About the Book
"We didn't get to choose the stories we inherit."
The rag and bone man comes meandering along your street in the dawn hours. He's looking for old things that still have a bit of fat left in them, including off-cuts of outsiders' dreams. If you decide to stop and talk to him, he will tell you the old tales of how to tease out the teeming world of spirits that bulges behind our reality. The Rag & Bone Man's uncanny narrative, bookended by historical context and a grimoire inspired by the novel, bridges the gap between old ideas and new paradigms with a watchful eye on historical biases.
In this luminous novel, Lee Morgan covers sensationalism and fraud in nineteenth-century spiritualism and the ways in which we manipulated folklore and magic to cover and recontextualize our wrongdoings. Some of The Rag & Bone Man's extra content focuses on the importance of sensory pleasure and alignment with the fetch, while crossing ectoplasmic lines to help you conduct a seance. The rag and bone man is a fixture in the novel's real-life setting and is included in a performance art installation you can experience through a QR code in the book.Enter the rag and bone man's world if you dare-but be warned, the stories he's picked up will break your heart.
About the Author :
Lee Morgan is a dual citizen of Britain and Australia and oscillates between the two based on fluctuating political embarrassments. A lifetime interest in the occult and poetry led to seven years at university studying wildly vocational topics such as literature. Fully assured of a likely career in the fast-food industry, Lee began to pursue publication of his first book. Lee continued to pursue publication of a book for well over a decade. A twenty-year involvement in traditional witchcraft and a lot of pushing from friends led to a first publication in nonfiction of A Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft, which Lee describes as the book he would have liked to have found when first setting out upon the crooked path and is designed for the discerning beginner. A more "advanced" nonfiction title, Sounds of Infinity: Traditional Witchcraft and the Faerie Faith, was published in 2019.
Review :
"In his new book The Rag & Bone Man, Lee Morgan shares the story of a young man who navigates the magical world of spirits, witchcraft, and forbidden love. In this delightful tale we follow along with Henry as he explores the unforeseen world of magick and passion. As Henry learns the deeper mysteries of magick, so too, does he learn the mysteries of the heart."
--Chris Allaun, author of Whispers from the Coven
"The Rag & Bone Man is a beautifully written and provocative work. First, we feast on the Victorian and spiritualist origins of many of our current practices in witchcraft, and open to ways of making new things out of the gatherings of the forgotten. Almost like time travellers, we next enter a novel, following a memoir and coming-of-age journey. Henry is an exquisite and poetic being, deemed a changeling, full of sensibility and mediumship, striving to find allies in an era curious by what he can offer, but denying of who he is. There is magic throughout, always coming from the dark corners, marginal and social misfits and stopped clocks. Through a synesthetic narrative, we are drawn in and carried page after page into the fascination of séances and the language of the dead. After this deep dive into the poetry and the sensorial, we are gifted with a few pages inviting us to experiment with communicating and communing with the dead, but firstly with the ancestors that inhabit our own bodies, emotions and shortcomings. To give voice to the unheard, to those who were silenced - and this is such a potent and enticing invitation that I have no choice but to accept."
--Petrucia Finkler, author, astrologer, and death midwife
"In over three decades of devotion to stories and storytelling, I have never encountered a story like The Rag & Bone Man. To call it a mere a coming-of-age story is a grave disservice. It is a skin-switcher of a tale; much like it's titular entity--who may be a ghost, a vagrant, an angel, the Devil himself, an echo of the past, a vision of the future, or all and none of these--it shifts and spills like mercury between times and places, forms and tenses, flowing from firelit mountain forests to candlelit séance tables, from childhood to adulthood, before birth to beyond death. It walks in bared feet between abominable humanity and sacred monstrosity, disguise and authenticity, one voice and All Voices. The novel revolves around the savagely beautiful landscapes of turn-of-the-century Hobart, reflected in the inimitable cast of characters who live and love, suffer and triumph within it, and--at last--holds high a firebrand of haunted love that neither death nor time can extinguish."
--James Graham Nelson, writer and poet
"I slackened my pace to luxuriate in Morgan's bewitching tale. I was under a faerie spell, intoxicated, as if in a laudanum dream and not willing to wake. I was transported back to gloomy Hobart Town in the mid-1800s where old Irish magic, spirits, and sexuality boil and bubble under the thin veil of respectability... He has beautifully captured the haunted soul of Tasmania and resurrected a cast of lost characters that once roamed the back streets of Hobart. I like to believe that they still do."
--Natasha Buchanan, educational leader
"Many times in my life I have felt the wyrd coils of fate tighten and relax around me - and The Rag and Bone Man is a hollow bone flute through which many of those serpents fall and rise. This living grimoire of flesh and flood offers to us a feast of what is now needed, what we desire. My own head, heart, and hands are lit aflame with ancient love in reading these pages, in swimming in these secrets laid out on the seance table. I desire my occultism and witchcraft always to be visceral and filled with holy longing and potent risk - The Rag and Bone Man is this consummation and hope. Love drenches us so deeply that beyond death, we remember. Lee Morgan enchants, incomparably."
--Fio Gede Parma, author of The Witch Belongs to the World and Ecstatic Witchcraft
"Lee's writing is a bardic force, a current entirely unto its own yet inextricable from the elegant weavework of his spirits, traditions, communities, and creativity. To engage his research is to engage his art(e), and to engage his art(e) is to engage something no less scholarly and acute. It is this generosity of spirit, of heart, and of imagination which makes everything he writes an invaluable gift to the practitioner and the creator, alike."
--Sasha Ravitch, author and educator
"Once in a great while, there are books which possess writing so compelling that the reader moves through the page into a sacred space. The narrative greets you like a friend from the past to remind you of who you have been, what you are, and what possibilities might await you. This book embodies such strong magic, and Lee Morgan is an expert writer. I crave more of the excellence that is present on every page. Don't wait for the Rag and Bone Man to find you, seek him out as soon as possible. "
--Matthew Ellenwood, founder of Ellenwood Studios performing arts studio and artistic director of Terra Mysterium Performance Troupe
"Stepping into this work is like immediately entering the Otherworld and experiencing its manifold eldritch dimensions. Lee Morgan's spellbinding language and poetic use of words, phrasing and terminology invokes the feeling of being deeply immersed in realms that are not normally entered for the average individual. For the witch, these realms are known, not necessarily comfortable, but certainly navigable with care and attention. Morgan takes the reader on a deeply emotional and transformative journey, both into these Otherworlds and also into the reader's own internal realms. Using factual research, fascinating (sic) fiction and magical practice, deep layers of the individual are unpeeled, examined and transformed into something altogether different. I was profoundly moved by the relationship between the main protagonists and cannot but recommend this work highly, both for those of a "changeling" disposition, but also for those that wish to get underneath the veneer that modern society and life has coated them with. "
--Nigel Pearson, author of Treading the Mill
"This is a strange and changeling book, and as Henry reminds us, all poets are changelings."
--Stuart Inman, Magister of the Clan of the Entangled Thicket
"In Rag & Bone Man, Lee Morgan invites you along for a trip down memory lane... a trip entirely unknowable while also intently familiar as you encounter The Rag and Bone Man on his nightly prowls to consume the refuse of memory, emotion, and thought. We follow the Rag and Bone Man's journey of becoming and unbecoming, from human to inhuman, from living to dead. We travel around the streets Hobart as the Rag and Bone Man seeks out that which sustains him."
--Benjamin Stimpson, author of Ancestral Whispers
