I’ve gone and done a Thing and started my own podcast about nothing and everything. Feel like hearing me ramble for half an hour, full odd associativeness unleased into the void of the internet?

From the episode description:

“In which I begin an experiment of linking things together in a stream of consciousness based around the theme of Beginnings and Endings.
Apologies for the massive beard-rasp. I shall endeavour to minimise the effect of my crackling virility hedge next time.”

So, yeah. Give it a click if you like.

Tyrell: She\’s beginning to suspect, I think.

Deckard: Suspect? How can it not know what it is?

Tyrell: Commerce, is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto. Rachael is an experiment, nothing more. We began to recognize in them strange obsession. After all they are emotionally inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them the past we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and consequently we can control them better.

Deckard: Memories. You\’re talking about memories.

– (Bladerunner 1982) emphasis mine

It\’s been a strange festive period, in some senses. Wonderfully normal, and yet suffused with a sense of anticipation, as if somewhere a bowstring has been drawn back and an arrow let fly. Heading round to friends for feasting and good company yesterday, I once again fell in love with this chilly damp Northern town which I\’ve made my home. The air was quite ordinary, and while other places in the UK were getting a belated White Christmas, we had some rain and a slight drop in temperature.

(The chill against your skin as you move, stirring the blood-flow, steaming of the breath. The way laughter and companionship can salve a more than a few aches and pains.)

And, then, the quiet of meditation in the dark; the ebb and flow of the Soul as thought skips and dances along the tips of the waves. The glimmer of the sea-foam, the shining spume from which Aphrodite emerges, to beckon with wild intent, all tangled hair and  salt-kissed skin. Ten thousand glamours appear before you, a plethora of image and sensation, enticing you to dance like a stone across the surface of the waves.

The thing with Aphrodite. you see, is that she resolved her-very-ownself from the severed member of old Ouranos, according to Myth. That foaming semen which splashed down after Kronos took a sickle to his father because he was crushing the Earth, his mother. That star-fire boiling upon the waters, transmuting itself into luminous and terrible beauty as it has congress with the Vasty Deep. There is, as always, a secret here, in Myth.

For they call the Morning Star Venus, and also the Evening Star too. Because a planet simply means \”heavenly body\” doesn\’t it? And if there\’s anyone in Greek Myth with a heavenly body, it is Aphrodite-Who-The-Romans-Called-Venus, right? Mistress of desire, she\’ll tug on your heart strings and drive you mad with the sight of her. Falling for a goddess is the very definition of obsession for us mortals, isn\’t it?

So, we\’ll come back to that, because we must. Because she draws us back there even against our will.

Of course, equating the planets and the gods is a grand tradition, isn\’t it? It\’s such a shame that it\’s plain wrong, for Venus-as-the-Planet is not Venus-the-Goddess-is-not-Aphrodite.

And yet, there\’s enough there to be going on with, because even the most wrong of suppositions was once made for a reason. That reason, that purpose, is what we must zero in on – and once we do, things become interesting. Every mistake seemed correct until proved otherwise, didn\’t it?

Now, think of this, dear readers: Think of how the bowstring trembles and strains before release, or if you prefer, the teetering on the precipice just before orgasm. Imagine the onrush which has built, the way skin flushes and breath quickens, sinew and tendon stirring themselves to strain with anticipation.

Now, remain there, friends, in that in-between state as we continue, for it is important – oh, so vitally important. The memory of that dynamic tension lies encoded in a million years of animal vitality. The heat within, the fercious vitality which would propel you, even for a moment, into a state of vital clarity. It is the inner heat which we must bear down on, the biochemical pyre which drives us to stand outside ourselves, to slip the bonds of our conditioning by once more infusing ourselves with the Primordial.

This vitalism, this raw path to Being-ness is unacceptable, in that it cannot be given. It lies within us, inherent and silent, immeasurable and vast  until conditions permit a palatable arousal. Whether that be within sexual intercourse or the daimonic creative urge,  it lies quiescent until  stirred. Or so we have been tricked into believing.

Listen now, to the beating of your heart; listen even, and especially if, you cannot hear it with your ears!

For the heart is the path, just as the blood is the lamp that lights the way.

Myth tells us of the might of Eros Protogonos, this kosmic apparition  who emerges in Primordial times. Rather than being some distant unworldly figure, it is this Eros which forms a kosmokrator, a Lord of the Kosmos – that is to say, less a distant ruler, and instead a Presence which engages and suffuses all phenomena. As Heraclitus would say:

There is a harmony in the bending back (παλίντροπος palintropos) as in the case of the bow and the lyre. This is also the same philosopher who is famous for saying Dike eris – or Strife is Justice.

Without that tension, the universe as we know it would not exist. This is the mystery of the need-fire, the friction which births the weltfeuer, the vast and glorious and terrible conflagration in which we all participate. The ferocity of it is unparalleled; the combustion and digestion, the coming-together and breaking-apart is revealed as unstoppable artefact of an ephemeral, quixotic phenomenal existence.

This is terrifying and monstrous to contemplate, and yet, in this we turn to Nietzsche:

“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”

Above, we see Mahakala  and, do you know, that Maha-prefix? It means, amongst other things \’great\’ in Sanskrit. And, in case you missed the last post, it has cognates with might. The monstrous mask of the figure dancing amidst the flame, the Being meditating in the charnel-ground, these are unacceptable. But what do we mean by unacceptable?

As seems to be traditional, this post is entirely the fault of the proprietor of Runesoup. Except, not wishing to scapegoat him completely, it\’s also RO\’s, because yesterday he and I sat down to talk Weird Shit, magick and generally drink pretty good Scotch. It was fun, and we rambled on for two or so hours, and I frankly pity RO in having to edit those two hours into something usable. I\’ll let you indulge in listening to that if you wish and you can all enjoy my dulcet tones and our general devolution into I love you man-dom.

Without that ramble, itself inspired by a mighty long thread on the old Mug-Tome where Jake Stratton-Kent and I basically poked holes in Neoplatonism and decided the Fuck You Plato! badges might be a good idea, I don\’t think Gordon\’s latest would have sparked this off.

Actually, that\’s a lie. A big old porky.

Because, you see we\’re swimming in very similar waters. A good chunk of us are, and often, the colour of our swimming goggles is very different. Which is a good thing, because frankly, seeing the world in one way is not only boring, it\’s also a bit bloody dangerous.   It\’s like being colour-blind when you\’re poking the wiring in your house – It might be all right, or you might end up half way across the room with some burns and smelling gently of pork, if you\’re not dead from the heart attack, of course.

Now, maybe you\’re wishing I would get to the point, but please, aside from the seemingly recurrent theme of pork – I like it better than turkey and so we\’re having it here on Christmas Day – note that this is inspired by a bunch of magicians writing things down and then talking about them. Of course, the important part of that, which isn\’t exactly explicit but is there nonetheless, remains that in order to write things down and talk about them, first you have to have the experience.

So no matter the colour of our respective swimming goggles, we can nonetheless recognise that we\’ve all been swimming. We\’ve all wet the baby\’s head, all had our baptism in the Sea of the High Weird. Gordon writes:

[T]he Four Kings -seen specifically through the eyes of Jake Stratton-Kent’s Testament of St Cyprian the Mage– has been one of my great praxis improvements of the whole year. You all know I find the Four Elements preposterous but directionality is in the literal sense ‘fundamental’…. having origins that go all the way back to Palaeolithic shamanism. I think you would struggle to do spirit work without directionality.

There is an additional layer to the Four Kings that only becomes apparent when you start to work with them. During the questions after my Glastonbury dragon presentation earlier this year I discussed the notion that quite a number of the spirits we think of as spirits began their afterlife as prominent dead people.

It was at this point, dear readers, that I called our friend Gordon some rather uncomplimentary names. He\’s Australian, so I\’m sure he knows that all such obscenties thrown his way are a form of deep regard and affection. It\’s something Straya! and Blighty have in common I\’m told.

I was swearing because I also share something of a debt to Tolkien, and also to CS Lewis. They too are part of my magical origin story, my exposure to Deep Myth via Narnia and Middle Earth, those fantastical lands where the Deep Magic held sway, where the heart could open you up to the Deepest Magic. My dear mum gave me a copy of The Hobbit – her own, when I was eight on a Sunday afternoon. Imagine that for a second; a rapacious reader of eight years old, bemoaning, as only eight year olds can, the lack of any more Narnia books. Those of you with kids can probably hear the exact Muuuuummmm wail I would have used.

Sorry.

I have only seen the first Hobbit film and I suppose I shall eventually get around to seeing the other two. Frankly, the book is far more precious to me. That very same copy is sat on my shelf now, thumbed by multiple generations. I suspect it is one of the things that I would strive to rescue from a fire, along with my girlfriend, my cat and the deer-skull which is the focus of my altar. So when Gordon writes about Middle Earth and magic, I prick up my ears, because there\’s an old familiar refrain in the air.

For example, The Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001, on December the 19th in the UK. I\’d been home from my second year of university probably less than a week. I remember going to see it with my parents and being absolutely awed. My mother and I were witnessing something which had always been ours, had lived inside our skulls since childhood, there out in the world with hundreds of others. I\’d been away from home, studying philosophy and getting up to all sorts of magical business for a year – whatever else I was, I was a magician-proper then.

So when December rolls around, Christmas and Middle-Earth rise up. The dark part of the year has been host to many cycles of repetition, many winter-tide exposures of the ordinary brain to the fantastical. Always has been. Father Christmas, Santa Claus, the Krampus…on and on. The stuff of fantasy of course. Nobopdy believes in the guy who visits all the children to give them gifts, except kids. But we still perform the rituals, employing men with varying degrees of hirsuitism to be the avatar of something old that was twisted and shaped through the lens of corporate marketing.

Nobody believes.

We watch the Muppet Christmas Carol, or any other one of myriad adaptations. We hear the tales of ghosts that change men as part of the miracle of the Christmas.  Or we watch other ghost stories told by lugubrious figures who have been undead monsters, wizards, Sith Lords,members of the British Intelligence Services and Bond villians and even voiced Death Himself while at the same time having a coat of arms awarded to their family by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Oh, who also release metal albums based around Charlemagne.

