Look at that: it\’s beautiful, yes? In fact I invite you to click on the image and enjoy it full size, then come back and read on. I\’ll wait while you soak it up and experience a little awe in the face of natural beauty!

…

So:

Such images are all around us, and unfortunately it\’s often the case that we don\’t notice, because they\’re not situated as singular things – they\’re part of a rushing continuum of sense experience. But, if they\’re divorced from that surging river, framed as frozen moments – as icebergs that are above the surface, they become something that draws you in.

Framed correctly, you can appreciate them as themselves, as a piece of art, as an extra-ordinary impression and experience, or simply a memory. And here\’s the thing – how we frame things dictates our behaviour. If we frame an event as a pleasant one, we react differently to it than if we frame it as unpleasant.

It makes sense really, because people are extremely well hard-wired to avoid discomfort, and you\’re wired that way because in some immeasurably distant time, an ancestor of yours  responded to dangerous and hostile conditions by simply not being in them if they didn\’t have to. Because of this, that ancestor prospered really quite well, lived long and reproduced probably quite a lot, which ultimately culminated in you reading this.

And next time you start to want to avoid do something, instead of getting annoyed or frustrated with yourself, simply take a moment to thank your ancestor for that reflex because without it? You probably wouldn\’t be alive to enjoy the  lovely and wonderfully enjoyable things you have planned out anyway.

Which would certainly  be, as they say, a bit of a bugger for reasons you can no doubt imagine.

There\’s an argument in the philosophy of aesthetics called the Institutional Theory of Art which can be summed up as follows:

\”A work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.\” – George Dickie, Aesthetics, An Introduction

Basically, philosophising aside, it suggests that it\’s situation and context that makes an object art – which is why objects in an art gallery are art, because people who inhabit the \’art world\’ say that it is of that world. Now, anybody with half a brain can can see the issues with this but that\’s not the point. The point is, it illustrates something intriguing about culture, authority, communication and human culture in general.

If an expert in a field declares something to be their field, it\’s generally accepted, unless other experts contest the assertion. Media pundits ride the same current – if you can get on television, or in print, you\’re elevated above normal mortals. Because you\’re Media:you partake of the role of channel of communication.

Media is the plural of medium. Think about that – the middle, the in-between.

The go-between.

Gordon\’s written a couple of interesting posts on Exorcism and Summoning Ghosts which play off this nicely. It\’s these figures that inhabit both worlds which are given a peculiar power over the human mind. Just as how people like Oprah, Glenn Beck, Martha Stewart – and for the Brits, Stephen Fry and Jeremy Clarkson – wield a strange sort of influence.

People listen to them don\’t they? They accept what they say, invite them into their brains, their homes, to speak to them from newspapers, from the tv screens and the web. You let in the ideas spoken of, the words written on the screen, and they slip into your mind and quietly, furiously, replicate.

Everyone does it. You\’re doing it now, and as you\’re reading, words are intermingling with your subconscious, linking with autonomic processes. Because that\’s what language actually does; bridging the gap between two worlds, it utilises shared structures and rapidly, speedily, it bypasses concious perception and definition and uses the vast ocean of experience to keep us on the same page.

The fascinating thing is, it does this almost instantaneously.

The pundits and the Media? They communicate with you, shape the happenings of a global world beyond your office and your living room into something you can comprehend. They\’re in the middle, and so they speak a language you can understand, a closer tongue to your own. Now, Gordon\’s done precisely that with his post on Summoning Ghosts The Old Fashioned Way. He\’s given you modern analogues for ancient processes, and he\’s done it in such a way that you look at it and see which subconscious ideas each portion of the rite plays off.

This then, is at the heart of the movement that eventually became known as Chaos Magic. Results-based work stripped right down to basic principles and then rebuilt in a way that is relevant and potent for the here and now. What\’s more, I\’m pretty damn sure Gordon knows exactly what I mean when I talk about regarding media and influence, being as he\’s not…unacquainted with that sphere.

A disclaimer here: I\’ve never actually met Gordon, this is just from reading Runesoup so I may be way off.  (That said guv, if I\’m ever down south and in the Smoke, and if you\’re of a mind to, wouldn\’t mind a natter and a drink…or six!).

Whether I\’m casting aspersions on our favourite Antipodean Magus or not, it\’s obvious that the role of Messenger/Pundit still has potency. And as folks who are interested in the deep roots of these sort of things, it\’s fairly certain that the mediator, the hedge-sitter, the in-between, liminal role has always had resonance.

Mercury and Hermes, Woden or Odin, Enoch and Raven.

All these are speakers, communicators, middle-men. The medium and the message. Some argue that the art and the artist are inseparable, and that makes sense doesn\’t it? To become a living embodiment of that, to be able to shift your shape, to alter your methodology or jargon as the need arises to develop near-perfect communication?

We can often read words by outline and shape alone, and at the risk of getting repetitive, I\’m going to connect this to another of Gordon\’s posts – his love letter to Pete Carroll, A Definitive Review of the Octavo, and once more we\’ll reach into the arena of Chaos Magic Theory.

And before I do that, I\’d like to recount a little tale that arose out of a discussion with a fellow known internationally for his wizardly ways – some folks may recall him being mentioned in an article of Pete\’s, for example. It\’s a short story, and it\’s designed to go straight past your conscious mind and into the fertile soil, so with an apology for sneakily lodging things firmly in your deep mind, I\’ll begin…

Once upon a time, when the world was a little quieter, when the cold was crisper in the winter and the summers smelt of warm grass, there was a Master Carpenter. Now this Master Carpenter lived in a small village at the edge of an ancient wildwood, and though he was far from civilisation, word of his craftsmanship had spread far and wide, even to the biggest cities.

So much so in fact, that wealthy merchants would send send messengers on fast horses out into the wilds where the Master Carpenter lived. But those messengers would soon be forced to dismount and walk their mounts along the almost non-existent trails, lest they fall and break an ankle and then die there as food for the wolves that still roamed the lands in those days.

And as ever, when they finally arrived, travel-stained and weary as they were, the Master Carpenter would welcome them to his home. He would stable their horses with his own calloused hands, and pour them a drink from his own still. Invariably, the messengers were terribly confused, for all knew that the Master Carpenter\’s work fetched only the highest prices, and yet he dwelt in a small homely house with no sign of the vast riches he must surely have amassed.

They always became even more perplexed when his wife arrived from the kitchen to kiss him lovingly on the cheek and ask them of their home city and the wider world. And  what, I hear you ask, was the source of their perplexity? Why, it was simply this:

The face of the Master Carpenter\’s wife matched exactly that of a beautiful princess, a princess of whom it had been said that she was the most beautiful woman in all the land. Larger still was their surprise when dinner was served and they found the exquisitely carven table marked with the royal coat of arms and the table linen bearing the royal seal.

By the end of the dinner, curiosity always won out over politeness, and the resemblance was remarked upon. Always, she would smile graciously while the Master Carpenter watched in amusement. And always, the answer was given that it was not merely  a resemblance, but that in fact she was truly Princess Sophia, daughter to he who held the Oaken Throne.

Curiosity still raging with unspoken questions, silence would then reign. It would reign until Sophia would refill their cups and quietly tell of the day that the King had set forth to find a master craftsman to make the mark of his rule upon that very same throne. For, as all know, the Oaken Throne was immeasurably ancient, hacked from the body of the First Tree in elder days. And all know that each monarch makes his mark upon that timeless wood – generations of kings have turned that black-faced seat into a creation of purest art, layer upon layer.

\”And a Master did my father find,\” Sophia would always say, with a fond smile towards her husband. For his part, he would shrug modestly, eyes twinkling as she told the tale.

In her honeyed voice she wove their first meeting. She recalled her father\’s impatience with the Carpenter who seemed so reluctant to leave his paltry village despite the promise of royal patronage and wealth. She set air to throng with memory of quiet nights with a man so unlike others in the royal court, a man who had never left his home in all his life, or so the locals said.

And so it was that the messengers would learn of her persuasion, which brought her husband to work upon the Oaken Throne in the shining city of her birth. Of how he worked upon that wood, alone and at night in the fabulous hall of the king, whistling a simple tune – the kind children make at play.

Blushing slightly, the lovely princess would confess to watching him work, veiled from his sight by rich tapestries full of scenes of battle and heroism. It was then, she would explain, that she knew she  loved him. For from her hiding place she could see that he glowed brighter than gold in the night as he worked.

\”Complete and whole,\” she\’d say, \”Like a river running or the moon gleaming, full to the brim and flowing over with it, so that it made the room even greater, the sight of everything truer and clear.\”

Then she would tell them of his return home, and her eventual nocturnal flight from the palace to join him. She spoke fiercely of her resistance to the idea of return, and of how the very wildwood seemed to devour the men her father had sent to bring her back, and how the very Oaken Throne had burned beneath her father until he had consented to do as she wished.

Oftentimes at this point, the messengers would be watching the Master Carpenter warily, lest he curse them with foul sorcery or burn their buttocks as in the tale.

And always the Master Carpenter would chide his wife for scaring the visitors, and explain that he meant no harm to no thing, living or dead, or wood or stone.

\”Be that as it may husband mine,\” Sophia would say \”Harm comes to those who mean you ill, whether by your hand or by what lies in their hearts. It matters not which.\”

Once again, silence would reign, until the bravest of the messengers would ask the Master Carpenter how he came by his skill, and who had been his teacher.

At this he would smile, and it was the kind of smile you would find \’pon the lips of a mischievous boy who has been caught, and is in no way sorry for the trick he has played.

\”When I was a boy,\” he would say to them, \”I was as clumsy as an ox and my fingers stumbled over the wood and stained it with blood, for the tools were always hungry. My father despaired of me ever having any skill at all, for nothing would help. Neither beatings nor kindnesses, guiding hands or simple pieces to practice on helped. It all eluded me. So I took to fleeing into the wildwood and walking amidst the green, fighting imaginary enemies and rescuing Princesses from jealous kings, that sort of thing.\”

At this, he would smile widely, full of honest mirth while his wife watched him levelly over the rim of her cup. He would spin more of his wanderings in the wood for a little while, until his listeners began shift uneasily. Then he would pause and tell of the day he met the Hooded Man, there amidst the green.

Tall he was, all cloaked in shadow and dappled sunlight; patchwork leather – some stained brightly, with other portions of more dusky hue – made up his clothes. His face was hidden, as all the stories say.

And in a voice like croaking ravens and rumbling earth he spoke to the boy in the wood:

\”Boy, I have need of sure hands and clear sight, will you aid me?\”

\”I\’m no craftsman sir,\” the tale-teller would recount. \”My father is back a-ways, perhaps he could help?\”

\”No, boy. I cannot come to those whose minds are fast as iron. Yours, I can see, may bend like a bough in the breeze, or run as quick as deer. To your father I am nothing but a demon of the wood, to be kept back with fire and fence and metal. He will carve me and cut me to fit such a form, and thus I will be naught but that.\”

The boy was thoughtful, and there at the table the Master Carpenter would grin at his guests like a cat. After a moment, he always continued:

\”But you\’re the Hooded Man, just like the stories say.\”

\”That I am boy, that I am. What do you think lies under my hood?\”

\”Don\’t know. Could be anything, couldn\’t it? Maybe that\’s the point – to keep people wondering? So they keep telling stories about you?\”

At this, the Hooded Man, Lord of all the Wildling Bands, be they Light or Dark, laughed loud and long.

\”Perhaps you\’re right boy, and perhaps I\’ll let you look so you\’ll have a story to tell about me, if you\’ll help me?\”

And agree the Master Carpenter did. For days and days he gathered fallen wood as the Hooded Man bade him, and in the noisy night of the wildwood, he wove and carved with stone and vine he found there, until at last there stood a great lintel strung between two trees as doorposts, and a patchwork of animal-hide hanging over the door-frame.

Though rickety and rude, it seemed to please the Hooded Man beyond measure; the faces the boy had carved in the wood of the lintel seemed to gape and grin with a strange life all their own, the kind of leering, sinister childishness that unnerves the righteous. All bulbous and grotesque, features knobbly and moss-spotted, they looked down upon the boy as he worked, until he finally stopped.

And when he stopped, he said quite gravely, in the fashion of small boys everywhere:

\”I think it\’s mostly done for now, sir. I could do more, but I might make it look silly, and I don\’t want to do that.\”

The Hooded Man loomed out of the shadows and prowled around the forest door, poked the hide and scratched at the wood, checking the boy\’s work. At length, the darkness beneath the hood seemed to smile somehow, and the tall figure gave a slow nod.

\”It\’ll do boy. It\’ll do.\”

\”Sir, what is it for?\”

\”Why, it\’s a door. What are doors for but opening and closing?\”

\”But sir, there\’s just the wildwood. It doesn\’t go anywhere.\”

\”Of course it does boy. It\’s a door, same as a hood\’s a hood. Doors always go somewhere, otherwise there\’d be no need for them, would there?\”

\”No sir, I suppose not.\”

\”Would you like to see what lies beyond the door you\’ve built, boy?\”

\”Well sir, if it\’s all the same to you, may I see your face? I mean I\’d like to see if there\’s anything on the other side, but you sort of, maybe, promised?\”

\”Yes, I did indeed sort of, maybe, didn\’t I?\”

And with one hand the Hooded Man pulled aside the hide that closed the forest door to reveal the lands beyond, while with the other he pulled back his hood…

Now, at this point in the tale the Master Carpenter had his audience on the edge of their seats, desperate to know what he had seen. Yet, without fail, every single time he would shrug minutely, saying only:

\”And thus I gained my skill.\”

No amount of cajoling or pressing would draw anything more from the Master Carpenter. No offers of bribes, or uttered threats would make him yield. Many were the times the messengers passed the nights sleepless and wondering, while the luckier ones dreamed strange and troubling dreams.

Always without fail, the next morning, there would be a letter of acceptance or rejection of their master\’s proposal resting on that fine table, words written in a lovely feminine hand. Their horses would be waiting for them, and the lady of the house would bid them farewell, explaining that the Master Carpenter was a-bed, as he had been working all night.

