THE DEAD HERMES EPISTOLARY by Slippery Elm

“This is the necromantic power of love, revealed to us at last by Dead Hermes. And by raising the ghosts of the past we are given visions of the future…”

In the nine missives which comprise The Dead Hermes Epistolary, trickster poet Slippery Elm leads the reader away from the pale world of dying meaning into the ever-living dream world of our forgotten past.

Whispers of wet forests, conspiracies of witches and indigenous elders, the erotic lyric of the troubadours, the arguments of Sephardic poets, Arabic mystic texts on agriculture, perfumed Andalusian gardens where kings bow before the power of beauty, the dead dancing with the living at a wedding: all these are the ghosts Slippery Elm summons to lead us towards the transgressive and liberating magic of Hermes Chthonios.

The Dead Hermes Epistolary is a work of deep poetic beauty and an act of soul retrieval for the revolutionary spirit, lost as it’s become in the pale half-light of the internet and Empire’s relentless war against meaning. Slippery Elm deftly awakens the knowledge hidden in places we’ve forgotten to look, all the while awakening in the reader the deep power of words and the deeper magic of radical friendship.

“The letters of Slippery Elm are the plumage of a nightingale who soars high, singing the lyrical anarchism of Spain. Language is the means of struggle, of subversion, satire and celebration, in a voice that turns from ecstatic to erotic. As they lift the groaning bones of Franco from his grave, the facist myth that elides the history of Al-Andalus crumbles to dust. Slippery Elm plays his part, sings the hidden song of lost Lorca, whose duende weeps as a spring more precious than gold, evokes a world that was and is, and is yet to come. An adventurer, whose path has all the light stepping and emphatic stamp of the flamenco dancer, whose dancing ground is strewn with poetry, a lover who writes with candour and beauty. It is a rare and precious thing to find a book which talks to the heart, and it takes a troubadour to perform such a miracle.”

—Peter Grey (author of Apocalyptic Witchcraft, Lucifer Princeps, The Red Goddess)