Christopher Lee\’s Ghost Stories for Christmas (Taster)

But nobody believes. It\’s all fantasy.

fantasy (n.) early 14c., \”illusory appearance,\” from Old French fantaisie, phantasie \”vision, imagination\” (14c.), from Latin phantasia, from Greek phantasia \”power of imagination; appearance, image, perception,\” from phantazesthai \”picture to oneself,\” from phantos \”visible,\” from phainesthai \”appear,\” in late Greek \”to imagine, have visions,\” related to phaos, phos \”light,\” phainein \”to show, to bring to light\” (see phantasm). Sense of \”whimsical notion, illusion\” is pre-1400, followed by that of \”fantastic imagination,\” which is first attested 1530s. Sense of \”day-dream based on desires\” is from 1926. In early use in English also fantasie, phantasy, etc.

phantasm (n.) early 13c., fantesme, from Old French fantosme \”a dream, illusion, fantasy; apparition, ghost, phantom\” (12c.), and directly from Latin phantasma \”an apparition, specter,\” from Greek phantasma \”image, phantom, apparition; mere image, unreality,\” from phantazein \”to make visible, display,\” from stem of phainein \”to bring to light, make appear; come to light, be seen, appear; explain, expound, inform against; appear to be so,\” from PIE root *bha- (1) \”to shine\” (cognates: Sanskrit bhati \”shines, glitters,\” Old Irish ban \”white, light, ray of light\”). Spelling conformed to Latin from 16c. (see ph). A spelling variant of phantom, \”differentiated, but so that the differences are elusive\” [Fowler]

apparition (n.) c.1500, \”unclosing\” (of Heaven), from Anglo-French aparicion, Old French apparition, aparoison (15c.), used in reference to the Epiphany (revealing of Christ child to the Wise Men), from Late Latin apparitionem (nominative apparitio) \”an appearance,\” also \”attendants,\” in classical Latin \”service, servants,\” noun of action from past participle stem of apparere \”appear\” (see appear). Meaning \”ghost\” first recorded c.1600; the shade of sense differentiation between appearance and apparition is that the latter tends to be unexpected or startling.

appear (v.) late 13c., \”to come into view,\” from stem of Old French aparoir (12c., Modern French apparoir) \”appear, come to light, come forth,\” from Latin apparere \”to appear, come in sight, make an appearance,\” from ad- \”to\” (see ad-) + parere \”to come forth, be visible.\” Of persons, \”present oneself,\” late 14c. Meaning \”seem, have a certain appearance\” is late 14c.

ghost (n.) Old English gast \”soul, spirit, life, breath; good or bad spirit, angel, demon,\” from Proto-Germanic *ghoizdoz (cognates: Old Saxon gest, Old Frisian jest, Middle Dutch gheest, Dutch geest, German Geist \”spirit, ghost\”), from PIE root *gheis- \”to be excited, amazed, frightened\” (cognates: Sanskrit hedah \”wrath;\” Avestan zaesha- \”horrible, frightful;\” Gothic usgaisjan, Old English gæstan \”to frighten\”). This was the usual West Germanic word for \”supernatural being,\” and the primary sense seems to have been connected to the idea of \”to wound, tear, pull to pieces.\” The surviving Old English senses, however, are in Christian writing, where it is used to render Latin spiritus (see spirit (n.)), a sense preserved in Holy Ghost. Modern sense of \”disembodied spirit of a dead person\” is attested from late 14c. and returns the word toward its ancient sense.

Most Indo-European words for \”soul, spirit\” also double with reference to supernatural spirits. Many have a base sense of \”appearance\” (such as Greek phantasma; French spectre; Polish widmo, from Old Church Slavonic videti \”to see;\” Old English scin, Old High German giskin, originally \”appearance, apparition,\” related to Old English scinan, Old High German skinan \”to shine\”). Other concepts are in French revenant, literally \”returning\” (from the other world), Old Norse aptr-ganga, literally \”back-comer.\” Breton bugelnoz is literally \”night-child.\” Latin manes probably is a euphemism.

Manes (pl.) \”Gods of the Lower World,\” in Roman religion, from Latin manes \”departed spirit, ghost, shade of the dead, deified spirits of the underworld,\” usually said to be from Latin manus \”good,\” thus properly \”the good gods,\” a euphemistic word, but Tucker suggests a possible connection instead to macer, thus \”the thin or unsubstantial ones.\”

Just fantasy. Never mind that. Tolkien was a scholar of Norse and Anglo Saxon.

Never mind that Middle Earth emerges from Old Norse Miðgarðr; Old English Middangeard, Swedish Midgård, Old Saxon Middilgard, Old High German Mittilagart, Gothic Midjun-gards

Never mind.

mind (n.) late 12c., from Old English gemynd \”memory, remembrance, state of being remembered; thought, purpose; conscious mind, intellect, intention,\” Proto-Germanic *ga-mundiz (cognates: Gothic muns \”thought,\” munan \”to think;\” Old Norse minni \”mind;\” German Minne (archaic) \”love,\” originally \”memory, loving memory\”), from PIE root *men- (1) \”think, remember, have one\’s mind aroused,\” with derivatives referring to qualities of mind or states of thought (cognates: Sanskrit matih \”thought,\” munih \”sage, seer;\” Greek memona \”I yearn,\” mania \”madness,\” mantis \”one who divines, prophet, seer;\” Latin mens \”mind, understanding, reason,\” memini \”I remember,\” mentio \”remembrance;\” Lithuanian mintis \”thought, idea,\” Old Church Slavonic mineti \”to believe, think,\” Russian pamjat \”memory\”).

Meaning \”mental faculty\” is mid-14c. \”Memory,\” one of the oldest senses, now is almost obsolete except in old expressions such as bear in mind, call to mind. Mind\’s eye \”remembrance\” is early 15c.

We couldn\’t pay any mind to kings under mountains any more, could we? No, our minds could never be drawn to the besting of dragons and scions of ancient lines reclaiming their thrones in hollow halls, could we?

We couldn\’t pay any attention to Gandalf the Grey, he who is called \’Stormcrow\’ leading three kings back to their rightful sovereign thrones could we? Pay it no mind that Gandalf the White back-comes after falling into the deepest parts of the earth. Gordon again:

Take the often-levelled criticism that when Gandalf returned as Gandalf the White he was technically invulnerable. Not even Sauron could destroy him. This means that had the War of the Ring failed, he would ultimately have been the last servant of the Valar left alive in Middle Earth after Mordor had killed everyone else… fighting alone in the centre of a limitless sea of orcs, trolls and Nazgul. Forever. This is not some novelist’s whoopsie. It’s horrifying. It is also a singularly northern European vision of resolve, of resistance. There is something Ragnarokian about it.

Pay it no mind that the grinding industrial complex built by Saruman the White falls when the old grey wanderer comes back from the dead to take his title. It\’s just fantasy after all, and we know I\’m a bearded frothing madman don\’t we; a member of a non-existent cult which honours a severed head; just a frenzied journeyman who feels a curious affinity with a certain Master of Fury.

In no way at all might we envisage a weary old man gripping his staff which is also somehow curiously a spear in some last frenzied final battle. No wizard with aching bones and heavy with the weight of time upon his hoary head, sagging there for a moment until the sound of bird\’s wings is heard – as ravens circle and settle on his shoulders. Nor might we see the weariness evaporate as memory and thought combine to ignite in the honeyed-blood mead of insipration, nor the sound of rushing wind as ten thousand warriors rise from their corpse-places to fight anew, drawn by his songs and spells.

Because that would be silly, wouldn\’t it? An army of restless, heroic dead riding out to do battle with the forces that would destroy connection and atomise us all?

Certainly the idea of the Holy Roman Emperor hanging out in a mountain is ris ridiculous, right? Except, no it\’s not – see where Charlemagne hangs out, in at least one legend? Yes, you read this right – Odin\’s Mountain. Look further on that page, and you\’ll find the tale of the Wizard of Alderly Edge – the myth of which you will find woven into the work of author Alan Garner, which I read as a child. I was down there with a bunch of Heathens in May and it is very strange indeed to be wandering along roads and paths you first knew intimately as a kid, and yet had never been there.

Here\’s the thing about Charlemagne though – he\’s a good candidate for a Most Recent Common Ancestor for any of us with European heritage. This sort of thing is not new – Anglo Saxon kings traced their descent from Woden, the wandering god who liked to learn things and cause trouble. Which is where, ancestrally speaking, things get…wibbly, don\’t they?

Because, as I said, it\’s all fantasy. No one believes, right? No one believes that we\’re surrounded by a swirling cloud of ambient dead folk and spirits. No one believes they can reach across time and space to tug on the ties that bind us, that if you scratch the soil you\’ll find the old things welling up? That Sovereign Kings long dead and never-quite human can still stir in their barrows and ride out when you say the right words. That the ghosts of Christmas, Past Present and Future can touch a man, that:

\”The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can.\”

Kings, you see, have their armies. Their loyal knights. Their faithful retainers, their band of brothers. Remember this?

From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;  – Henry V

That\’s some straight up warband ritual, some honest to goodness espirit de corps consciousness raising. And before you accuse me of being a monarchist let\’s do the etymology dance of remembering, shall we?

king (n.) Old English cyning \”king, ruler,\” from Proto-Germanic *kuninggaz (cognates: Dutch koning, Old Norse konungr, Danish konge, Old Saxon and Old High German kuning, Middle High German künic, German König). Possibly related to Old English cynn \”family, race\” (see kin), making a king originally a \”leader of the people;\” or from a related root suggesting \”noble birth,\” making a king originally \”one who descended from noble birth.\” The sociological and ideological implications render this a topic of much debate.

Finnish kuningas \”king,\” Old Church Slavonic kunegu \”prince\” (Russian knyaz, Bohemian knez), Lithuanian kunigas \”clergyman\” are loans from Germanic.

As leon is the king of bestes. [John Gower, \”Confessio Amantis,\” 1390]In Old English, used for names of chiefs of Anglian and Saxon tribes or clans, then of the states they founded. Also extended to British and Danish chiefs they fought.

can (v.1) Old English 1st & 3rd person singular present indicative of cunnan \”know, have power to, be able,\” (also \”to have carnal knowledge\”), from Proto-Germanic *kunnan \”to be mentally able, to have learned\” (cognates: Old Norse kenna \”to know, make known,\” Old Frisian kanna \”to recognize, admit,\” German kennen \”to know,\” Gothic kannjan \”to make known\”), from PIE root *gno- (see know).

Absorbing the third sense of \”to know,\” that of \”to know how to do something\” (in addition to \”to know as a fact\” and \”to be acquainted with\” something or someone). An Old English preterite-present verb, its original past participle, couth, survived only in its negation (see uncouth), but see also could. The present participle has spun off as cunning.

know (v.) Old English cnawan (class VII strong verb; past tense cneow, past participle cnawen), \”to know, perceive; acknowledge, declare,\” from Proto-Germanic *knew- (cognates: Old High German bi-chnaan, ir-chnaan \”to know\”), from PIE root *gno- \”to know\” (cognates: Old Persian xšnasatiy \”he shall know;\” Old Church Slavonic znati, Russian znat \”to know;\” Latin gnoscere; Greek *gno-, as in gignoskein; Sanskrit jna- \”know\”). Once widespread in Germanic, this form is now retained only in English, where however it has widespread application, covering meanings that require two or more verbs in other languages (such as German wissen, kennen, erkennen and in part können; French connaître, savoir; Latin novisse, cognoscere; Old Church Slavonic znaja, vemi). The Anglo-Saxons used two distinct words for this, witan (see wit) and cnawan.

Meaning \”to have sexual intercourse with\” is attested from c.1200, from the Old Testament.

