Sacrum Regnum Issue 2

As the New Year moves forward and with gratitude to all who purchased and contributed towards our first instalment we now unveil the second issue of Sacrum Regnum .

We begin as we did before with a range of short stories. In the first, John Howard’s Into an Empire, a stamp collector and amateur historian begins to detect the presence of a more allusive realm, whilst in Charles Wilkinson’s The Human Cosmos a retiring jeweller looks back over his life whilst trying to make sense of a series of seemingly minor events. A scent of autumn and melancholy pervades this piece as it does the next: Colin Insole’s Dreams from the Apple Orchards , a nightmarish reminiscence of a childhood touched by wartime tragedy and cultural guilt. Our fiction selection closes with a powerful story of lost love in Post-Soviet Hungary, courtesy of Thomas Strømsholt.

As for translations we are very happy to present a newly translated short story from the acclaimed Polish writer Stefan Grabinski, entitled Red Magda . Our thanks to Grabinski stalwart Miroslaw Lipinski for providing this piece. Additional material, in verse format at last, comes in the form of translations from Baudelaire (by John Cairns) and Fernando Pessoa and new poems from Loha Connell and Bethany van Rijswijk.

We finish with an array of reviews, articles and additional material. Mark Valentine explores the works of Claude Haughton, a neglected ‘thirties novelist whose stories of Archangelic powers abroad in London are only just being rediscovered; Martin Echter provides an appreciation of the anarchist and decadent adventurer Hanns Heinz Ewers, and Nigel Jackson examines Mary Butts’ From Altar to Chimney-Piece via the cosmic symbolism of René Guénon and the Traditionalist school.