The bravest or most troubled of the messengers would sometimes pluck up the courage to ask the princess what her husband had seen. But their questions were met with gentle resistance, for she would only say this:

\”What the Master Carpenter sees is in the grain of the wood and the heart of all things. It remains with, or without him, yet you can only see it because he does as you ask.\”

And so it was that the messengers carried back tales of the Master Carpenter and his wife, back to civilisation. I heard one, and now you have heard one, and so the legend spreads. This is the way of things, is it not?

So, how does the Master Carpenter link to anything? Well, if anything can be said of the Chaos Magic philosophy, it\’s that it originated as a practical toolkit. Gordon\’s stated that his review is a love letter, and that\’s no bad thing. Because it echoes the idea that it\’s not actually a rational undertaking. Carroll\’s attempt to bring magic into the realm of science is laudable. But for me it\’s not laudable because it is pure and clean and Science! which removes us from the dark fog of ignorance.

It is at best, one man\’s attempt to make sense of the vast oddness of the universe. Mathematics is about relationships, just as language is. Communication and comprehension increase the richness of experience, and certainly I liked the Apophenion for its implicit (some might say explicit) acknowledgement that there is an human urge to make connections, even where there are none to be made.

No, Carroll\’s work is laudable because it is, at is core, the gloriously irrational labour of love which is attempting to have a world that makes sense. So the Octavo, as with much that has arisen out of the original Chaos Magic ethos over the past thirty-odd years, is a fantastic piece of contouring and shaping, albeit one born of an irrational urge.

Making sense of chaos might sound like an oxymoron, but humans have been doing it since the beginning, so Pete Carroll is in good company. If reductionism helps you, so be it. If you take comfort in the idea that everything is accurately intelligible to the human mind, I\’m not going to tell you that you are wrong.

What we perceive is defined by the method of perception. The way things appear is contingent on how we re-cognise them –  which is not a typographic error, by the way.

If you like your Chaos with probability scores, then Pete\’s weltanschauung is probably more easily inhabited. As a medium he proposes theoretical constants and shapes – takes head-bendy maths and physics and brings it into the world of the occult. For that alone he should be regarded as partaking of the magician role.

Myself, I\’m not going to try and explain what truly lies beyond the door-frame. Because in my view, it only relates to the door, and not what it is, in and of itself.

I may tell you some beautiful and terrible lies about it though!

Blatant Whorebaggery below. I\’m proud to be part of this, even if I might disagree with some of the other contributors. Because that\’s what keeps minds open. Additionally, from February I will be contributing to the ModernMythology.net blog, which I hope my readers might like to comment on and get things really going in the comments section!

______________________

For Immediate Release: London, 17th of January 2011

Weaponized is proud to announce the publication of ‘The Immanence of Myth’, an anthology arranged by James Curcio of Mythos Media. This anthology includes conversations, art and articles with those in the process of creating myth now, from up-and-comers and long-time underground myth-makers to celebrated artists such as Laurie Lipton and David Mack.

It will be published by Weaponized and available in print through major retailers and in Kindle and other eBook formats from July 2011.

About ‘The Immanence of Myth’:

Thinkers such as Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Karl Kerenyi, and many others have helped to popularize an awareness of the psychological significance of archaic myth inside, as well as outside, the ivory tower of academia. However, the vast majority of their work has been focused on understanding and legitimizing the myths of the past.

Yet myth is an immanent, ongoing dialogue, an assemblage that interconnects us all. Joseph Campbell made it a part of his life’s work to emphasize the central importance an understanding of myth plays for the artist, and it is a perspective that arguably has been lost in many corners of the modern art world. This makes this investigation essential for artists (and would-be artists), regardless of their medium.

However, myth’s central importance does not end with art. Our beliefs and ideas about the world determine how we treat the world, how we engage with it and enter into it. Far from being archaic relics of the past, myths will affect the future for all of us. Even if we are unaware of them, they will continue to affect us.

Nearly half of this five-hundred page book was written by James Curcio, a writer and art director with extensive independent media experience. Since getting involved in media production as co-founder of Evolving Media in 2000—the first in many media/arts collectives he helped organize—he has built engaging narratives, utilizing the mediums best suited to the task.

He says, “I am excited to be building a platform for the exploration of the subject of mythology in a modern light, both through the release of this book and the website modernmythology.net, and believe that Weaponized is the perfect partner to bring this to fruition. I hope that this continues to be a springboard for the much-needed discussion of the role that myth plays in all our lives, as well as the creation of new media which builds upon this knowledge.”

John Harrigan of Weaponized says “One of the key reasons FoolishPeople founded the Weaponized imprint was to ensure that important works such as ‘The Immanence of Myth’ are published and made widely available. Now more than ever the subject of Myth is of vital importance to the very nature of humanity and we’re proud to publish this book.”

We must invent our myths—or re-invent them—ourselves. If you haven’t already, take this as a wake-up call to join in and become a myth-maker of the 21st century.

About Weaponized:

Weaponized publishes experimental forms of fiction, prose and art that offer new ways to experience stories and myth. They are passionately committed to finding unique narrative hybrids that challenge, engage, inform and inspire readers.

The imprint was founded by FoolishPeople, a group that has been creating theatre, collaborative events, live art, books, music and film for over fifteen years. FoolishPeople combine mythology, shamanism, drama therapy, strategic forecasting and open source collaboration in the creation of this work.

Since its launch in August 2010 Weaponized has  published FoolishPeople scripts ‘Cirxus’ and ‘Dead Language’ by John Harrigan, ‘The Sparky Show’ by Xanadu Xero and ‘Forum’ by Richard Webb.

Amongst other titles scheduled in 2011 Weaponized will publish ‘Citizen Y’ written by John Harrigan and James Curcio in April.

Starting in February and leading up to the publication of ‘The Immanence of Myth’ in July, James Curcio’s ModernMythology.net and weaponized.net will feature writing and interviews with contributors featured in ‘The Immanence of Myth’.

www.weaponized.net

www.modernmythology.net

PRESS CONTACT

For further information please email

press@weaponized.net

Do you know something? I never had an invisible friend as a child. Not so strange perhaps, except there\’s this thing about me. I\’m fairly certain that if you have read any of my stuff, you\’ll know what that thing is so I\’m not going to say exactly what it is yet. Hell, you may even work it out as you read on, on the off-chance you don\’t already know, or this is the first time you\’ve read my words.

But, as a child, I did as most children did, and played games. I imagined things, played out stories in areas that weren\’t necessarily conducive to being a cowboy, a super intelligent android, a barbarian hero, a starship pilot or a being of phenomenal cosmic power.

(Cardboard boxes, behind the sofa, in concrete playgrounds and under the dining room table for example).

The raw power of this always amazes me now, the fact that children can manufacture and incorporate disparate pieces of environment into a coherent whole. The creativity of it is stunning – the effortless conjuring up  of alternate existences for the purposes of exploration, understanding, and above all of these, sheer unadulterated fun.

Of course, adultery, adulteration; all these words have their roots in violation, alteration and corruption. Etymologically they emerge from alter:

alter (v.)

late 14c., \”to change (something),\” from O.Fr. alterer \”change, alter,\” from M.L. alterare \”to change,\” from L. alter \”the other (of the two),\” from PIE *al- \”beyond\” + comp. suffix -ter (cf. other). Intransitive sense \”to become otherwise\” first recorded 1580s. Related: Altered; altering.

An adult world is a complete world. Adulthood is the culmination of development, the completeness, the crystalisation of a full person. This is what is subtly taught in our culture. School trains us to think in terms of \’work\’ and \’play\’. Play is something children do, permitted because you are incomplete. It\’s seen as a trial stage, a way of learning before the actual business of life begins.

We even ascribe play to juvenile animals, as practice for hunting or social interactions. It\’s a dry run, the testing phase. To play as a child is acceptable, and as we grow older, the time for play becomes smaller, eventually morphing into a \’break\’ from work; a necessary sanctioned interrupt, rather than what it was before.

It\’s interesting how things change, isn\’t it?  It\’s okay to goof off on your break, but not too much because you\’re still at work, right? Certain things are Not Safe For Work, and I\’m not just talking about porn here, am I? For some people this blog is NSFW – being spotted reading a site like this might range from the totally fine to outing one as alternative and slightly odd, or.at worst, some kind of crazy person or sinister black magician.

Exposure of one\’s nature as an alternative sort of person isn\’t always the best thing – everybody knows that. From pogroms to social snubbing and mockery, the gauntlet can be a little annoying and frankly unpleasant. Not \’taking things seriously\’ can be levelled as an insult, a criticism or worse.

Have you ever been in a situation when the word \’immature\’ has been used? I\’m sure you have, haven\’t you?

Because:

You\’re not old enough, ready or willing enough to understand what I\’m talking about.

Really.

You have yet to reach the level of understanding and advancement that I have, have you? You\’ve not gained enough experience to level up.

This is a grownup thing, only discoverable by highly spiritually aware persons…

(Even writing that made me feel dirty, that and want to laugh, by the way).

You get the idea though, don\’t you? This is the kind of thing that\’s there all the time, the glass ceiling, the pay grade barrier, the security clearance. Sometimes, there is honestly a reason for it – certain information is necessary or maybe specific training. That\’s not what we\’re referring to though.

No, what we\’re talking about and thinking about here, you and I, is the way there\’s always another hoop to jump through, some illusionary threshold held up.  Once you cross it, you\’ll be OK. You\’ll be there, you\’ll be accepted.

And to do that, to form yourself correctly, you accept certain things as true. It\’s a social reciprocity. We learn it as kids, collaborating with others if we play with them. For the duration of the game, we accept that the cardboard box is the fortressspaceshiphousegaolbedroomspaceofinfinitepossibility.

But to echo the late, great, Bill Hicks:

\”It\’s just a ride.\”

Just a game, and when it\’s over we can do something else. Except people forget, don\’t they – and they forget because they\’ve been trained to look for the next stage in some kind of progression towards…something. Something complete, something ultimate. Something ripe and ready that will answer all your problems.

And you know, that\’s how power works.

\”Stick with me kid, and you\’ll go far.\”

Mimic the cool, the successful the wealthy; strive towards some halcyon thing that allows you to entertain the reptile-brain dream of a post-scarcity existence; essentials whenever and wherever you want. Glorious unaging immortality, avoiding the nasty business of flux and struggle and eventual death.

Ah, promises, promises.

Kids know the game ends eventually, because their world is one of eternal incompleteness. That\’s fine, because they fill in the gaps with will and imagination. You were a kid once, and you know what it was like. Remember that simple decision to treat something in a particular way, just because you could?

I\’m a trained philosopher – undergraduate and postgraduate too, and I\’ve studied Aristotle, Plato, and a host of other dead people from various places and times. I\’ve even done it with some living people too.

That was fun.

Really fun, playing with the fundamentals of the universe, chopping and changing premises like some manic six-year old who\’s found the joy of playing dress-up in their elders\’ clothes.

It\’s so much fun, I do it all the time. I\’m doing it now. That\’s what this is. That\’s what I\’m about, and you\’re here with me, playing along.

Are we having fun yet, or do you want to look away, to stop reading because somewhere, there\’s an itch in your mind? And that\’s part of it, that itch.

The very concept of \’Is\’? Blame Aristotle for most of the roots of thought on Being and Is. That\’s a game too, by the way. It\’s not even neurologically accurate. If we wanted to be accurate we\’d have to say \’It seems to me.\’ every time we use \’Is.\’

What a mouthful. It\’s a pity we don\’t have a \’Find and Replace\’ mechanism for our thoughts, a Copy \’N Paste Brain. Or is it?

Austin Spare would talk about the power of \’as if\’.

Suppose you treat everything as having a goal? Wouldn\’t that mean that rambling, labyrinthine posts have a point? And that reminds me of a story.

This is how it goes:

Once upon a time, there was a King and there were some gods. These gods, being much less ineffable than the one that lurks in the back corner of the modern Western mind, liked gifts. We can all get that, right? We\’re all aware that we might be more kindly disposed to those who just plain nice to us, yes?

And just as we like gifts to be unequivocally ours, so these gods liked that too. They had certain things they liked humans to do, so that the gifts were marked as theirs. So these marks were obvious to the universe, like a nametag, or a sticky label on the tupperware box which your lunch is in while your store it in the fridge at work.

One of the gods, Poseidon, was rather nice to the King, who happened to be called Minos. In return for being rather nice, there was a great white bull which the god liked very much and put his mark on. Now, this was an extraordinarily handsome specimen of taurean flesh. Snow white it was, and shining like the seafoam; its breath was as fierce as a roaring storm and the sound of its hooves was like the crash and boom of a thousand thunderous breakers

This bull was, in short, the shiznit; it was the zenith, the veritable peak of bovine brilliance, trust me on that. Its flanks gleamed brighter than the moon. It was tasty, tasty, very very tasty, if you catch my drift? Everyone knew it, even King Minos, in fact, especially King Minos. It was the gourmet leftovers in the fridge of life, the ones that somehow smell and look delicious despite being neatly sealed and tidily labelled. Makes your stomach growl so it does, sets the mouth to water like a stream. We\’ve all been there, and it\’s all the more delicious because you can\’t have it, because it\’s just beyond your reach, isn\’t it?

Sometimes people idly entertain nicking a little bit don\’t they – the owner won\’t really notice a spoonful gone, that sort of thing. It\’s a very human thing to do. King Minos was very human, which is always nice because that means you have someone to identify with in this story, and that always helps. Plus, humans do slightly silly things when we\’re enamoured of something – and we\’ve all done that.

Now, Minos was a King, and by ancient definition, being a King meant you were a bit larger than life; you turned things up a notch or six. In fact, you might say Minos turned it all the way to eleven in the silliness stakes, because despite that bull being marked, very clearly, in big black capitals as POSEIDON\’S BULL  – DO NOT TOUCH: MORTALS THIS MEANS YOU! Minos raided the divine fridge. Not just a spoonful either.

No, Minos pilfered the entire lot for his very own self.

(Many a courtier was plagued by the sound of nonchalant whistling from the royal chamber for days after, let me tell you!)

Having brazenly stolen from a god, well, as I\’m sure you\’d understand if some uppity git had nicked your gear, King Minos\’ name was mud as far as your average divinity was concerned. So much so that Aphrodite, stunning, beautiful, vindictive, vicious Aphrodite – the lovely lady who emerged from the sea-foam, decided to give King Minos a bit of a slap for his temerity on behalf of her oceanic colleague.

So it was that goddess of love did her thing, wove her way over King Minos lady wife – who since you ask, was named Pasiphae. For if Minos so desperately wanted god-stuff in his life, she\’d give it to him – and how! Gods you see, though they walked among men, were way beyond what most mortals could handle. They sort of made normal life impossible if you bumped into them. Your average mortal just went pop – mad, dead, cursed, or all of the above and worse, times ten.

Let me tell you, many\’s the folks been changed by contact with those things that lie beyond the human world. Divine attention was not necessarily what you wanted. Most kept their head down and made sure they did enough to keep the folks on Olympus pleasantly disinterested. Rare was the individual who stuck their head above the parapet, y\’know?

King Minos however? He\’d not just stuck his head above the parapet. No, he\’d dropped his trousers and hung his naked arse over it for everyone to see. Not, as I\’m sure you\’re aware, the best thing to do when there\’s an inhuman immortal who nurses a grudge looking your way, is it?

So Aphrodite, she caused Pasiphae to find the bull mighty fine, if you know what I mean? If there was anybody around then and there who could make you want a bit of bull in every way you could, and several you couldn\’t but were going to try anyway, it was Aphrodite.

But Pasiphae, she wasn\’t some empty-headed bimbo. No, she was one smart lady, albeit maddened by divinely inspired lust. She knew there were going to be some anatomical…issues. So she commissioned Daedalus – yes, that Daedalus – to make here a hollow cow she could be inside so that the whole business would be…more interesting.

And Daedalus, more of a mechanical genius than Leonardo Da Vinci plus Archimedes, multiplied by the incomparable Montgomery Scott, does so. It\’s a mighty fine cow, for a mighty fine bull, and the inevitable soft focus and seventies soundtrack occurs. In due time, there\’s a child, a sprog, some bullspawn.

These days he\’s mostly known as the Minotaur, but his name is Asterion and his mother loved him very much, despite the head and the tail of the bull poking from his little bastard rump. Now you may think a bit of adultery is a mild punishment for thieving Minos, but there\’s more.

The divine violence wrought on Minos continues, for ickle baby Asterion not only provides a reminder of his wife\’s infidelity and rampant zoophilia, the  little star – for Asterion means \’starry\’- possesses some distinctly inhuman appetites. Asterion you see, grew not by normal human methods of nourishment. Mother\’s milk did not sustain him, no. He grew and grew and grew, becoming huge and terrible and hungry for human flesh.

Such a thing was really rather unpleasant for Minos, as the hungry beast seemed never to be sated, and if there\’s something worse than a bull in a china shop, it\’s a monstrous hybrid spawned by divine ire and lust. So Minos, thoroughly sick of his impossible stepson and his violation of human order, called on the supergenius Daedalus, who built a prison for Asterion in the form of a maze – the Labyrinth.

(You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. They have nothing to do with David Bowie or his sock. Or maybe they do…)

Asterion is killed by Theseus after Minos\’ daughter helps him through the Labyrinth, but that is another tale, to be sure, one which precedes the flight of Icarus. The events continue on, there is never really and end to storytime. It is endless and shifting, nested, layer upon layer, spooled like a ball of twine given to Theseus by Ariadne.

So lets play in storytime.

Imagine yourself in the Labyrinth; at the centre sits the Minotaur Asterion. In the night of the looping tunnels, the enclosed, claustrophobic spaces, air stirs. The echo of his father\’s breath roars past your cheek, warm and stifling.

> N

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> what is a grue?

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

Is the  Minotaur a grue? A monstrous star in the dark? Why put such a bright thing in the mazelike place? Are you fearful or are you an adventurer? What secrets might Asterion hold, his feasting never finished, his hunger never sated, where might the endless tunnels lead?

The Labyrinth holds endless potential in its darkness, just as the blank page or badge conceal possibilities. If the senses are deprived of things to grasp, what then? A half-seen, twilight world, phantasmal and yet absolutely real and totally immersive when experienced. Such is the stuff of dreams, of hopes, of aspirations and of nightmares.

Incomplete and in total flux, Heraclitan in the extreme.

For those of you who have read The Invisibles, there is a reason I go by VI. The elegant turncoat.

\”I just met the Secret Chiefs of the Invisible Order. They’re as alien as the space between your bloody fingers and I mean that.\”

The space between, the potential multiplicity. What happens if we introduce many gods instead of one, just as an idea, just as play, just as a method of exploration. Play with serious things, like Love and Justice and Honour and Integrity. Especially morality. What if we could imagine that all the gods that were, in a vast company, at a party?

Allah and YHVH discussing literary criticism with Vishnu. Dionysus and Tammuz chewing cornstalks and getting drunk on homebrewed beer? What if, after thousands of years, the Devil picks himself up from his prat-Fall and twirls his Chaplin umbrella? Or Jesus and Astarte nip off into a corner for a spot of tantric sex?

If you don\’t exist, then what\’s wrong with dying? If nothing is what it seems then a thing can be anything and everything. The flesh and blood of man can embody the entire universe, after all – the incomparable vastness of the All present within the space of a hands-span.

Aristotle gets drunk, and IS shifts into SEEMS TO BE. It\’s all bleary and smeared and I LOVE YOU MAN.

Let us experiment rigorously, ruthlessly, for SCIENCE! Let us experience completely and furiously, caught up in the awe and terror of Aphrodite, the rage of the roaring sea  – the hieros gamos – carnal and full of lust.

Experi! Experi! To Try, to Play!

The same word root, the root of being human. And that\’s not human is, it\’s human-seems-to-me! Come dance in the Harlequinade – turn your coat inside out and stand on your head.

\”The Invisibles is an immune program: triggered by the Barbelith buoy when the game crashed and embedded the player.\”

Do you know something? I never had an invisible friend as a child.

Would you like to come and play with us? We\’ll back in time for tea.

Be seeing you.

It\’s been getting a bit nippy up North, I\’ll tell you. Though it must be said, the way this country shuts down after a bit of the white stuff is nothing short of ridiculous. Still, each to their own. It\’s been a busy few months in the life of Mr. VI – and mine too; this is as close as you will get to a third person reference in this entry, and I suspect you may be grateful. Equally, the gap, the hiatus, the disruption to service, has borne strange fruit.

So that\’s all right then, because quite frankly said fruit is rather intoxicating when you have allowed it to reduce to an inspiring liquor. October brought its tide of strangeness and autumnal in-betweeness; November brings a cold beauty and warm hearth to the fore, and I am doubly sure that December will continue to bring winter and Yule fortune.

The photograph above is Furness Abbey. It\’s a place I\’ve only been to once or twice, but on each occasion I was fascinated.  As you might imagine, ruins are deeply, strangely illuminating things which may shed much light on the subtly hidden processes of the mind and soul.

Imagine wandering through that place in the snow; footfalls and other sounds muffled by crisply packed powder that crunches and gives beneath movements that slowly lead you through the gaps and archways. Fallen walls and red stone are now open to a winter\’s sky, everything rounded off . Even the echoes of generations of voices raised in song and prayer are naught but indistinct whispers in your ears.

Just shy of nine centuries – that\’s how long this place has held a grip on the mind of man. Four hundred years of faith and devotion, and the same again as ruin. Half its life as a broken, destroyed thing, and still it stands; still it brings pilgrims to drink from the well of its existence. Still they come, drawn by its weight, to walk its halls and cloisters.

And with each passing year, still it conjures. In its presence, the stone possesses a power, a power which reaches out across the centuries. Human ingenuity suffused with inspiration, from an urge to mimic and create awe and glory; a massive undertaking to speak of the service of divinity.

For some, that divinity reaches out as a sense of holiness, and that is a wonderful thing because holiness presents a wholeness which you may use as a reference point – a greater pattern perhaps, or simply the notion of smooth-running nigh endless complexity; an emergent biosphere which has developed its viability ins spite of, and also due to, circumstance.

For others, the very fact that these ruins might be conceived by some kind of sapient intelligence echoes the notion that divinity is a property of both sapience and sentience. Either that fusion creates the notion of divinity, or it is suffused with it –  mankind as microcosmic avatar of the macrocosm; children of the very gods themselves.

Genius itself was originally conceptualized as a tutelary daimon. Inspiration, the act of breathing, is synonymous with the pneuma of the philosophers, the önd of the Norse, the ruach of the Hebrews. How many times have we truly uttered the phrase \’it took my breath away\’ and meant it?

How many times have those words been spoke to evoke the sense of awe and majesty experienced; a moment in time that disrupts the normal rhythm of the perception and existence in our lives, replacing it with a sense of something extra-ordinary?

Boreas runs, the Greek god of the North wind, and as he runs he brings winter and its storms, even to these islands. Islands which are one of the physical gates to the terra incognita of Hyperborea and, by implacably cold esoteric logic to COLD ALBION itself. Beyond the North Wind lies a place of dreamed maybes, once-and-future things; woodsy breath and ancient stones now ruined and serving as mysterious doors in every sense.

Gordon wrote an extremely interesting post a while back that introduces the Maori terms Turangawaewae and Whakapapa. For me, the ancestry that links me to these islands is a thing that goes beyond heredity, genetics and physicality. When all things are possessed of the potential to reach backward  through time, all things  are linked and held in the complexity of wyrd, and the gods themselves meet in counsel around the well of Urðr according to the Eddas.

This deep well nourishes the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree – axis mundi of the Heathen cosmology – and in a mythopoetic worldview where humans have their origins in trees gifted with  divine breath, one can easily see the  idea that it is this wellspring that nourishes a person. Add to this the notion that the World Tree is indeed a tall, one may even say the tallest tree since it supports all of the nine worlds, and suddenly these strange sounding words in a tongue that is alien to many become a little more familiar, don\’t they?

It\’s from this genealogy, this mythic source buried deep within the very fabric of conciousness and landscape itself, that we find the roots of ourselves, the genius of history – not as an old man, but as an eternally blooming maiden. She is not static, this Norn, this giant-maiden. No, her essence is just that; not merely Past and  gone, left behind on the road to wither and become a crone, but instead ever moving and vital!

As events and circumstances shift, she embraces and encompasses them, weaves them into the fabric with her sisters – the skein of life  shimmers in gleaming flux. And ruins are past things, are they not? By definition, they are incomplete, they have collapsed and become something other than their simple physicality.

They are, in a sense, pieces of negative architecture, an absent space which may be filled and reconfigured by that very same spring, becoming shaped by it and marked by its strange tide-marks and sediments; in that place, the imaginal is summoned and evoked. Unbound from a single purpose, they become gateways to the manifold othernesses, which make up the possibilities and permutations of the secret landscape; markers of hovering on the threshold, where the vast world inside the skull meets the hugeness of the outside…

And I haven\’t given you any crunchy blog posts in a while, have a slightly odd story I wrote. Hope you enjoy!

\”THE ISLE\”

But you, they say, were on Sams Isle,

And drummed for the wights with the Völvas,

Like a wizard (vitki) through the world you passed,

which I thought was an unmanly (ergi) thing to do.

(Lokasenna: 24)

He comes to a place where the roads meet; there in the dead of night, he raises his gaze to the gallows and sees its heavy corpse-fruit swaying in the breeze. The dark is full of strange cries and weird rustling noises; shrieks from creatures not seen abroad by the light of day fill the air; his skin crawls and he pulls the knife from his pocket, slicing open his thumb along the old scar.

It burns like fire for a moment, the edges of the flesh gaping wide and empty for a frozen instant and then the wetness pulses and drips; warmth swiftly stolen by the wind as he marks the design out on his forehead; a spindled wheel with forks and bars which forms the stave-sign – an ægishjálmr – the helm of awe.

Nine breaths later, he feels his face shifting upon the planes of his skull; something old and terrible emerging once again from his features as he steps up and hugs the legs of the hanged man tight to his body. The sharp stench of excrement rises from the dead man\’s breeches, mixed with the faint odour of spent seed, sticky and cold now that the final spew is done and the head lolls upon a broken neck.

Ignoring the urge to retch, his bloody hand now seeks the prize; finds it flaccid and shrivelled and so anoints it; paints it scarlet there in the dark and soiled places of death, strokes it like a lover – crooning, croaking runes like a lullaby.

A groan escapes the dead man\’s mouth – lips all spittle-flecked and slack around a swollen tongue in a bloated, blackened face. A groan like an old oak creaking in a storm, like the timbers of a ship as she strains against roaring waves and jagged rock; a groan of doom and horrified release.

The prize now hard as iron in his palm, all blood-slick and leaping as a wild horse beneath his fingers; he grips tight and feels sightless eyes upon his face as he works, the grave-gaze chill and inhuman.

“More.” A sepulchral pleading, a doom-laden entreaty. “Give me more…bitch.”

The last word is bitten off in a snarl, a savage jerk of the wrist wrenching at manhood\’s root, sending the memory of pain down into the depths to reach this dead thing.

“Please, I beg you. I was not always as you see me, all full of foul wind and rot. Once I was mighty and beautiful, and all the women wished my seed within their furrow. They howled when I took them, she-wolves and hell-cats all.” A death-rattle of laughter then, “If they would not throw open their gates at fine words then I would break them with fist and fury, \’til I could wash myself in their tears.”

“But the dead shed no tears now, for we are far too cold and our souls are all crusted with sea-rime; the rivers are poison and so we may not bathe. Our stench follows us like a cloak, we who are barred even from the halls of Hel, cast out beyond her yard across the plains of misty darkness and writhing serpents. Have you no pity for us – you with your hand so warm and breath so sweet?”

“No pity for me, who was once a man amongst men, who fought and fucked and fed like any other? I who raised my voice in battle-song and sought victory harder than any, I who sired sons and daughters all over the kingdom. I who honoured the gods and gave them the finest things?”

And though the red hand does not cease its work upon the corpse\’s prick, the reply comes like a song of steel voiced with the roar of thunder:

“No pity.”

Cunning fills the corpse-voice then, like oil on water, or the whispering of doubt:

“You have the look of him, grim and severe – like a son to his father. I\’ll be betting you\’ve had your way with better furrows than the grave, just like him. Cut me down; let me stand and we\’ll range across the worlds, living and dead, all full of fury. He\’d like that, no?”

Silence is the only answer, broken by the wet slap of hand on flesh, moving with inexorable rhythmic purpose.

“Or maybe,” this last in a tone of echoing desperation. “Maybe I\’ll tell a tale they sing, out in the wilds where the wind blows raw and the sky goes on forever; where the world is roofed with the skull of a giant?”

“Maybe…”

**

This is the tale they tell of the Old One, amongst the quiet ones and the shrivelled and amongst the shriekers too. This is the tale of how Jalk – the Gelding – came to the womenfolk and danced and sang, how he drummed and called; how the Allfather opened himself as mother opens herself to her child.

For this is one of many ways he learned the secrets of the volvas and the spaewives; how the wisdom taught by the lady of Fólkvangr in distant past set him to wax and grow in endless understanding; how that hidden god, every greedy for the Mysteries, learned women\’s ways and wiles.

Thus did Waytamer come to that isle in the North, and first he walked in the guise of mortal flesh and did learn many things from the men of that place. Gifts of war-wisdom he gave in return, woke the thunder in the blood and fettered many a warrior there – freezing their hearts and setting the fury to rise so that they ran as wolf and bear.

A kingly few he marked, mixing blood with god-breath and words born in the cries of eagles and the croakings of the blackest birds – for is it not told by the skalds that there are lords arising from the very loins of the god himself?

Yet those are tales for another time, for the graves of Angatyr and his brothers did not yet lie upon the isle and the berserkers\’ deeds were as yet unspoken. Still, even in those distant times the isle was known by all as a hallowed place, full of mighty wights and ancient powers.

So came Jalk across the sea and over land, to sit and spy out the places where men shiver and move hurriedly on. Long he waited in wind and cold, and many were the runes he carved; strange were the words he hurled from his lips into the air like spears. Many were the days he shook, and more still were those in which he was still as stone, until word came to him of a path that led to a secret place.

Along that path he walked, until he came to a high place in the wilderness, and there he waited for night to fall. So it was, as he was biding his time, that he began to see movement below, there in the dusk. Flame and torch sprang up, marking out an enclosure and the wind carried the sound of women\’s voices to his ears. Carefully, silently, he moved closer, the encroaching night gathered about him like a cloak, to rest all hidden just beyond the reaches of the light.

Now let me tell you, sweet one, of that which Jalk saw with his eye on Sams\’s Isle. Let me tell you of the gathering there; of the wise women that stood proud and unfettered by the fire with their hair unbound, all clothed in brightness – gleaming with amber and fine work – full of power and deep knowledge.

For you have heard and seen tales of seeresses, oh red hand. You have heard of their staff kept close by them and the songs that are sung to call the attention of the wights and sweetly slide free of flesh.

But I ask you, have you seen as Jalk saw? Have you see them pass the rod from hand to hand, raise it to their lips and kiss it, or heard them call their ancient mothers and unborn children to the rite to witness? Have you heard them call out to the earth, to the great and terrible women with the might and power of the greatest of giants?

All this he saw, that and more; unveiled he saw them, gentle one moment, fierce the next. Clothed and naked, young and old, all adored the secret centre. Coarse and refined, lust and chastity both; unleashed – unfettered and free.

There in the dark he watched as they opened themselves to the world, holy and unafraid as it poured into and through them – watched the awe-inspiring embrace of womankind as it enfolded all things without fear or judgement. There he saw them, laughing with troll-wives and giantesses; each volva as mighty as those who the very gods themselves took as wives!

For have you not heard the doom of the worlds, spear-stroker? How One-Eye went to the mound and called upon Her and she spoke of ancient days and those yet to come? She spoke of the giants who gave Her bread before the world was made, and of those mighty giant-maids come from Jotunheim before the gods made men and dwarves.

All these things Jalk knew, had heard from Her in days before men; all this he knew and he saw yet more there. Great wights came up from the earth to feast and put on form; to whisper words and discharge ancient obligations.

Fine were the shapes there in the light, well-wrought was even the oldest hag – years worn like jewels, sunken dugs and sagging flesh gleaming with sacred power. Things monstrous to menfolk walked there, wearing the faces of daughter, wife and mother. Great was the wailing and the air was thick with power all unchained.

Such was the way of things when silence fell and all eyes turned to where Jalk hid – golden gazes and lambent eyes piercing the dark. Fixed there as surely as if a spear had pierced him, so the watcher looked boldly back, meeting each in turn with brazen frankness, though his breath was held.

Many are the names and many the ways of the speargod; he brings death at a word and victory to those he chooses. Yet even he paused there, when all had the ancient blood awoken in their veins, each a terrible fury, as fierce an enemy as a horde of giants.

Until at last, a voice spoke from that great throng:

“No man can come here tonight. All know this, and yet you come. Did you think to feast on us with your eye, to steal our beauty and lock it away in the treasure-chest of memory, to stroke your spear on cold winter nights? Or perhaps you thought to rape, to rut, to plant your seed, to seize and take by force the one that caught your fancy?”

Now had it been I, my sweet guest, this would be true – for rutting was my greatest joy. But even I should have died there screaming, ripped asunder by vengeful hands and butchered like a beast. As it is, I hang here for the same reason. But I am not Jalk.

Nay, not he; for he shook his head and stepped forward, saying: “No, great Lady. My lust is for other things, great though it is. I am no man, for my name is Jalk.”

“Gelding is it?” the voice was arch as he moved slowly onward, until he was surrounded on all sides by witches. “Queer then, are you? If you prefer the company of men, you are in the wrong place entirely!”

Can you imagine, can you hear the laughter of witches all around you, unfettered by law or propriety? It echoed off the landscape like a storm, and many were the hands that reached to grab and test him, but Jalk smiled and inclined his head in acknowledgement.

“Bent and crooked; these both I have been called for many years, and surely will for many hence Lady – just as I have been called treacherous and fickle, and I am sure there are many here who have borne the same!”

At this the laughter ceased abruptly, a murderous silence rising up and enveloping the world. Yet still they held back, as the Lady emerged from the throng. Her hood was furred with catskin, face obscured, and about her waist gleamed amber that seemed to burn in the firelight. It drew the eye to her hips, highlighting her movements, fluid and elegant as they were.

In her arms she cradled the staff – thick as a man\’s arm, carved and ridged and trailing bright streamers that shifted faintly in the breeze.

“Is that courage or foolishness I hear Gelding? We have little use for the latter and the former must be of the right kind. Perhaps we should test the truth of your name?”

“Neither courage nor foolishness, Lady. Merely the truth – just as my name.”

Hardly had the words left his mouth when hands began to rip and tear at his clothes. Sharp nails drew blood, voices shouted and laughed as he was roughly stripped to stand naked amidst them. Hungry eyes devoured his form on all sides – taking in the beasts and runes, the battle scars and ritual marks that told their tale upon his hide.

Naked stood he, member drooping and sac shrivelled as the Lady circled, prowling like a cat. Stock-still, waiting; thus he was as the staff struck him from all angles, testing his poise. Three times he was driven to his knees, rising each time to stand with resolute strength until she stood before him, eyes upon him within her hood.

“Are you afraid, Gelding? I have seen many a man unmanned by fear – brave warriors on the field of battle sometimes turn to craven cowards in the bedchamber. We have all seen it.”

“I would be wise to fear Lady. There are many of you and I am alone – I have seen the forbidden and the holy and know you may wish to end me for it. But I am not unmanned by fear, no.”

“Is your name a curse then?” she asked him coolly, slipping off a catskin glove and stretching out a hand to grasp him with firm fingers. “Has some wife wished you ill, some wizard struck your rod with black thunder?”

“No curse Lady, though given by men. No wizard\’s spell has stolen my manhood, nor have I abandoned the ways of my grandfathers.”

“What then?” asked she who stroked him, as you stroke my cold cock. “Why do you not leap as a stallion at my touch? Why does the sight of womanhood all unveiled not fill you with desire?”

He smiled then, all crooked and bent, flesh soft in her palm. “I am full of desire Lady, full of hunger and fury – my blood is the blood of bright blue ice and shining moon. But I am old and have no need to spread my seed, an old wolf with many cubs and grey fur.”

“Are you spent then, Gelding?” she asked him mockingly, eyes gleaming from within her hood. “Is your day done, are you an empty thing?”

“As empty as the yawning void where rime met fire, in the days before the worlds my Lady, full of naught all up to the broad brim of my hat and empty eye!” he said with gusto, exultant and amused.

“What need have we then of you? We who have a staff where you bear none.”

“No need at all.” admitted Jalk. “Save that I come in openness and without fear.”

“Why should we feed an old grey wolf who is always hungry? Why should we place the fruits of our labour in your gaping maw, so you may gobble them up, glut-lusty with knowledge?”

“No reason at all, nor need, as I have said. Simply thus:

The eagle\’s eye gleams brightest and his voice cries loudest when the wind is beneath his wings.
The horse is at his finest when he runs and and rears with smooth muscle and shining mane.
The serpent is at his wisest when he coils, ready to spring, all venom held in fang.”

“All these things have no master Gelding, and yet by your own name, you have been mastered. Your staff is crooked and cold when another\’s would be aflame. What knowing have you of these things?”

“I know much Lady, but I would always and ever know more. Before the question is asked by the spaewives, I would no more. Before their tongues twitch and breath gather, I would know more. In that knowing, and by it, I taste the truth of your words, for all those things have I been. All have known no master, and yet you speak rightly!”

Bright was the eye of the Gelding as he spoke, glinting with sharp merriment. “I have been mastered by he who is High, Just as High, and Third. I have been bound and pierced by the spear of Volsi himself. Aye, Lady, Jalk I am, and made so by Ygg the Terrible One, ridden by his fury until I knew naught else and my flesh turned as if to water!”

Now at these words, shaft-cradler, the Lady gave a great cry and all assembled began to pound the earth as a great wind sprang up and set the flames to roar. In answer came the shriek of an eagle ripped from the throat of a shape than ran like a river and howled like the wind. There, in that place began a terrible thing, there on that dark night.

For there danced the Gelding, twitching and arcing like I when the noose tightened about my neck. Unmanly were his movements, all wild and unrestrained his Art – with spit-frothed lips and rolling eyes did he thunder across that plain as if a horde of maddened horses.

One moment he fell down dead as a corpse, the next he leaped up as a ghastly thing – face black and breath foul, food for the worms as all semblance of manhood left him. A womanly thing it was, or so men would say, as he shivered and shook like a newborn babe, begging a suck from the tit of the Earth itself. There, he sweated like a maiden, crying out in agonized joy as the song of the stars pierced him like spear. There he bled moon-blood like like a lass, spilling out upon the ground, seeping into the places below, filled up with spirit seed until he drowned in that fierce jism.

The took him them, the witches and the volvas and the spaewives and the giant maids. They raised him up as the roots of Yggdrasil clamped about him. Twining about his limbs, the roots of that great tree held him as he gripped that trunk, festooned with a noose of his own bowels, bound there by tendon and sinew as he held the staff – the vast column of the pizzle of that wooden horse the axis of his very existence.

They raised him up to the heights and lowered him to the depths, and in the darkness of the hood he was seidhmadhr – the seidr-man. Charms and spells he spun and wove and wove them well, though men say such weavings be women\’s work. Bestla\’s son was he – born betwixt the thighs of a giantess, and blood breeds true – this you know, my night-worker.

From shadows he struck his enemies, and with poisoned words and subtle spells he ended great men and tugged upon the threads of wyrd, touching the lives of those not yet dreamt into existence. His fingers ran over the loom of fate, learning the ways of the Norns and seeing the growth of many a fylgia as a child slumbered snug in its mother\’s womb.

And when the night was done, when the wights had sunk and returned from whence they came; when the blue dawn hour came and his body ached and his skull felt empty; when his hide felt loose yet shrunken and the shadows rose out of the night, so Jalk remained once more no-man, with a belly full of boiling dreamstuff nourished in the darkness of his bowels, full of power and quiet might.

Upon that isle then, it is said that he learned those ways, and that ever more, upon some silent night beyond the walls of Asgard, a shivering flowing shape would shriek and sing until dawn in that godly place, with the body of the lord of that realm seeming to lie cold and dead upon its earth.

**

“Unmanly then, the lord of Valholl, or so they whisper.” groans the corpse, “Filthy work, filthy as the hand that is my whore. Filthy bitch come greedy for my seed, begging for it with your every breath, your every word. Your features flow like water, run like rivers of fire through my sodden soul.”

In the dark, the gallows creak with the rocking of a dead man\’s hips, the rustling of the leaves and the rhythm of frozen breathing. Then, abruptly, a splash of silver gulped greedily down by a shadow.

The sob that echoes forth from the corpse is already fading; the ties of inhuman lust are fraying, the summoning diminishing and bond between bloated flesh and outlaw shade now thinning to nothingness. Upon a plain of bones and writhing serpents a once-man wakens from a half-remembered dream of life to trudge endlessly through the icy wastes of Nifel.

There at the crossroads, a figure pauses to feel the singing in its cold blood with gleaming silver sheen, and then tips a broadbrimmed hat to the dead and to the living before striding silently out into the night, the sorcerer from out of the blue…

Restoring mental health does not mean simply adjusting individuals to the modern world of rapid economic growth. The world is ill, and adapting to an ill environment cannot bring real mental health. Psychiatric treatment requires environmental change and psychiatrists must participate in efforts to change the environment, but that is only half the task. The other half is to help individuals be themselves, not by helping them adapt to an ill environment, but by providing them with the strength to change it. To tranquilize them is not the Way. The explosion of bombs , the burning of napalm, the violent death of our neighbors and relatives, the pressure of time, noise, and pollution, the lonely crowds; these have all been created by the disruptive course of our economic growth. They are all sources of mental illness, and they must be ended.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist peace activist (Emphasis mine)

I\’m no psychiatrist, no counsellor, no professional trained brain-shifter. Well, that\’s not strictly true – I don\’t have qualifications ratified by some external authority, however, I have well over a decade of poking my own head under my belt and also the knowledge that I\’ve helped more than a few folks over the years.

I know this because they\’ve told me, and it always surprises me. I like that surprise, because it actually tells me that I\’m not set in my ways when it comes to talking to folks. Which is great because it means I\’m still learning, still adapting, still becoming better at what it it is that I am.

Now, I am by no means perfect; I have my flaws, and many of them are fairly obvious. I\’m still working on them though, which is the point, isn\’t it? Because if we stop, we\’re dead, to put it bluntly – everything moves, everything shifts, flows, changes, eventually decays and is recycled.

Nobody wants to be dead – at worst they just want to die, which is really an exit-strategy against pain and suffering or other pressures, be they internal or external. That\’s completely understandable. My cousin took that route, and I won\’t fault him for it; it was his choice and despite the fact that it led to a great deal of pain for his family and was, essentially, what broke me and began my descent into the depths.

I won\’t fault him, because without that, it would have been far harder to break myself. Instead I shattered and found myself in some pretty dark places, and I learned some terrible things and experienced the nadir of my life to date. Without that, and without the love and support of my friends, I\’d never be where I am now.

I wouldn\’t be able to grin at death, smile at the grim and mind-numbing and find fuel for my dreams and thoughts in almost anything. I wouldn\’t have become the peculiar person you all know and love, or at the very least are oddly fascinated by.

I have the quote at the beginning of this piece emblazoned on my brain, and as I\’have already said I\’m no psychiatrist, no counsellor, no professional trained brain-shifter – and that\’s great because I can put all my effort into the second half of that equation, the section I have emphasized:

The other half is to help individuals be themselves, not by helping them adapt to an ill environment, but by providing them with the strength to change it. To tranquilize them is not the Way.

By now, if you know me at all, you\’ll have become aware that I spend my life trying to be myself completely and that I don\’t esteem herd behaviour that much. When I catch myself at it, I grow faintly annoyed, because I should know better, and actually do more than 80% of the time.

I\’m not big on tranquillization – I dislike numbness and somnambulism and it actually makes me feel a little ill. I was talking to somebody the other day, and she knows who she is, about the numbness and lethargy. I was most impressed and gratified by the notion and demonstration of screaming for stimulants, let me tell you.

Stimulus is important and more than that, it it is vital because it is contact with the world. When I take part in a stimulating experience or conversation, the action it engenders reminds you that things can change and become something else.

It has been said that my writing has an intoxicating edge, and that that is wonderful to me, because it means that when you read it, you can become aware of things – you are stimulated and presented with options and choices that you were previously not aware of.

Yet somehow you could become aware of them, or at the very least you can recall times when you\’ve been enlivened and stimulated, can\’t you?

Times when you\’ve felt so very vital and full of possibility that it feels like you might overflow and break your boundaries, move beyond other people\’s image of yourself into something greater. We all have them, and for some they\’re distant childhood and for others it\’s just yesterday. It doesn\’t matter when it happened to you, what matters is that you know what it felt like, doesn\’t it?

Amidst that feeling, anything is possible, and that\’s the key to it all. Amidst the thrill, the intoxication, the sheer inspiration – which is echoed in the constant everyday action of breathing; the act of inhaling. You are dead if you have expired, and so long as the possibility to inspire and be inspired exists you are alive.

That\’s the thing you need to remember and consider at all times – every thing in all the worlds proceeds from that.

Because of that fundamental fact, I can quite honestly tell you that I don\’t rightly care that no external body sanctions my actions. Nobody gave me leave to start breathing, did they? You\’re supposed to keep breathing until you die, so they say.

Well I didn\’t.

I stopped. I tasted death, and I started again. This is, needless to say, not normal, is it? So I\’ve been flouting that since day one and there\’s no reason to stop now because it\’s easier or less painful. Thus, consider me a renegade when it comes to that, and that means I\’m not exactly bound by conventional forms of morality.

This is of course beneficial to me, and hence to you, because I can do certain things far more easily than those tied in knots by certain moral qualms. When I communicate with people, everything I say or do arises from the notion that the universe is ambivalent and that the world is a constructed thing -built by people and their ideas.

All it takes it to disrupt the world, the everyday business of life, is to inject something odd, something different, something extra-ordinary into the system. This is easy for me, because I make it my business to find the extra-ordinary, to hunt it down in the wilds of the mundane, to bring its secrets up from where they have lain hidden.

Literally as well as figuratively, I\’m an occultist – from Latin. occultus \”hidden, concealed, secret,\” pp. of occulere \”cover over, conceal,\” from ob \”over\” + a verb related to celare \”to hide,\” from PIE base *kel- (see cell)

So when it comes to people, everything I do is specifically designed to help you do the same, to open the cellar door and descend to find yourself. To give you the wine that intoxicates you, takes you across the threshold to the Otherland; to breathe enough breath into your lungs that you can dive into the depths of the ocean that birthed you.

All these things are metaphors, paths and ways  which can be used to find your own runa, your own Mysteries. When you find them, you will begin to change your world, because you will understand how to do so. This is what I am absolutely certain of, and that\’s because I\’ve done it, and it has enabled me to do things thought impossible.

Gordon has an interesting post entitled The Doc Brown School of Self-Improvement which you should read, about the dangers of inductive reasoning and gives an interesting method of keeping tabs on your own processes. Because I\’m a contrary sod, I\’m going to take issue with a possible interpretation of the post, rather than the post itself.

The issue isn\’t really the traps of inductive reasoning – in actuality the issue is that the past is not fixed, nor that the future is a plane of possibility. It\’s an issue of propulsion here; if one is to project into the future, a kind of physics still applies. To get to this future requires energy, requires fuel – the plutonium for your flux-capacitor which, combined with the speed of 88 mph catapults you elsewhere.

Where does this fuel come from? How exactly does future-you come back? More to the point, how do you go back and tell your past self what they need to know? You\’d have to have the fuel in the present to do it. Now, before you get us all in trouble with the counter-terrorism bods in your search for nuclear material, I\’d like to invite you to consider another option.

Suppose, just for a moment, that your future, your extrapolation, is completely unnecessary. That in fact, all that exists is you now, that you are newly emergent from the maw of chaos, and that all your past was created to give you an identity to stop your newly formed consciousness from falling apart, or so you\’ve been informed/discovered.

Both future and past are manufactured, born of the same stuff. Thought and Memory drink from the same skull – yours.

If that\’s the case, if the terminals of your awareness are not fixed, then what of the awareness itself? Might not it be plastic and far more malleable than first thought?  What would you change if anything was allowed and all was tabula rasa?

How might you become a fundamental thing, an axis mundi, the centre of the worlds?

I\’m utterly selfish and that\’s because I wish to be surrounded by people who have found themselves. I know what one man can do when he embraces his runa and focuses on becoming it in totality – what could a band of such souls do, working together – ask yourselves that!

Where to begin this, where to explain and make an entry point? That\’s always the first trial of a writer, always the first test. How do you break in the page, how do you allow it to move under your hand?

For me, it\’s often a violent thing; often something akin to war. You pick your ground, collect your tools and weapons, check your intelligence and then you go to work. I sat here staring at the blank screen and nothing came, so I stopped looking outward, and looked inward. There is always a moment of vertigo when it comes to this, a kind of sick leaning out over the ledge to see what\’s there.

There\’s always the chance that you will be confronted with nothing, always the chance that you will witness nothing but a vast yawning gulf. However, patience is a virtue in this, because as we continue the metaphor, the troops and weapons and resources available to us are often terribly good at not being seen.

(Camouflage and painted faces, blending with the landscape of the psyche. The empty warehouse-as-crowded-ninja-bar.)

Here\’s the thing though; in warfare as in writing, that\’s exactly what you want; what you\’ve trained for.

Subtle! Subtle! They become formless. Mysterious! Mysterious! They become soundless. Therefore, they are the masters of the enemy\’s fate. Sun Tzu, The Art of War Chapter VI

These resources you have exist in potentia. The minute you catalogue them all, give them form, is the minute they gain properties and can be stolen or lost. So who is the enemy in writing, and hence as far as I am concerned, in magic itself? If the enemy of every writer is the horror of the blank page, then maybe Sun Tzu would say that mastering it would bring victory?

If suddenly, one can take that horror and transmute it, can allow it to become a manifold which actually benefits the writer, then we might be on to something. Thus the landscape, the page, the environment – all these become spaces not to be conquered or captured.

Instead they are ways to victory.

One of the biggest problems of warfare as a metaphor is that these days, war contains implicit annihilation. It wasn\’t always that way – not by a long chalk. Instead, war and battle were often attitudes that had their main thrust well beyond simple aggression and grinding the other fellow to dust.

It\’s for this reason that I would like to muse on it a little.

For starters, let\’s consider one of the primary concepts here – that of the enemy itself. It\’s a lovely thing this, having its roots in not-friend, and what I find intriguing is that for most considerations, there must be an enemy for warfare to occur. Hold it in your minds a second, yes; war with no enemy.

Sounds ridiculous doesn\’t it? How can there be war if there\’s nothing to fight against? Surely then, it\’s not warfare, just violent chaos. This is what we\’ve been quietly programmed to believe, and its taken as a heavy duty fundamental. As usual, I\’m going to offer up a heresy:

Victory itself is war without an enemy, without a resistant force.

Sigðir -Victory giver
Sigföðr – Father of Victory, War Father
Siggautr -Victory Geat
Sigrhofundr – Victory Author
Sigmundr – Victory protection
Sigrúnnr – Victory Tree
Sigtryggr – Sure of victory (Victory-true)
Sigtýr – God of Victory, War God
Sigþrór – Successful in victory, Thriving in victory

Sieg \”victory,\” from O.H.G. sigu, from P.Gmc. *sigiz- \”victory\” (cf. M.Du. seghe, O.N. sigr, O.E. sige), from PIE base *segh- \”to have, to hold\” (cf. Skt. saha- \”victory,\” sahate \”overcomes, masters;\” Gk. ekhein \”to hold\”)

Above you see nine heiti, bynames and titles of the Norse god Óðin – nine of over two hundred recorded in various sources. Two hundred names describing the deeds and things the god is known for. What a busy sod that awful old man is, no? That\’s just the Norse – what of the names of Godan of the Lombards, Woden of the Anglo-Saxons and countless others?

Now, before you dismiss this as simple Heathen frothing (which in a way it is, for it has at its roots furious inspiration) I\’d invite you to consider something:

On the host his spear | did Othin hurl,
Then in the world | did war first come;
The wall that girdled | the gods was broken,
And the field by the warlike | Wanes was trodden.

The notion of a spear being hurled over the enemy is one of dedication and sacrifice – the battle belongs to the god. As a complex deity, its often noted that the Old Man can appear as one treacherous fellow, abandoning heroes and eeling out of oaths as he chooses. In the technical sense, he is ambivalent, this lord and battle and fury. It doesn\’t matter which side wins – the war is his, offered up.

Somehow, Old One Eye can\’t lose. Everything that he does can be turned into a winning proposition. Enemy and friend are equally holy – the fury is what matters, what is divine. No matter where it comes from, he\’s the master at using it. I\’ve often pondered Ragnarok and his fate in the myths – devoured by Fenrir, who is then torn open by Vidar the Silent.

What kind of dodgy geezer doesn\’t have an exit strategy, eh?

That is of course, neither here nor there. What I find interesting is the notion that enemy and friend are rendered meaningless, that victory occurs irrespective of combatants.

If magic exists, then it alters and attacks so-called \’reality\’ – that\’s the enemy and battlefield rolled into one kids. But if victory is war without an enemy then what about reality?  If there\’s no enemy, nothing to push against, nothing to fight, what do you do?

The answer is horribly simple. Become an originator of victory. Whatever happens, whichever side loses, you are always victorious. This goes way beyond the simple working of \’angles\’ and moves into territory that some might find horrific, and that\’s not hyperbole.

Let me show you:

Pain and weariness as you stand with the butt of the spear planted in the mud; its the only thing keeping you upright You can feel the muscles moving under your skin, rippling in strange and spastic ways; a spasm hits like a hammer blow and the sinews clench in a burning iron fist. You choke back the roar as the pain floods your system, as it comes again and again and you\’re shivering in the freezing fire that\’s crawling through your flesh.

Smoke on the wind and the metal stench of blood and mortal terror; your lips draw back in a rictus grin and your eyes close, black then erupting into a phantasmagoria of fractal shapes and screaming beasts pushing their way out of your hide as you see men reaped like crops at harvest time.

All of them are screaming for their mothers, groaning from torn throats, howling with ruptured bellies, thrashing in the bloodsweat with wild eyes, bones glistening through broken flesh, jagged edges grinding like teeth.

Last one standing, that\’s you; amidst the ruined bodies of mortality, the temples of flesh now bust open to spill ruby scarlet rivers of precious life. You burn in the cold as the black birds call, feasting amidst the carnage; here an eye gulped; there a nose ripped, lips torn by cruel beaks.

There are no friends here, no enemies, and the field is full of blood; all is smoke and iron, fierce and darkly bright as another crescendo of pain rises. You do not flinch, and the grin widens, your jaw cracks with the effort of it; your tendons like creaking steel, your bones weary yet hard as diamond as you voyage ever deeper through seas of agony.

And still they cry, and your eye is dry and sockets hollowed out cups brimming with vision that threatens to spill out over all things, a tide of spume and surf and bitter wisdom. You have no shape, all is running as river, as knifing like breeze and the spear slides easily through all things, as it slid so easily through your flesh as the bindings burn and you scream out the silent speech of the void before and between the worlds.

Death is a beautiful blossom, exotic in its form and function. Inhale such a scent and know it as rich perfume – there is glory in this. The victory is everywhere; and from the field, born of shadows, emerging through the passageway of pain and death, passing along the fibres of your bondage, come your brothers and sisters.

An army full of gleaming weapons and dark of face, of scar-shaped wyrd and rune-blood bright, they come to stand with grim purpose, and one has the strength of all. On the wind they march with pounding drum and skirling horn, with shrieking joy.

Until there is only ever laughter – always.

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, \”These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.\”

They said to him, \”Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?\”

Jesus said to them, \”When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.\” –Gospel of Thomas

Let me tell you a tale as it was told to me by an Initiated Man; as it it passed from his lips to my ears and beyond, into the very Foundation of my being.

Let me tell you a tale, by wyrd words and Art; a tale that is true when the rain falls and the thunder rolls, when the lightning flashes and the night is dark; when the sun is but a hope in the winter\’s cold, a dream of warmth, and the cool of the evening is a balm from the blazing pitiless sun!

Let me tell you a tale dear friend, as you read my words and hear them spoken by the voice within, shape traced by eyes now long used to the task – for you know how easily you read all the letters placed before you, don\’t you? You know how reflexive that has become, and hence how you draw near to listen even now, as I am about to begin.

How well you recognize the storyteller\’s flourishes! How excellently you can perceive the hooks in the preamble, watching as they sink into place, flowing like a river as it enlivens a dry stream-bed. Drink deep therefore, and if you would, allow yourself to see, to feel and to experience all that is to come – listen good and well…

For he waited there, in that room alone, until they came for him. Dimly, faintly, he heard them moving in the temple; preparing with word and voice, with barbarous names whose syllables slid across his awareness like raindrops on glass. He sat alone and prepared, stilled his mind and opened his heart; he matched his breath with the beat of his heart as sand moved through the glass, a dry rustle of the desert there inside that place.

When they came, when the door opened and they asked if he was ready, he spoke:

\”I am.\”

So by those words he gave them license, commended himself to the hands of those who would work upon him on that night. First to depart was his vision; a blindfold made him sightless as he was led through the corridor. The temple door was opened, and he was announced. Where before there had been only darkness, now light lay just beyond his vision; flickering firelight and the thick, warm, scent of frankincense hung in the air, flavoured with further fragrances that were unknown to him.

They were others there, as he was drawn into the rite – a voice spoke of Earth; a crushing weight placed upon his head, the inexorable nature of that element brought forth; flesh yields to Earth in the end after all – it provides us our final home, our base and ground. So it was that Earth was laid upon him and he was bound with rope, the hands of man forcibly stilled by fibre and weave.

On then, to the spirits of Air; all-present and all-penetrative comes the whispered word, the touch of blade marks the way on skin as the sharpness cuts away the gross matter. He flinches at the cold kiss though he has steeled himself for such an ordeal; the sound of his breathing harsh, the bite of the bindings about his wrists a constant presence as Air passes through him in sharp purity, like the wind through the hollows of his bones.

On then to Fire as dim candle-flicker marks the path; a shrieking voice assails him in an alien tongue and the sting of agony announces his arrival. Scourged and assaulted again and again, until the skin of him is burning and that shrill shrieking sears his nerves as the blows seem to come from all directions. Fire is hungry and pain blossoms in scarlet flame, alternately soothed with scented oils of heated places; soft hands touch skin and wield the way of pain against him, until at last it passes.

At the sudden urging of Silence where before stood Rage and Passion, so passes he into the cool of the Deep Waters. Here his wounds are bathed and sweet refreshment is raised to the lips of the blind and bound figure. Sweet it is, this water, this mead of inspiration, these slow dark rivers made from the blood of gods. Calmness descends then, the calmness brought by the awareness of the vastness arrayed all about him; a single drop in the great watery Abyss.

Cleansed then, he returns to Earth to find the ground of all Being, to emerge and stand naked upon that distant shore which lies beneath all things. He moves with it beneath his feet, strengthening his every movement; he moves to stand amidst the roaring storms of intellect and thought as they batter his essence with their crushing fury.

Yet still he endures, and endures as he passes beyond into the burning heart of flame, and as the pain comes, as the agony hungrily plays across his nerves, he answers it with a hunger of his own. Greedy, he burns with it, draws the flame within, ignites himself, burns joyously on the pyre – a laughing conflagration descending from the Aether to plunge into the Beyond.

Amidst that nightblack place he swims, its crushing depths and pressures reconfiguring his shape and form, until the salt water in his blood matches that great and awful sea. Strange company he keeps there in the sightless gulfs, antediluvian creatures well at home beyond the realm of concious awareness.

Swims down deeper then, until the pressure compresses, until all that remains is diamond hard and shining with the light of a sun that dwells at the centre of the Earth. Thrice then has he walked the path, thrice judged, thrice refined; thrice and finally triumphant, he gains the right of vision.

Blindness disappears in and instant, the temple gleams and those present encircle him. They make the signs and ways of LVX and NOX; with words of power they send forth and awaken he who stands at the centre. Thrice again, aye thrice this is done, until he who is the centre beholds the shining reflection and ascends by descending!

So it is that he stands within the sphere of the Moon, at the Foundation of all things, who walks amidst the gardens therein, where all others see dry dust and airless cold. Walks aye, as those who wrought this work sink to their knees to hear his  worlds and words. So it is that he walks in the roots of things, beyond the sphere of man. So it is that he stands with gleaming figures, elegant and slim, spindly and fierce – towering in cathedrals of the stuff that men foolishly call dream.

For that salt blood that runs in his veins is the same salty sea which roars and thunders along the shores of awareness, that shining ocean, that silver gleaming cornucopia of creativity!

\”Behold then.\” they whisper, these spirits born of star and moon, these gigantic astral presences, \”Long locked away have been the thorns within the blood. And beneath the roots of things stirs thunder, for that which is forgotten does not lie quiet, nor shall memory buy you safety. Long lost be the powers, though we come again, for upon our backs mankind has built its world.\”

Fierce the pain within his veins as thorns unfold, pierced from the inside out. Blood flows, and where its droplets fall, so spring up countless universes. With sharp inhuman smiles and fathomless ancient eyes full of the light of long-gone galaxies, they stretch out needle-thin fingers and he meets them with his own, all gleaming silver-bone and clothed in deep kosmic blue.

\”The essence of power is this: Make your Lies into Truth and the Truth into Lies.\”

Understanding blossoms then, a bittersweet fruit ripening in an instant, its ashes the base for an elixir of paramount wonder…

II

\”Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted.\” – Hassan i Sabbah

Thus spoke the Old Man of the Mountain, or so the legend goes, in the days when his fortress at Alamut was the nexus of lines of flight and burrowing both. The Hashashin roosted at the Eagle\’s Nest; masters of asymmetric warfare they struck in ways which hit the hearts and minds of their enemies.

I have long written about war machines within the context of Deleuzian philosophy; particularly highlighting the notion of exteriority, I have suggested that the extra-ordinary is possessed of a greater variety of potentials than the ordinary. The well of potential is what makes a thing powerful, and while the words of the Nizari master echo down through a thousand years, it\’s true that they have become almost a cliche amongst certain types of magicians and philosophers.

Yes, \’Orthodox\’ Chaos Magicians, I mean you. Do please stop parroting it – you\’ve relegated it to a distasteful sound-bite, right up there with management buzzwords and things like synergy and paradigm. I mean, come on – paradigm? Have any of you even read Thomas Kuhn? I know I have. So hush, would you?

(I may feel strongly about certain things, can you tell?)

However, for all that it has become a tired old saw, I invite you to consider the statement in relation to the events I recounted above – to consider that the Weltanschauung – the wider world-view may be understood in terms of language and dreams, that the fundamentals of what you consider reality are inherently based upon the episteme born of your culture – and here I give a nod to Foucault, thus pleasing Jack and Gordon at least!

Consider if you will, that the very notion of that phrase implies possibility. I raise this because of the notion of things brought up by this post of Jack\’s, in particular relation to this one over at Strategic Sorcery. The distinction between Truth and Lie has ancient roots – deeply rooted in survival processes. The words phantom, phantasm, fantasy and fantastic spring from the same source:

An apparition, a spectre then – a sight seen with the Imagination. Compare this to the etymology of \’false\’ and \’illusion\’:

false

c.1200, from O.Fr. fals, faus, from L. falsus \”deceived, erroneous, mistaken,\” pp. of fallere \”deceive, disappoint,\” of uncertain origin. Adopted into other Gmc. languages (cf. Ger. falsch, Dan. falsk), though English is the only one in which the active sense of \”deceitful\” (a secondary sense in L.) has predominated.

illusion

mid-14c., \”act of deception,\” from O.Fr. illusion \”a mocking,\” from L. illusionem (nom. illusio) \”a mocking, jesting, irony,\” from illudere \”mock at,\” lit. \”to play with,\” from in- \”at\” + ludere \”to play\” (see ludicrous). Sense of \”deceptive appearance\” developed in Eng. late 14c.

I am sure you might begin to spot what I\’m getting at here: that the issue is not one of truth, instead it is of deception and seeming. If one cannot trust something to act as it is obliged to by its definition, that thing becomes dangerous. It might do anything, and this possibility is something that requires that we keep an eye on it, just in case it tries to harm us.

This is a survival mechanism folks.

By nature, survival is easier in stable conditions where predators aren\’t an issue and resources are plentiful. The shortcuts taken, the agreed upon assumptions about the environment which are shared by a group; these form the roots of the social contract – the bedrock of any given society.

The weltanschauung, the Focault-episteme – these give rise to taboos and laws which are rooted in survival in the environment that a culture inhabits and emerges from. The interactions of all forms of perception and understanding come together to create a pattern which informs and influences any given reality.

At the root of Indo-European culture – and others besides – stands the conception of a righteous order, opposed by a deceptive influence. In Zoroastrianism, this is manifested as the  Asha opposed by the Druj, or the Truth vs. Lie. The fundamental distinction between the two can easily be traced to that which maintains the integrity of the status quo, as opposed to the deception which undermines it and threatens the integrity of the world – literally the \’age of man\’ or group.

Think about that for a moment, and then turn over the concept of an assassin in your mind, yes? What images does it conjure, what associations? I\’ll lay good odds there\’s an element of stealth, of dressing in black and moving unnoticed before striking and vanishing like a ghost. Or perhaps it summons images of poison, a knife in the back, sneaky indirect wet-work of dubious morality – a Black Operation par excellence.

Now, if you haven\’t read that link to the article on the Druj – and you really should, trust me – then I\’ll give you a supremely relevant quote:

Druj-, Avestan feminine noun defining the concept opposed to that of aša- (q.v.). Controversies about the meaning of the latter word have naturally had implications for the understanding of druj-. The corresponding verbal root in Indic (druh: dru‚hyati) seems to have the basic meaning \”to blacken\” (Mayrhofer, Dictionary II, pp. 79 ff.), perhaps preserved in Avestan in Yašt 5.90 and 8.5. In view of the opposition of the two words, if the meaning of aša- is \”truth,\” then that of druj- must be \”lie,\” but, if the meaning of the former is \”order, justice,\” than druj- must mean \”error, deceit.\”

Christian Bartholomae prudently gave both meanings: \”falsehood, deceit\” (AirWb., cols. 778-82). Considering that the meaning \”falsehood\” corresponds to a certain kind of derivation (see the discussion of draoga-/drauga-, below) and that the meaning \”deceit\” results from a specific contextual usage (cf. the verb druj:dru‘a-, below), the opposition was probably between \”real order\” and \”illusory, deceptive order,\” the first being linked to the lights of the day, the second to the shadows of the night (Kellens, 1991, pp. 46 ff.).

A black thing indeed then, this Druj – this vision which ensnares and draws away from the Truth; a distorted mockery which sets you to question, to wonder if  perhaps the fundamentals of the world are not as they have been illuminated before you. A garden of temptation, full of houris and rivers of milk and honey.

They say many things about Hassan i Sabbah. They say he would dose his acolytes with hashish and make them believe they had died, only to awaken in a garden he had created to present the illusion of Heaven. Then, once returned, they would be fanatically loyal to the cunning Old Man of the Mountain.

They say he could command his man to throw themselves from the parapets of Alamut, plunging downward to their deaths all unconcerned. But they also say he beheaded his own son when he found him with a bottle of wine in defiance of the laws of the Qu\’ran.

They say a lot of things, don\’t they? Did you ever wonder who They are, and where they get Their unimpeachable information?

It doesn\’t come out of the Black Night; doesn\’t emerge from the sightless, senseless gulfs. No, it comes out of the streetlight, the neon and the campfire, the fierce glow of rationalism and progress. From repeatable results and the bedrock of reality and generations of assumption that the chair you\’re sitting on is solid and you won\’t go through it.

The flaming sword guards the gates to Eden, held in the hands of an angel. Paradise is but a memory and mankind tills the soil and lives and dies, trying once again to bring it to being. It builds and creates, one thing on top of another, layer upon layer of solidity and structure. The blade cuts the black earth and the seeds grow.

What of the assassin then?

What indeed! For he too has a blade, and it is swift and silent in the night. He strikes and brings forth blood that falls upon the same earth. Cain slays Abel and is marked by YHVH – the first killer, now rendered untouchable.

There\’s iron in the blood and the metal in your veins may gleam, oh so bright; opened up by the assassin as he moves unseen amidst the sheep – for as I\’m sure you know, Abel was a herder of livestock, and Cain a grower of crops. So here we find the asssassin\’s way in an interpretation of the doctrine of taqiyya – strategic dissimulation.

By taking on a seeming, the practitioner survives amidst the hostile or larger population, to perform in secret those things which are unacceptable to the masses. By embracing the lie, the truth is preserved – the truth of the inner nature. Without it, those that follow the call of that nature would be destroyed.

Thus we find a secret hidden in the heart of all things; that the notion of Asa-as-Truth and Druj-as-Lie are contingent each other for existence. You cannot have one without the other.

In the Black Night one finds the inner Light gleaming, shining silver in every cell. There is no neon, no street-light – no external source of Illumination. As the assassin strikes at the fundamentals of existence, his blade cuts deep into the heart of the world itself. He murders all that is known and understood, until all around is an ocean of shining blood and the sun and moon are eclipsed and torn down.

By now, you\’ll have begun to notice the leaps and connections I\’ve made, the associations and links – vaulting from one thing to another, a path that\’s easily traceable across the rooftops of your mental metropolis. The use of metaphor to slip sideways through the cracks, easing behind your mind to stalk the shadowed corridors of your subconscious; the evocative conjuring of scenes – of souks and bazaars heaving with myriad ideas beneath minarets from which the wail of the muezzin calls forth strange things in the night.

Can you comprehend what phantasms and images might emerge in the darkness, what horrors and glories might be revealed at that time? Or what strange and terrible forms might wake from sleep and stretch out their hands to you; might speak in tongues no human mouth has ever uttered?

This is the essence of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights; Scherezade\’s perfume fills the air, exotic in the desert heat. Stories within stories, concepts within concepts and words within words. Such power it has, the power to stave off even death itself, to ensnare even a king, to draw ever in, and ever deeper. A Labyrinth in the dark, and at the centre the monstrous Minotaur, born of Woman and Beast.

Will you walk those passageways, those paths guarded by djinn and ifrit, those netherworld paths buried deep within your consciousness?

Try it. Reach inside yourself, into the dark of your body, the space between each thought, voyage deeper and deeper, and do it now. Navigate the Labyrinth, sightless and blind. Go on, I dare you.

I\’ll be here when you get back…

III

The chair is solid, isn\’t it? The seat you\’re sitting in is going to hold you up and the business of life will continue on, yes? After all, if things were different, that would be crazy talk. Certainly, you wouldn\’t sit on a chair with holes in that you can fall through, would you?

Except you are sitting on a chair with holes that you can fall through and what\’s more physics agrees with me. So, if you think I\’m crazy, if you think these are purely the ravings of a madman, then please consider how much space there is in an individual atom, and how many atoms make up your body.

After that, move on to your seat, and when you\’re done, I\’m sure you\’ll join me in praising the charges on the particles for their sterling work in keeping things repulsed, and making everything seem solid. Because actually, there is an extraordinarily small chance that all the space and charges could align in a certain way and you and the chair might pass through each other.

It\’s all right though, it probably won\’t. So that\’s fine…isn\’t it?

Wait a second though, if that fundamental is only a seeming then what is the truth?  What actually is? Honestly, several millennia of philosophers and scientists are still scratching their heads about that one. Some of the really clever ones have come up with good workable theories which have enabled many wonderful things – but all these are based on some fundamental assumptions.

I spent both my undergraduate and post-graduate time at university studying philosophy – and that certainly counts as being trained. Four years (3 year BA and 1 year MA course) learning how to think. It\’s not as easy or as reflexive as you might believe, this thinking business. Along the way, I went a little mad and something broke. The apocalyptic and terrible visions of worlds burning, of millions marching in lockstep to unthinking doom that I have described here and in other places, were not simple metaphors.

They were things I actually experienced.

The bedrock of the world fell away, and I was insane by most standards. Yet somehow, I survived, and the transmutation into a kind of combat philosopher began like an alchemical process. Your fundamentals are not mine – the heritage of the epistemological assassin awoke in my blood.

Why am I telling you this?

The answer is simple – Jason\’s post makes the interesting point that certain things work whether or not you believe in them – that the efficacy may very well be in the operation itself as opposed to the primacy of belief so beloved by modern magicians, particularly of the CMT variety.

At first glance, this is a step forward – an attempt to break free of the idea that we are at the mercy of external powers that require bowing and scraping. On the second glance, it\’s only one step – and though its regarded as post-modern, we must remember that post-modern is the child of modernity, and that modernity is inherently anthropocentric (human centred).

Which, while a shiny view, does not take into account the interrelation of humans with the environment they inhabit. It\’s a thing of narrow focus, and as anyone who\’s been watching the news lately will tell you, this way of doing things has caused…problems.

But for all of you who hold to the view that belief is primary, and that changing beliefs is powerful, I\’d like to smile and draw my blade. What is belief? What is this thing that supposedly gives such great power?

How can you use it, how does it work – these are things each of you needs to sit down and consider for yourself. Equally, for those who choose to hold that there is something inherent in a given thing which lends it power, I ask you, what is that?

Think on these things, and think hard. Reply in the comments if you want. If you\’ve read this far, I know I have your interest and as such, I\’m going to offer another way.

The way is this:

Neither operere ex operato nor belief are what you think they are. Truth, Lie, Asha, Druj – all these concepts have definitions and borders. Walls between them.

Imagine if you could walk through the walls or pull back far enough to see them laid next to each other as part of a whole. Picture that, and if you have a moment of psychic vertigo as you allow yourself imagine them as parts of a larger thing, then you\’re with me and I\’d advise you to keep doing it.

What if it is all seeming – what is solid then?

If you can imagine all things, everything you know, as a phantasm that shifts and dances and is always ever changing; if you can hear the roar of chaos all about you, primordial and protean; if you can feel the thunderous silence at the heart of yourself, the Black Night when there is the Void, and there is you; and if that same infinite Void welcomes you and you can begin to realize that you are a shifting phantasm with boundaries and definitions that can be passed beyond, then it has begun.

When understanding dawns and the vastness dwarfs you, the nature of yourself as a grain of sand on that kosmic shore, and what you call \’belief\’ is nothing of the sort, but is instead a grasping for the ungraspable. When the Self is known as as that which gives rise to you, that the personality which is considered you is but the tip of a nigh infinite iceberg?

Then belief becomes irrelevant, and all things brim with potency.

The chair is allowed to seem solid. It is allowed to be a chair-shaped space and also a symbol and a word in your mind. All these things and many more besides, nigh-infinite in its variety. All are permitted and none are exclusive.

Nothing is True, and Everything is Permitted.

So spoke Hassan, he who they say gave men licence to do impossible things. Think on that, would you; and then understand that the essence of doing the impossible is doing what others cannot…

This was supposed to be posted on Tuesday, but didn\’t take for some reason. Oh well, now you have an inaugural audio introduction rather than anything else, but  I think it\’s an exciting thing to play with, don\’t you?

Of course, you may realize I mean audio in general as well as the voice in all its variety, with its pauses and repetitions; all its little shifts in pitch and tone. After all, the day we learn to talk is the day we learn to refine our baby cries even further into precise mechanisms for getting our ideas into other people\’s heads, into getting what we want done, done.

Communication changes things and you don\’t have to be an expert in advertising to be aware of that, or have any expertise in linguistics to begin to realize it. The issue isn\’t whether you\’ve got a psychology or linguistics degree, or even any formal training, and in fact sometimes it\’s better not to have any because theory can get in the way of the obvious.

Because the obvious is horribly mundane – that you can tell someone\’s emotional state from the sound of their voice or the way they\’re standing. You can tell if someone\’s stressed by the way they hold themselves; how comfortable they are by how they sit, or how defensive they\’re feeling.

What\’s more, these things have the proven effectiveness of evolution. Without them one might die in a very messy way, and the fact that you\’re here today is certainly down to your ancestors not dying in a very messy way. Or at least, not doing so before they did the squelchy.

This then, is something of an experiment – a chunk of audio within the span of six minutes; recorded on an Android mobile in the wee small hours – a piece, if you will, of direct thought; an opening and beginning. What I hope to achieve is something akin to a demonstration of the raw brain-product, the way words are laid down, one in front of the other, to take you somewhere interesting, as they do me.

I say this because, for me, each of these pieces is following a path, moving in a certain way as I plot my course by landmarks in the spaces of thought, the call of something that catches my interest, the scent of it on the air.  Now as you listen to what I\’m saying, bear that in mind; and if you wish you can allow yourself to spot possibilities in all of the pauses – they\’re certainly not being all tied up.

Without further ado:

VI in VI minutes vol I

And the 3rd Angel sounded
And a star fell from heaven
Burning as it were a lamp
And it fell upon the 3rd part of the waters

Asteroid

I’m a ball of fire
Fire from heaven
Terror from nowhere
You’ll never shoot me down
Days turns to minutes
5 seconds till it hits us
3 seconds to ground
1 second to ….

Asteroid
Coming in from the void

On the bed of the ocean
Where history lies
Strange civilisations
Vapourised
Days turns to minutes
5 seconds till it hits us
3 seconds to ground
1 second to ….

Asteroid

I.N.R.I
Nature renewed by fire made whole

And I climb to the mountain
Light to dark
Behind time and space
A hole in your Ark
Days turns to minutes
5 seconds till it hits us
3 seconds to ground
1 second to ….

Asteroid – Killing Joke

It\’s been interesting reading blogs over the past few days, and not least because it\’s quite obvious how interconnected ideas can provide inspiration and comment. I always find it extremely intriguing that certain subjects appear to suddenly well up and and flow as currents through people\’s thoughts and actions.

I say this because, just like physical currents, the currents of thought and idea can vary – some can be deceptively placid and yet exhibit a vicious undertow that leaves you struggling to break free. Others are powerful streams that move within larger bodies of work, of thought and memory, or gentle journeys that take you on meanderings into the vast sea of imagination and possibility.

Let\’s take for example, three blogs that I\’m fond of reading for their varying perspectives:

On Rune Soup Gordon\’s put up two posts which I greatly enjoyed. In this one, he goes into detail on his thoughts regarding Holy Places, in particular a site associated with St. Nectan, down in my native Cornwall. The notion of landscape and environment as sacred, combined with a focal point of veneration has always struck me as peculiarly important. Gordon\’s words reminded me of an article I occasionally return to for inspiration – THE EROTIC LANDSCAPE written by Mogg Morgan.

It has repeatedly struck me that the notion of embracing the landscape, the spaces we move through, is a spectacularly potent technique. Rather than viewing it as a thing to contour and control, if we view it with the range of emotion and action one would allow oneself when engaging with a loved one, we can be presented with a level of nuance and subtlety which goes beyond the level of appearance and into the realm of deep understanding.

Further, if we cultivate such an understanding deliberately, if we allow ourselves the pleasure of being within the environment, being open and accepting to it, as we would a lover, we engage in a communion and communication with that which lies beyond the confines of the civilized \’human\’ world.

\”We who are about to partake of each other, shall walk past all amorous sickness and deaths, for we are within the magical equinox.

Amen

We who proudly make unto ourselves every graven image, shall have great copulations and are allowed to love our Gods, for we know the Sacred Alignments.

Amen

We who do not crucify – nothing shall hurt us that is of the \’Nature\’; neither our comings and goings from the womb, for we have the Key to all aesthetics.

Amen

In this sacred moment (here occurs the symbolic eating of flesh and blood) we forget our enemies: therefore let our dead children sleep. And let our dead loves arise, so they too may watch and enjoy our ecstasies. Let their animation be power to our memories and so resurge all ecstasy, for in this day there shall be no inhibitions.

Amen

Thou insatiable peripheral quadriga of sex.

Amen.\” – THE PRAYER OF COMMUNION, Zoetic Grimoire of Zos

Above we see the words of Zos vel Thanatos – the sorcerer-artist Austin Osman Spare, honoured ancestor and geezer to a million chaos magicians, whether they know it or not.  Spare\’s erotic exploration of aesthesis has a great deal in common with the Cosmogonic Eros mentioned by Ludwig Klages, and for Spare, the highest principle is that of Self-Love.

Such a principle is not solely masturbatory; rather it is a recognition, through Eros, of the multitude and variety of beauties and grotesqueries which the individual is capable if containing and expressing innately! To engage with all things in a Sexuality which has only a tangental relationship to the act of copulation – an erotognosis as it were; enabling a knowing of the world in its totality, a knowing in the Biblical sense almost.

If we are speaking of flesh and blood forming a carnal gate to the soul as we have been, if we are suggesting that body and soul are, in fact, not at all separate, then Gordon\’s second post quite neatly backs us up, doesn\’t it?

Here, he recounts the conception of the blog – the incarnation of it, and his return to doing magic. I hope he won\’t mind me quoting a portion:

\”Then at the end of the tomb I arrived at St Peter himself.

It bowled me over. I almost cried. The energy emanating from this tiny gilded casket was like nothing I have ever felt. Something had happened to this man.

So I stood there and thought about what this something might have been.

• This man may have met something divine that we can still feel two thousand years later even after his bones have turned to dust.
• He was somehow raised up or elevated about normal human status by… Something.
• The faith of more than a billion people currently living on planet earth converging on this one tiny chamber have built something.

Whichever way you look at it, this was magic.

And this is what I love about chaos magic. The explanation doesn’t matter in the slightest. In fact, it’s probably speculating beyond the data. All you can know for certain is that something magical is happening.

The universe is magic. It didn’t matter that I currently had no ‘use’ for practical magic. Magic’s existence is too important to ignore. If magic exists -and it does- then that colours everything about your life.

That was it.

In that tomb I committed to pulling the sheets of the furniture in the wizard’s tower and firing up the octarine generator.\”

The bones of St Peter, the flesh and blood focus of the Catholic Church, had an effect. A contact was made, and it wasn\’t with some ethereal thing, but a very real and physical object. Now, we can argue for ages about whether it was directly the object, or something more subtle – that\’s not the issue though.

The issue is that, by interaction with the physical, Gordon\’s awareness shifted and he was spurred into becoming committed  while he was in a tomb in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. You know the one, the sprawling edifice of Empire which has millions committed to it. The same Church that had the pagan temples shut down and regularly used to execute people on grounds of heresy!

Think about that for a second, and as you do, as you ponder the strangeness of that fact, have a read of Jason Miller\’s posts on the Strategic Sorcery blog and the comments they\’ve engendered, here and here – also here.

Are you done yet? If so then, you\’ll have no doubt noticed that a lot of strong feelings are engendered by the subject matter, and the way it\’s quietly connected to Gordon\’s posts too. Perhaps you\’re not so sure what I\’m alluding to, and if not then I suggest you take a look at this post, or this one from Frater R.O.

I\’m sure you can see both the similarities and differences in all these perspectives, can\’t you? After all, that is what blogs and the internet are about – communicating ideas as we surf the web by hyperlink, moving hither and yon in a veritable galaxy of information. Now, you might have worked out by now that I\’m a polytheist – the world is full of gods and spirits and other wights.

Personally I have no problem with people choosing to be monotheists, henotheists, monolaters  atheists, agnostics or just plain confused – that\’s their look-out. All that matters to me is that possibility is allowed, that the sheer multiplicity and variety of ways of being is acknowledged.

In all the posts I\’ve linked so far, what should become obvious is that there are icebergs in the current, that each of the ideas discussed, each opinion expressed, is somehow connected to each other by the web, by the people behind the keyboards. Many people see only the surface connections – the obvious contact points, the pins and holes as it were.

I say there are icebergs in the current precisely because the lion\’s share of a given idea-stream occurs beneath the surface, just as the majority of an iceberg is said to dwell beneath the surface of the freezing waters. When I and the other chief contributors of The Sutra Of the Poison Buddha – say hello Jack and Ryan, there\’s good bastards – wanted to take on new material, we\’d look at our lives, our works, and our thoughts. Then we would literally free-associate without censure, following the maze of twisty passages as we rode the Synchronicity Highway at breakneck speed, laughing all the way before the shock of it would sober us up.

The same technique can be applied to enter a current from any of the tips of any of the icebergs, until suddenly one is washing up on strange shores which seemingly have no connection to where you were before. The key is to abandon any notion of cause and effect, and instead become aware that connections are multiple-way, that meaning may be manufactured, and to realize the ability to make connections is in actuality the fundamental Arte.

II

If you\’ve read this far, you might be wondering what this has to do with the song lyrics I\’ve used as an opener. I suppose it depends how much you trust me, doesn\’t it? Ask yourself if I would  waste time on such a thing without there being a purpose, given what you have previously known of me – and if you know little, then perhaps you should read the things I have  already written with an eye on what\’s between the lines, yes?

Once you\’ve answered that question enough for your own satisfaction, I\’d like you to re-read the lyrics and drink them in; think of them not as dry words, but things that are wet with salt water; with sweat and blood and burning fire borne from the celestial sphere down into the realm of men.

An incarnate ecstasy, alive with the fury of divinity, with the fellowship that comes from the fire and the sword brought to men, to reveal the Mysteries to those half asleep. drowsing in their rote definitions of existence. Read those words, and imagine how they might inflame you, how you can allow them in to ignite your heart and sear your soul. Can you see the look upon the faces of those who watch it fall from heaven, a burning thing with the body of a star descending to you across the ages?

Watch the way their features shift as its light washes over them how their bodies rock and sway in glorious anticipation and growling thunder announces the coming, how the electricity sizzles in your veins and your heat leaps. How the silence falls and the voice speaks, as the tension grows.

You know this.

And if these things are difficult to conjure and comprehend, then watch and see the video below. Embrace it as a living thing, watch it as many times as you like, so that with each run you become more aware of what lies behind the simplicity of a song…

Now, regardless of what your taste in music is, I am sure you saw that the crowd were extremely into the experience, and I\’m absolutely sure you can appreciate the sense of theatre that Jaz Coleman and the boys have, and equally that you can begin to see the connection between that and what I\’m saying, right?

Given that that\’s true, I\’m fairly certain that you can join me in following through on that and the other connections which I\’ve illuminated earlier, in spite of the fact that they might not be obvious at first glance – after all, if they were, I\’m sure each one of the posters would have written about it by now because well, duh.

If we\’re going to take a dip in that stream, to dive off the icebergs and swim down to find the structures and connexions, then I\’d ask you to pause a second and consider what all these things have in common; the shared figures and symbolism, the distinct notion of an esoteric gnosis which has been either lost, or hidden over the years.

There is definitely a division between the people who simply accept what they are told, and those who explore it for themselves, isn\’t there?

There are those who delight in being guided, in having the yoke lifted from their shoulders, in giving themselves over to something larger then themselves, and of course, there is nothing wrong with doing so provided that the thing, person or group they submit to doesn\’t abuse that trust.

There are also those who are drawn to experience directly, to seek out what lies behind the ideas themselves, searching, always searching. I\’m sure you can tell which  of the two I am, but what about you? Would you leave behind all you knew to seek the truth, and live the Life – knowing that you can never go home again?

Most wouldn\’t…

Except, Simon the fisherman and his brother throw down their nets and follow, don\’t they?

\”Unless you want to believe the fairytale…\”

III

The crucified serpent is alchemical symbolism for the operation known as fixing the volatile – transmuting mercury into a usable elixir. Add to this the revelation that nachash or serpent, in Hebrew Gematria has a value of 358, the same value as mashiach or messiah. So we have the image of a serpent that, according to Genesis, brings mankind to knowledge it wasn\’t strictly supposed to have, elevated beyond its original design. As well of this, there is the erection of a brazen serpent on a pole by Moses in response to a punishment set upon the Israelites by YHVH, in the form of fiery serpents. The brazen serpent would cure all those bitten by the fiery wyrms if they looked upon it.

In terms of symbolism then, the notion of Jesus\’ crucifixion may be squarely equated with fixing the volatile – the transmutation of a figure into a Saviour – that\’s to say a healer and preserver. This fits in well when we consider the Christian Communion and the Catholic notion of literal transubstantiation, or the symbolic version  of the same in other denominations. The congregation partake of the body and blood of the Saviour, consuming the elixir which gives them access to the Kingdom of Heaven.

But let\’s consider the notion of a descent from that place a second – orthodox Christian Doctrine claims Jesus was sent from the Father, and the more Unorthodox versions have a great deal to say about who/what that Father is – be it the Logos or the Nous. The word asteroid is composed of roots aster and eidos – making it literally an object that has the form of a star.

Crowley said that \’every man and a woman is a star.\’ Might we then be able to suggest that Jesus-as-Saviour might have provided an intercessory method of finding the Kingdom of Heaven within mankind, instead of the standard exoteric  notion of a post-Apocalyptic bliss-fest?

Let\’s think back to the imagery of fire, the sensation of the electricity in your veins, remembering the ecstasy, the immanent otherworldliness as it crawls up your spine and seizes your lungs; as your skin crawls and something uncurls at the base of your spine, hotter than suns as it twines through your body, energizing and strengthening you, unlocking centres of excellence and terror you didn\’t know you had.

It immerses you in the awareness of something beyond your skin, a billion eyes opening and looking right at you, and for a moment you think you might shrivel to nothing, be blasted to dust before that gaze, as the wings are removed from their places and you are struck by the Truth of the serpentine choir.

Can you survive such a transition, or are you clinging on like grim death to your humanity? Do you fall sick, your soul burned to naught by that fire, cast adrift and drifting towards the grave as the source of your identity is shattered?

Or do you exult, and join your voice with a thousand others, tongue dripping with glossolalia, eyes wide and unblinking, full of shining ophidian gnosis which whispers of the days in Eden? Does Moses\’ Egyptian wisdom give you the way to survive, imbued as it is with ancient sorcery and power?

In a small room over Jerusalem, can you hear the rushing wind and see the flames leap from the crown of your brethren? Can you feel the urge to speak in a tongue like rain, to pass on the gnosis by sound alone, knowing full well that it lies beyond language – that the wisdom passes on like a contagion, from one person to another. The Master\’s words echo in your ears:

\”He who has ears, let him hear!\”

Now you may begin to see what\’s here – the notion of scriptural lore as a transmission method, an encoded symbolic language capable of altering someone\’s thought processes to enable proper integration with a new way of being. Is it any wonder that this might become exoterically misinterpreted?

Just think about that – when consuming psychoactives, one of the important things to remember is set and setting – how things are framed dictates responses and that means a great deal.

Now, as a dirty heathen, I\’m apparently a prime target for evangelizing – except in my case, I\’m actually an apostate. As such, when I am evangelized at, I actually smile, because many of those who others find so irritating are wielding their words with no skill other than fervency. The heat of what they are saying is like a candle-flame when compared to the blazing roar of nature.

That\’s not to say its without value – it\’s prime setting material, a psycho-social grounding framework that enables them to function, and that\’s right and good for them. Similarly, the hateful fundamentalists provide me with (g)no end of amusement – they\’re waving around the equivalent of a twenty megatonne gnosis-bomb and clocking people on the head with it as if its\’ a club.

(Mind you, a person with a club can still knock your brains out, so it\’s best to keep an eye on them and either disarm them or find some way to avoid their attention!)

Then there are the honest ones, the ones who have faith and attempt to love their neighbours as themselves. Wait a second…Love one another – isn\’t that what the Man said? Love thy neighbour as thyself!

I\’d like you to see the grin on my face as I write this, bearded and evil-minded though I be. I\’d like you to picture the gales of laughter that shook me as I realized the way this post was  going, because you\’re probably going to want to go back to the beginning of these words and look for it, stated as plain as day.

I couldn\’t be that devious could I? That would require precision, hidden in all the verbosity, surely? To do that, to dive into the current and end up connecting things which supposedly have no connection at all, and hence start you thinking about the deep structure within it all. Because once you start seeing the deep structure,within any given current you can recognize it, and spot it, even though it\’s cloaked in a form that bears no direct representation to what it reveals.

Go back if you like, with that new recognition, that texture in the dark, that scent on the wind, the string in the labyrinth that spirals on through infinite eternity. Go back over it all in your mind and let me tell you a bit about my past, and allow me to show you something…

IV

I have priests and preachers in my family, missionaries, lecturers and political activists on both sides; this is a true fact. The drawing you are  seeing is a depiction of the village church of which a close family member was Rector – an ordained Anglican priest. I spent much of my early life in a family where the symbolism of Christianity, and the twin poles of church and pub were central to the Cornish village in which we lived.

Imagine a Sunday if you will, the bellringers standing at the Lychgate – the gate to which corpses were brought – filing the air with fragrant blue pipe-smoke, the Cornish drawl and lined faces, the smell of the wild garlic growing greenly as it festooned the old stone wall. I used to pause there when I was young and pluck a few leaves to chew in the service. The moss on the gravestones seemed to bristle and flex as you made your way up the path through the graveyard and round the tower.

Pausing now, you take in the war memorial, the worn stone steps that lead up and further into the graveyard that\’s been open for as long as the church has been here, way back in the 13th century.  Feel the weight of eight hundred years of folk, of living and dying and praying and laughing.

It wraps around you, the green does, and if you were to move on, you might find the holy well said to be where the Celtic saint for whom the church and village are named began to preach when he first came to this vale. If you\’re so inclined, you might fall to wondering if there\’s another layer to the tale; whether that well might have held offerings to some pagan god or spirit long before the coming of Christ – and truth be told you would not be the first to wander along those paths of thought, I assure you.

For now though, you might open the heavy wooden door inside the porch and step inside the church, immediately struck by the scents of old wood and the faint tang of polish as you pass by the font where generations have been baptised , running your fingers over the intricate carvings on the pew ends, just like I did as a boy.

Stand in the nave then and look past the rood-screen to the altar, topped with slate and supported by weighty Cornish granite…

And now, we\’ll shift and it\’s not a Sunday but a Friday, a Good Friday – that day when a man-god died and descended into the grave to preach and pass the gnosis to the dead so that they might be liberated.

Picture the scene; that same church all unlit as the priest of your blood leads the way through the Stations of the Cross halting to read the tale of Christ\’s death, mimicking the journey through ritual and meditation as the voice rings out and though it\’s a spring day, the place feels hollow like a ribcage and the light is thinner somehow.

And as that familiar voice, the one you hear every day, speaks the words and weaves the way, you see all the falls, all the stumbling on that day in Jerusalem, so very long ago. You can smell the sweat and the blood and the roughness of wood against your skin, the gape and flex of broken flesh from the scourging. Your vision wavers in the painful heat, blood trickling into your eyes and mixing with the unshed tears as the thorns snag your scalp.

One foot. Then another. Then another. It seems endless, this path of sorrows. You are so very weary – all you want to do is rest, to flee the agony and the jeering. But you can\’t, though you know there\’s far worse to come yet, a terrible darkness as you are drawn to the place of Place of the Skull, as you stumble to your knees, and are almost immediately dragged onto the wood by the soldiers.

The cross tears at your skin, and you give it blood in return, staining the grain with your blood, the blood of a man and a god, son of your Father. It\’s your lover now, that rood – it will be with you until death you do part; you are wedded together in pain.

Hoisted into the air then, part of a stand of trees, a  grove of execution. Somewhere in the back of your mind, amidst the spiralling and narrowing of your vision, the painful pounding of your heart, you are aware they are nailing you to the wood. It might strike you as funny – how many times in your younger days did your carpenter\’s hands drive nails into wood, loving as you did the crafting and making of things? Yet now, it is you who are being crafted, made holy by the sacrifice.

Some part of you, the part that was something other than flesh and blood, remembers that you are not alone, that you partake in all the sacrifices that have ever been made since the dawn of time. Bound and brought to death, all of you have done this, do this for others, be it willing or otherwise. Yet still you wonder, as it becomes harder to breathe and  you can feel your lungs filling with fluid, feel something tear in the shattered remains off your palms:

\”Why am I doing this?\” You cry out, wondering if the Father has deserted you. \”Why have you forsaken me?!\”

The doubt tries to blossom, but it is choked like a weed by the agony – the blessing of flesh – until all of you burns and there is nothing at all but fire. You try to scream but your lips are dry, your breath weak.

The moments stretch on, until bitter vinegar is pressed to your lips. You suck without thinking, glorying in the bitterness and the sting as it spills into your cuts, knowing that it is merely a matter of faith and will – how else did you turn water into wine at Cana?

What\’s left of your human mind embraces it, embraces the whole world, and with the strength of the rood at your back, with the power of your pain and suffering, you love them, you love the whole world because there is no other option. You love them with the fierceness that only a dying man may muster, you love them with the infinite, furious and all-encompassing love of the Divine.

You beg forgiveness on their behalf, you grant the thief a seat at the Father\’s table, you forgive all their sins and secrets and their lies and their petty vindictiveness and all the horror that has been and is yet to come; to unborn generations and those gone before, you give the gift of your blood and the forgiveness that it buys.

Your last act as a mortal is to cease to be human, to commend yourself to that daimonic realm from whence you came. As the sky turns black and the force of the sacrifice ripples out through all there ever was, you descend into hell and open the way to heaven, your immortal form a way and a road, the cross an axis mundi to climb upward once more…

And now, back to that church back to the silent staring at the wooden cross which stands in the nave on this day, taller than a man. It stands there stark and empty as you realize its nature, not as an instrument of torture and execution, but rather as an icon, a key to unlock the deep Mystery of death and sacrifice.

As you sit there in the pew, surrounded by the accoutrements of exoteric Christianity, the fine work and hollow building, the silence of meditation all about you, notice something. Notice, as I did in those moments, year after year, that the gnosis of blood and love is combined with the gnosis of death and words.

Think on this deeply then, as I did – until I walked away, until I began to take the steps which ultimately led me to throw down my nets and never go home again. For though it has taken years and I no longer sit before that cross on Good Friday, I owe a great deal to the things it taught me.

Perhaps you know a little more now, and perhaps you can allow yourselves to navigate with your eyes closed and follow the streams, and see where you end up. Go on, have a wander – I\’ll still be here.

Be seeing you.