Two separate etymological roots here, you might think. And I would agree, save for the fact that one would only found a kingdom if one were able, if one were mighty enough to lead. Which brings us back to the old themes of might and main and may, doesn\’t it?

magic (n.) late 14c., \”art of influencing events and producing marvels using hidden natural forces,\” from Old French magique \”magic, magical,\” from Late Latin magice \”sorcery, magic,\” from Greek magike (presumably with tekhne \”art\”), fem. of magikos \”magical,\” from magos \”one of the members of the learned and priestly class,\” from Old Persian magush, possibly from PIE *magh- (1) \”to be able, to have power\” (see machine). Transferred sense of \”legerdemain, optical illusion, etc.\” is from 1811. Displaced Old English wiccecræft (see witch); also drycræft, from dry \”magician,\” from Irish drui \”priest, magician\” (see druid).

may (v.1) Old English mæg \”am able\” (infinitive magan, past tense meahte, mihte), from Proto-Germanic root *mag-, infinitive *maganan (Old Frisian mei/muga/machte \”have power, may;\” Old Saxon mag/mugan/mahte; Middle Dutch mach/moghen/mohte; Dutch mag/mogen/mocht; Old High German mag/magan/mahta; German mag/mögen/mochte; Old Norse ma/mega/matte; Gothic mag/magan/mahte \”to be able\”), from PIE *magh- (1) \”to be able, have power\” (cognates: Greek mekhos, makhos \”means, instrument,\” Old Church Slavonic mogo \”to be able,\” mosti \”power, force,\” Sanskrit mahan \”great\”). Also used in Old English as a \”auxiliary of prediction.\”

Let these themes sit at the back of your head for a while, let them sink into your guts, then well up again into your heart. Let them swirl around a little, learning how they taste upon your tongue. Then consider what working with those Four Kings might do, from an ancestral, necromantic perspective. Think about the pacts made, the poets\’ song. Then consider that the idea of sitting on the burial mounds of your ancestors all night for wisdom was a thing in, at very least Iceland and Scandinavia. Consider also that the conversion of Iceland was presaged by the lawspeaker spending a day and a night in silent meditation under a fur cloak.

I\’ve pointed out before that at least in the Icelandic sagas, there are tales of the dead still living inside their mounds, and pissed off dead would often have to be wrestled back into thier graves by barehanded heroes, many of whom would have mounds built for them because they were badass – see Beowulf as an example. I also may have mentioned that Odin has a byname which translates as mound-lord as well as one which boils down to Lord of the Restless Dead.

Why am I repeating this? Especially since nobody believes it, and yet the Lord of the Rings Trilogy made $2,917,506,956 worldwide?

That is quite a chunk of change, really. Wonder with me, for a moment, how many people engaged with it. How many of us got swept in to a thing that came from words on a page, itself rising from a flickering light and words and minds in a smoky mead hall over a thousand years ago? How many people spend money to  create the illusion of the jolly man who brings presents?

(Just think about that. And while you\’re at it, consider that Ragnarok is a prophecy spoken by a volva, a sybiline oracle summoned up by Odin and forced to speak against her will. )

Gordon again:

Dead Kings and their relics feature prominently on both sides of the battle for Middle Earth, itself set in a landscape of tombs, ruined kingdoms and half-remembered heroism. Working with the Four Kings, you become aware that there is or was a famous ruler in a cold land to your north. You may not know the content of his legend but you at least feel that it was obviously significant enough for you to be calling out to it. There is a necromantic physicality to the action that can only be experienced performatively. At least some part of this spirit is built of a Dead King. The upshot of the rite is to call the might, the renown, the mana of glorious vanished kingdoms.

I\’m on the same line of lattitude as Canada, here in Albion. So when I tell you that I\’ve heard a voice whisper The Master comes from the North for years now, you might want to understand a little quirk. Look up in the night and you\’ll see The Plough, The Big Dipper. But it\’s got lots of other names, perhaps chief amongst them Ursa Major, or The Great Bear. The fun thing is? Multiple  etymological suggestions for Arthur suggest relations to bears. The same stars are sometimes called Charles\’ Wain – and Charlemagne was sometimes known as Charles the Great.

The thing is though, despite what you might be thinking, all these names and asterisms are named for terrestrial things, migrated into the sky. Stories drawn up from the Deep Below and cast into the heavens where they might be visible in the night.

Which isn\’t to say that the might, the mana of the Once and Future King, is Out There. It\’s In Here, Right Now.  In a reversal of the standard Hermetic dictum, we might say As Below, So Above. The world we inhabit, this Middle World, well, let\’s just say that the starry vaulted ceiling of that is a projection of that cavern where the Light is born anew. Which means friends, nothing is ever lost. And as Britain suffers a Dickensian Christmas with 60,000 people relying on food banks this holiday period, well, maybe it\’s up to us to help.

I might very well be a cripple, but that doesn\’t stop me from trying to gain my own sovereignty, because right here and now, the King is in his Mountain, the Sibyl is in her cave. Did you ever wonder why the Spirits visit Scrooge? Why a certain cripple is dead until Scrooge changes?

Think about it.

And to borrow some words from Tiny Tim the Necromancer as an evocation: God(s) bless us, EVERY ONE.

Enjoy your festival of light, folks.

Just so you know:

I am a bearded frothing madman who occasionally says and writes things which might have a certain personal or kosmic relevance to people. I try my damndest not to be prejudiced, or misogynistic.

I\’m a white British cisman with a physical disability who uses a wheelchair due to brain damage suffered in and ex-utero. I\’m been practicing occult weirdness for many years and have been Heathen for over a decade now.

Why am I saying this?

Because I want you to know that I\’m human. That I still fuck up. That I am not some enlightened being or person to be slavishly admired. I still have to go for a piss in the morning, I probably make funny faces when I take a crap, and I certainly have anger issues. Oh boy do I have anger issues.

Most of what I know, and what I have learnt, is just down to life-experience. Now, my life experience is probably significantly different to a chunk of you. That means that I sometimes look at things a different way. Sometimes this difference is what enables me to point certain things out quite naturally, because that\’s the way my life has gone, and certain things which  are instinctive to me, may not be to you.

And no doubt your life experience has given you differing life experience too. That\’s rather the point.

For a while, many years in fact, I would beat myself up because I couldn\’t do something, or hadn\’t achieved what others had – be that spiritually, physically or elsewise. Sometimes, I still do – even as most recently as last night – but in general, friends? In general this is my life, my body, my bone and my breath.

These are my words. The magick and occultism and spirtwork and things that I know are mine. Years of existence have taught me them, and I\’m still young, still in my early thirties. To some of you, that might seem ancient. To others I am no doubt a whippersnapper who should get off their lawn.

(As to how I ended up on so many lawns at once, answers on a postcard please!)

I\’m writing this because there will come a point for all of you, if it hasn\’t already occurred, where you may begin to realise that whatever power you might conceive of engaging with or using, it is deeply and intimately connected with your very core.

No matter how many spirits, wights or people there are, you are the essential commonent, in life, and in magick or any spiritual pursuit. It is your awareness, recognised and refined, which reveals Enlightenment. It is your awareness, concentrated and deployed in Image, word and performance, which connects to the kosmos as a whole, sends trembling lines of breath and song along the lines of the web of wyrd.

It is you who shows up at your job, that social gathering, that mystical rite. Witthout you the outcome would be entirely different, in every interaction in the world.

(AÔTH ABRAÔTH BASYM ISAK SABAÔTH IAO!)

For what feels like ten thousand years, and yet in actuality is just over ten, I\’ve said these words above with absolute truth. And they come with a corollary: You are not who you think you are.

Because what you think you are, is just a thought. Because you existed long before names and language had any grip on you. Why do you strive to meet the names and shapes others have given you?

Because those shapes and skins would be recognised as pale and empty without your presence, without your desire. You are Necessity itself. As am I.

Understand that everything that happens to you, wouldn\’t happen, without you. That\’s in no way blaming you, no way saying you\’re at fault, that you should have done anything different. On the contrary – what happens happens, what is, is.

I am imperfect. So are you. And in our imperfection, we are perfectly Ourselves, underneath all the layers of conditioning and fear.

You are at the centre of yourself, the root of every experience.

And me, I experience this gnosis in flashes, in surging roiling bubbling things, and in utter calmness. I\’m not always aware of it, but it\’s there. I can take all the rage, all the frustration that I experienced last night, and I can look at it now, and see it as it is, a shadow that can nonetheless, as I am writing this, return me to the conscious knowledge of my primordial nature.

With all my flaws and fuckups, I can still raise my shaggy head and heave on the pillars of Creation and bring it down around my ears to create something new.

(IAÔ IAKOUNBATT IÔ ERBÊTH IÔ BOLCHSÊTH IÔ PAKERBÊTH IÔ PATATHNAX IÔ ERAPOMPS IÔ TANONO IÔ ERBÊTH IÔ ABRASAX IÔ PSAAPOPSI…)

See?

Because in all honesty, the thing that drives you, well…It\’s rather like a Smoking Mirror, an Obsidian Shewstone in which all these thoughts and forms appear. A stone mirror, coughed up from the deep volcanic below and polished to a gleaming shine. 

And though all this is metaphor, like any magician, in time you learn to manipulate what spirits come, and how they act. You can try banishing them, all you like, but ultimately, they\’ll rise up again. Best to work witth what you got.

And my rage, when it comes up, is like lava. It can\’t be stopped. It can only be allowed to cool and disperse. But without it, I wouldn\’t have written this. And so, I make it serve me, rather than berating myself for being a failure or losing control.

This is not the psychology you know. No, this is the dreaming reality of Eros and Psyche. The realm of imperfect daimons who do not transcend themselves but are completely themselves, flaws and all.

 Contemplate that long enough and you might begin to realise that flaws and benificences are only differing kinds of judgements on what is. Given enough time, all these thoughts and desires  will either depart, or lead you where you need to go.

Don\’t worry if you \”can\’t meditate\” if you \”lose your temper\” or \”get distracted\”. So what? You\’re doing what you\’re doing, without realisng it. You might screw up horribly. So what? What\’s wrong with that?

Like I said, there will come a time when thought and conditioning no longer oppress you – when in fact even they can be horsed in the service of your Soul.

I am perfect, being imperfect. I appear as a conditioned human, as do you – when in fact, well…

Be seeing you.

I don\’t normally publish results of rites publically, but for some reason it feels important I should do with this one, so here we go:

We come up from the Hidden paths, to walk by the side of the Lake so vast that it may be a Sea.. There are campfires burning, smoke hanging in the arc of the sky. All around lie the tents of kings and their warbands, these lords of strife and cunning; there is a moment of wondering how so many tents can be here, clustered together in all shapes and colours.

Then we understand, for there have many kings, many masters of the gnosis whose soul mirrors the land. Each of them receives their weapons, the tools of their trade, to reign with full-soul strength, from the waters.  In return they are drowned, wounded and baptised in their own royal blood. There is nothing holier – for they are Annointed.

And though we come from the Waters, we pick our bone-ways, our hoof-stamp dance drumming. We thread our way through those tents, full of animal vitality, and the smoke seems sweet to our nostrils. But our eyes are upon the Mountain, for kings are common-as-muck, which is to say deeply uncommon, for the land is from where we draw our vitality.

Into the Mountain then, swimming like a salmon against the tide of priests and magicians and wandering troubadors. Back upstream to the source, into the hollow of the mound.

And there she sits, lounging sidewise upon her throne, fingers twining round the stem of her goblet. Her feet kick airly and idly in the air, swinging like a child.

We breathe that place, with all its light and laughter and golden-green; we  raise our red right hand to the Queen of that place, and find a cup there. Our welcome is clear, our visitation expected. Our blood cools, slow and easy as we drink cool clear water and are refreshed.

She smiles impishly, this Lady underground, and leans as if to impart a secret. \”The Baptist\’s Head was given to Salome, mistress of desire – because she desired it. But twas poor slaughtered prophet who woke that desire in her.\”

  We are hunted, laid low ten thousand times by hunter\’s horn and bow. Heavy is the head that wears the horns of power. Our death is Desired, our flesh to feed and nourish. Our sacrifice so that others may live.

She puts a finger to her lips, smile widening.

In the silence is found all speech – so the Prophet cries out to Death, and in dying lives forever.

The head endures; from its mouth flow the waters of the cup.

We are born to become Ancestors, we who are so full of salt-water and iron-blood – here for a brief span, to serve, and then gone – back to remain amidst the Dreaming Azothian sea.

But we never left – the Fisher King is healed, and the land thrives. Because it always has. The sickness lies only in foolishly wrought speech, in the thoughts of mind.

Drink the waters and die. Drink waters and live anew.

So we drink, and she says \”Do not worry about how. Let it carry you like wine, to where you must go.\”

And then water falls from the cup I left out in offering to my ancestors and spirits, drenching my bad foot – the one with chronic pain and healing problems – with cool water, and the trance is broken.

Curiously enough, it does not empty itself but leaves some on in the glass. That\’ll stay there for at least a week, as will the jug containing more.

And in the dark, amidst the smoke and flickering candles, I realise that thanks to the water cycle, that a portion of that water might very well be the same as the tears of Alexander the Great, the sweat on the brow of the first dancers around the fire as they called on gods. That the moisture on my brow might have fallen, in part, on the head of Alaric as he laid siege to Rome, or that another part might have soothed the throat of a thousand scops and skalds.

That long ago, it might have staryed into the solar system and, being captured by the sun, descended to earth hidden in rock and flame and ice, gifting us with seas and oceans, mixing with the chemical reactions in the bones of the earth to form aquifers and springs which source our rivers.

Water is ancient – it\’s the gate to the Memory of who and what we truly are, the liquid transition. We\’re born floating, and we\’ll ascend to heaven as our corpse evaporates and burns in the fire, or the flesh and blood slough off our bones to soak our graves.

“I am the Headless Daimon with sight in my feet; I am the mighty one who possesses the immortal fire; I am the truth who hates the fact that unjust deeds are done in the world; I am the one who makes the lightning flash and the thunder roll; I am the one whose sweat falls upon the earth as rain so that it can inseminate it; I am the one whose mouth burns completely; I am the one who begets and destroys; I am the Favor of the Aion; my name is a Heart Encircled by a Serpent; Come Forth and Follow.”

– PGM V. 96-172, Aune trans. aka  Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist  aka, Rite of the Headless One. Emphasis mine

There is a reason offerings have been cast into water since time immemorial, sacrifies made, to move things from the phenomenal into the numinal.

Mimir\’s head sits by the well. Bran the Blessed gets his head cut off after delivering the cauldron. John the Baptist\’s head sanctifies the grail.

You get the point.

(All song lyrics from above)

I\’m writing this on a Wednesday, in the beginning.

That part\’s important, for the beginning is an arbitrary thing but the day is not. Because there are times and places that it\’s always Wednesday, where the twilight and the gloaming spread the double-ended, twice folded blue of their cloaks and skirts to reveal a sky that lightens and darkens all at once.

The arc of the heavens curves up and away; the thin envelope that kisses the earth, gathers all our breath and presses it close to the heart like a lover\’s keepsake. In the beginning, there were not seven days, jusr Night and Day – it\’s only when the song of the spheres touched men\’s ears, hummed along the skin of the world, that the distant lights in the sky stood apart from the stars. And in the beginning, the stars flowed like a river, a gleaming shining path in which we might travel as boldy as the oceans from which we crawled dumbly; terror-struck as our world was divided in two.

They say it began in Fire and Ice, but in truth it might as well be Red and Blue, or Black and White. They say many things, so they do, but for our purposes, our Saying begins at the edge of the ice. Long ago it was, when the songs were sung and the dances danced, in the spaces between glacial fingers.

For yes, long ago, dear friend, though I thread these words with awl and bone needle, though I gather the weave and warp and weft, the strings of it that bind us all together with thew and sinew, and I am but a clumsy tongued fool, with crippled fingers. But as all things pass away, so shall this – the song uncoils behind the eyes, shining scale and burning lamp, and so I give in to the black-bird-cries, for good or ill.

So, and aye. In the beginning, it began with Witches. It always begins with Witches, but you knew that already, yes?

Cry crime against sex, form and gender if you must, but know they are but part of a lie.

Have you truly not heard of Witches, those beings which walk like men and women and everything in-between? Those monsters of terrible beauty, neither fish nor fowl, beast nor human kine? Those raw shrieking voices of awful portentous ecstasy? Does not the marrow of your bones recall those who might stir the roaring cauldron, the boiling kettle of existence? Does not the memory of their knowing push and pulse inside your very veins, even now? Have you not heard tellings of their Art, these dancers along the Shining Path; these heart-wrights, these soul-shapers, these sun-riders and moon-mounters?

Can you honestly say you have not known of them, in the time before words, vast and formless in their imense gravity? Their handiworks surround you, these sculptors and smiths of dreamflesh – or did you think the body of the Dreaming was made into Hand and Eye by merest happenstance? Did you think the naked in-between coalesced here and now and then, alone?

Oh no. If that be the saying upon your tongue, laid upon your eyes and ears, then you have been led awry by mischevious folk!

For it was They who rode with wild abandon. It was They who Walked and Sang amidst the screaming feathered skies, the incarnate rainbow aurorae and falling comets! Nameless and naked in their feral innocence, so They touched the earth lightly, and hid within its heart leaving spoor of fire, tracks and signs for gods to interpret; syllabi unspoken-as-building-blocks for ten thousand Creations.

Hush now, for heresy contains the most truth; Witches are older than gods, but gods can be Witches.

So understand,  dear friend; Witches-Never-Were. Witches-Never-Are. Witches-Never-Shall-Be.

They are the Ur-Kenning. And Witches, but only ever after-Thought came and spread its wings.

It is they who this poor painter of word-pictures must attempt to bind in character, if only for a moment. If only for a moment, in Sympathy for and with the One they called, so I bid you hold the Image within your mind. The whirling dance within the hidden darkness of the caves, the blood of dream spattered, silver-scarlet, bright as ochre in the days when the ice held sway. For this call stretches out in between the breaths of rime and frost.

Before this island was island, so They called, so they drew the threads of wyrd and teased the idea of mankind from the weavings of the world.  Echoing out, so they seeded dreams; herds heard them, kine and kind came Up and North and Along, and with them, long-downstream, came the two-legs, following game into this far western peninsula.

And the One? In what shape did he come?

Some Sayings have him as a great black bird, grandfather to Ravens, Eagles and All Those Who Feed on Flesh, Living and Dead, coming out of the Sun at the head of a storm of howling winds, Thunder following after. Others that the One was Waiting for two-legs, to whisper in their ears and set their Souls aflame. Those Sayings have him noose and pluck and thieve the breath from men\’s lungs. Some say, even then, that he was a Witch, master of the hunting magics and the hunting spirits, and the charms that cure and also bring disease; ruddy red and gold in the heated evenings of the cradle of mankind. Others, that he was a god entire, leading his brothers across the sky, striking from a distance with spear and bow!

Some Say the One rolled and rattled the knucklebones of men, that he prowled the graveyards with dogs and jackals and nightmares; that he diced and played with men\’s fates long before the two-legs learnt to mimic the spinning of the sunwheel and carry carts and chariots, that  he howled and hooted in the night, stalking at the edges of the light, to seize men and turn them Inside Out, so that they returned not quite as  before, full of strange notions, and stranger doings.

Many things are Said; and each Saying may have many meanings. Those strangers may make sacrifice to the wind that flutes through bone, and open themselves to the Coming-And-The-Going, secret whispers and myteries, becoming-as-queerly-together-as-apart.

For certain is this – the One is ever restless. The songs that snared mounts, these he learned from secret places, traded bone and breath for secrets, and though he is Old in his Seeming Now, in truth his Youth is never in question.

Troop-master then, the Eldest of the Eld – from him proceded wisdom and experience; the privations and piercings which wrought youth to manhood were dispatched at hir silent word; hirs the maidenhead that bled, the wound that dripped and gaped, hirs the prick that throbbed and shone.

Man of Ways and Lady of Means, he has borne both names as Gelded Father – his wooing of maids borne of his own courtings. So some Sayings have it; the eros and agape of brotherhood binding tight and loosening fast and swift. Some say they found the One in mountain caverns, others misty forests, thick and dark. Still others in the midst of battle, or on lonely roads, or a shape in the dark in the heat of passion, an extra presence rolling and swelling with the rhythm.

Many names has that One borne, each a patchwork scrabbling, a fragmented glass, a shard of pottery burst and ruptured by the uncontainable, incontravertible nature of his Being. Dare you to bind the inspirer of very awe?

But these are foreign lands, and it it is a Wednesday, is it not. The in-between of the week, the forked path, the crossing of the roads! Anything and all and nothing is possible at his hand.

\”Take a little walk to the edge of town
Go across the tracks where the viaduct looms
Like a bird of doom as it shifts and cracks
Where secrets lie in the border fires, in the humming wires
Hey man, you know you\’re never coming back
Past the square, past the bridge, past the mills, past the stacks.\”

Albion is a land of wanderers, a place where immigrants come. The land is stuffed to the gills with them, even if they\’ve been here over two thousand years.

Wave after wave of folk came to this place, loving and dying, fighting and fucking, living and breathing, just as you do now – until the land was thick with their gods and spirits. Until it was stuffed with shrines to the sly and terrible things they met on the moors. To the voices heard on the wind, howling in the night and whispering with hot breath on the backs of their necks.

Years have a way of passing, and centuries a way of rolling on; babies are born and bodies are buried. Their bones thicken the soil and their blood feeds gnarled old trees that groan in the night. Stones are hauled aloft, then fall, buried in the earth – that, or broken up and built with.

Battles leave the spoils of victory long forgotten in the fields; ghostly banners flickering in raven-dreams that are soundtracked by the music of the dying. The cries of pain and the clash of metal echoing outward, – the earth cracked open and its silver blood drawing up from the depths along with choked and clotted lungs rattling down to the ribs.

From those subterranean wounds, from the hissing of steam and and the clank of machinery, comes the poisoned earth-blood that turns rivers red and keeps faces black while storms roll in and whip leathered flesh with salty squalls.

Rife with sea-stench, spattered by spray and burned by rope, sailing the vast horizon of the gleaming waters, nets and lines pluck bounty from maritime halls. Eyes flicker between star and water, sun and moon. Folk piloting the currents that threaten to drag them down, weaving through shoals that would gut ship-bellies in a trice.

So they come, riding wood and weave of sail; Britons meeting Phonecians and Greeks in the south to trade for tin, while up in Orkney lie ancient temples, now long since rendered mysterious. Was the One here, even then, in all his fury, masked and known by another name, as the poet-prophets of the Keltoi brought him up through flesh and bone. Or was it the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who brought him in their blood?

But hold! Further back and back in his wanderings, did this master of magic not learn from all? What of the shamans of the tundra, the fierce  riders that surged across the steppe thounds of years before the Khans were even a gleam? Scythians with bow and spear, Phrygians with cap and wolf-leaping, Samartians with their hordes and Suebi with their knotted hair!

And wait, what of Northern Apollo, the Midnight Sun of Hyperborea burning like an eye in the aurora-wreathed night? How many forms and shapes and blendings and fuckings and furies has the master of the wodh known all these years? How many times has he as master wizard been bound into and onto the tree?

His face his shadowed here, this queer figure that stalks the hills and downs from tip to tail, to say nothing of Tacitus blurred dreaming of Germanic tribes making sacrifices to Mercury? How many legionaires knew him in blood in the last days of the Empire, the Germanic soldiers serving while their Gothic brethren howled outside the gates?

Along the Roman road to Preston, or not far off, lies the old cavalry station of Ribchester, where in 2nd century AD, yet more Samartians came, long before Christ ever reached these shores, settling  for two long centuries before the Angles and Saxons.

