The Black Alchemist: A Terrifying True Story

by Andrew Collins

  No more than two feet away from Dave Rankine, the moving shadow came to a halt. In its clenched hands was a long black baton, a swordstick perhaps, being lowered slowly towards his head, like some Japanese katana in the hands of a ghostly ninja.

  Realising what was going on only at the last moment, the ritual magician and devotee of Hekate quickly used the power of the mind to rebut and push away the amorphous form. The cowled spectre vanished and once more a sense of calm befell the cocooned bodies until the threat of further danger was removed by the welcome light of day.

  Following our return from Eastbourne’s Paradise Mound, I made the final changes to The Black Alchemist book. After nearly three years of writing, editing, re-writes and disasters, I had managed to get it into a suitable state for publication.

  The first advanced copies arrived on Saturday, 5th November, the rest of the 15,000 coming a few days later. They filled the entire house, yet little by little the book began selling in huge quantities all over the country. The furore it created led to virtual riots in towns across the Southeast as fundamental Christians attempted to disrupt or cancel promotional events.

  Death threats were received, and one venue was even threatened with a firebomb attack. Regularly Christians ripped down posters advertising The Black Alchemist or picketed meetings and all-dayers. Clearly, the book’s contents and cover artwork touched a nerve that no one could really quite put their finger on.

  Throughout this period Bernard’s link with the Black Alchemist and the Black Sorceress of Arundel continued, leading to a fresh round of quite baffling and, inevitably, disturbing incidents that were recorded down and featured in a subsequent book entitled The Second Coming (1993).

  Yet by this time my world was changing as I now embarked on a career as a major writer of the ancient mysteries subject, inspired by the psychic material Bernard had provided regarding a lost civilization he felt sure existed prior to a great cataclysm around the end of the last Ice Age.

  Very often this extraordinary material had emerged coincident to confrontations with the Black Alchemist, and even overlapped on occasions. The search for the Stave of Nizar came as a direct result of our intended astral exploration of the hidden chambers and caverns existing beneath Egypt’s Great Pyramid and Sphinx monument. One seemed integrally bound up with the other.

  This shift in my life gave Bernard the determination to finally rid himself of his unwanted link with the Black Alchemist. Yet whether dead or alive, it is clear that this man remains a very real threat to whomsoever chooses to transgress his world and attempt to interfere with his ill-conceived ambitions.

  Bernard’s death in 2010 brought him final release from this terrible anguish. Yet my life is entangled with that of the Black Alchemist in ways that can never be severed. For me it will never be over.

  Not in this life at least.

  47 Resurgence

  Current day. Proof reading the pages of this new edition of The Black Alchemist allowed me to review the remarkable sequence of events that Bernard and I had endured during the making of this book. It got me thinking about the 276-day ‘gestation’ period between the dagger-in-the-heart incident on 5th November, 1987, and the proposed ‘birth’ of the Black Alchemist’s unholy child on 8th August, 1988. This, as I knew, is in Christian tradition the prescribed number of days between the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and the birth of Christ, something the Black Alchemist would appear to have inverted for his own purposes.

  Christians believe that in the final days the Antichrist will be born, not like Jesus in Bethlehem, but in Babylon, the city of iniquity of biblical tradition. Since the Black Alchemist employed the use of notable place-names and local myths and legends to enhance the potency of his landscape alchemy, was there a place called Babylon near Eastbourne’s Paradise Mound?

  Checking the map I found that just two miles north of Paradise Mound is a headland called Babylon Down, one of only a few ‘Babylon’ place-names in the whole of Britain. Might this have been a factor in the Black Alchemist’s choice of Paradise Mound for the ‘birth’ of his antichrist? It was certainly possible. Yet, curiously, one of the oldest prophecies mentioning the birth of the Antichrist, written by St Jerome in the fourth century, states that the ‘Antichrist will be born near Babylon’.

  Why near Babylon. Why not Babylon itself? The answer seems to lie in the fact that in medieval lore the site of the Garden of Eden, the earthly Paradise, where God placed Adam after fashioning him from blood-red clay, was located just south of the city of Babylon, in what is today southern Iraq. Here then the Antichrist would be born as the second Adam. So to find that south of Eastbourne’s own Babylon is a place called Paradise is something the Black Alchemist will not have ignored.

