We at RENSEP believe that the individual perspectives of scholars and practitioners can complement and enrich each other. As RENSEP wishes to break through habitual academic boundaries between the researcher and the researched by creating ‘strategic collaborations’ between scholars and practitioners, we announced in June 2023 a prize of 500 euros to the best paper co-authored by both an academic scholar and an esoteric practitioner on a topic related to esoteric practices.

We are thrilled to announce that the prize has been awarded to Steve Patterson and Jeff Howard for their paper titled “To Reveal the Hidden Kingdom of Eld: Andrew Chumbley, the Cultus Sabbati, and Imaginal Space in Cornwall.” The paper will soon be published on the RENSEP platform.

Dr. Jeff Howard is a scholar of occulture and esotericism. He works as a Senior Lecturer in Games at Falmouth University in Cornwall, where he specializes in the occult and games. He is the author of two monographs Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives (now in its second edition) and Game Magic: A Designer’s Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice. He translates theory into practice as a core team member of Apocalypse Studios, where he consults on worldbuilding and systems design. He is also the creator of “Howard’s Law of Occult Design,” published in 100 Principles of Game Design. Howard has presented on games and the occult at a variety of international conferences, including Berlin Occulture, Trans-States, and ESSWE9. In addition, he has been an invited speaker at Viktor Wynd’s Last Tuesday Society, where he has spoken about folk magic and folk games. Howard studies Sabbatic Craft at the intersection of the Left Hand Path and the Typhonian current. Through his scholarship and creative practice, Howard is an ambassador for the power of play as a transformative and transcendent practice.

Steve Patterson is a folklorist, outsider researcher, author and artist who lives and works in west Cornwall. He is the proprietor and curator of Gwithi an Pystri – the museum of folklore and magic in the maritime town of Falmouth. He was deeply involved with the growing pagan earth mysteries movement  in the West Country from the 1980s onwards. This led to further involvements with the museum of witchcraft in Boscastle on the North Coast of Cornwall and initiation in to two branches of the old craft tradition, one of which was the Cultus Sabbati. He was both friend and brother in the Arte to Andrew Chumbley in the last three years of his life upon this earth and was witness to the first stirrings of a great transmutation of the Cultus Sabbatti.