Where\’s the Old Trickster hiding; how many times has he whispered a horseman\’s word in the ear of a shying mount? How many times have you passed him by on those same Roman roads that stretch through these lands? Would the marching Legions have met the old traveller passing by?

And when the Christians came from Eire and erected their wheeled crosses, did he chuckle slyly at these sun-wheels raised in stone. These things to cast down the pagan sun-worship into the shadow of the Crucified, did they have a double meaning? And when Constantine converted Rome and brought the Germanic tribes in, as we have seen, who was it that whispered in the ear of the scribe that penned the Dream of the Rood, or the poet who had Christ and his warband of 12 disciples harrow Hell to save souls?

(Who was it that bled, wounded by a spear upon the Tree again?)

For why was there place an altar rail, a barrier to mark the holy place, and why does one pray with hands clasped, in traditional posture of vassal to lord?

Who was it that hanged there, as a sacrifice?

\”On a gathering storm, comes a tall handsome man
In a dusty black coat with a red right hand.\”

At the Tyburn Gallows, how many kicked and pissed and shat their last to the tune of cheering crowds, only to have folk whisper words to the fallen corpses? How many witches died by the noose in Lancaster while the vicar and the great and the good looked on from the roof of the Priory?

\”He\’ll wrap you in his arms
Tell you that you\’ve been a good boy
He\’ll rekindle all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy
He\’ll reach deep into the hole heal your shrinking soul
Hey buddy, you know you\’re never ever coming back
He\’s a god, he\’s a man, he\’s a ghost, he\’s a guru
They\’re whispering his name through this disappearing land
But hidden in his coat is a red right hand.\”

And what about the marsh and Thames? The idol from Dagenham with its missing eye, missng phallic peg, 4 milennia old or more, buried next to a deer. Has he been here that long, made from Scots Pine, the North reaching out again – offered up to the waters as Odin gave his eye to Mimir at the well?

Has the Furious One possesed poets and prophets since time immemorial, mounting them with frenzy, gifting them with inspiration? How many humans\’ frenzied shades have followed in his wake, this hooting and howling cohort of hanged men and women screaming across the sky. This ergi creature who the Norse made king, though he be a dancer with witches and worker of evil?

And when the Norsemen came and blended and settled, return once more the Heathen ways to this land, did he smile once more with bone-white grin, this stalker of city streets and gnarled old wild-wood both? And when the fury raged over Europe in the great wars, did the savage echo of Wotan twisted to a madman\’s gleam meet also with old English Woden and the Norseman\’s harrier?  Strife on all sides, victory assured however it turns out?

Doubled ended indeed, for while still wandering wise man and warrior both, he is healer too:

A snake came crawling, it bit a man.
Then Woden took nine glory-twigs,
Smote the serpent so that it flew into nine parts.
There apple brought this pass against poison,
That she nevermore would enter her house – Nine Herbs Charm

Phol and Wodan
rode into the woods,
There Balder\’s foal
sprained its foot.
It was charmed by Sinthgunt,
her sister Sunna;
It was charmed by Frija,
her sister Volla;
It was charmed by Wodan,
as he well knew how:

Bone-sprain,
like blood-sprain,
Like limb-sprain:
Bone to bone;
blood to blood;
Limb to limb
like they were glued. – 2nd Merseburg Charm

Oh to whisper, oh to see – the mighty difference between me, and thee. For the old one stalks the land, by dream, by single eye and hand. How else to explain the Raven King, master of magic in that vast work of fictional English Magic,  Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? How else to consider slouch-hatted, long-bearded Gandalf in Tolkein\’s Middle Earth?

If Albion dreams of wizards, in deep myth-time, do not  tree-riding wizards who change shape come to the fore? Is it not at the crossroads where the dirty work is done, where the criminals and outlaws are hanged?

In sulphurous sodium yellow streetlight, does not a conman roll dice down back alley ginnels and slippery cobble-stones? Do not black dogs, big as wolves still pad the corpse-paths and give warnings and omens of death to those with eyes to see?

Aye, they do. Trust me. Worst car crash I ever had was the night after after a Black Dog trotted across the traffic lights and sat there with tongue lolling!

\”You\’ll see him in your nightmares
You\’ll see him in your dreams
He\’ll appear out of nowhere but he ain\’t what he seems
You\’ll see him in your head, on a TV screen
And hey buddy, I\’m warning you to turn it off
He\’s a ghost, he\’s a god, he\’s a man, he\’s a guru
You\’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by his red right hand.\”

He\’s the Stranger who\’s been here forever, the Native who\’s always just arriving. The one who walks without walking, who is both and neither and much more besides. He\’s the groan and the moan from deep within, the wailer and the singer of magical words – the one who understands the language of the birds, because they speak to him. The one under whose black wings we may shelter, restless in his immense sillhouette and shadow.

He\’s the dancing dead man who\’s both eagle and snake, whose very shamanic piss is what gives the poet their portion. Remember, not all gods are Witches, but this one? He\’s learnt from the best and worst – and been both. His words are double headed and double ended; call him what you will – god, devil, demon, daimon, magician, wizard, sorcerer – you\’ll never hold this Terrible Old Man.

But that\’s wyrd and Witches for you, innit? Weaving together the rope from threads, making the noose and slipping it over your head, ready for the Long Drop. And there\’s only really one question, isn\’t there:

Did you jump, or were you pushed?

Down and Down, to the Bottom ot the Well, where the waters roar in the centre of the earth. And what do we find there but a burning Eye, a blazing chthonic sun in the middle of the darkest Night.

And so, it is not entirely with my own voice that I say:

Be seeing you, in dreams.

So I\’ve been listening to Gordon on m1k3y\’s Cosmic Anthropology podcast today, and several things have struck me. More accurately, I suppose, they\’ve made me reflect on the things I\’ve been writing during this shadow-period of depression I\’ve been going through the past 3 or so months.

To a certain extent, I\’ve long learnt that this is psychic weather, and while entheogens do indeed help me as they do my antipodean friend, there\’s a certain set of everyday realities which drag you down, disability-wise if you\’re me. But the funny thing is that being Down Here seems to be something more, when we factor in the polyvalence that I talk about in Albion Dreaming. The nested Russian-Doll nature of these complex ontological tectonics we rather naively call \’reality\’ means that metaphors are all we have

\”All words, in every language, are metaphors\”

\”All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.\”

– Both from Marshall McLuhan

And here, dear reader is when we begin to realise that the words we use to describe our world, every single one of them, is a metaphor. Whether that be \’I\’ or \’You\’; \’And\’ \’Either\’ \’Or\’ \’But\’, they are still metaphors, still sidelong-glances created by mimicry, repetition and replicative distortion.

The only corect way to to view them is out of the corner of our eye – so in a very real sense, we should be \’side-eyeing\’ reality, as it were. It\’s been put together by dodgy geezers in the camel-hair coats, the conmen in sharp suits and the million year old shark-smiles. But let\’s delete the \’should\’ from this equation, the sense of psychic obligation shall we? Let\’s admit that we have no idea what\’s going on, that in fact there\’s no whip-cracker telling us to do things. not here.

Depression is a word, a metaphor for an experience that seems so very ridiculous when you\’re not in it. That sense that you are low, that there\’s a weight pressing on your sense of Being. That sense of hopelessness, of numbness wrapped around a throbbing ache you can\’t quite describe. Somewhere along the line, you might feel like you got disconnected from the world, cast adrift.

On the podcast, it\’s mentioned that liberation technology never lasts long before it\’s either co-opted by the archons or brutally suppressed. Crowdfunding is soon to get new SEC rules laid upon it, certain strengths of cryptography are illegal in the US, the TOR router network has been compromised…I could go on but you get the picture, because it\’s nothing new. Even the Roman Empire would co-opt barbarian tribes to fight for it in the end.

It just doesn\’t last long, Down Here. The liberation technology encoded in the mythology of Christ, and its antecedents, was soon co-opted by the state. The heresies – competing \’fanfiction\’ if you like, were brutally supressed or twisted beyond recognition by detractors. And before anyone gets offended by use of \’fiction\’ in this concept, understand that we are creating fiction all the time – that\’s what metaphors are.

That\’s why, ladies and gentlemen, I lied. I said there was no whip cracker here.

There is. It\’s me.

You\’re reading these words and they are shaping your thoughts. You couldn\’t read them otherwise. That\’s what communication is, extensions of our psyches. But you knew that already, right?

(Promise not to beat you too hard, just enough – or as much as you like. See me after class, etc. etc.)

The thing with fanfiction is that it\’s often truer to the lived experience of the work than the authorised version – if it wasn\’t, then it wouldn\’t exist.

So people might want an Alternate Universe where Jesus and John were totally doing it, or where Judas switched places with Jesus and got crucified, leaving J-Man to settle down and sprog happily with Mary Magdalene, founding the line that culminates in Charlemagne. Or, that young Yeshua travelled with Uncle Joe all the way to Cornwall in  earch of tin, which is why the Grail ends up in the Westcountry.

Maybe Germanic Jesus, with his feast in the meadhall, his warband of 12 trusty warriors, and his sacrifice on the Cross-that-isn\’t-in-any-way-Yggdrasil/Irminsul is there too. Or Arian Jesus – some dude who became a god after being possessed by a divine spirit. Or maybe disturbingly-white Aryan Jesus because you\’re a white supremacist idiot who has a fit of existensial wangst anytime anyone of a slightly different epidermal shade comes near you. Maybe drunk and bitter Jesus, or sleepless and omnipresent Jesus who\’s quite obviously insane because he never sleeps.

The choice, as they say, is yours. The authorized version is the one that either squishes others, or eats them, metabolises them, and spits out some bastard hybrid. And of course, it\’s not only Christianity. Any story, any narrative can be blurred, spliced and fanfic-ed.

Look at the Tea Party in the US, or the Birthers, or the ruling classes of the UK. Each of them are spinning their own fanfic version of reality. And here\’s the thing? Shakespeare wrote fanfic. He took stories, and turned them into pop-culture, with drama, pathos and quite a lot of dick jokes in a Westcountry accent.

Fifty Shades of Grey? Twilight fanfic. Lord of the Rings? Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythfic, in an AU Christianity.

Maybe some part of you is rebelling against the designation of fanfic, as if it\’s somehow a perjorative designation. It isn\’t. The printing press, which gave birth to the Penny Dreadful, to Dickens, is part of the same reflex that gave us pulp horror and sci-fi, that gave us Trek and X-files, and all the weirdness Chris Knowles details on his blog.

\”You fellas think of comics in terms of comic books, but you\’re wrong. I think you fellas should think of comics in terms of drugs, in terms of war, in terms of journalism, in terms of selling, in terms of business. And if you have a viewpoint on drugs, or if you have a viewpoint on war, or if you have a viewpoint on the economy, I think you can tell it more effectively in comics than you can in words. I think nobody is doing it. Comics is journalism.\” – Jack Kirby

The late great Jack Kirby is the centre of much weirdness, just as several of the pulp-sci-fi writers were. Just as Alan Moore is. Just as Grant Morrison is. The key here is that these things were never built to last. They were never meant to be serious. Comics were words and pictures, the combining of the two greatest forms of communication we had, until we had the moving image. Even now, these funnybooks do things with space and time that wouldn\’t be possible without a million dollar special effects package in movies.

Pop-culture, with its rapid consumption and its obsessive tendency to induce fanaticism, is ephemeral; like poetry, its performance, its action is fleeting. The echoes of the voice die away into the silence, but the impressions it makes can last a lifetime, can shape whole generations. Propagandists and advertisers understand this as well, but the sheer rapid diffusion of data means that it can\’t be completely controlled, not totally – the archons are always lagging behind. They\’ll catch up eventually of course, lock things down, but by then, as it\’s mentioned in the podcast, we\’ll be further down the beach, onto the next thing.

Alan Moore once suggested that things were moving so fast, culture was speeding up so that it \’was becoming steam\’. It\’s no longer solid, diffuse. It gets everywhere.

What I\’d like to suggest is that it\’s not just culture, that it\’s yet another manifestation of McLuhan\’s prophecy – we are once again, thanks to technology, returning to a global \’village\’ state. Stories are being spun around the campfire – we can hear what\’s going on in the next country as easily as we can hear our neighbours having sex two huts over.

Think about that. I\’m writing this in Lancaster, and you can hear my thoughts in your head miles away, hundreds, maybe thousands of them away from the brain in which they originated.

But here\’s the thing – you probably know this already. You probably understand it\’s all metaphorical, that language shapes the way we think, that it makes us do things we wouldn\’t think we would do, like some mind-invading virus from outer-space. Hell, you probably understand what I mean when I said that in Chaos Magic \”The best magician is the one who has internalised their status as a magician, and then completely forgotten about it.\”

But how you know it, that\’s the question. Because the Gnostic technology of liberation doesn\’t come from here, according to traditional narrative. It comes from the Pleroma, to give us the keys to unlock the door. The comic prison break, if you will; the message that will self destruct in 5 seconds should you choose to accept it.

It comes from the Above into the Below. It comes down here to suffer and die and get screwed over simply for the chance to show us the way home. Now, that might seem contradictory to what I\’ve been writing lately; that we\’re going to be OK, that it\’s all right here, around you. That you are a primordial Being who doesn\’t actually have to anything except Be, and in doing so you will find yourself running down that starry beach faster than the Flash. It doesn\’t seem to accord with the living vitalistic Gnosis which I embrace; the notion that all phenomena are portals to the dreaming all at once, the wondrous numinous Night where an ancient sun burns in bright darkness.

But it does. It really truly does. Because it is a metaphor; a door into knowing a thing that may have multiple meanings, multiple shapes and forms. This fluidity, this polyvalence, is precisely why the elves went into the West, why the Grey Havens exist in Tolkien. Why the fairies \’left\’ and the \’little people\’ went \’underground.\’

Because \’down here\’ is fixed, because it\’s been divided between authorised and fanfic.

And what\’s fanfic but the human heart telling stories that are relevant to human existence, using characters and frameworks? Sounds awfully like another kind of thing which has been treated perjoratively by the archontic world:

Myth.

In a polyvalent, poetic understanding of reality. the archons are metaphors for something else, and because of that they are beings in and of themselves, as real as \’you\’ or \’I\’. There\’s no value judgement here, because metaphors can affect us physically, psychically and literally. If they couldn\’t we\’d never have started using them in the first place. That\’s why DARPA have been running tests on you via selectively contouring your facebook feed and internet, and why media choose to publicise only certain stories, by the way. Because the boffins are starting to clock on to something that wizards have known forever.

Your world is created by responses to stimuli, flickers of electrochemical lightning, gone in a fraction of a second that, nonetheless has seemed persistent throughout your entire lifetime. So, let\’s look at some fanfic etymology for a second:

fanatic (n.) 1520s, \”insane person,\” from Latin fanaticus \”mad, enthusiastic, inspired by a god,\” also \”furious, mad,\” originally, \”pertaining to a temple,\” from fanum \”temple,\” related to festus \”festive\” (see feast). Meaning \”zealous person\” is mid-17c. As an adjective, in English, 1530s, \”furious;\” meaning \”characterized by excessive enthusiasm,\” especially in religion (of Nonconformists), is from 1640s.

feast (n.) c.1200, \”religious anniversary characterized by rejoicing\” (rather than fasting), from Old French feste (12c., Modern French fête) \”religious festival; noise, racket,\” from Vulgar Latin *festa (fem. singular; also source of Italian festa, Spanish fiesta), from Latin festa \”holidays, feasts,\” noun use of neuter plural of festus \”festive, joyful, merry,\” related to feriae \”holiday\” and fanum \”temple,\” from PIE *dhes- \”root of words in religious concepts\” [Watkins]. The spelling -ea- was used in Middle English to represent the sound we mis-call \”long e.\” Meaning \”abundant meal\” (whether public or private) is from late 14c

fiction (n.) late 14c., \”something invented,\” from Old French ficcion (13c.) \”dissimulation, ruse; invention,\” and directly from Latin fictionem (nominative fictio) \”a fashioning or feigning,\” noun of action from past participle stem of fingere \”to shape, form, devise, feign,\” originally \”to knead, form out of clay,\” from PIE *dheigh- \”to build, form, knead\” (source also of Old English dag \”dough;\” see dough). As a branch of literature, 1590s

dough (n.) Old English dag \”dough,\” from Proto-Germanic *daigaz \”something kneaded\” (cognates: Old Norse deig, Swedish deg, Middle Dutch deech, Dutch deeg, Old High German teic, German Teig, Gothic daigs \”dough\”), from PIE *dheigh- \”to build, to form, to knead\” (cognates: Sanskrit dehah \”body,\” literally \”that which is formed,\” dih- \”to besmear;\” Greek teikhos \”wall;\” Latin fingere \”to form, fashion,\” figura \”a shape, form, figure;\” Gothic deigan \”to smear;\” Old Irish digen \”firm, solid,\” originally \”kneaded into a compact mass\”). Meaning \”money\” is from 1851.

I mean, seriously? Look at those bloody cognates. Look at them.

Then think back to Lascaux. Think back to the San rock art. Think back to the fire and the shadow and the crackle and the song; think about the idols and the arts; think about the spirit running fast through flesh and the dance and the sweat. Rituals that last a moment, an hour, a day, a month, a year.

Quite an experience, to live in fear, isn\’t it? That\’s what it is, to be a slave…I\’ve seen things you people wouldn\’t believe… -Roy Batty, Bladerunner

Do yourself a favour and watch the whole scene, even if you\’ve seen it before – not just the lines. Then consider who is the daimon, and who is the man, if that\’s your thing. Argue all you like about Batty gripping Deckard\’s broken hand, with a nail through his own.

Because the secret is, that these moments are indeed lost in time. These fleeting, temporary contacts with the Weird can\’t exist Down Here for long, not without a significant change in the structure of your awareness. Conversely, they can happen anywhere and at any time – though to be sure, there are some places which seem to serve as cosmic elevators.

So we have to ask – is it because they appear so temporary that they can actually interface with our perception, contoured and manipulated as it is? Here one moment, and then seemingly gone the next, only to reappear when we\’re further down the beach? Is their very lack of repeatability dependent on our only seeing them through cracks in the walls.

In the end though, metaphor is king – because it\’s only us who are moving down the beach. The beach doesn\’t move – it simply is.

Which is pretty trippy, when you go into, say, Norse myth and realise that humans were supposedly created by gods finding driftwood washed up on a beach, isn\’t it?

Fanfiction again. Stuff made under the influence of gods and spirits, things that are supposedly extradimensional interacting with the human heart and making them spew metaphor and poetry until they\’re shuddering and exhausted. As the old saying goes:

Folks from round \’ere ain\’t from round \’ere!

And this is further borne out by my harbour-wall thesis – because Down Here, as is seen by most, is irretrievably separated from Up There. Except of course, it isn\’t, but the world we have built with one-sided metaphors has trained us thusly. In fact, the momement we start embracing the poetic polyvalence, although it might be a little hairy for our sanity, things start getting Weird. Just like wizards are bloody everywhere, so the Weird reveals itself with a mischievous trickster-grin.

We are in fact High Weird ourselves.

We\’ve been trained out of it of course – and our trainers don\’t even know they are doing it, initiating us into the bound flow of the world as their parents did to them. But really, there was a time before we grasped language – a kind of Pre-Adamaic existence that is powered or run by something which exists outside of language and thought. Because that\’s what\’s creates our thoughts and feelings. Our existence works from the Inner into the Outer, not the Outer into the Inner. Our thoughts and feelings are metaphorical too.

So when I talk about depression what am I talkling about? For me, I\’m talking about the fact that, not only am I Down Here, but I\’m at the bottom of a very, very deep well. I\’m talking about when the one for one metaphor structure no longer serves as a decent map, when the separation widens still further, and the disconnect feels like an uncrossable gulf.

But if I treat depression as a polyvalent metaphor, then what are we presented with, in the mythic fanfiction sense? If I allow a daimonic intensity to develop around and in and through it? If it is at once brain chemistry and environment, yet also a path, a message and a being come to meet me, just as it has come to meet so very many of my kin?

All of these and none – when the ache becomes a beacon into the underworld, when the obscenities and cruelties the voice in my head visits upon me become so cartoonish that they make flee inside my heart, in and down; until at last I meet the secret sun waiting there, at the centre of the crossroads.

Because, the simple fact of the matter is, that sun remains no matter what we do. That hidden heart of the star burns with a subtle and secret lamp in our blood. And by that fire, we might smile at the Black Dog of Fear and Loathing that chased us here, knowing that its daimonic presence is needful.

Now of course, the damonic does not appear identically to everyone. Depression is not to be welcomed, or feared – like everything else in the kosmos, it is what it is – which to say it may appear in manifold forms and shapes. And as magicians, as wizards, it\’s our job to say Come not in that form, when we need to. It\’s our job to shift our own shapes and learn more things so that we can craft the beautiful ephemera that we were born to do.

We can only liberate ourselves, and share what we know in as open-to-interpretation way as possible, if we wish to loosen fetters and help others. Each of us has an innate clarity which arises – like the way the water clears if we just allow it to settle. The immortal comes to us in moments, but we can go and meet it, once we realise that all moments are this moment. No past, no future, only Now.

And we can let our thoughts scamper ahead into possible futures and recreated pasts all we like, but the Now never goes anywhere. Ten thousand years-ago-was-Now-too. Those dead harvest festivals can live again if you bring them into the Now as living festivities rooted in the Here and Now.

The wildness can be found, the ferocity in the most domestic of situations – the Dark Mountain may be discerned by the shadow it casts on the floodlit fields. There is no separation.

There\’s no such thing as contradicting yourself. You just need to learn to listen. You know how. It\’s written into the skeleton key of your bones.

OK, so this came from Tumblr, but it started me thinking something interesting:

Peter Carroll outlines chaos magick theory in a precise (and pedantic) fashion in Liber Kaos, with several magical formulas. I like these formulas for their simplicity and the obvious absence of any extraneous forces, but then I’m an atheist magician. I’ve included them here so that the reader can get a taste of the underlying theory. A far better explanation of these formula comes from the author himself.

M = G x L(1-A)(1-R)

[..]

All factors are between 0 and 1.
M equals the force of your magic. Which is dependent upon your G (Gnosis) and L (magical Link) multiplied by two negative factors. (Things working against you). Your conscious awareness of the desired result (1-A) and your subconscious resistance to doing magic (1-R) -i.e. “Mommy told me magick doesn’t work.”

– Chaos Magic Theory, Fra. Ratatosk

The esteemed @cole_tucker a.k.a swissshard on Tumblr chimed in with:

A recent hubbub got me thinking, a discussion about the magical link might be useful. A digression on blurring the lines between microcosmic and macrocosmic forces and concerns thereof may be in the cards as well.