  I wanted to go back to the area, see what I might find. Yet on looking at the map my eyes were quickly drawn away from Babylon Down, just west to a church situated in the nearby village of Jevington. Inside it, I discovered, is an oblong stone slab showing a carved relief of Christ that is over a thousand years old. It first came to light in 1785 when Sussex antiquarian Sir William Burrell uncovered a curious ‘stone chest’ that had lain undisturbed beneath the dirt floor of the church’s ancient Saxon tower for hundreds of years. On opening it, he saw that it contained the mysterious stone carving, which is today mounted on the church’s north wall.

  64. The tenth

  century Christ

  figure in Jevington church. Notice the cross-topped lance spearing a lion, and the serpent on the other side of his legs.

  Christ, wearing just a loincloth, is shown plunging a crosstopped lance into the mouth of a lion, its tail interlaced in the socalled ‘Urnes’ style, dating the panel to c. 950 AD. Balancing the lion on the other side of Christ’s legs is a snake, its interlaced coils in the same artistic style. Historians suggest that the carving relates to Psalm 91, which reads: ‘Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder; The young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet’, although this is by no means certain.

  Reading about Jevington’s strange relief of Christ, I remembered the Holy Lance seen psychically by Bernard in connection with the Paradise Mound. At the time I had interpreted this as the Spear of Longinus used to pierce Christ’s side in the Crucifixion story. Yet might Bernard have in fact picked up on the Black Alchemist’s magical utilisation of the cross-topped lance wielded by Christ in the Jevington carving? Was this the real lance point that Bernard had seen hanging vertically above the Paradise Mound? Did it link also with the stone spearhead found in Lullington churchyard, which seemed to reflect some aspect of the Peredur story? The fact that the Jevington lance is being plunged into the mouth of a lion is also perhaps significant, as the lion is an important symbol in alchemy.

  So why might the Black Alchemist have used such blatant Christian imagery in his warped landscape alchemy? The answer seems to lie in the fact that historians have occasionally identified Jevington’s strange sculpture with the Long Man hill figure, located just one and a half miles to the northwest (Lullington church itself is only two miles from Jevington). One might well have inspired the other, although which way around this might have been is unclear.

  I intended putting together a promo video to accompany the release of this book. So I made the decision to return to Lullington and the Sussex Downs with my friend and colleague Richard Ward, who I had been working with on psychic quests for the past twenty years.

  The last time we had visited Lullington was in December 2007, having just interviewed a couple from Eastbourne who believed they had located the Black Alchemist’s house after reading my book in the early 1990s (see the Notes and References section for the full story). On that occasion Richard had linked psychically with what appeared to be the Black Alchemist, who made it clear he could reveal to us new mysteries if we so desired. It was an offer we had chosen to ignore.

  Going back to Lullington with the original inscribed stone spearhead, found by Bernard in 1985, was a strange experience. We re-
enacted its discovery, realising this was surely tempting fate. As clichéd as it might seem, the day, which had started sunny with only a minimal risk of showers, now took a turn for the worse as the wind began hissing ominously through the trees as if in response to our presence.

  From Lullington we continued to nearby Wilmington church. Here we learned that a tunnel connected the church’s crypt with the one in the priory next door, which Bernard had been drawn to back in 1985. So was this where the Stave of Nizar had been concealed, inside the crypt, somewhere beneath the church altar?

  Outside in the churchyard, the winds continued to rise. Here Richard and I linked in mind to a yew tree over a thousand years old, and waited to see what might come to us.

  Richard, who had earlier felt he’d glimpsed the Black Alchemist standing beneath a tree in Lullington churchyard, now saw nothing.

  I, however, thought I could hear rhythmic chanting.

  With it came an image of the Stave of Nizar being held up vertically in the middle of a circle of brown clad monks. Suddenly, the stave changed into the cross-topped lance in the hand of the Jevington Christ figure. This then transformed into the Long Man hill figure holding his twin staves, which in turn dissolved to become a huge cavern-like entrance leading into the hill itself.

