Coil’s debut EP, How to Destroy Angels, was dedicated to Mars, the Roman god of war who Balance understood as the god of both spring and war, and it was released in 1984, during Coil’s solar era. Where Coil is concerned, they seem to form the same kind of magical energy, and it seems that Balance understood this as being a “masculine” phase of Coil’s artistic history, in contrast to the “feminine” energy of the “lunar era”, as pretty explicitly emphasized by Musick to Play in the Dark. In fact, Coil referred to How to Destroy Angels as “ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy”. That’s not a bad summary for the occult impetus of Coil’s early 80’s output, and it’s a tantalising start.
But the solar era of Coil’s work is also tinged with death. As Eden Tizard observed in her 20th anniversary review of Musick to Play in the Dark for The Quietus, there are numerous references to death within Coil’s solar works, and these touch on various cultural references, including the Mexican Day of the Dead, ancient Rome, and the shadow cast by the AIDs crisis. There’s also a fixation on Rome itself evident in Horse Rotorvator, evoking the cultural memory or imaginary of ancient Roman excess and numerous references to Rome itself, focusing on either the ancient land of Rome (as in the song “Slur”) or the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini (as in “Ostia”), an openly gay Italian film director who was murdered in Ostia in 1975 (probably by criminal gangsters who were allied with the Italian far-right).
Returning to the subject of How to Destroy Angels, Balance already explained in 1984 that it really was a functional record, in that it really was a ritual to build up male sexual energy. In 1985, Tim O’Neill, writing for Gnosis, explored this idea in more elaborate detail. O’Neill observed that How to Destroy Angels was meant to create music for a ritual environment in which various aspects of “the Martian octave” could be visualised, which would then build up that male sexual energy, while also noting an onanistic practice that was reminiscent of the Death Posture elaborated by Austin Osman Spare. Spare, of course, was one of Balance’s primary occult interests, alongside the work of Aleister Crowley, and Spare’s Zos Kia Cultus was the principal inspiration for the band Zos Kia. In fact, Spare and Crowley echo widely not only in Coil but also throughout the fantastic catalogue of industrial, post-industrial, and ritual industrial material that is Nekrophile Rekords. Founded by Zoe Dewitt in 1983, the label itself is enthusiastically devoted to occultism, and especially Thelema, Crowley, Spare, and the celebration of sexuality, death, and the void, and their catalogue rather masterfully evokes this ineffable darkness, which Coil in its solar era also evoked in their own way with Transparent and later 80’s releases.
Speaking of darkness, though, O’Neill also talks about an “Invocation of the Black Sun” that was perfomed by John Balance and Kristine Ambrosia. Ambrosia got a lot of ideas about Inner Planes after listening to Coil’s “Solar Lodge” in 1985, and from there, after some phone calls with Balance, the two got together with O’Neill to organise a transcontinental ritual to raise “the Black Sun”. As eyebrow-raising as that sounds, it seems that this has basically nothing to do with neo-Nazism (whose adherents probably didn’t seriously start talking about it until the 1990s). But it probably has everything and more to do with a much broader chthonic (or rather solar-chthonic) power. The participants discussed travelling through subterreanean aetheric passages in the Underworld and working with various entities within during their descent, and on the Day of Solstice the ritual begin. Performers rode upside down, conveying the Saturnian inversion that the underworld represented, Ambrosia and Balance apparently conveyed energy to each other from other sides of the world, in a cycle symbolised by the Ouroboros, and then the “Black Sun” would be raised. O’Neill said that this was to be followed by a different ritual, the raising of “the White Sun”, thus clearly indicating that they are talking about the alchemical Sol Niger, and the broader framework of alchemical transmutation. In fact, John Balance outright identified it as the alchemical Sol Niger in an interview with The Feverish in 1985.
