Nemglan Press is my micropress; a channel for my own works in a variety of guises where the outputs are careful emanations of the imaginal and the numinous.
All the works are sold out, highly sought after and command considerable prices on the resale market.
New manifestations are being considered. Substack subscribers will be the first to receive news, and will enjoy early access to pre-orders.
On words, stories, myths and the imaginal
The poet, the scop, the skald, the bard – spell-weavers all. Story-tellers were once recognised as such. Shaman-like, through feats of imagination, they undertook journeys into the unseen worlds and returned bearing fundamental truths of existence. Then, by their word-magic, they conjured this wisdom for the benefit of others; through their direct participation with the spirits, the story-teller wove the myths of the people.
It is imagination that reveals the gateway to the otherworld, that sharpens the blade in order to cut the veil. It connects us to the deepest recesses of the unconscious and the highest summits of the spirit-realms. This is why stories possess power. They transform reality, bestow revelation and change the profane into the sacred. They grant identity and provide both a link with the past and a direction for the future.
The relationship between magic and story-telling is so inextricably intertwined as to be self-evident. This is the basis for everything I write or publish: the imagination as the preeminent organ. There is nothing pejorative about storytelling. It is en-chantment, poesis, mythopoeia.
The Nemglan Press Catalogue
Shalat
The Age of the Crusades is in its death-throes. The Frankish military orders – the warrior-monks of the Templar, Teutonic and Hospitaller Knights – cling to Christendom’s last bulwark against the armies of Islam: the city of Acre. They await the arrival of their nemesis, the Mameluk Sultan Al-Ashraf and his unassailable horde of 100,000 men.
In response, a new and clandestine fraternity puts into motion its Great Plan: to seek and unshackle a being interred deep in the Judean desert; a fell and blasphemous creature as old as the Earth and more potent than anything that lives upon it.
Yet their covenant with the benighted Black Pope and his formidable retinue is fragile. While this Patriarch professes a union of common purpose – to bind the creature to their will as a weapon against the Turks – his real motives are veiled and inscrutable.
Caught between the armies of the Muslim Turks, the Black Pope, and the occult order of Frankish knights, a rag-tag brotherhood of damaged men rides towards its doom: a disgraced Templar knight, a haunted Nizari Hashashin, a mute Spanish hermit and a Jewish mystic. Only as their enemies draw close do they begin to understand their otherworldly purpose amidst the bitter and brutal crucible of war.
Meanwhile, the witch-queen known as Elath Arba observes all from her eyrie upon the summit of Mount Hermon. Yet as the intricate web of destiny unfolds, even she cannot determine its outcome, despite her best efforts.
All will come together for a terrible reckoning but, at the very end of things, only one of them will comprehend the extent of the Powers at work, and the nature of their True Master.
Format: 408 B&W printed pages, hard-bound in black book cloth with a crimson hand-foiled front cover and spine, red and black headbands, black endpapers and a red ribbon.
Edition: Damnati edition, limited to 23 hand-numbered copies, signed by the author. The edition includes four exclusive art prints from renowned illustrators, each depicting scenes and characters from the book. The artists are: Arik Roper, Benjamin A. Vierling, David V. D’Andrea and Joshua Andrew Belanger. Each copy is also signed by the author.
The Autumn King: Ivar the Boneless, Edmund of East Anglia, and the Cult of Yngvi-Freyr
This important work is a wide-ranging study of the relationship between two men: Ivar the Boneless, son of Ragnar Lothbrok and the völva Aslaug Sigurdsdottir, leader of the Viking Great Heathen Army; and King Edmund of East Anglia, last of the Wuffinga royal dynasty.
The book explores many topics, including: the Norse magical art of seiðr and its deviant male practitioners; the fertility god Yngvi-freyr and the timing of his blót, or seasonal sacrifice; heathenism in the Danelaw; Edmund’s early cult and ideas of northern so-called ‘sacral kingship.’
Full of revelations, the book provides answers to many key questions including: what was the nature of Ivar’s deformity? Why was Ivar known as ‘Hinguar’ amongst the English? Why did Ivar slaughter Edmund in the manner of a ritual blood-sacrifice? And why was Edmund subsequently venerated by Viking settlers?
