'Sorceror' Hew Draper's Tower of London graffiti: a black art indeed

[icymist]

The spectacular astrological engravings carved by Hew Draper into his Tower of London cell offer a glimpse into Britain's magical past

Two of the strangest and most enigmatic works of art in Britain can be found in a tower beside the river Thames. The Salt Tower is part of the Tower of London. Like other places in this vast fortress, it has been used at various times in its history as a prison. And the images carved into its walls were created, like many other graffiti in the Tower, by a prisoner making his mark before he suffered who knew what awful death.

Hew Draper was a 16th-century Bristol innkeeper who got sent to the Tower for attempted sorcery. He claimed that although he had been interested in magic, he had burnt all his magical books – but his engravings, cut into the very stone of the Salt Tower, reveal he knew plenty about the occult. For a man trying to prove he was no witch, these arcana are the equivalent of someone accused of dissidence in 1950s Russia writing passages from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on the cell wall.
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