And then that sort of let me off the leash:

\”Can\’t quite remember which book it is, but Ramsey Dukes posits that Western Culture and science currently reign as dominant paradigms because it\’s composed of  seemingly\’better magicians\’ That\’s to say, those have bound ambivalence into repeatability.

So, let\’s entertain Caroll\’s theory for a second – and I really find that his equations are the product of that same superiority-culture complex, but let\’s ignore that for now

The most effective magicians, as the above notes, would be those with the lowest negative factors. Except that this presupposes that Awareness in this equation is in fact a negative. A lot of CMT is based on so-called slight of mind, in slipping past the resistances and censors to trick oneself into doing magick despite the fact that it\’s completely impossible.

Let\’s just consider things historically for a second – the West\’s colonialism ultimately comes from expansionist tendencies. And who were the originators of those tendencies but the monarchs and the pontiffs?

Divine Right of Kings anyone? Pope as viceroy of God on Earth?

Go back far enough and we have the notion of Sovereignty-as-hieros-gamos, right? The Sovereign and the land are one, which even early might have been the land and the-leader-guide of the people are one.

Even earlier and we have The People and the Land are One. The sovereign is the People – this is why the touch of kings was held to be able to heal people. Look at Ancient Egypt all the way through to mediaeval monarchs.

So, on some level, the colonialism was backed by magical beings.

Think about that for a second.  The Crusaders were backed by papal bull, the Roman Catholic church was made the official religion of the Roman Emperor – part of a dynasty that, thanks to the magical technologies of the Imperial  cult rendered them as gods! Tie in a direct link to the God that had evangelised all the other deities and spirits into demons, the god who sent his son to earth, the man who told his disciples that they could do anything through his name

Newton, Hook, Fludd, the inumerable Islamic Scholars who gave us optics and built on the basis of the Greek philosophers, who, oh wait, seem to have indulged in katabasis and dream incubation. Think about them. Think about YHVH and You shall have no other gods before me.

Then think about the Age of Enlightenment – the surety of Western Superiority that ties in with European colonialism through the 15-20th century.

Think about the US mythology of Manifest Destiny, the Land of the Free. The New American Century. The New Thought Movement. The Secret. Spiritualism, the Nine,  Hitler, Himmler, the Anhernebe, Ariosophy, Project Paperclip. Think about the Project for a New American Century.

All of these things are expressions of awareness, but awareness without ambivalence, without doubt, because their throughline is absolute self belief.

In terms of Carroll\’s equation, for the purposes of this thought experiment,  A is not a subtraction, it is constant and R is approximating zero.

In Chaos Magic, the best magician is the magician who has internalised their status as magician, but has forgotten it entirely. The basis of Western magic and reality, as Robert Anton Wilson puts it, is as follows:

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

When your entire culture is based on magic, but it\’s been forgotten by most, what happens? Anything that goes against the dominant paradigm gets blocked, which is why CMT has zeroed in on sleight of mind,   because it\’s about working the angles and dusty corners, the edges where ambivalence and polyvalence might exist.

Now, let\’s consider an indigenous society, where there is no need for forgetting, because actually, the essence of magic is in fact Memory.

If we posit that magic is, by definition, something which takes place in a context where past, present, and future are in fact all one; where everything is entangled with everything else, and everything is alive – then we are presented with a bit of a mindfuck.

Because, if everything is alive and entangled, then the world is indeed polyvalent, and gnosis-in-CMT contexts becomes gnosis in a more traditional sense.

The magician-who-has-remembered-they-are-a-magician, remembered they are a child of Earth and Heaven, as the Orphic Tablets have it (amanesis ala Plato, & Know thyself ala Oracle at Delphi) does not in fact have to contend with notion of \’finding a magical link; because to their restored perception, all things are a magical link including themselves as expression of perennial gnosis.

It simply then becomes a matter of selecting the right arrangement of consciousness by which they may achieve their goal, as dictated by the dreaming, polyvalent all-at-once, rather than the seeming phenomenal reality as itself.

“Millionaires don\’t use Astrology, billionaires do.” ― J.P. Morgan

And this the deep and terrible trick pulled by those magicians who have forgotten they are magicians; some of them have remembered-their-forgetting.

That\’s to say, they have forgotten the historical antecedents, inheriting only notions of birthright, but have recalled that the normal rules of reality as they have written it do not apply to them. Because they wrote it that way. Because it has always been that way. They accord to their own inner law, paassed own the centuries, a distorted version of true gnosis, yes, but nevertheless a lineage which stretches back to the beginning.

The rest of us? We scrabble in the dirt. But honestly we need not worry, because the gnosis erupts throughout history. There will always be magicians, because nothing is ever truly forgotten.

Traditional and indigenous societies are separated from their lands and culture, precisely because that is what gives them the strength to resist, to exist beyond the monocultural framework. Without their lands, their stories, their songs, their identity begins to pale – what once was nourished by contact with the world of the Soul at prescribed intervals begins to wither, leaving little choice but for the people to enter into a singular world which subsumes them.

Even notions of folk-identity have been poisoned by the amnesiac magicians. The phrase folk-soul mutates into a vile excuse for abuse, nationalism, genocide and murder of millions.

Because nationalism is never rooted in the land, not really; the people are rooted in the land – and what might be true of the world within a ten mile stretch might not be true two towns over.

This then, is the power of local wights and genus loci, as theheadlesshashasheen has written many times. This is the power of the local rites and highly specific arrangements of consciousness peculiar to individual areas. This is the power of Turangawaewae –the place where you stand tall, as gordonwhite points out.

But hey, this is just a thought experiment – isn\’t it?\”

So glad I\’m not a Chaos Magician any more.

I\’m a white severely disabled bisexual cisman with chronic depression. I have trans friends and former lovers. Male friends, female friends, non-binary friends; Muslim friends, Christian friends, Pagan and atheist friends. Black friends. POC friends. Friends in every letter of the LGBTQ acronym. Loved ones who are survivors of rape and sexual assault, family members who are regularly in and out of psychiatric care.

And they all deserve to live rich, fulfilling lives free from fear and hate.

And yet I get tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of racism, feminism, ableism. Tired of hearing about Ferguson. Tired seeing of police brutality and corporate manipulation that would reduce us all to consumptive slaves toiling away for techtreats until we die.

Exhausted by the spells employed by the black-magicians-of-the-media that are piped into our brains, that shout at us from behind artfully arranged slogans and 140 character concentrations of emotion designed to alter our brain chemistry.

Wearied by the bilboards and the ads and the browser tracking and the mail-reading and the roar of the opressed the world over; each individual voice subsumed into the pain of a fallen child; it drills through my brain like the screams of a babe that doesn\’t understand that their parents are only just out of sight for a short span

I get fatigued by the blog and reblog, the endless cargo-cult of mimesis found in body and mind, form and shape and word. It makes my bones ache, my guts knot and roil in disgust. Wading through a torrent of shite, peppered with pieces of gold that gleam in the dark, only they are hardly ever seen because everyone walks with their nose in the air so that they only occasionally catch a whiff.

Sickened, poisoned by it. This engineered future that arises from the cogs of a great and terrible machine that built itself ad-hoc like a monster stitched together and welded with scorched fumes of lost hope. No vast conspiracy, just a blind, wormlike questing for sensation – an abandoned infant groping for its mother\’s teat in the dark.

And in that moment: I hate it here. I hate it now. I hate myself for existing.

My throat burns with bile, and I would do anything not to be locked within this synthetic laboratory, this crazed funhouse of mirrors, this prison of Black Iron presided over by bloated gaoler-archons that grow fat as ticks, filled with the blood of my very soul.

It aches and burns, this hollow chronic fatigue of overstretched, hyper-stimulated nerves; shellshock-echoes from the carpet-bombing of my senses.

Somewhere there\’s someone screaming, and I\’m never sure if it is or isn\’t me. I\’m being crushed, drowning in salt tears I  can never shed.

So very weary. It is as if I can no longer fight, as if I stand on a battlefield surrounded by the corpses of everyone I ever loved. Some, I mark, still seem to breathe and turn their heads, but they are no longer there; the spark has gone and they are mere mechanism alone!

And it would be so very easy to join them, to ease my aching bones, to rest at the bottom of this curved bone bowl. and fight no more. So very easy, to simply forget and slip into Lethean stupor.

I stagger, I fall. No longer can I support myself against the smoke and ash and stench of sweat and struggle. I am borne down by chains, into the nadir of it all.

And then, in the depths of that fogwrapped greyness, that aching nullity, I see – no, not see, but perceive, but know – a sudden, deep rich darkness.

Black as raven\’s feather, shining with the many and one colours of crow\’s wing in the rain, so the understanding comes. It comes upon me and I teeter as if on a precipice. Breath catches in my throat, and the knowing scratches its charm onto my bones; scrimshaw runes, bird-carved Mysteries.

This is not the End. This is only the door. Pass beyond the threshold and be refreshed.

And the weight on my back intensifies. Crushes me to dust. Makes me to scream in soundless horror. I am only meat for worms. They shall riddle my hide forever. I shiver in terror, subdued, unable to lift my head.

The world grinds me excedingly fine – what point is there in fighting? Was I not doomed to fail from the moment I was born; fated to eat, fuck, shit and die as billions of my kind have always done? Enslaved to heredity, to recapitulation of endless crimes against the Soul; a million petty slights against the infinite variety of existence; ten thousand dismissive ignorances of the kosmos.

A horse-head appears in the darkness, ribboned with flayed flesh, the regular thudding of the whip into flank as its drum beat. The knowing whispers without words, strokes my heart with razor fingers of mourning.

(And in this moment, this dark-shadow-time where flame fickers on the walls of a cave beneath the earth, I know Nietzsche as he throws his arms around the bloodied beast in Turin, weeping. And an antlered head, all heavy, lifts my chin with beast-fingers, eye to empty eye.

I see the shapes writhe from life, the stone walls suddenly revealed as crystal clear ocean. Undersea cities and forests peopled by Atlantean strangenesses that greet me with a knowing smile.)

And the be-ribboned hobby horse, the skeletal puckish thing all dressed in red and black, turns and leads the way.

This is not the End. This is only the door. Pass beyond the threshold and be refreshed.

And so I fall – the weight that crushes me now suddenly slaved to gravity; it is suddenly bound to something larger and vaster than the designs of the grinding machine that would have me shivering on a slaughterhouse floor, all amazed and blind.

We fall, the world and I, burning like a comet. We ignite and burn in flaming Luciferian light, until the asterism of our combined self impacts into the earth. Eden is consumed by wildfire, the endless green wrapped in flame so as to scatter its seeds and renew the soil. The buried iron of us melts and flows, refined, and meets the secret veins of metal within the dark and welcoming earth, hidden beneath the world-that-was.

We are quenched by deep, abyssal cisterns, filled as they are with subterranean Leviathan-light and armoured by its hide, feasting with the long dead on the food of the fair-folk. Then, after the third day, so we arise, gleaming like the sun, our bodies and blood suffused with solar light and lunar coolness.

You have to die before you die, so that you don\’t die when you die.

Understand my confession friends. Breathe its words, let them settle in your belly as fuel to the furnace of your own desire.

This is not the End. This is only the door. Pass beyond the threshold and be refreshed.

There is a part of you that survives, that burns and freezes, a kernel of light-in-darkness; a star in your heart, a lamp in your blood.