The findings also affect our magickal understanding of St Edmund, a figure widely venerated in East Anglian witchcraft. Far from being a passive victim, Edmund is revealed as a powerful embodiment of the king-as-vivifier: a consort of the land, a provider of fertility in life and a supernatural guardian in death.
Format: 112 printed pages, hard-bound in a full-colour cover, with cream end-papers and a black ribbon.
Edition: limited edition of 50 hand-numbered copies, including a free supplementary 24-page booklet ‘Seiðrblót’ with additional important insights into seiðr and seiðrmaðr or ‘seiðr-men’. A workable seiðrmaðr ritual is also included.
Our Failing Shadows
These 25 spell-poems are otherworldly meditations on the themes of love, death, sin, redemption, ecology and nature, the ritual year, and the soul’s yearnings. Deeply mystical, they take the form of curses, hymns, incantations, evocations and invocations.
Our Failing Shadows is a twilight text, best read at dusk or dawn. Indeed, many of the poems call on themes of liminality, the unseen and the shadowy presence of the dead within the land. Few spirits are named, and those that are not draw power from their ambiguity. The poems vary in voice and style, some are invocatory, others bold statements of identity from the otherworld. The spirits are called and given a voice, and sometimes that voice whispers things uncomfortable to hear. The poet engages with concepts of sin, both religious and ecological. ‘Anticosmic’ and ‘A Curse (for Humankind)’ confront us with the fact that however much we other ourselves, we cannot escape our humanity…. It draws in form and style on ancient hymns, spells, psalms, charms and folk music. It is also a text that can be worked, including invocations to spirits and even a solitary rite, with full instructions. This is not a passive book about someone else’s spiritual experience, but one which the reader too may become involved in.
Format: 50 printed pages, hard-bound in black bookcloth, with black end-papers and a full-colour dust jacket. 25 poems, each accompanied by a sigil designed by the author.
Edition: limited to 23 hand-numbered copies.
The Longest Night
A collection of 25 spell-poems exploring the dark half of the year; that is, the six months from the autumn equinox to the vernal equinox. The folk-spells, incantations, catechisms, eulogies, hymns and evocations in ‘The Longest Night’ are otherworldy meditations on this dark tide. In observation of the seasonal calendar, they include ritual verses for Mabon, Samhain, the Winter Solstice, Yule, Imbolc, and other notable feast-days and blóts. Some evoke the spirits and deities associated with this time of year, others acknowledge its presiding energies and flora.
This collection of spell-poems, incantations, catechisms, eulogies, hymns and evocations is concerned with the dark half of the year; that is, the six months from the autumn equinox to the vernal equinox. Ordered according to the ritual calendar, to read them in sequence is to ride the seasonal dark tide as it washes over this world, reaching its apogee on the longest night – winter solstice – before ebbing thereafter.
Many of these works are inevitably concerned with myth, dealing as they do with the sun’s cosmic struggle at this time of the year. These days, the term ‘myth’ is pejorative, synonymous with falsehood (‘the myth of capitalism’.) But myths are not lies or confections; rather, they are sacred narratives describing a primal epoch when humans were surrounded by an unseen supernatural realm. Myth was the product of mystical engagement with directly apprehended powers, of the unmediated revelations of gods and goddesses.
We still exist in a continuum of mythic activity, where some have occurred, some are in progress and some are yet to pass. Conscious magickal engagement with the mythic cycles of creation and destruction, enshrined in the wheel of the year, gives us, like our ancestors, license to direct their unfolding. And in so doing, we can briefly walk with gods once more.
Format: 57 printed pages, hard-bound in black bookcloth, with black end-papers and a full-colour dust jacket.
Edition: limited to 50 hand-numbered copies.
The Ritual Day and The Ritual Year
This beautiful A2 print is printed on heavy 300gsm white stock and shows a dozen correspondences between the macrocosmic tides of the year and the microcosmic tides of the day – useful for reference, meditation or personal ritual.
This limited edition A2 print illustrates the principle of ‘as above, so below’ and shows the deep correspondences between the macrocosmic tides of the year and the microcosmic tides of the day, including the following:
The hours of the day
The four elements
The compass points
The classical winds
The tides of the day
The quarter and cross-quarter days of British and Celtic tradition
The months of the year
The zodiacal constellations
The zodiacal signs
The planetary domiciles
The seasons of the year
The axis mundi