  I saw the cross-topped lance stretched out across the landscape, linking the Long Man of Wilmington with Jevington church and Eastbourne’s Paradise Mound. They formed a perfect straight line, at the end of which was the tip of the lance, piercing the mound, imagery I now felt sure the Black Alchemist had used in his ritual to create the unholy child.

  Afterwards, Richard and I carried on to Jevington church. Here we filmed the mysterious Christ carving, before journeying on to Babylon Down. Thick woodland covers the bleak downland, and this we explored as the light faded and gale-force winds tore incessantly through the treetops.

  For a while we lingered on an exposed tumulus. Yet the wind was so strong it forced us to retire to the car, which we’d parked close to the entrance of some rather uninviting woods.

  As we sat there in the darkness, wondering whether we should attempt to attune to the site, I admit I felt on edge. Had we triggered something untoward by recreating the discovery of the stone spearhead in Lullington churchyard earlier that day?

  From the safety of the car, Richard now opened up his mind.

  ‘I see him,’ he began, ominously, meaning the Black Alchemist. ‘He’s sitting above the Long Man, between the two staves, just above the head. It’s like he’s sitting on top of the head. It’s as if he’s controlling the Long Man as an entity by doing this. He’s put something down, on the head. I can’t see what it is.’

  There were a few moments of silence before he said: ‘I hear words: “and he shall die on the cross.” I now see a dark shadow stretching out behind him, like a dark cross on the landscape … it’s inverted.’

  Perhaps he sees this cross as Jevington’s cross-topped lance.

  ‘I think he does,’ Richard confirmed.

  There was a pause as the ferocious winds outside rose to an almighty crescendo. Suddenly, Richard flinched violently, before opening his eyes. I asked him what had happened.

  ‘I was flashing between seeing him there, and me being there,’ he revealed. ‘He then came up and grabbed my arm, which is actually quite painful now,’ he said, rubbing it.

  We gave it a few minutes before trying again.

  ‘I don’t see him now,’ Richard revealed. ‘I’m standing where he was, directly above the head of the Long Man. I want to follow him down the line of this cross. There’s a sensation of burning. Like something turning to ash, blackening the land as it goes out … the size of this cross … it has something to do with sacred measurement … proportions … the cross piece is one third the length of the shaft.’

  There was more, although the gale-force winds made concentration difficult. Soon afterwards we decided to leave.

  I drove into the night, feeling quite out of synch with everything—the road, the car, everything.

  We remained on edge about the possible repercussions of the attunement, even though the likelihood is that we were simply picking up on the Black Alchemist’s lingering residue, left in the landscape where he had conducted his chaotic rituals for so many years. That’s what we told ourselves, anyway.

  Back home I discovered that the head of the Long Man hill figure, Jevington’s church tower and Eastbourne’s Paradise Mound are in perfect alignment, a realisation that simply stunned me. So, had this line of sites really been important to the Black Alchemist in his attempted manifestation of an antichrist back in 1988?

  Zosimos of Panopolis saw the ultimate task of alchemy as the rebirth of Adam, an act that can only be achieved by bringing back together every divine spark released from Adam’s body at the time of the fall. These sparks now reside in each and every member of the human race, and only with their release through salvation at the point of death can they come together to allow Adam’s second birth.

  Was this what the Black Alchemist had been trying to achieve all along—not simply the creation of an antichrist, but Adam’s rebirth in Paradise, an act that was to have been completed after the tip of the Holy Lance had pierced Eastbourne’s Paradise Mound? That the Long Man of Wilmington has occasionally been identified as Adam,34 the first man, seemed strangely relevant here.

  65. The precision alignment between the head of the Long Man of Wilmington, the Saxon tower of Jevington church and Eastbourne’s Paradise Mound.

