Bio:Leigh Blackmore
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Leigh Blackmore was born in Sydney, New South Wales, the son of Rod and Beth Blackmore. He was educated at North Sydney Boys High School (1971–72) and Newcastle Boys' High School (now Callaghan College Technology Campus) (1972–76). He read omnivorously from an early age, particularly the works of Geoffrey Willans, J.P. Martin, and W.E. Johns. In high school, he graduated to devouring the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Leslie Charteris, also becoming fascinated with horror fiction (especially the Weird Tales school and Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos). While at high school he co-founded the Arcane Sciences Society and the Horror-Fantasy Society; the journal of the societies, Cathuria, was banned after three issues by Blackmore's high school principal for quoting in a review four-letter words used by the unleashed monster in Flesh Gordon. Blackmore was also a devotee of horror movies principally from the Hammer horror era. Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs became lasting literary influences at this time. He also became interested in Aleister Crowley through reading Moonchild (novel), Crowley's Confessions and the John Symonds biography The Great Beast.
Following stints at Macquarie University and Sydney University (where he majored in Semitic Studies), Blackmore worked as an editorial assistant on The Australian Horror and Fantasy Magazine in the early 1980s and went on to co-edit its successor, Terror Australis magazine from 1987-1992. In 1990 he travelled to Providence for the H.P. Lovecraft Centennial Conference and contributed financially to erecting the memorial plaque in honour of Lovecraft which was erected outside the John Hay Library, a trip during which he also met writers Dennis Etchison and William F. Nolan in Los Angeles.
He worked as a bookseller in Sydney for 25 years (1979–2004), primarily managing specialist science fiction & fantasy departments within larger bookstores such as Dymocks.
He resides in Wollongong, NSW where he has been a Guest Lecturer on science fiction, fantasy and horror for the University of Wollongong's Faculty of Creative Arts. He has guested as an expert on horror literature on TV programmes in Australia including Ray Martin's Midday (television show) and Jennifer Byrne Presents. [2] Blackmore is Editor of the Sword and Sorcery and Weird Fiction Terminus (SSFWT) amateur press association (which has members in Australia, the UK, USA, Sweden and Finland) and edits its online blog. He also contributes a regular zine to S.T. Joshi's "Esoteric Order of Dagon" Amateur Press Association. He is also a member of the Australian Sherlock Holmes society the Sydney Passengers, and of the C.G. Jung Society of Sydney. He is a regular panellist at science fiction conventions such as the annual Conflux convention in Canberra, and with Margi Curtis often runs workshops on esotericism and magick at these conventions.
In the early 1990s Blackmore was involved with the anarchist scene around Jura Books in Sydney, though his primary political interests lay in the Situationist International, (especially the works of Guy Debord); and the ontological anarchism of Hakim Bey, as well as Neoism (especially Stewart Home). At this time he initiated various culture-jamming operations under the rubric of Thoughtcrimes (whose primary slogan was "Say No to the Drug of the Commonplace") and issued the zines Possibility: A Journal of the Interzone (its title cued from passages in the work of Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs) and Antics: A Journal ov Anti-Control. At the turn of the Millenium the Thoughtcrimes projects were continued under the rubric of Zeroism and the Zeroist Alliance, a form of post-Neoist agitprop. Blackmore is still an advocate of post-left anarchy and immediatism.
He also worked with TOPY-Chaos, the Australian 'station' of Genesis P. Orridge's Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Partly inspired by the track "Looking for the O.T.O." from Throbbing Gristle's 1981 album Mission of Dead Souls, Blackmore undertook extensive serious study of the works of Aleister Crowley and became a practitioner of Thelema. After locating the O.T.O's Sydney body and experiencing the Gnostic Mass, Blackmore joined the Australian Ordo Templi Orientis, formally accepted The Book of the Law (which he had first read in 1985), and became an O.T.O. initiate and an ordained Deacon of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. He has performed in a number of series of the Rites of Eleusis with the Australian O.T.O. In 2001 he founded Aurora Australis Thelemic Temple as an independent Thelemic teaching & research body. His main occult interests include alchemy, Tarot, Qabalah, Hermetica, archaeoastronomy, Goetia, Kenneth Grant's Typhonian Order, the Zos Kia Cultus and Enochian.
He has also written columns on Magick and the occult (with poet, Reclaiming (Neopaganism) witch and activist Margi Curtis) - "Arts of the Craft" (2005) for Spellcraft magazine and "Black Cauldron" (2008–2009) for Black: Australia's Dark Culture magazine (Brimstone Press). He regularly lectures in the Illawarra NSW on Western esotericism and co-facilitates MoonsKin, an eclectic ritual working group.
Blackmore is also an expert on the Pre-Raphaelite painters. The creative component of his Honours thesis was a 35,000 word ficto-critical novella on the relationship between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall.