In a country that’s dealing with an MP and mother of two being shot and stabbed to death by a man in the street in broad daylight. A man who, according to some witnesses, shouted “Britain First” before firing. A man who had a history of mental illness and had connections to Neo-Nazi and right wing groups, as well as books and materials in his home.

A man who obtained an illegal firearm and, just over a week before the Referendum on whether Britain should remain in the EU. A country where the Daily Telegraph (one of the country’s most conservative newspapers) calls the murder “An Act of Far-Right Terrorism”.

I’m sat here, and all I can think of is all the neo-nazi scumbags in Heathenry, who rather than recognising that the elder heathen cultures valued hospitality and kindness to strangers, seek to expel and belittle people on grounds of sexuality, ethnicity, or physical ability.

All I can think is how wrong they are. How this island I call Albion has welcomed wave after wave of immigrants since the ice-age, including the Norse and the Anglo Saxons. How, for all the battles, the mixing of cultures occurred, how the people and land prospered together,

All I can think of is how unbelievable their fear must be, how much they must be certain that they are not enough, that they’re going to be swallowed up, everything they are is to be lost.

I’d call them frightened children, unable to face the possibility of Change’s elder brother, Death. I’d say they have no grasp of the old ways, of the knowledge that our ancestors knew – that there is no safety, and that the world is full of Life with its own agenda.

But that would, I think, be petty. Instead I wish more understanding upon them. Instead I wish revelation upon them, wondrous as it is – the knowing of the fact that we are inextricably bound together, across space and time. That all of us on the island are nourished by the same dirt, and the bones of all those incomers and outgoers. Those roots, our variegated multi-woven twining roots are what keep us alive in an uncertain world.

Our earth, our dirt.

Doesn’t matter where you come from, you eat the dirt, you’re welcome, y\’know? Muslim, Black, Gay, Straight, Polish, Syrian….you eat her dirt in the food and the water and she\’l take you, mix your bones with all the others yeah?

And the holders of those bones surround us – Roman cavalry from the Black Sea, African legionnaires on Hadrian’s wall, Brigantian tribesmen strengthening the arm of those who farm on holdings established by Norsemen a thousand years ago.

We’re bound together. That’s not hippy talk, but a fact of life and death. The ancients called it wyrd. And wyrd goes as it should.

It’s time to remember humans were made from trees, as in Norse myth. The land is us and we are the land.

Albion sang to William Blake once, gave him great visions and poetry of that vast giant. Its gods and goddesses, songs and stories, still remain, If we are to survive, we must do as our ancestors did, and learn to listen – to join our voices once more to the great song of adding and taking away. To go down Below and across the borders of Here and there. To answer the call to be watchers, singers, makers, dreamers and shapers again.

To drink from the well of Memory, and bring forth vitality from that freezing stream, to answer the Lady of the Lake, not with requests for swords, but with song and poetry and story.

I may be a cripple, I may me weak, but my heart beats under the skin, same as the mighty, and I have my Dead all about me. The lines and maps of men mean little, but the land remembers.

So we must learn to listen. To remember, and recall we were NEVER alone.

Let me share with you a vision:

A man lies in his bed, unable to move for pain. It consumes his consciousness, snaring thought and perception, cutting into awareness like a barbed wire noose. Like an animal, he seeks to escape, to rid himself of the constriction of a ring of knives and fire, but there is no escape. In fact, all his struggles are for naught; the more he struggles, the more it bites, and the more he becomes frantic in his efforts to escape.  Pain becomes all there is as he throws himself at the walls of his cell, the thorns of the encircling hedge.

All is fire and agony.

And like an animal caught in a trap, he goes limp. The reality of his situation does not so much set in, as wait patiently for the inevitability to dawn on him. Struggling does no good, and he is already exhausted. There is nothing to do but wait for whatever comes next. Which, ultimately, is death.

But here, the man and the animal differ. For the man, death is in the future. For the animal, there is no future. There is only now – escape may be possible, or it may not. This moment may, in fact, be the moment of death. Whatever the case, the animal will make the most of its options.

And in this vision there is a very particular awareness. An awareness of what both animal and man share, and what they do not – the animal does not, after all, possess the much vaunted \”human consciousness\”, instead being possessed of (by) its own form of Being in the World.  What both share however, is that animating quality we might call Life.

Both are constellations, manifestations, of that quality, though differently arranged in space and time.

animate (v.) 1530s, \”to fill with boldness or courage,\” from Latin animatus past participle of animare \”give breath to,\” also \”to endow with a particular spirit, to give courage to,\” from anima \”life, breath\” (see animus). Sense of \”give life to\” in English attested from 1742. Related: Animated; animating.

animus (n.) 1820, \”temper\” (usually in a hostile sense), from Latin animus \”rational soul, mind, life, mental powers; courage, desire,\” related to anima \”living being, soul, mind, disposition, passion, courage, anger, spirit, feeling,\” from PIE root *ane- \”to blow, to breathe\” (cognates: Greek anemos \”wind,\” Sanskrit aniti\”breathes,\” Old Irish anal, Welsh anadl \”breath,\” Old Irish animm \”soul,\” Gothic uzanan \”to exhale,\” Old Norse anda \”to breathe,\” Old English eðian \”to breathe,\” Old Church Slavonic vonja \”smell, breath,\” Armenian anjn \”soul\”). It has no plural. As a term in Jungian psychology for the masculine component of a feminine personality, it dates from 1923.

Now, what kind of animal is ensnared in this vision, I wonder? What manner of creature do you envisage, lying exhausted and quiescent? Think on that, for a moment. We\’ll come back to it

Let me share something else, too:

The great difference between Renaissance Neoplatonism and animism is that Man does not stand in the middle of this energetic onion, having all the forces of the universe beaming down into us, with the rest of Creation relegated to supporting cast status or background greenery. (This is incidentally what Bruno railed against and why he thought they were all idiots. An infinite universe, a cosmos lit with countless little lamps extending into infinity is directly opposed to the magical onion worldview of Neoplatonic/planetary spheres. He was a rock star space shaman.)

That\’s from Gordon\’s post entitled  Gnosticism is the Map. Animism is the Territory. So:

map (n.) 1520s, shortening of Middle English mapemounde \”map of the world\” (late 14c.), and in part from Middle French mappe, shortening of Old Frenchmapemonde, both English and French words from Medieval Latin mappa mundi \”map of the world;\” first element from Latin mappa \”napkin, cloth\” (on which maps were drawn), \”tablecloth, signal-cloth, flag,\” said by Quintilian to be of Punic origin (compare Talmudic Hebrew mappa, contraction of Mishnaic menaphah \”a fluttering banner, streaming cloth\”) + Latin mundi \”of the world,\” from mundus \”universe, world\” (see mundane). Commonly used 17c. in a figurative sense of \”epitome; detailed representation.\” To put (something) on the map \”bring it to wide attention\” is from 1913.

territory (n.) late 14c., \”land under the jurisdiction of a town, state, etc.,\” probably from Latin territorium \”land around a town, domain, district,\” from terra \”earth, land\” (see terrain) + -orium, suffix denoting place (see -ory). Sense of \”any tract of land, district, region\” is first attested c. 1600. Specific U.S. sense of \”organized self-governing region not yet a state\” is from 1799. Of regions defended by animals from 1774.

\”Since -torium is a productive suffix only after verbal stems, the rise of terri-torium is unexplained\” [Michiel de Vaan, \”Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages\”]. An alternative theory, somewhat supported by the vowels of the original Latin word, suggests derivation from terrere \”to frighten\” (see terrible); thus territorium would mean \”a place from which people are warned off.\” 

The map is a flag, a cloth full of signs and symbols – engines and operators, transporters which work in concert with that much vaunted \”human consciousness\”. It is a banner, a thing that snaps, moves, shifts, moving and billowing as the breeze dictates. Without that, it hangs slack, meaningless.

It is a cloth, yes.

A cloth for covering, for laying over the world. What lies beneath, under the colours and signs of human make? When we lay a cloth on a table, on a body, we cover and protect what is covered. We produce a layer that lies-between. Consider then, that such a cloth is a method of distancing, whether by producing distance between objects and experience, or by creating a protective boundary between what lies above/outside the covering, and what lies beneath.

A map produces distance between the world and the perceiver. In effect, it provides a bird\’s-eye view, a top-down perception which influences feelings of importance. From On High, we can survey all of our domain – all the enclosed space which is \’ours\’ by virtue of perception. Distant, we have time to prepare, to marshal our resources and operate from a position of \”strength\” and \”might\”. The map provides a sense of optionality – it provides us with the illusion of choice, time to plan, the luxury of room-to-move. The cloth provides us with defence against the cold, it breaks the line-of sight, shielding the covered object from prying eyes, so that only the \’proper\’ owner may know what lies beneath (unless it becomes uncovered, of course).

The map is the tyranny of knowledge (tyranny in its technical, philosophical sense, rather than as pejorative). It is the singular view, held in fixity, in stable, easily parsable manner.

The territory, on the other hand, does not imply distance. Even at its most jurisdictional, it deals directly with the land, with the earth itself.

Contrast the heavenly map with the earthly territory.

Consider the place of terror to the distant On High.

There is a vibrancy here, an intimacy born of necessity. Rather than being apart from the world, we are embedded in it. The map gives us a sense of distance from the world, turning us into giants. Distances that would take months to cross might be measured, covered, by the span of a thumb. The world recedes, held at arm\’s length, perspective shifting. Provides us with escape-as-optionality, the illusion of freedom.

The map is a cloth, yes.

And cloth is woven, thread taken over and under, in the warp and the weft. The individual spun threads are pulled, tightened – the gaps are closed up, covered. Here is the irony though – the cloth only matters in relation to something outside itself, whether that be what it covers, or what it holds apart. Without the animating breeze, it hangs slack and useless. Without the earth, the very existence of that which it depicts/represents, it has no purpose. All that remains is an illusory echo – the map of the Neoplatonists matters only to those who perceive it. It is useless, unless some benefit is gained from it. To be fair, it must generate some benefit to those who use it – that echo must in some way satisfy an urge or need.

But what distance does it create?

If Man strives to the pinnacle, to refine its consciousness to that of some distant On High, then so be it. If Man seeks to end suffering, so be it. But we must recall that the map is a covering, a machine-for-distance. If it enables us to be giants, to cover thousands of miles with a thumb, so be it. But this does not negate the thousands of miles, the hundreds of microclimates, ecologies, realms and neighbourhoods of beingness which lie beneath the thumb.

No matter how much Man-as-humankind might wish otherwise, the territory exists in all its terrific variety, all its inescapable shapes and forms. It cannot be known from a distance. It must be experienced, come what may. Indeed, it cannot be avoided, no matter what the map says.

Some might skim the variety of Gnostic schools and conclude that all were matter-world hating dualists, the very epitome of those who sought distance from the world. But in that surface skim, they would perhaps miss the sheer variety of Gnostic perspectives, might forget that gnosis is the root of to know.  To know the world as it truly is, this is the gnostic impulse, even if we regard the fact of ultimate certain knowledge as impossible.

To no longer kowtow to those On High who dispense the maps of-how-things-are, but to go out and explore, for ourselves, to get the dirt under our fingernails, to acknowledge our constant lack of knowing and let that drive us, hungry and in love  with the world, to discover and to experience the More which we instinctively feel a call to, which lies covered and hidden.

occult (adj.) 1530s, \”secret, not divulged,\” from Middle French occulte and directly from Latin occultus \”hidden, concealed, secret,\” past participle of occulere \”cover over, conceal,\” from ob \”over\” (see ob-) + a verb related to celare \”to hide,\” from PIE root *kel- (2) \”to cover, conceal\” (see cell). Meaning \”not apprehended by the mind, beyond the range of understanding\” is from 1540s. The association with the supernatural sciences (magic, alchemy, astrology, etc.) dates from 1630s.

This then, is the knowing, not by maps and distance, but by heart\’s-blood, by coming-together with-and-breaking apart. In this, the we resemble less Man possessed of the much vaunted \”human intelligence\”, than the animal possessed by the animal intelligence.

In a Kosmos filled with Life, it is only sensible to regard the multitude of Forms of Being which we encounter as Beings-In-And-Of-Themselves, precisely because they are constellations of Life. It doesn\’t matter whether or not we are \’projecting\’, only that we accord the possibility of Life to all things, since we ourselves are constellations of Life, and are acted upon by the world at large. This is no the same as anthropocentrism – we do not regard all Beings as human, merely possessed of the animating quality we call Life.

In immersing ourselves in the Gnostic impulse, we seek that which lies below/beyond/within the map – the creative impulse, the enthusing Powers which weave the cloth, in ourselves and in the wider world. We do not seek to solely know what lies On High, but those Powers which weave the complex web of interrelations which make up the Kosmos. Not only that, we seek to become aware of our own participation in the weaving – that which we were previously unconscious of.

In various ancient cultures, the importance of weaving and spinning was well understood, and associated with magic. The Norse volva held an iron staff, modelled on a distaff, and the goddess Frigga, wife of Odin and knower of many things, was associated too. All this, and also the Nornir, three giantmaids held to weave the wyrd of men and gods. The classical Fates also come to mind.

In each case, the imagery of threads being woven together applies; the various inputs and responses, interconnexions, relationships and feedbacks come together to form a whole – each Being connected, or entangled with each other – something that quantum physics is showing exists at the very smallest level of existence.

Nor is this notion of interconnection limited to Norse myth – the notion of Indra\’s net as a metaphor for the interconnected nature of the universe existed long before the mediaeval transcription of Norse myth:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each \”eye\” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering \”like\” stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

Recall what Gordon said about Bruno?

An infinite universe, a cosmos lit with countless little lamps extending into infinity.

If each of us is a lamp-jewel, reflecting all others in the Kosmos, what then?

And so, to return to the vision to the trapped man and animal – I told you we\’d be back, didn\’t I?

The man lies there, encircled in his agony. He waits for death, but the animal? The animal, possessed by its intelligence in distinction to Man\’s distant possessing of  it\’s intelligence, does not wait for some imagined future. Instead, it takes events as it comes.

The man lies there exhausted, unable to escape, convinced there is only death to wait for. But, in his agony, he has forgotten he is embedded in the world. Even his cell, even in his pain, there is Life.

In an animistic universe, all is Life – even, and especially, the air we breathe, is full of it. Recall that the root of animate, is breath.

So let us imagine, for a moment, that the man in the vision is quite ordinary, but for one thing – he is a magician.

And as a magician, rather than merely wait  for death, he has made it a habit to regularly contemplate his own demise. On some occasions, he sees and feels himself die violently by war, accident, by flame, drowning or weapon. On others he sees and feels a sickness devour him from within, or the weight of old age drag him into the grave.

And so, to pass the time, as he breathes, he begins to notice the feel of the air against his skin; the way it touches him always, the way it feels and tastes as it enters and exits his lungs, ever-present for every moment of his life. Slowly, surely, he realises he is surrounded cocooned by the breath, by the warmth of the sun and the earth, just as he was surrounded by amniotic fluid in the womb.

It occurs then, that he seems to recall wombtime; floating in warm darkness, life moving in and out of him through the navel, wastes and nutrition passing through him, moving within and without like the tides.

Immersed in that Kosmic ocean, he becomes aware that every piece of him is connected to every other piece, and that all these pieces are connected to everything else in the Kosmos. He knows there are those who wish him and others well, and so, as he abides, he allows his mind to dwell on those connexions, on all those who would wish an end to pain and suffering. He adds his own existence to the weight of all others, allows himself to become enthused with Life. His body adjusts, his pain remaining, but no longer the centre of his world.

Instead. it as if he is entangled with everything else. His every molecule attached to every other, his pain, his thought linked inextricably to all things. To move a hand, his hand, is to alter a world, to stir the waters, sending out ripples. To speak a word is to influence the entire Kosmos.

Understand, in this vision, there is no sense of conventional power, no mighty exertion. Only existing. Only Being. Moment to moment. All thought devoted to experience and flowing, rushing movement as Life enters and exits, runs through its infinite possibility.

What was a man lays aside the distance of \”human intelligence\” and becomes as-animal. That is, he allows himself to become fully animated, releasing his grip on any a particular shape of thought and form. He sinks deeper into the Waters, and finds their wellspring. He descends into the Well of Memory, moving beyond his personal history, his personal embodiment.

Perhaps he might be described as one of those jewels in Indra\’s net, quietly being reflected upon by, and reflecting back, the Kosmos?

Perhaps he might meet the one of the keepers of the well?

Who can say.

What is able to be spoken is that the breath is in his body and blood. Whether that be mere oxygen or something more esoteric, the fact remains – what lies within, lies without – and vice-versa. In an animist universe, the animation exists within us and without us. And if each of us is a jewel (or a star) reflecting all others, then are we in fact living lamps?

Can we not, if we care to, cultivate that light within our blood, becoming enthused beings who do not seek distance or escape, but rather to meet with and have communion with all experiences, Powers and Beings? Can we not discover the Life in all things, the Pleroma  unveiled?

What use static maps? What use the diktats from distant On High, from monocultural overlords?

Stamp your feet to the rhythm of your blood, to the pulse of Life. The Gnostic impulse is to know things, not on the terms of others, but from your own experience, from the union of yourself with Life in all its terror, beauty and vitality. The Primordial is an existence filled with a Pandaemonium, a cornucopia of Beingness. It is \’Their\’ world only insofar as we are not Them.

Except of course we are as Them. We are as animal, as strange and daemonic, as estranged from \”human intelligence\” as anything in the Kosmos. Two fingers (or one if you\’re American) up to the Archons, be they human, or otherwise.

We\’re coming back to the feral banquet, to the furious sabbat of Being. We\’re waking up to the orgy of Life.

orgy (n.)1560s, orgies (plural) \”secret rites in the worship of certain Greek and Roman gods,\” especially Dionysus, from Middle French orgies (c. 1500, from Latinorgia), and directly from Greek orgia (plural) \”secret rites,\” especially those of Bacchus, from PIE root *werg- \”to do\” (see organ). The singular, orgy, was first used in English 1660s for the extended sense of \”any licentious revelry.\” OED says of the ancient rites that they were \”celebrated with extravagant dancing, singing, drinking, etc.,\” which gives \”etc.\” quite a workout.

Time to remember – and:

So. There I am, minding my own business, lying in my sickbed, surfing the painkiller tides, on Wednesday.  And what happens? I see Gordon post about Kingliness and Jupiter, and fall into reading a nice little back and forth betwixt him and Jason Miller here, and here. You should probably read them, because they\’re good posts with valid points, and if you\’re into those points, go and buy The Chaos Protocols and Financial Sorcery respectively. Then, for the triple? Get Money Magic: Mastering Prosperity in its True Element, by Frater UD.

Pipe those into your brainmeat, and then watch as your perception of influence gets reshaped. Because, quite succinctly, it\’s not about the money. (I don\’t get paid for plugging books, for one.)

Anyway, I\’m lying in bed on Wednesday, and I\’m reading the back and forth when, as sometimes happens, I find myself propelled into the realms of synchronicity – the Cosmic Coincidence Control Centre spoken of by Robert Anton Wilson seems to spend time favouring me with high density bursts of Meaning, every so often.

Dozing every now and then between the paragraphs, I found my mind drawn to a line from Tacitus that, if you\’re a Heathen, gets thrown about, quite a bit:

Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims. Hercules and Mars they appease with more lawful offerings. Tacitus, Germania

The barbarian Germanic tribes, being uncivilized oiks in the eyes of the Romans, didn\’t worship Jupiter. Instead, they chiefly worshipped Mercury – a figure that scholars generally agree was some Continental Wodan/Woden/Odin analogue, with Mars being Tyr/Tiw, and Hercules being Thor/Thunor/Donar  (it\’s the club/hammer, see?)

No Jupiter for them. Instead, we have a rather different scenario – note the remark about lawful offerings? Their chief deity enjoys offerings which are unlawful to the Romans, which isn\’t too far a stretch to regarding it as criminal. Now granted, this is almost certainly the classic blood-libel against outsiders, but still, there\’s something here.

It\’s something that\’s puzzled scholars for many a year too. After all, linguistically, Tyr is closer to Zeus – suggesting a Sky-Fatherdom might have been part of Indo-Europeam mythemes until something shifted:

Tuesday (n.)third day of the week, Old English tiwesdæg, from Tiwes, genitive of Tiw \”Tiu,\” from Proto-Germanic *Tiwaz \”god of the sky,\” the original supreme deity of ancient Germanic mythology, differentiated specifically as Tiu, ancient Germanic god of war, from PIE *deiwos \”god,\” from root *dyeu- \”to shine\” (see diurnal). Compare Old Frisian tiesdei, Old Norse tysdagr, Swedish tisdag, Old High German ziestag.

The day name (second element dæg, see day) is a translation of Latin dies Martis (source of Italian martedi, French Mardi) \”Day of Mars,\” from the Roman god of war, who was identified with Germanic Tiw (though etymologically Tiw is related to Zeus), itself a loan-translation of Greek Areos hemera. In cognate German Dienstag and Dutch Dinsdag, the first element would appear to be Germanic ding, þing \”public assembly,\” but it is now thought to be from Thinxus, one of the names of the war-god in Latin inscriptions.

Tiw/Tyr is there in Norse Myth, but the chief god as given by Snorri in the Eddas is Odin. To him is accorded the title Allfather, patron of kings, nobles, and poets – while archaeology suggests that the ancient Icelander common folk were more fond of Thor. Further confusing to some is that this Norse patriarch is, quite frankly, a dodgy geezer. While Zeus, as Jupiter\’s Greek forerunner, is fond of getting his end away with mortals, he\’s still a pater famillias  in some senses – guarantor of the social order.

Odin, by contrast, is a morally ambiguous conman.  A mad, murderous, shape-shifting, knowledge-hungry gender ambiguous necromancer, wizard and wisdombringer, who’s fond of getting laid and leading an undead band of hunters and/or warriors in some grand kosmic multilevel game which manifests variously as a battle, story, poetry, and liberation from the forces of oppression and ignorance.

Nor is this just a Norse thing – what little reference we have to the Anglo-Saxon Woden suggests he was a lone wanderer or traveler, unless he brought his band of undead hunters with him. Recent scholarship (2014) in the European Journal of Archaeology even suggests that the famous Sutton Hoo helmet may have had had analogues across Scandinavia, analogues which had, amongst other things, eyes struck out.

Neil Price and Paul Mortimer, in their paper An Eye For Odin: Divine Role-Playing In The Age of Sutton Hoo  raise the possibility of the helmet being one-eyed in certain light conditions – specifically the low-light conditions of a medieval mead-hall, and that the ruler as helm-bearer might mimic, symbolise, or somehow host the one-eyed god. When we add this to the realisation that certain Anglo-Saxon royal dynasties traced descent directly from Woden, we may begin to wonder what precisely kingship meant to these Germanic peoples. It seems a long way away from certain ideas of kingship we moderns have been fed by endless costume dramas, doesn\’t it?

Suddenly, it seems as if might have to challenge our assumptions. Even within so-called traditions of monarchy, things are far from what they first appear – as Gordon puts it:

I pass palaces on my way to work. I’ve attended the same parties as princes. They don’t dress like real estate agents in strip clubs. That’s what a poor person’s view of a rich person looks like, and I said as much to Sef the other year. (I’m an amazing friend.) You see pictures of the Queen tootling about Balmoral in her old Range Rover and she looks like a bag lady who just hotwired a student car. Which, funnily enough, she could actually do, being a war mechanic and all.

Unlike Gordon, for myself personally as a British magician, I\’m not allergic to gods. If I was allergic to gods, I\’d be sneezing all the bloody time, and the state of my skin would be absolutely terrible, because  this place is full of them. Just like it\’s full of sheep and rainy days and crumbling stately houses and megaliths that are five thousand years old. They\’re part of the furniture, part of the climate. To steal an analogy from certain Eastern philosophies, they\’re nothing special, nothing inherently superior. In the same way a tiger or the Ebola virus isn\’t superior, they just are – a particular order of beings.

Maybe it\’s because I\’m the son of a clergyman, and while not having visited palaces, I\’ve taken tea with the local landowning family that can trace its lineage back to god knows when, while on the same day drunk with farmers and fishermen and builders. Being Church-By-Association can get you rubbing elbows with unlikely folks – the Church and State are, just about, still a thing here. The Queen is, after all Defender of the Faith, initiated in a temple by a high priest.

If you start thinking mythically, and hence magically, things are a lot odder than one might first suppose.

So, it\’s Wednesday (not Tuesday, mark you) and I\’m lying in bed dealing with the pain of an unhealed wound.

(Yes. I know. The Fisher King resonances have been bugging me for years. Don\’t even get me started on the Lombards, the Quinotaur or the Merovingians.)

Now:

As is my wont when bedbound, I turn to Netflix for distraction, and currently am making my way through the BBC\’s Hustle, which is all about a gang of grifters, or con-men. (I am also, unsurprisingly, fond of the US show Leverage) I surface from another morphine-induced doze to find I\’ve missed the beginning of the third season, and now we\’re on episode 3, entitled:

Ties That Bind Us.

I come around specifically ,just as we\’re introduced to the character James Whitaker Wright III – grandson to a financier and conman who conned British banks in the 19th century by floating non-existent goldmines on the London Stock Exchange. The bank in particular he targeted is called Cornfoots – possibly a reference to Coutts, a real private bank founded in 1692 and patronised by the British Royal Family and other wealthy clients, including the company which owns the land my flat is on.

(Hurrah for paying ground rent the Right Sort TM(!))

So, the episode already has all the threes. Fair enough. Except, well…erm, yes. Forgive my terrible GIF-ing  but it\’s the only way to convey my surprise and mirth:

Bearded Man approaches young fellow about a ring? How very Gandalf meets Southern gent, I thought drowsily, amused at my own cleverness:

\”Try your hand against a real crossroader?\” Wait…what? I stopped, blinked, and hit rewind.

Nope, still said cross-roader.

\”Bite my own eye.\” Wait, this is a show about grifters, I know that con from somewhere, I\’m sure…It\’s not..? No…Can\’t be, surely?

Oh. Oh no. I don\’t believe it either, Danny.

\”I\’m there, minding my own business, and then he shows up.\” As pretty much every person I know who has interacted with the being I call the Old Man will testify, this description pretty much nails it.

Gordon again:

There is a reason The Chaos Protocols has a crossroad pact with the Devil in it. If you were to bundle up everything I don’t like about this world, about monoculture, and build a temple to it, it would be the temple to Jupiter I see in the Roman forum whenever I go there. (Or, at least, what little remains of it. Hail chaos.)

Now, see, in the book Gordon mentions Loki-as-trickster, but here\’s the thing – his blood-brother Odin is actually attested as taking crossroad pacts in 1692 in return for money, as well as data from 15th century witch-trials in Sweden. There\’s even a fourteenth century runestick which calls upon Odin as \”the greatest of all devils.\” Add to this, a story recorded  by a man born in 1926, of an an early 19th century hunter who was advised to make a pact with Odin to improve his hunting luck!

Even allowing for cultural shifts and Christianization, there is still a traceable link to Odin-at-crossroads-as-gallows-site from ancient times. Such things are attested in the Eddas – this god of Kings and Nobles is no Jupiter. The interpetatio romana  is accurate as far as it goes – Mercury is god of trade, thieves and wealth, so comparisons can be made. Yet for these barbarians, at least for a large swathe of history, this was the god greatest respect was paid to, to the extent of human sacrifice.

I\’ve little time for nationalism in the form of borders and politics. There\’s a reason this blog is called Cold Albion – it refers to the mythic poetic wild power which dwells in the land. I\’ve got a lot out of Jason\’s Strategic Sorcery course, but for me, if there\’s a kingness in this island, it\’s shot through with that barbarian grifterdom. London may be Roman, but it sits on older wellings of power.  Is it any wonder that the City is full of thieves and geezers in sharp suits? And is it any wonder that there are poor folk who still go to the crossroads, or magicians seeking knowledge?

Not, I think, too hard to comprehend this other Kingship when our psyches are also suffused with Arthur and his warband, only latterly civilised into knights. Not too hard when the god of kings is a lonely wanderer, an unexpected guest, leading his rowdy band into civilised homes and catapulting us out into adventures of terror and wonder.

You can keep your Pater Famillias, thanks. I\’ll stick with the grifter  god who comes on raven wings, bringing the storm as he walks between raindrops, the mad capricious fellow who makes and breaks kings. I\’ll keep the bloody Mercury with the bone grin, pipe and drum. The masked, strange-horned dancing devil with one eye who poses us the gnostic riddle of our own death.

He\’s been running the gig for thousands of years, after all.

Catch you at the crossroads, friends.

Not content with me residing in a morphine-based haze, Gordon\’s  gone and done a number on the back of my brain with his post entitled \”They Live In The Starlight.\” Go and read it, because I can\’t be arsed re-contextualising it fully. Suffice to say, his remarks about following the wrong birds and hence not eating for a week ring horribly true to me.

I call following the \’right\’ birds black bird magic  because of many reasons, but in actual fact, it\’s because in the particular grammar of my worldview, black birds are a multi-level multivalent symbol of meaning. Crows, ravens (and almost all corvids including rooks, jackdaws and magpies) and other black winged carrion-eaters and raptors such as vultures and eagles, all operate within a constellation of Importance.

On one level, it\’s quite simple – where there\’s a bunch of the black birds, there\’s usual something  going on Growing up in rural Cornwall, you\’d see great flocks of them congregate when the earth had been turned by farmers; to say nothing of the classic idea that they appear where dead things are. So already, we have the idea of chthonic, deathly revelation. What\’s hidden is revealed, what\’s under the earth is brought to the surface. Conversely, the seed put down into that earth attracts them, so they exist at that interface-point. Winged messengers descending from on high to consume the fruits of the earth and under the earth. They eat the dead things too – are at home in the trash stratum of Phil K Dick. Gaining nutrition from the excrement, from the rubbish, from what would be corrupt and rotting, they can make food out nearly anything.

That\’s just practical observation, except for the metaphor of the winged messengers, right? But lets cast ourselves back to the hunter-gatherer stage – where the black birds are, there\’s nutrition. Maybe we, as hunter-gatherers, can get some meat without having to expend so much energy running down prey, eh? Maybe there\’s a clump of nutritious plants nearby. You get the idea. They convey the message of import, the thing that allows you to survive.

And the weird thing is, they get to know you. They recognise the hunter-gatherer, the one who leaves them leftovers, the farmer who digs up those tasty worms and bugs. And if you listen to them, you could swear they\’re communicating complex ideas with each other (and it seems you\’d be right). So, the literal lived experience of the black birds occurs first. Then you dig down, and find that the raven\’s head – the caput mortuum or caput corvi – is associated with putrefaction. with nigredo in alchemy. Have you ever looked at a crow\’s feather ? Black as night, except when the light catches it just so. Then you see the whole rainbow, somehow hidden within the darkness.

Lived experience again.

Signs of death, of putrefaction, of potential nutrition. Of hidden light and colour. Signs that can solve problems, and that can speak..

Or, this full documentary is pretty good for a watch, talking about the communication and facial recognition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89C5gsdaSXg

The point being, these associations are logical extrapolations of lived experience – they do not come from nowhere. They are not made up out of whole cloth. Instead, they arise out of context and observation – all the magical correspondences you\’ve ever seen, all the narratives and systems, grew out of a moment when the kosmos connected with the human mind and in doing so evoked something, brought it forth. As Gordon says:

This brings us back to the ‘rainforest’ of ‘cultural symbolism’. Theoretically, the chaos magical use of cultural symbols can yield equivalent magical effects as using more traditional mythological systems, but only in certain instances. There is a naïve assumption -which I have repeatedly stressed was never there in chaos magic’s original formulation- that you can just use anything you want and they’re all the same. But if you go looking for apotheosis in the subtext of Everybody Loves Raymond rather than the X-Files then you are ‘following the wrong birds’ and your family won’t be eating pig that week. Or ever. The problem with so-called pop culture magic is not on the magic side… it’s on the fact that modern culture is mostly shit and getting worse. In fact, you are better off approaching any of this from an almost Alan Moore direction: art is always magic and sometimes popular culture. Find the art, not the pop.

This is no institutional theory of art, either. Rather than asking What is Art? the kind of art in question is that which induces, which affects, and produces effect. Let\’s take Star Wars as an example, or Lord Of The Rings. These did not come out of nowhere, but rather were deliberate attempts to evoke the power of myth, to bring forth the mechanisms of affect. When I sat in the cinema as The Two Towers came out, I was, in some sense, joining my childhood self reading the book, entering once again the world of Middle Earth. And that world was conceived in the mind of Tolkien, who himself drew on Norse myth and Anglo Saxon lore,

George Lucas worked Star Wars in such a way that it evoked themes as described by Joseph Campbell. Campbell himself developed his theory of mythic structure by distilling, comparing and contrasting myths from all over the world. There\’s a continuity there. As I sat in the cinema watching The Force Awakens  a second time, I thought about all the idiocy of those who said it was just a rehash of the original trilogy. Idiocy, because of course it revisits themes and story beats. Of course it tells the story of a family dynasty and rebels and outcasts and heroes.

Because myth is cyclical. Mythic time is cyclical. The reiteration of theme and shape occurs because these, like the black birds, are Symbols, signs and portents. The spoor of the numinous reaching out to catch the human mind, to coyly hint at its ever-presence.

portent (n.) 1560s, from Middle French portente, from Latin portentum \”a sign, token, omen; monster, monstrosity,\” noun use of neuter of portentus, past participle of portendre (see portend).

portend (v.) early 15c., from Latin portendere \”foretell, reveal; point out, indicate,\” originally \”to stretch forward,\” from por- (variant of pro-; see pro-) \”forth, forward\” + tendere \”to stretch, extend\” (see tenet). Related: Portended; portending.

tenet (n.) \”principle, opinion, or dogma maintained as true by a person, sect, school, etc.,\” properly \”a thing held (to be true),\” early 15c., from Latin tenet \”he holds,\” third person singular present indicative of tenere \”to hold, grasp, keep, have possession, maintain,\” also \”reach, gain, acquire, obtain; hold back, repress, restrain;\” figuratively \”hold in mind, take in, understand.\”

The Latin word is from PIE root *ten- \”to stretch\” (cognates: Sanskrit tantram \”loom,\” tanoti \”stretches, lasts;\” Persian tar \”string;\” Lithuanian tankus\”compact,\” i.e. \”tightened;\” Greek teinein \”to stretch,\” tasis \”a stretching, tension,\” tenos \”sinew,\” tetanos \”stiff, rigid,\” tonos \”string,\” hence \”sound, pitch;\” Latin tendere \”to stretch,\” tenuis \”thin, rare, fine;\” Old Church Slavonic tento \”cord;\” Old English þynne \”thin\”). Connecting notion between \”stretch\” and \”hold\” is \”cause to maintain.\” The modern sense is probably because tenet was used in Medieval Latin to introduce a statement of doctrine.

It strings us along, lays a thread for us to follow, like Ariadne leaving Theseus a thread so he could escape the Labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. We\’ll come back to Ariadne later, but for now, it\’s the thread which is important. The connecting sinew that binds us, that holds us, that possesses us.

This is something that we\’ve only recently forgotten about, in some senses. Ironically, it is this loss of memory which propels us to explore, to descend and learn and bring forth. Not only have we forgotten the things we once knew as magicians and wyrd folk, but we seem to think we can automatically do things better.  The cyclical, spiralling understanding, the back and forth  has been abandoned in favour of straight line, linear progress.

Now, I\’m not being so foolish as to say \’older is better.\’ Often, those older things have become moribund, hidebound pieces of ineffectiveness based on simple \”doing what has always been done\”. But, again like the birds and their Symbolism, it is often forgotten that these older, traditional systems, came forth out of lived experience. 

It\’s that experience, that becoming acquainted with, that gnosis  of the cross-roads meeting point, which we seek. The moment where something is summoned forth from Memory. Memory then, is not merely the act of recall, but the grasping and following of that thread.

Which brings us to a link passed my way by the good Dr. Al Cummins in a conversation on Mugtome,  It\’s an academic article on John of Morigny – a medieval scholar who wrote Liber Florum,  a text which was intended to \’destroy\’ the Solomonic grimoire known as Ars Notoria. Now, by \’destroy\’ we mean a series of prayers and rites designed to remove the demonic influence from the rites and preserve the holy core of knowledge which somehow remained in the Ars Notoria.

Except, good old John didn\’t actually write the purificatory text of Liber Florum – or rather, he wrote it but it had an otherworldy originator. Specifically, the Virgin Mary. From the article:

John petitioned the Virgin for the delivery of Liber florum\’s thirty central prayers for the explicit purpose of destroying the Ars Notoria, which John had come to regard as demonically corrupt. […] Though John aimed at destroying the Ars Notoria, he also stated he wished to preserve what was good and holy in it, and that he had plundered its divine words as the Hebrews had plundered the Egyptian treasure.

[…]

[R]eliance on an idea of  prelapsarian knowledge which is constituted primarily in a curriculum is perhaps the most important common feature of the two texts. Both open with general prayers for the faculties which enable absorption of learning: memory, perseverance, stability, eloquence. Both proceed via a series of prayers and figures through the seven liberal arts, first the trivium, then the quadrivium, leading to prayers and figures designed to take philosophy, and in the culminating stage, theology.

The seven liberal arts formed the basis of a medieval education, themselves passed down from the Graeco-Roman world, something they share in common with Hermetic philosophy. This article by John Michael Greer of the Art of Memory in Hermetica is worth a read to get some context, but I\’d like  to return to John of Morigny, in his own words:

On a certain night, I was placed in a kind of ecstasy, whether in the body or out of the body I know not, God knows. And lo, I saw a certain horrible figure, and it seemed to me absolutely certain that it was the enemy of the human race. And that figure rose up against me, wishing and craving to suffocate me. When I saw it, I fled aghast in great fear from its terrible face and it pursued me hither and thither and could not catch me, and yet pressed upon me as it followed, so that I left the house that I was in, fleeing from the face of my persecutor. And when I went outside, it did not cease to pursue me; and when it rose up hugely I stopped in my tracks and ran towards the church of the blessed Mary. I entered it through the right hand door of the main entrance on the west front , and when I was in the church, I immediately lifted my eyes – I was next to the door at some distance from it – towards the image of the blessed virgin Mary. And lo, suddenly the devoted virgin Mary counselled me sweetly with a sign of her arm that I should come to her. After seeing this, I ran to her quickly and fled as though to the true comfort and refuge of sinners.

As the article states, the iconic link between Mary and the liberal arts  is clear – and it is through purification of the soul that one may access the prelapsarian knowledge, for learning is said to be the uncovering and remembering of the knowledge. But this knowledge is not the knowledge of men, but of God – complete, whole and absolute. In this sense, it\’s displaying its Neoplatonic heritage. Track that back further, and what do we find but the pre-Socratic notion that knowledge is learnt from the gods, or in the case of Parmeneides – a Goddess.

Which brings us rather neatly back to Ariadne. In some versions of the myth, she is abandoned by Theseus, only to be be found by Dionysos and made his wife, raised to godhood. The same Dionysos whose maenads tore apart Orpheus. You know, the poet-singer who went to the underworld. The one who is supposed to have founded the tradition which left tablets instructing the initiate to identify themselves to the judges in the underworld as being of Earth and Starry Heaven. Doing this, gets them a drink from the well of the Mnemosyne – you know, the Titaness?

Oh, and the name of the Minotaur, at the centre of the underground Labyrinth? Asterion, or Starry.

All of this goes some way to show the recurring signs and symbols involved here. The Wyrd is a shameless flirt, a coquettish trickster leading us on in some erotic game. Onward, ever onward, except like a labyrinth, we end up circling back on ourselves, going ever deeper each time. And whether its the crazy furor guy driving us, or the utterly pure (arihagne) virgin, we are propelled into ecstasy. We are taken outside, set beside ourselves by that thread, by that noose.

Art is the propulsion method, the affector. Culture is an accretion, a stabilisation mechanism and mode of defence against the High Strangeness because we intuitively understand that there\’s a very real risk we might get torn apart by it. What\’s popular is often so diluted that it often has only the  tiniest morsel of it left, because anything more would threaten stability. The task then, is to mine, to dig, to follow the signs through and beyond the popular – run the risk of getting lost in the rainforest, dying of dysentery and snake\’s poison.

We enter into a world that is run on non-human logic, returning once more to a state which is variously described as primal, prelapsarian, pre-Adamic – Titanic in some senses. This is not popular. Not something that extends into realms of sociability. Because to find one\’s own relation to the neighbours, to the daemonic, is to become daemonic. There comes a time when one has dug down to a level where the raw affect leaves one uncivilised, shuddering and shaking, unmoored from what everyone else knows.

Nor is this hyper-individualism – one might start out worshiping Marvel\’s Thor because you like the character, or because you want to assume a godform of a thunder deity who millions have watched on screen, reasoning that its more relevant than some archaeological deity. But dig further and you\’ll find he was created by Jack Kirby, the mad bastard artist of comics, with a whole load of strange and paranormal associations under his belt. Then the blond guy with the hammer might shift in your perception to a burly redhead who drives a chariot of endlessly resurrecyted goats, until that day when thunder rolls and you see the lightning connect heaven and earth in an erotic charge. The thunder hammers your ears, shakes your bones, and suddenly you become aware of the beingness behind the medieval texts, the presence behind the thing your mind shapes like a man.

And boom. There\’s just you and a thing generations have called a god. It was never about you.

Because there\’s always More. To quote Michael Bertiaux:

¨In opposition to all humanistic culture, we are lured ever to the brink of chaos. We want to go where we are forbidden. We want to know what has been denied to us. We seek, in a word, the ‘more’.¨

If it\’s turtles all the way down, we become-as-turtle, in a erotic congress from which emerges Art itself. We re-birth Symbols, bring them forth in our own flesh, our own lives. We scavenge the mounds of trash, scavenging for the nuggest of nutrition, the shining gleam of the numinous. Ingesting it, we are inspired, intoxicated, and in ecstasy. It is within that ecstasy that we attend the sabbats, we take our place as co-creators of the world, affectors and affected.

Art doesn\’t belong to you. It belongs to all beings as a method to break us out of that humanistic fugue trance, if only for a moment. Art seizes, it possesses, it disrupts and reawakens.

And if the pop culture is the tamed, gentled version, then it is is time to voyage back along the ancestral tree, from the cute puppy to the feral direwolf  which may or may not walk like a man under all moons but the full. Back to the age of ice where naked hunters waited steaming in the blizzard, warmed by inner fires while their prey froze to death. Back to see what made them that way, and to touch it once more.

The fusional  chimeric mediating Being at the centre of the labyrinth is our own quixotic mirrored soul which reveals the immensity of the daemonic. Then it casts aside one mask after another and we realise that it is not us that possess Soul, but Soul who possesses us; the awe-inspiring, terrible ever-desiring, constantly creating pandaemonic All.

The bricolage of the magician draws its power from a well of Memory, until all events and objects can be re-membered, put together again, thrumming with might and potency as enlivened members of a whole. The well of Wyrd connects us all, and it is bottomless.

Down into the Underworld and out into the stars we must go.

There’s no such thing as Authenticity, or being Real as opposed to fake. No static boundary to cross, no goal to make. To suggest that there is a quality, distinct and clear, is to misunderstand the fact that Being is continuous. This is not post modernism – on the contrary it is pre-modern in nature.

There’s a rushing sense to it, like trying to catch silver fish in a running river with your bare hands. The moment you grip it, the fish wriggles, changes. The water cascades around you. All the sensations impinge and impress upon you, but they are there one moment, and then gone the next, replaced by something new.

Authenticity always hearkens to the past, to the moment when you finally realise what a thing is – except by the time the realisation forms, what spurred it has gone.

The only solution to this problem, such as it is a problem at all, is to note that the Primordial exists as a kind of Never-Was.

Insofar as Never can be described as a specific species of negation, the Never-Was negates the past as fixity.Instead of fixity, we are presented with Fate that is not oriented futurewards – indeed, there is no futurity. There is only the Primordial, which itself is a mere label since there’s actually no numerical sense involved – no primary, secondary, tertiary etc.

But what manner of Fate are we describing, this thing which is apart from our notions of past, present and future? In this, we consider the premodern word

Urðr,  from which we derive wyrd, and weird.

Wyrd is not past, present or future. Indeed, in old texts like Beowulf, it is said wyrd always goes as it must.

In this sense, wyrd, fate does not conform to past-present future – even when we factor in Verðandi (happening) and Skuld (debt/obligation/consequence) we are not experiencing the same tripartite structure.

Even gods are bound by wyrd – which is to say there is an inexorable process occupying what we might conceivably visualise as as a simultaneous Before-Between-After and yet permeating all events, too.

Therefore, there is no distinct Authenticity, there is only wyrd, and in considering this, we are faced with the possibility that our actions are not our own alone, but also the actions of every entity within the kosmos. Our actions may in fact be the description of negative space – our lives are like the air inside a lung, shaped by ‘outside’ forces and yet influencing those forces though the air seems apparently empty space.

In this, we approach again, the Nietzschean amor fati. If God is Dead (insofar as God is understood as a singular moral arbiter and guarantor of so-called explicit ‘order’, rather than some specific Abrahamic deity) then we are liberated from notions of linear progression. Instead of a single line, we are presented with a vast manifold, a cornucopia of options which, paradoxically to our modern minds, require deliberate intensity – wilful Dionysiac engagement with all events and occurrences, beyond all notions of so-called Good and Evil, Real and Fake.

And this is not easy. Indeed it is the hardest labour of all, to  see all events as but Images, endless protean iterations of wyrd, each one a portal to all others – an entangled web gleaming with burnished illuminating darkness.

This does not mean that all things are equal – indeed it demands we engage with all these Images anew, differently each time, on a case by case basis. The seeming lack of guarantee of value does not, and never has, levelled the landscape of existence into a marketable, democratized form. Instead, we are driven to seek that value, as a people entering an unknown land must explore it in order to find those resources which will allow them to live, and live well.

By embracing this Terra Incognita, we face death, annihilation and loss. Our fears are our daemonic companions by which we might find the dragons we always dreamt of, unlocking ancient serpent wisdom – the knowing-of existence itself.

We would do well to consider the words of Philip K. Dick:  “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.”

The unwanted, excreted, exiled, the thrown-away, the impure and the monstrous – all these are cast out, and in that casting are imbued with a Beyondness, shot through with alien Outsiderness.

As exiles, they become messages and mediums carrying the previously unknown, the forgotten. They are the first place the Wyrd breaks through – as evidenced by the works of Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal in particular

We ourselves are patchwork creatures – inheriting genes, speech patterns, beliefs and tastes in many different endlessly inventive iterations. If one were to slice our lives into pieces, it is doubtful each piece would recognise the other as itself,. All we have then, is the wyrd of it, the unutterable strangeness of our own existence, our own experience, which of course is not our own, but an Image composed of all the kosmos coming to be within the localised envelope of appearance we call life.

It is in this highly localised  environment that the kosmos reveals itself, each moment brimming with daemonic creativity, mirthful tricksy divinity. that mocks and pokes fun at our dearly held notions of matter, space, time, morality and perception.

It is that wriggling silver fish, that rushing stream, the chill in your bones, the hunger that drove you to even try. It is the cry your mother made in the moments before your birth, the last rattle of your own breath as you die.

Vast, immeasurable and irrational, seeking to lead you on a wild goose-chase into the woods with the faeries. The fleeing deer who catches and kills its hunter with bloody velvet antlers covered in carven magic spells meant to bewitch so as the laughing god might have true, honoured sacrifice.

It’s the lights in the sky that dazzle the eye and violate the laws of physics with criminal intent, the old stone that writhes all mossy under your fingertips, the whorls and lines catching starlight in a net and letting it loose in bottomless pools wherein lie maidens waiting to drag you down to the underworld.

Strange and terrible charlatan magi in feathered cloaks and broad-brimmed hats howling barbarous words while birdheaded scribes stain stone with hieroglyphs that last for tens of centuries. Thieves, liars, illusionists, pariahs and poets.

And it’s wyrd, this raw strangeness, this sly and terrible hint, this cold-edged spine-burn of tear jerking, gulping joyous immensity. This vertiginous yawning gulf of momentary knowing  which passes understanding and comes to bring sword-peace and pulsing, surging life.

Enough to wake the dead and have them climbing from their tombs and dancing, all foxfire-illumined in the cavernous starry gulfs. Look careful there, and you might just catch your own face amongst them, shorn of care, before you’re whirled and spun and struck by the awe of their ever-presence – sent madly careening through the fields of your own doubts, laughing all the while.

Then, chilled by the dew upon your skin, on the morning after the night before, cold grey comedown will make you wonder, make you reason, make you seek some rhyme and rhythm as it all recedes.

And that’s the way of it – rationality pours concrete over starry meadows. Day after day, you might be faced with that greyness, until one day, it seems that’s all there is. So that’s when you sit. When you seize the concrete, when you rake that plane with the sheer stress of your regard. Seize its pitting and its pattern, its grit and its surface, and then, as its imperfections swell, its brutalism cuts and bruises your heart, let yourself bleed. Let yourself mourn. Let yourself howl for the forgotten things you think you have lost.

Then:

Aye, and then, there’ll be that single, stunted, broken blade of grass, parched and browning. Exhausted, fallen, a crippled corpse severed from its fellows. Stabs deeper than a knife, that blade – delivers a mortal wound, so it does.

In the moment, its all too much. You die, or some part of you does. It falls away, crumbling away. Lies there, curled and brown, circling grass around some outcast dream that can no longer survive the desert of existence.

Except..where did that grass come from?

From whence sprang that tiny thing, in all this field of blankness and sharp edges?

Look again, and its gone. Look thrice though, and you’ll see it’s not alone. On the edges, in the neglected parts, there grows scrub, there grows weed and thorn. Raggedy, out-of-place, having no home here, no right to be present.

How in all hell does it survive, you might wonder?

Even weeds have roots. Beyond what is seen, down and down, they stretch into the earth. They are everywhere, and this is just a metaphor, an analogy. A story, a lie – and yet, well..

Wyrd, innit?

In a way, it\’s fitting that my first post after the blog\’s return from being hacked is written under the influence of morphine. After all, mankind has enjoyed a close, if somewhat fraught relationship with the poppy, for thousands of years.

Whether that be out in Afghanistan, China, the opium dens of Britain and America, or even the Romantic poets and the Victorians with their laudanum and other preparations, it\’s been around for a long, long time. It\’s in my particular system for health reasons which I shan\’t go into here, but suffice to say the last few months have not  been particularly pleasant.

Why do I bring this up? Possibly, to explain the nature of this post, and to ask for some forgiveness if yr. humble correspondent strays from the paths of relevancy. Yet also to mention that, though it took me weeks to read, my conciousness ebbing and flowing, my attention wavering from print after only a few moments like the proverbial stoned ape, I really enjoyed Gordon\’s first book.

In case you didn\’t know, that\’s Star.Ships: A Prehistory Of The Spirits and it\’s really good. Like, 2001-monolith good. Somehow, Gordon\’s managed to distil down a slab of something which, if you approach it with an open mind, might very well give you some new ground to recontextualise myth amd magic. Let it into your brain and see where you end up.

But this isn\’t a review. No, this is – actually I don\’t know what this is,  but I was occasionally nicknamed Coleridge at university, so you\’ll have to forgive my fugue and put up with a sort of juxtapositional quotefest:

WE ARE THE WITCHCRAFT. We are the oldest organization in the world. When man was born, we were. We sang the first cradle song. We healed the first wound, we comforted the first terror. We were the Guardians against the Darkness, the Helpers on the Left Hand Side. Rock drawings in the Pyrenees remember us, and little clay images, made for an old purpose when the world was new. Our hand was on the old stone circles, the monolith, the dolmen, and the druid oak. We sang the first hunting songs, we made the first crops to grow; when man stood naked before the Powers that made him, we sang the first chant of terror and wonder. We wooed among the Pyramids, watched Egypt rise and fall, ruled for a space in Chaldea and Babylon, the Magian Kings. We sat among the secret assemblies of Israel, and danced the wild and stately dances in the sacred groves of Greece.
(John Whiteside Parsons, We Are The Witchcraft)

And:

Before we knew how to farm, before we lived in villages, before we even knew how to make pots, we built a star temple on a hill. The simplicity of this statement belies its astounding implications. […] We did not build Göbekli Tepe in Southeastern Turkey because a surplus of stored food allowed a priestly class to emerge and tell us make-believe stories. We did not monitor the movements of the stars because it told us when to plant crops, because we weren’t planting crops.We built Göbekli Tepe because it expressed something about ourselves and our place in the universe. The temple complex restores the quest for meaning to its preeminent place atop the goals of human life. Philosophy is rescued from being a mere nighttime hobby of farmers to being the defining human trait, that which we value most. This is what the site’s discoverer, Dr Klaus Schmidt, means when he says that the cathedral predates the city. It may well have been the coming together for spiritual reasons that birthed settled cultures, rather than the other way around.”
Star.Ships: A Prehistory Of The Spirits, Gordon White

 

All very well you might say. But who is this John Whiteside Parsons? Originally born as Marvel Whiteside Parsons, named after his father who left, and then latterly becoming known as John?

Around here, we call him Jack Motherfucking Parsons. Look him up. You\’ll find he has a crater on the dark side of the moon named after him, helped found what became NASA\’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked Ritual Magic with L Ron Hubbard – yes, that L Ron Hubbard, and blew himself up in a lab explosion. This is the guy who looks so terrifyingly like the father of Tony Stark (Marvel Comics IRON MAN) that I swear it\’s one of those Things.

Why do I bring this up? Because as well as introducing Grady McMurtry to Thelema, he is instrumental in our attempts to get. To. The. Stars. A scientist, Thelemite, magician, libertine, who gave us jet fuel and Solid Rocket Boosters. Like Dee he had a dodgy partner – L Ron was his Kelley in some senses. There are even the wife swapping parallels.

Now, no disrespect to my Thelemic chums, but if the OTO had as much pull and celebrity influence as the Church of Scientology does/did, perhaps it might be further along with the whole Thelemic worldwide project, eh?  But, no matter.

Therefore our name is Lucifer. We are on the side of freedom, of love, of joy and laughter and divine drunkenness. Therefore our name is Babalon.

Sometimes we move openly, sometimes in silence and in secret. Night and day are one to us, calm and storm, seasons and the cycles of man, all these things are one, for we are at the roots. Supplicant we stand before the Powers of Life and Death, and are heard of these Powers, and avail. Our way is the secret way, the unknown direction. Our way is the way of the serpent in the underbrush, our knowledge is in the eyes of goats and of women. (Parsons, Ibid)

And:

“While Laurasia may be the ‘containing narrative’ for Western magic, many of its spirits are at least Gondwanan and potentially Pan-Gaean. You can even make the case – and I do – that ‘true’ Western magic, devoid of its much, much later onboarding of Neoplatonism, is a practical application of a Pan-Gaean world-view: God may exist but its existence is materially irrelevant; the Trickster/Devil is the gatekeeper and lord of culture; and it is recourse to local spirits and the dead by way of sacrifice that is the most commonly performed action. The witch is a very old woman and she has been on a long, long walk.” (White, Ibid)

It\’s been interesting, hasn\’t it, the discussion of the Devil in various blogs, within Wicca and Witchcraft? Even Llewellyn has authors getting in on the act too. Somewhere I can hear a chuckle as a Wanderer throws up the horns, walking along the corpse-paths of starry night. And then there\’s the film, The Witch: Black Philip and the dark woods:, all warm-mouthed and living deliciously, hot buttered young crumpet and old hag dancing in Sabbattic Nightflight.

Ochre-red handprints, human and otherwise, pressed on the stone roof, the curvature of the Earth propelling us Down and Into Abyssal Starry Gulfs amongst the immortal, feral dead – all unbound, justified and ancient. Uttering barbarous words that are no words in any mortal tongue because they\’re the language of the shining angels, the black and hungry birds. Lucifer – Light-bringer. Morning Star The name for Venus. High in the heavens and within her Sibylic Mound within the Earth.

This is the monolith. The single stone. Except it\’s not single. Not at all.

No more than Crowley and Coleridge had their problems with opiates alone – the former, heroin, the latter laudanum. No more than I have a precisely calibrated slow release of morphine sulphate movng through my bloodstream even now, prescribed by healers whose ancestors once dreamt in caves and earned the wisdom of the pharmakon from the spirits. No more than years ago, when the hunters and the gatherers came together and met and talked and told grandmother stories, and grandfather stories. No more when serpents and eagles and scorpions wheeled above them and writhed against stone pillars, when the memories of all the Floods that ever were, sluiced through minds primed for the remembrance of times lost.

We are the Witchcraft, and although one may not know another, yet we are united by an indissoluble bond. And when the high wild cry of the eagle sounds in your mind, know that you are not alone in your desire for freedom. And when the howl of the wolf echoes in the forests of your night, know that there are those who also prowl. And when the ways of your fellows about you seem the ways of idiocy and madness, know that there are also others who have seen and judged – and acted. (Parsons)

To place things in context – nobody is talking about a single Ur-text, no singular method of hierarchical transmission. The words and phrases, Gondwana, Laurasia, antediluvian – these are mere placeholders. No early twentieth century Perennialism here. No nineteenth century Murrayist Old Religion which requires slavish reconstructionism. The palm tree becomes oak, becomes ash. The mundus imaginalis, in all its intermediary intercessory wonder, reaches out. There have been a hundred Atlantises, a thousand – the wisdom teachers who carry the memories of a drowned land are legion, because of the nature of stories  and Being. Because there have been events and times which must be kept as doorways, preserved as the very vessels which carry us to the realm of the stars.

As above, so below is not merely some comment on the tendency of humans to plot the movements of the heavenly bodies. Nor is it solely a statement on the holographic, holistic nature of so-called reality. It is an aid to memory, a signpost to communion. For it says that the stars are not, have never been, apart from us. That stellar chthonic realm, that endless arching curve of the velvet heavens, is us.

The way up is the way down. That constellation of Tricksters with ten thousand faces, those daemonic culture heroes – strange-grifters all. That legion of daemons led by some hoary-headed thing of laughter, wonder and terror. That feral band of night-dancers, terrible in its singular gravity, curving space and time, twisting it into lemiscate knots to hover above the heads of charlatans.

There\’s an awful marvel here, friends.

marvel (n.)c. 1300, \”miracle,\” also \”wonderful story or legend,\” from Old French merveille \”a wonder, surprise, miracle,\” from Vulgar Latin *miribilia (also source of Spanish maravilla, Portuguese maravilha, Italian maraviglia), altered from Latin mirabilia \”wonderful things,\” from neuter plural of mirabilis\”wonderful, marvelous, extraordinary; strange, singular,\” from mirari \”to wonder at,\” from mirus \”wonderful\” (see smile). A neuter plural treated in Vulgar Latin as a feminine singular.

miracle (n.)mid-12c., \”a wondrous work of God,\” from Old French miracle (11c.) \”miracle, story of a miracle, miracle play,\” from Latin miraculum \”object of wonder\” (in Church Latin, \”marvelous event caused by God\”), from mirari \”to wonder at, marvel, be astonished,\” figuratively \”to regard, esteem,\” from mirus\”wonderful, astonishing, amazing,\” earlier *smeiros, from PIE *smei- \”to smile, laugh\” (cognates: Sanskrit smerah \”smiling,\” Greek meidan \”to smile,\” Old Church Slavonic smejo \”to laugh;\” see smile (v.)).

From mid-13c. as \”extraordinary or remarkable feat,\” without regard to deity. Replaced Old English wundortacen, wundorweorc. The Greek words rendered as miracle in the English bibles were semeion \”sign,\” teras \”wonder,\” and dynamis \”power,\” in Vulgate translated respectively as signum,prodigium, and virtus. The Latin word is the source of Spanish milagro, Italian miracolo.

smile (v.)c. 1300, perhaps from Middle Low German *smilen or a Scandinavian source (such as Danish smile \”smile,\” Swedish smila \”smile, smirk, simper, fawn\”), from Proto-Germanic *smil-, extended form of PIE root *smei- \”to laugh, smile\” (cognates: Old English smerian \”to laugh at, scorn,\” Old High Germansmieron \”to smile,\” Latin mirus \”wonderful,\” mirari \”to wonder\”). Related: Smiled; smiling.

wundortacen, wundorweorc.  Signs and wonders. Powers and portents.

Because it was never about us. Never. The human was never the centre of the universe. Instead, that central point, that crossing place, that axis mundi which has wizards and wonderworkers trapped in trees or hanged from them? That place of dismemberment and reconstitution that makes worlds, the place where angels descend and shining folk take us apart and put us back together so that we may see anew with ancient eyes?

That is where we stand. Only in that meeting, in that moment. That\’s the doorway to eternity.

I shall let you into a secret, dear friends. This has taken me days to write. Days to put the letters next to each other. (Morphine, you understand.)

Yet, you\’ll read it as a whole thing, a complete object. You\’ll never see the false starts, the moments lost, staring blankly at the screen, while raw emotion and wordless thought crashed together like waves of an ocean. You\’ll never see it unless I let you, unless I show you. The logic of it, of Gordon\’s book, meets William Blake in my mind.

Jerusalem, the emanation of the giant Albion. The shining city of Imagination upon a hill. They made a hymn about it, but so many thought they were speaking of a desert place, a distant place.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England\’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England\’s pleasant pastures seen?  – From Milton: A Poem by  William Blake.

A question there then, from Blake. Did Jesus, the living divinity long held distant in time, walk these shores? Did Milton, with his tale of the fallen Lucifer, the descending rebel angel, serve as Virgil to Blake\’s Dante? And if Lucifer the Lightbringer is applied not only to Jesus, but to Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter – what then?

If there is a Meeting Place, then there are Meeting Places. Multiple, Plural. Altars, shrines, holy places. Tapu places. Places you don\’t want to go at certain times lest you be taken Under The Hill into those timeless fairy realms. Places that exist that way, not because of superstition but because of memory, but because of the wyrd interconnected nature of things.

This has taken days to write, as I have said.

While this place was down, I\’ve been on and off tumblr, and I became aware that apparently, some folks think analysis is antithetical to chaos magic. I mention this, because of Jack Parsons. Because of the calculations and the mathematics of John Dee. Because of the curvature of the earth and the raising of the stones and the movements of the stars. Because of the teaching of herblore and surgery and healing and harming. I mention this because Gordon runs a chaos magic blog and talks about experimentation and results, and floods and geopolymers used to build the pyramids in his book.

>I mention this because when we come together at that meeting place to share stories and ideas, when we cast our minds back to ancient lands where ancestral grains lie, the grandfather of the strains which give you bread today, we find that the division is not there. We find the cathedral instead, the star temple. We find magic, not as an exclusive thing of bits and pieces, but as whole fabric. We find it born when high wyrd meets the human mind, and in reaction, like a body breaking out in hives, we find culture, that attempt to grasp to shape, to understand, to acquaint, to have knowledge of.

Humans it seems, by our nature, are a Gnostic species. While we cannot speak for our cousins the hobbits, or the Neanderthals or the Denisovians, we can nonetheless find them in our DNA. We knew them, biblically, Gnostically. We found these Others, and we met them, and now we carry them with us through time.

This has taken days to write, periods of time. Of comings and goings. Yet you are seeing, reading, only one thing. Which is the truth of the matter? Knowing my opiatic status, my poppy process, what changes? I live in the 21st century. I was born towards the end of the twentieth. Yet, I\’ve lost count of the times I\’ve uttered the words from the Greek Magical Papyri, barbarous names from 350CE and centuries before. Lost count of the times I have called upon the Headless One, with mouth aflame.

Gordon again:

Read the rest of this entry

This was originally a comment on Facebook, but I\’m preserving it here, because it\’s important to remember and things get lost:

The whole \’hero of our own story\’ thing is also bullshit modern Western enculturation. I love Joe Campbell as much as the next guy, but the monomyth is just a cultural comparison tool. We are not solo-creatures, not individuals at all. The narratives which are our lives are merely portions of a greater saga, one that includes our ancestors and (potential) descendants.

There\’s a fundamental misapprehension of what stories are, borne of the false idea that story=fiction, when instead what it is, is a recounting of events. When we start thinking like that, then the stories of indigenous cultures are once again understood not to be simply metaphorical, but a fundamental way, in a very precise and particular way, of transmitting and refreshing vital information to a people.

This is why the recounting of a particular story or ritual not only passes on information, but reconnects the participants, or story-teller and audience with the primordial world of the powers, allowing them to participate and maintain the ties which hold their universe together.

Thus, there\’s a fundamental difference in perspective – your experience, your personal narrative is not solely personal but trans-personal. It exists because all of those who wove their actions together, consciously and unconsciously to create a place for \’you\’ to emerge.

Without that understanding, things get fucked up. We get beings thinking they can do what they like, without consequences, believing in lie of endless progress that does not need to connect to the wisdom of the landscape, heart and soul. We get beings who slaughter people who believe this way, or call them savage and seek to \’educate\’ them in schools and destroy their culture, or label it a \’life-style\’ choice instead of what makes us human.

Most magicians/spirit-workers/witches/occultists (a large proportion of those who self-identify as such in the West) do not realise that a fundamental longterm change in epistemology, ontology, ‘conciousness’ and awareness is necessary and inevitable if you’re not just playing mental masturbation games.

You are – you become – pitted against fundamental logocentric, trancendentalist/escapist  ‘progressive’ and materialist ontology which forms the basis of Western culture, which requires massive deconditioning to even achieve.. It’s not just about going ‘into trance’ or ‘doing astral work.’

You can’t switch it on and off – it’s not yours to switch off, to lock away when things become uncomfortable. Not just your personal fantasy playground. It’s bigger than you, wilder than you, and it will fuck you up. When indigenous societies say this shit can kill you, or drive you mad or steal your soul?

They’re completely fucking right. That’s not just ‘primitive superstition’ but a fact of existence in a living Kosmos. It’s not a fucking role-playing game, any more than a disaster-porn movie is anything like a real tsunami or a nuclear explosion or an asteroid strike.

So the question is – are you prepared to risk everything you think you are, to take your place in this Weird and Terribly Awful universe?

Would you know more, or what?

This post comes with a warning that it might appear contradictory. That\’s not just because I\’m a contrary sod, but is in fact because I intend to challenge some fundamental assumptions about certain concepts.

I am, in case you didn\’t realise, a cripple. This a self-identifying term which has arisen out of pejorative connotations applied to a simple linguistic description of fact – for some people, it\’s an offensive term, and they would rather it not be used to describe them.

Which is completely fine, for them. Everyone can make their own decision about whether they are comfortable about using pejorative slurs as reclaimed statements of identity, or not.  In my case, I\’m fond of the etymology involved.

cripple (n.) Old English crypel, related to cryppan \”to crook, bend,\” from Proto-Germanic *krupilaz (cognates: Old Frisian kreppel, Middle Dutch cropel, German krüppel, Old Norse kryppill). Possibly also related to Old English creopan \”to creep\” (creopere, literally \”creeper,\” was another Old English word for \”crippled person\”).

creep (v.) Old English creopan \”to creep\” (class II strong verb; past tense creap, past participle cropen), from Proto-Germanic *kreupan (cognates: Old Frisian kriapa, Middle Dutch crupen, Old Norse krjupa \”to creep\”), perhaps from a PIE root *g(e)r- \”crooked\” [Watkins]. Related: Crept; creeping.

creeper (n.) Old English creopera \”one who creeps,\” agent noun from creep (v.). Also see creep (n.). Meaning \”lice\” is from 1570s; of certain birds from 1660s; of certain plants from 1620s.

creep (n.) \”a creeping motion,\” 1818, from creep (v.). Meaning \”despicable person\” is 1935, American English slang, perhaps from earlier sense of \”sneak thief\” (1914). Creeper \”a gilded rascal\” is recorded from c. 1600, and the word also was used of certain classes of thieves, especially those who robbed customers in brothels. The creeps \”a feeling of dread or revulsion\” first attested 1849, in Dickens.

There\’s a root concept here, a principle of bentness, crookedness which is associated with abnormal modes of movement and bodily existence which translates directly into conceptions of wrongness.

wrong (adj.) late Old English, \”twisted, crooked, wry,\” from Old Norse rangr, earlier *wrangr \”crooked, wry, wrong,\” from Proto-Germanic *wrang- (cognates: Danish vrang \”crooked, wrong,\” Middle Dutch wranc, Dutch wrang \”sour, bitter,\” literally \”that which distorts the mouth\”), from PIE *wrengh-, variant of *wergh- \”to turn\” (see wring).

Sense of \”not right, bad, immoral, unjust\” developed by c. 1300. Wrong thus is etymologically a negative of right (adj.1), which is from Latin rectus, literally \”straight.\” Latin pravus was literally \”crooked,\” but most commonly \”wrong, bad;\” and other words for \”crooked\” also have meant \”wrong\” in Italian and Slavic. Compare French tort \”wrong, injustice,\” from Latin tortus \”twisted.\”

wring (v.) Old English wringan \”press, strain, wring, twist\” (class III strong verb; past tense wrang, past participle wrungen), from Proto-Germanic *wreng- (cognates: Old English wringen \”to wring, press out,\” Old Frisian wringa, Middle Dutch wringhen, Dutchwringen \”to wring,\” Old High German ringan \”to move to and fro, to twist,\” German ringen \”to wrestle\”), from PIE *wrengh-, nasalized variant of *wergh- \”to turn,\” from root *wer- (3) \”to turn, bend\” (see versus). To wring (one\’s) hands \”press the hands or fingers tightly together (as though wringing)\” as an indication of distress or pain is attested from c. 1200.

And the thing is, I am twisted, I have skeletal deformity and muscular spasticity which has pulled me in abnormal directions. This turning from the straight,  righteous conception is a mark of difference – a signifier that such existence is minority in nature, an edge case on the curve of the normal distribution. If one were to draw the bell curve, one would find the crooked, crippled and bent on the outside edge of the curve.

We can see, however, that the inside/outside dichotomy, while dualistic and inherently self-referential, nonetheless has importance because it illustrates that there is no single term, variable or item, which constitutes the norm. Rather, it\’s a range of values  which coalesce under the curved umbrella of an idea. It\’s the level of intensity, of extremity, which flips the switch and turns an analogue, organic range into a binary, digital state.

The markers of difference are that which produce affect – that induce a recognised change of state in perception, which is to say that which makes one thing suddenly into another. These markers are specifically interesting within a polytheistic and oral culture. The cult epithets of a deity or spirit, their associations, weapons, or armaments, are specific items which affect those who interact with them. Thus, in the case of so-called \’disabled\’ deities – Hephaistos for the Greeks, Odin and Tyr for the Norse, Nuada or Lludd for the Irish and Welsh, their \’disabilities\’ were in fact, markers of their difference, expressions of their numinous power.

Hephaistos the Lame, Odin the One Eyed/Blind, Tyr the One Handed, Nuada of the Silver Arm, Lludd of the Silver Hand.

Rather than being slurs, they were simple statements of fact which came along with the presence, the very Being of that deity. This is why it is important to consider these cultic titles (heiti in Old Norse) on their own merits – the modern connotations and political notions applied to them often detract from these powerful Gnostic portals, doorways into deeper knowings and Mysteries. This is also to say nothing of the potential representation that those who we might consider \’disabled\’ today might have gained, or the affinity they may have felt or gained with their deity\’s epithet.

II

Angel Millar, over at People of Shambala, has an interesting article entitled Who Killed Buddha-Nature? The Outsider in an Age of Consumer Radicalism which, while I\’m not sure I agree with all of it, raises some extremely valid points about the way the norm eventually devours the outsider, particularly  in regards to political dissent and identity politics. This is not a modern phenomenon either – the Roman Empire eventually co-opted the Germanic tribes as vassal states or foederati.