There is a solar image associated with Coil, a black ten-pointed star or sun that can be seen as the band’s logo. For Balance, this black sun can be seen as the alchemist’s Sol Niger, and represents the most magickal and mysterious aspect of the sun, as well as a chaotic preceding purification. It is also the sun in the underworld, the psychic realm of Hades and death, and the necessary breakdown of matter illustrating the transformation of base material into gold. Yet, for Balance, that black sun was also simply a symbol of chaos, like the blind spot that appears when you stare into the sun for too long. But Coil’s black sun is also quite clearly an anus. In fact, the original release of Scatology included a version of their “black sun” design that was covered by a swirling staircase motif, as in “The Anal Staircase”. There’s something very obviously Bataillean about that image. I don’t quite know if Balance or anyone from Coil had read anything from Georges Bataille, let alone The Solar Anus, but there’s an Abstract Magazine interview from 1984 in which Coil discussed the idea of “worshipping base matter” in relation to Scatology.
Returning once more to How to Destroy Angels, the album itself used iron and steel instruments in correspondence with Mars, as these metals were clearly associated with Mars. Another correspondence was the use of five huge gongs and five small gongs, as the number five was also sacred to Mars. Even the length of the title track almost precisely accorded with a Martial number: approximately 17 minutes (well, 16 minutes and 45 seconds really, but that’s close!). Coil also used specially made “bullroarers”, meant to invoke an atmosphere appropriate for male initiation rites, apparently of the kind that you might find in Australian, New Guinean, and South American tribes. There may also be something chaos-magickal in the application of this Martian ritual. The ritual of How to Destroy Angels was constructed precisely, apparently following Kabbalistic guidelines, but Balance also says that any ritual can be constructed in any way, and that it is the belief itself, and the sanctity that you impart to that belief, or whatever it is triggers psychic processes appropriate for the ritual, makes the seemingly ordinary actions transcend its worldlinees and ordinariness into something Other, something magickal. This probably reflects Peter Carroll’s idea that belief itself is a means of changing reality or producing desired effects, and that idea, or some version of it, is pretty fundamental to chaos magick. How to Destroy Angels took a Kabbalistic numerical formula and applied it in a way that seems to basically follow the logic of chaos magick.
I might also bring the aspect of Mars as a warrior to the chthonic sun in a different way. In The Testament of Cyprian the Mage, Jake Stratton Kent refers to the “Underworld Sun”, the chthonic sun, as synonymous with the Thracian rider or Hero, a divine warrior, symbolised by both the sun in the sky and, in his chthonic aspect, as a dragon or serpent. The Underworld Sun is thus the image of a heroic mystery, and Coil’s black sun reflects a spirit familiar to this mystery. A similarly but also very differently “heroic” symbolism might be found in Coil’s black sun. In an interview with Tape Delay from 1987, John Balance explained that Coil got the image of their black sun (which he called a surrealist symbol) from Isidore Ducasse’s Maldoror, and that it has ten rays, which is 2×5. Coil at this time were a duo, and five, according to Balance at least, is the number of the Aeon of Horus, so that must mean that between John Balance and Peter Christopherson is probably five rays each. Horus is a heroic deity in his own right, in fact some depictions of Horus represented him as a rider god, similar to the Thracian Hero. But Coil did not openly represent themselves as emissaries of the Aeon of Horus, both to avoid misinterpretation of their aims and because they viewed silence and secrecy as being most appropriate to the image of Horus: a “conquering child” with a finger to his lips, thus giving the sign of silence.
Horus was not necessarily a sun god, at least not officially as far as the ancient Egyptian cultus was concerned, but there are times where Horus has been considered a solar deity. In the Greek Magical Papyri, there is a spell that refers to Horus as the “fiery, invisible begetter of light”, which closely matches the Neoplatonist description of the Greek sun god Helios. Indeed, the same spells sometimes directly identify Horus with Helios. More importantly, Crowley had explicitly identified Horus, the god of his new Aeon of freedom, with the Sun, which he referred to as a symbol of “that image of our True Selves”. Remember also that, as Crowley said, every one is a star, and of course that the Sun itself is a star: we are our own solar myth, our own solar Lucifers in a way, bringers of light, full of and casting darkness. And of course, Kenenth Anger’s epically psychedelic pagan revival piece that was Lucifer Rising, which was in its own way a ritual conjuration of a Crowleyan, solar Lucifer-Horus.