  As to the rest of the psychic material from that evening—it all checked out, and with it came a growing sense that we had tapped into energies that had lain dormant since the late 1980s. Although many psychics think the Black Alchemist is no longer alive, what Richard was now seeing suggested that there was unfinished business on the Sussex Downs. Somehow we had walked into something, some kind of future destiny set up by the Black Alchemist, which he knew that one day, when the time was right, I would be unable to resist fulfilling in some manner. That day had finally come.

  TO BE CONTINUED

  Notes and References

  1. This entire account is faithfully reconstructed from Bernard’s recall of the ritual when he made contact with the stone spearhead in Lullington churchyard on 30th May, 1985. The spoken words were devised from our subsequent knowledge of the ritual, gleaned from further psychic information and later research.

  2. Details of Wilmington Priory’s ecclesiastical immunity, along with its alleged unorthodox religious activities, were confirmed on 4th June, 1985, when Nigel Pennick showed me his copy of Rodney Castleden’s The Wilmington Giant (Turnstone Press, 1983).

  3. As Note 2.

  4. ‘Ogmor’, probably the Scots or Irish Gaelic óg or óc, ‘youth’ and mor, ‘great’, thus the ‘Great Youth’.

  5. See Bromwich, Rachel, Trioedd Ynys Prydein—The Welsh Triads (Cardiff University of Wales Press, 1961).

  6. Fraser, Kyle A., ‘Zosimos of Panopolis and the Book of Enoch: Alchemy as Forbidden Knowledge’, Aries 4:2 (2 November 2004), 125-147.

  7. See Chapter 21.

  8. In 1989, a couple living in Eastbourne, Mr and Mrs Eddie and Anne Clark, identified a terraced house in the Latimer Road area of the town as matching the one described by Bernard following his powerful dream of the Black Alchemist’s house in June 1985.

  66. The

  house seen by the

  Clarks in 1989.

  Like the one in which BA lived, its exterior features included double bay windows, a narrow garden bordered with Victorian railings and privet hedge, a black and red chequered tile path four to six paces in length, and a recessed green front door at the back of a porch with windows facing each other on either side. Above the bays were two further windows, all exactly as seen by Bernard.

  The initial discovery was made by Mrs Clark, who at the time was a welfare officer for the blind. On her rounds she noticed the house in question and recalled Bernard’s description of the Black Alche
mist’s home. To make sure it fitted the bill, the couple made a rough copy of Bernard’s drawing as it appears in The Black Alchemist and took it out to the location in question. They then filled in the colours and finer details to complete the picture. As you can see from Mr and Mrs Clark’s drawing, the houses are almost identical. Unfortunately, Mr and Mrs Clark only informed the author of their discovery in October 2007, and despite an extensive search of the area in December of that year the house could not be located, the couple having failed to note the address.

  Two years later, in November 2009, I received information to suggest that an abandoned house matching the description of the Black Alchemist’s home had existed in the mid 1980s in Carlisle Road, Eastbourne, close to both the Eastbourne Campus of the University of Brighton, and the Paradise Mound above Paradise Drive. This information came from a Paul Appleton, a resident of the town, who after reading The Black Alchemist wrote to me saying: ‘I believe this house [the one in Bernard’s dream] to have been on a crossroads between Granville Rd and [… Carlisle Road. It was] over the road from our school and just at the bottom of the hill from Paradise woods. We as youngsters had entered the house via the back garden that we assumed was squatted [and entered a] room … littered [as Bernard described] with bottles and ornaments. I can remember none of us dared to go upstairs. This house some time later caught fire. I think it may be a new build block of flats now [extract from an email received 9th November, 2009].’

  The actual address of the house was 20 Carlisle Road, Eastbourne. It lay just over a mile from the western end of Latimer Road, the site of the Clark’s own candidate for the Black Alchemist’s home. So, did they get the location wrong? Was this why we were unable to find it? Was it really 20 Carlisle Road? Is this where the Black Alchemist had gone too far, eventually destroying not only himself, but also the very essence of the house in which he lived? 9. Bifrons, meaning ‘two-face’, is, coincidently, the name of a demon in the Goetia, a medieval grimoire known also as The Lesser Key of Solomon. It takes its name from a Roman god, a form of the dual-faced Janus, guardian of doors and gates.