At first glance, particularly given what we\’ve already discussed, outsider status seems conditional in the modern world. One is either placed there, or one makes a deliberate effort to extricate oneself. Oftentimes, for marginalised populations, it becomes a simple matter of survival – one seeks to avoid oppression or mitigate suffering, and this is, in itself, completely understandable. The gravity and attendant influence that comes with being part of the in-group as distinct from the out-group, has beloved by psychologists, anthropologists, and naturalists for generations. It\’s quite clear that there benefits in operating within the boundaries of a society after all – were it not so then outlawry and excommunication would not and could not have functioned as useful deterrents and punishments.

There is something to be said for the idea that  if you can afford to rebel, you don’t actually need to. And if you need to rebel, you can’t afford to.

Certainly, there are those whose position is enforced by the status quo, and who cannot hope to go toe to toe with that very same. The very nature of the status quo is that it expends resources to structure existence in a very particular way. For those without the resources to extricate themselves, the possibility of rebellion seems laughable. However, recognition of this asymmetrical position is the start of a fundamental change of understanding. To quote Ernst Junger:

“A forest passage followed a banishment; through this action a man declared his will to self-affirmation from his own resources.”

At first glance, this seems to be a paen to self-sufficiency – precisely the kind of thing those who are enmeshed in the coils of the status quo can ill afford. But, and allow me to quote myself here, from my own post on Junger from earlier in the year:

Note that this not some Libertarian survivalist individualism, some off-grid anti-government fantasy. No, this is a banishment, an exile. Those who are going into-the-forest are now asocial – the mechanisms and processes of their existence, internally and externally, are different to those of society by necessity of survival.  The metrics and methodologies by which they navigate the world are completely different; the social stimuli, the call and response, the hoops you have to jump through with all their etiquette and nuance, do not serve you in the forest. There is a reason prisoners and soldiers often have trouble reintegrating with society – when they were Elsewhere, different necessities applied.

What\’s more, there are those who have always dwelt in the forest, or on its edges. Not through choice, but because they have always been there since birth – and indeed, in many mythologies, it is the forest dwellers who counsel and train the exile in the ways of the forest and its Mysteries. Encounters with these sylvan folk, these mad prophets, wizards, witches and fey monsters are what pass on occult and gnostic powers to the protagonists of the myths.

This then, brings the lie to the notion of self-sufficiency. Those who are exiled die, or survive. This is the bald fact of existence, Those who do survive however, are not isolated figures locked up in ivory towers. On the contrary they become adepts, learned in the ways of the  forest, not in an extractive context, but in fact in a symbiotic fashion. The division between hunter and hunted dissolves  – instead both are merely forest dwellers, each one an individual expression of the forest\’s vitality in a unique form.

The forest dweller recognises themselves, not in contradistinction to the forest, but as part of it – not superior or inferior in any manner. The relational hierarchy is not one of top-downess or transcendence, but of upwelling and immanence, passages and methods of existence spreading like root and branch. By recognising that they serve a unique purpose in themselves, what may be considered a rebellion or deviation is an actual commitment to the core vitalistic wellspring from which emerges the sense of Selfhood, which constantly shift and flows. We are always coming-together-with-and-breaking-apart. It\’s impossible not to be a mere part of a larger, manifold system.

As part of this inward-and-backward-turning  we may appear to diverge from the norm even further – and here, etymology is again instructive:

versus (prep.) mid-15c., in legal case names, denoting action of one party against another, from Latin versus \”turned toward or against,\” from past participle of vertere (frequentative versare) \”to turn, turn back, be turned, convert, transform, translate, be changed,\” from PIE *wert- \”to turn, wind,\” from root *wer- (3) \”to turn, bend\” (cognates: Old English -weard \”toward,\” originally \”turned toward,\” weorthan \”to befall,\” wyrd \”fate, destiny,\” literally \”what befalls one;\” Sanskrit vartate \”turns round, rolls;\” Avestan varet-\”to turn;\” Old Church Slavonic vrŭteti \”to turn, roll,\” Russian vreteno \”spindle, distaff;\” Lithuanian ver čiu \”to turn;\” Greek rhatane \”stirrer, ladle;\” German werden, Old English weorðan \”to become\” (for sense, compare turn into); Welsh gwerthyd \”spindle, distaff;\” Old Irish frith \”against\”).

rebel (adj.) c. 1300, from Old French rebelle \”stubborn, obstinate, rebellious\” (12c.) and directly from Latin rebellis \”insurgent, rebellious,\” from rebellare \”to rebel, revolt,\” from re- \”opposite, against,\” or perhaps \”again\” (see re-) + bellare \”wage war,\” from bellum \”war.

re- word-forming element meaning \”back to the original place; again, anew, once more,\” also with a sense of \”undoing,\” c. 1200, from Old French and directly from Latin re- \”again, back, anew, against,\” \”Latin combining form conceivably from Indo-European*wret-, metathetical variant of *wert- \”to turn\” [Watkins]. Often merely intensive, and in many of the older borrowings from French and Latin the precise sense of re- is lost in secondary senses or weakened beyond recognition. OED writes that it is \”impossible to attempt a complete record of all the forms resulting from its use,\” and adds that \”The number of these is practically infinite ….\” The Latin prefix became red- before vowels and h-, as in redact, redeem, redolent, redundant.

This movement, cycling back, as it were, places us within the context of rebellion, not for its own sake, but as  a by-product. One rebels, without trying. Precisely because such rebellion is not constructed within the direct terms of the status quo, it is often regarded as not a direct challenge. Rather, it is associated with strange weirdness – weird being of course a modern formation of the ancient wyrd.

This  provides a hint – rather than rebellion-as-escape,  it is akin to the Nietzschean amor fati, or the Scandinavian root of doom.

III

We are conditioned, culturally and to some extent biologically, to wish to move. To move to the next thing after we have got the previous done. Consumption itself  requires there to be more which is consumed – we are driven to accumulate resources, in whatever form they may be, for the process of extraction, processing etc. We need more food, more water, on the most basic level. This is simple physics – the coming together and breaking apart of form and function occurs at the most basic atomic level.

So it\’s no surprise that we continually seek \’fuel\’ to maintain our inner furnaces which carry out the basic processes of life, to maintain our minds and bodies. The most efficient way to do so is to distribute resource collection – this is why society exists – groupings which enable the most useful recovery for the benefit of all. We are thusly socialised and enculturated by the emergent properties of the culture we inhabit – we absorb its mores, its structures and patterns. This enables us to survive.

However, there are those who are, through no fault of their own, unable to absorb and integrate those patterns. Whether this is a quirk of physiology, consciousness or some other property, it does not really matter. By necessity, they are forced to find their own methodology of survival – their own way of interacting with the larger systems and processes of existence. This then, is the essential quality – the individual themselves, returning to the most primordial of necessities. Driven by survival – which is to say their own personal, primordial impulse towards and expression of Life – they discover a way of Being which enables them to exist, either amidst society or beyond it.

This is to say that the kosmic fire, called Agni by some or Heralitan fire by others, iluminates them in such a way that they may serve as a beacon of another way to Be. It is this illumination which draws others to them, this bloodlight  by which they may find new ways and paths for others around them. They are not self-sufficient in the sense that they eschew the presence of others, but rather, their sense of Beingness provides them with an endless source of refreshment – which is to say that whatever befalls them may in fact, serve as fuel.

Thus they have no particular need  for any pre-existing condition, because all that occurs may serve to strengthen their inner flame – just as Heraclitus held that all things eventually returned to Fire.

One therefore begins the process in a manner that seems contradictory, as warned at the beginning of this post – the human tendency towards constant movement and novelty must be re-organised, re-cognised and re-purposed – in effect turned back upon itself. One of the first steps, as found in many traditions, is the pursuit of stillness – something which eventually ceases, since we become aware we do not in fact, have to pursue it. Similarly, pursuit of bodily stillness is bound to fail – try sitting without moving for three hours, and you will fail. It will however, if practised properly, give you an awareness of movement which is distinctly different to the \’normal\’ human perception. One discovers levels of bodily awareness which were often completely unknown before, when properly taught.

Similarly, the process of recognising oneself as an essential part of the kosmos  alters awareness significantly. By doubling down upon our own Being, by sitting with the fundamental distress of our so-called \’humanity\’ we achieve a deeper understanding which can benefit everyone around us. In short, we do not seek to be other than what we are, seeking instead to transmute all aspects of life in in the alchemical furnace of Being, so that even the most \’mundane\’ experience and act reveals itself to be an Image lit from within by the kosmic fire.

Thus, even those who are constrained may find their chains to be methods by which they may proceed along the merciless path.

It is called merciless for several reasons – not least because there is no thanks to be had – none will thank you for this process, save perhaps your own Soul, It is also the case that there is no-one to pay you and not receive some form of exchange – no-one to please, no justification for this save an inner drive – that inner spark of Life. This is also why one cannot flinch – just as those exiled to the forest cannot flinch from learning its ways and terms, lest they die.

The union then, between \’Self\’ and \’Other\’ is an erotic one, the sexuality one of polarity rather than reproduction – the charge engendered between hunter and hunted, between artist and art. The charge  is simply not there if one \’partner\’ is not fully, terribly present, willing to adapt and shift for the mutual benefit of those involved. Note then, that this mutual benefit is precisely what it says – mutual,  from mutabilis.

mutable (adj.) late 14c., \”liable to change,\” from Latin mutabilis \”changeable,\” from mutare \”to change,\” from PIE root *mei- (1) \”to change, go, move\” (cognates: Sanskrit methati \”changes, alternates, joins, meets;\” Avestan mitho \”perverted, false;\” Hittite mutai- \”be changed into;\” Latin meare \”to go, pass,\” migrare \”to move from one place to another;\” Old Church Slavonic mite \”alternately;\” Czech mijim \”to go by, pass by,\” Polish mijać \”avoid;\” Gothic maidjan \”to change\”); with derivatives referring to the exchange of goods and services as regulated by custom or law (compare Latin mutuus \”done in exchange,\” munus \”service performed for the community, duty, work\”).

The changes involved presupoose that-which-is-changed, that thing which is occulted in normal perception. For this reason, the inward-turning is a subtraction, but not necessarily a divestiture – a violation of ordinary rules of accumulation. Only by this subtraction, this coalescence, can we hear the pulse which beats in frenzy, the onrush of Life which will surge through us when we make contact with that most fundamental  principle which thrums through all things.

Only by descending along the crooked, merciless path, can we discover the truth of who we really are. There is no escape.