John Balance has been a self-described pagan for much of his life, but this paganism has taken on multiple meanings over the course of his life. In 1984, Balance explained (as Geff Rushton) that he viewed Paganism not as a religion in itself but the opposition to religion, since the term “pagan” to him just meant being “godless” in the eyes of those who believe in God, and that meant rejecting all gods except those you created yourself. In many ways, this is “paganism” less as a reference to the religions and gods of old and more like how Friedrich Nietzsche understood polytheism as a system of individual valuation and multiplicity. Of course, his beliefs, then and always, were very complicated. But there’s also probably a throughline very familiar to chaos magick.
Balance definitely seemed to have some interest in Chaos as a dynamic occult force. Coil at one point called themselves “Archangels of Khaos”. On Scatology, Coil refer to themselves as great believers in the redeeming powers of chaos and confusion, and that out of a primordial and chaotic state arose the order of the universe, which is simply a mass of creative energy. In fact, the cover of Coil/Zos Kia’s Transparent features an illustration (depicting winged monster with an erect penis, a serpent for a tail, and a thunderbolt in its right hand) that comes from the “red” edition of Peter Carroll’s Liber Null, which was published in 1981. But there’s also a deep-rootenedness in Thelema, or at least more particularly Aleister Crowley. For one thing, Coil’s electrifying slogan, “THE PRICE OF EXISTENCE IS ETERNAL WARFARE”, was itself derived from Aleister Crowley, more specifically from Crowley’s Book of Lies. But more than that, the work and even the life of Aleister Crowley is something that has deeply informed John Balance’s artistic/personal desires and sensibilities, and Balance seems to have believed that Crowley a reason and purpose for every thought and action and a supreme justification for a continued, ever-searching, and ever-experiencing experience. Balance also framed Coil’s work, at least during their solar era, in the context of a private mythology that they aligned with Crowley’s concept of the Aeon of Horus.
An important aspect of the Aeon of Horus informs the composition and design of Coil’s 1991 album Love’s Secret Domain. On the cover of the album is a pentagram, one pointing upwards rather than downwards, as well as an all-seeing eye representing Ordo Templi Orientis. In this case the pentagram is clearly not used as a satanic symbol, but nor is it employed as a Christian or Hermetic symbol is it has been for a great deal of Western esotericism (or more specifically the Right Hand Path). Rather, Coil used this pentagram as a symbol of sexual power, and to honour gods such as Mars and Mercury, who Peter Christopherson said were seen as sources of sexual power by the O.T.O. Lust and sexual power are an overriding theme of Love’s Secret Domain, and this again is connected to the solar myth of the Aeon of Horus. As Crowley said, “Be positive, be lustful and enjoy the things of the senses. Fear not any god shall deny thee of this.”. That was the attitude Coil reflected in Love’s Secret Domain. The band Coil itself was at this time presented as a sensual entity in its own right, a vehicle in which to indulge all things carnal. I would say that there’s a sense in which that continues all the way from How To Destroy Angels.
I believe that there is a sense in which John Balance and Peter Christopherson sought to establish their own solar myth – that is, before they decided that Coil was going to be making lunar music. This solar myth is broadly pervaded by what they called “sado-surrealism”, which more or less denotes their particular interest in Spare, the Comte de Lautreamonte, and the Marquis De Sade, but also the whole aesthetic, artistic, and even occult impetus drawn from them. The Surrealist mission as expressed in Coil is in many ways linked to the “Invocation of the Black Sun”, with its whole aim to traverse the underworld, which itself is linked to the ancient solar myths themselves, in which the sun descended in the underworld, to its own source of renewal. But Coil’s lust also not only reflects the Surrealist interest in the carnal realm, not to mention a delightfully satanic impetus in some respects, but also Crowley’s own solar myth itself. The leaping goat, the goat that Crowley identified himself with, was signified a solar creativity, a universal creative force that recognised no bounds, and it is in the same spirit that Crowley identified Satan with the sun. In fact, he even argued that Satan was only called evil because he was associated with the burning rays of the sun, which is interesting because in fact there are two gods in Hellenistic antiquity who had this exact association: Helios (who was the Neoplatonist Demiurge), and Seth Typhon (who, at a certain point in time, was about as close to an evil god or a Devil as it got for ancient Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians).
Coil’s solar era is best observed as its own solar myth. And I believe that there is room to learn from Coil’s solar myth, at least for those who seek to stoke the fire of their own solar myth. But then again, that much is my intention, my desire, my “mission” if you like. There’s definitely pagan chaos magick going here.