It will light your way forever, if you let it. It will guide you through the mire and muck, revealing the golden gleam all about you. When you are at the end of your tether, when the noose tightens, that is when you remember it.

You are not alone. You never have been.

And so it was that in 2014, the people of the land of Scotland elected to remain united with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But the island of Albion has known many kingdoms and nations. From the  Celts, Picts,  Romans and all the other tribes, the small island has had mankind drawing  boundary lines all over it since humans first settled here. From the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy to the Danelaw and beyond, the maps and desires of mankind have been as shifting sands. Human hands have shaped the island too – the once great wildwoods are either no more, or sadly diminished. Roads criss-cross moor and fell, carrying busy minds hither and yon – and yet, through it all, Albion dreams.

Or, perhaps more accurately, Albion is dreaming.

And though this piece will be filled with the art of William Blake, his complex mythological cartography is not entirely what we mean. Having said that, Blake was a visionary artist and poet who made Art – he went forth and visited the numinous realms and brought back imagery, visions and understandings. Even the most soothing of his pieces exudes a vitality which does violence to the simple act of representation. So when we speak of Albion, we are not simply speaking of that giant who emanated Jerusalem – a feminine spirit as well as a place – but of the primordial Beingness of the island, the living avatar that mankind calls a giant.

(Remember my contention that people can be portals? Not all people are human.)

So, we recall that while we dream, things seem perfectly real, no matter how non-sensical they are, how inchoate and strange they may become, yes? Only rarely do we find ourselves in possession of a flash of lucidity which reveals the true nature of the experience. Unless that is, we have either natural ability or have trained ourselves in the art of Lucid Dreaming – in working with the very substance of experience to achieve our wishes and fulfil our needs.

Now, we know of course, that the structure of dreams has its own logic, its own Deep Structure. We know that the Imagination creates these worlds for us in the bone arenas of our skull; vast enthralling shadow-plays unfolding behind flickering eyelids. And yet, we forget that that same Imagination does the same whether we are asleep or awake. It takes the raw stuff of experience, and, like a smith, it builds the world around us. All that we see, feel or do is of a direct consequence of Imagination\’s Art – our entire lives are predicated on our responses to these constantly updating, vibrant exhibitions.

Is it any wonder then, that the redemptive figure for Blake is the fallen avatar of inspiration and creativity? That Los, as he is called, is in fact a blacksmith, and one who falls repeatedly by becoming too enmeshed in the world?

Half Friendship is the bitterest Enmity said Los
As he enterd the Door of Death for Albions sake Inspired
The long sufferings of God are not for ever there is a Judgment

To retrieve what has been lost,  he enters the very heart of Albion, descending down to the centre – this anagramatic Sol, this inverted sun surrounded by earth. But, as ever it is best to allow Blake\’s work to speak for itself. His vision, his seeing through the crack in the walls that are no longer fit for purpose, is his own. One can, and I suggest you do, descend deeply into Blake\’s work – travelling far in the vehicles he has created. Vehicles, which despite the Christian overtones, have less to do with ordinary religion and more to do with gnosis and the terrible, awe-inspiring ecstasy of the mystics.

And that, dear reader, is where we meet – for Blake was more than an engraver, he was a poet – he understood the nature of existence was revealed in allusion, rather than illusion; that Truth might be revealed by Beauty, but that they were not the same. The language of dreams is one of symbol and metaphor;  poetry\’s knowing is heartfelt and intimate, a kenning  that illuminates the way, revealing as much by the shadows cast by its flickering flame as by the light it casts. Positively brimming with the laughter of a child, completely innocent in awareness of good or evil, cruelty or kindness, the damonic reality of Albion\’s dreaming affects us all on this island, whether we know it or not.

After all, this is an island of many gods, spirits and wights; as many peoples as have settled here bring their own dreaming to weave together that endless tapestry. The many lands and places of this island have their own boundaries, their own senses of Self which may or may not accord with those held in the minds of humankind.

Here then again, we meet – for it has been my experience that all things are influenced by the Dreaming – that humans are influenced on deep and subtle levels (as well as the explicit, obvious ones in some cases) by these stirings of the Soul of the World. That these perturbations, these eddies and flows and ebbs and tides, influence everything we do and shape our responses.  This is why I am careful to say that Beingness can be reavealed as dreaming rather than a singular dream. For it is an endless process – the dreamer has always been dreaming, which is why they may inhabit endless forms and shapes in all times and places. Not sequentially or linearly, but All At Once – bleeding into each other like a morphing optical illusion or the variety of flavours which make up a gourmet meal or fine wine.

And just as the avatar falls when they grasp too closely at the world, this wonderful temple-which-is-also-a-theatre, so we fall when we begin to identify too tightly with particular things. Rather than regarding things as being direct representations, we might consider them as ambivalent – or even polyvalent.

Is becomes may-be and seems-to-my perception.

This is the apparent Gnostic position – that the world as-it-appears is a prison. That the faculty of Imagination and Creation, the divine craftsman has become blinded and deluded. It is innfected or contaminated by a counterfeit Spirit of thought, a codified facsimile of the living logos which insists on A=A alone, instead of  Alpha and Omega – which is a certain Gnostic key familiar to many Christians.

Each stoiechion – letter, element – is an explicit expression of the implicit whole.

We can never isolate an individual element from the whole, because the whole is what gives rise to it. All we can do is refine that element so that it becomes more and more itself, until at last its stands as a uniquely particular revealer of continuous wholism! By allowing ourselves to dream, to be ambivalent about our circumstance, we can discover the multiple meanings of each element of our experience.

We experience synchronicity as meaningful co-incidence – that is, elements of experience arrive in our consciousness simultaneously, not because we are making a connection but because one already exists on the level of poetic, daimonic reality. We abruptly experience a localised awareness of simultaneity – the All-At-Once reveals itself in explicit, particular form, only to seemingly vanish the next moment.

Why? Because as Gordon explained a while back, everything is entangled!

Now, I\’m a Heathen, so I have a deep suspicion that this is what our ancestors were trying to describe when they spoke of wyrd. The mysteries and runes and weaving associated with the three Norns, and even the similar reflexes across Europe pretty much seal this for me. An endless upwelling, or an endless weave – both of these imply that everything touches everything else in some way.

I can no more refuse to acknowledge the Christian grounding and symbolism which permeated my upbringing and my family, past and present, than I can refuse to acknowledge that I am quite probably a carrier of a lethal genetic disease – Cystic Fibrosis. I could deny it, were I feeling foolish, but it would still be present, would still be lodged in my dreaming.

Likewise, it would foolish not to acknowledge that Scotland is a human fiction, yet also a sovereign nation, as well as being part of the larger UK. And is also none of these things.

It has its own culture, its own dreams and Beingness. None of these, contrary to appearances, is exclusive – they are in fact, inclusive. Like facets on a gem, they are particular and distinct entities, in and of themselves, while also being products of human perception.

So, rather than suggesting that All-is-One, what if we suggest that All-is-Many? What if we loosen our grip on what things mean, and instead accept they are Meaning itself? In the painting of Blake\’s above, we see Albion opening Himself to Christ in what is a quite a traditional posture – a kind of I\’m here, I\’m not hiding, come Be-With, with me  – exposing His heart.

From a Gnostic perspective, this heart-connection between Albion-as-Primordial-Man and the  Gnostic Christ is fundamental. If one considers the painting a while, one can quite easily Imagine a direct link and invisible bond betwixt the two figures.

In Blake\’s mythology, Albion is the personification of humanity as a whole, as well as a place. From Albion emanate all the forms and varieties of Being, separate yet also-with. For us though, we might see Albion the giant as this island and all its dreams throughout the aeons, now, before or since.

We might see the connexion of the Gnostic Christ descending and being crucified in order to form that link with Albion, as a deliberate polyvalent stoicheion. We might see it as a mythic Mystery, a deliberate dreaming symbol; far from descending, the Gnostic Christ-as-revealer is an element which is already within the very heart of Albion. It is only by coming upon the Mystery of the crucifixion – that is, the uniting of body and blood with the Tree of Knowledge and Good and Evil, via death, that the scales fall from the eyes.

Blake\’s Albion is eventually redeemed by Los, who we also note enters the heart of Albion through the door of Death. So we might say, from a Gnostic perspective that the Christ (literally \’the annointed\’) is an Anamnesis, or memorial sacrifice, both philosophically as Plato would have it and liturgically. As a sacrifice, the Christ gives rise to the re-cognition of humankind\’s dreaming nature.

And what happens when we realise we are dreaming? Why, sometimes we spontaneously become lucid.  We are no longer enmeshed in the dream but can play as we wish, and live an existence of onrushing gnosis instead of static idea.

One does not need to be a follower of the Christian religion to obtain gnosis. Indeed many would argue that religion is inherently  structured so faith and adherence to the teachings – as well as acting on and expresing those teachings in daily life – is enough. But that is not enough for some; the perennial Gnosis of the kosmos as vital, living Beingness with infinite variety of difference and form reveals itself again and again the world over.

This island, this Albion holds many gods, wights and spirits –  portals, persons, and people who participate in the Dreaming, some lucidly, others not. As a Heathen it is my nature to engage with that plethora of ways, that cornucopia of Being that wells up from all sides – we are all dreaming after all, whether we be humans dreaming we are butterflies, or butterflies dreaming we are human.

Both. Neither. Polyvalence.

Wizards are quite lucid about and within the Dreaming. They read its signs, its many faces, its multifarious spoor. They too are beings of living Imagination. They craft it like smiths, stir it like cauldrons. Sorcerers bang Imagination against other bits of Imagination to create weapons to do battle and make tools to manipulate the dreaming even further.

Did you ever wonder why Albion produces so many wizards? Why they stalk our dreamscapes like wild-men and wanderers, feral urbane gentlefolk in sharp suits and funny hats; spymasters and angelspeakers, confidants of kings and dirt-poor cunning folk all at once? Trench-coated bullshit artests and art-school geniuses turned to sketching in pubs, or breaking into Egyptian pyramids?

We\’re bloody everywhere. I mean that quite sincere, and as polyvalently as possible. Dig anywhere in the world, look up  and away for a moment and you\’ll find a wizard\’s counterfeit bones suddenly there, where none were before. Except of course they were, you just didn\’t see them, did you?

Turn the right way and you\’ll be tripping over oracles. Whole ossuries of severed-head-prophets waiting to spin you a yarn with a serpents tongue and breath like fire. We\’re drowning in lucidity – labouring in the liquid light of Leviathan.

I grew up in Cornwall, like I said in my last post – and it\’s what I call gnarly land in a Pratchettian sense. It\’s absolutely huge but it\’s folded up into a very small space. Folds within fold within folds, like a fractal; it depends which way you look at it, and for how long, and what you think you\’re thinking at the time – and also what you really are thinking, but don\’t know it yet.

All of Albion\’s like that really. Goes down deep into the labyrinth, into the heart of it. That\’s the Dreaming as a whole of which Albion is but a part because Albion is also a dream which is dreaming and is being dreamt by something larger, as well as simultaneously being dreamt by the things it is dreaming.

Remember, everything is connected to everything else – it\’s the entangled folds, you see. Fold a sheet of paper, punch a hole – you know the drill.

The Gnostic Christ hanging on the tree is connected to Wodan hanging wounded on Yggdrasil;  Wotan-Krist, the Master of Fury steals the sacred mead and flies away into the sun as an eagle, while Taliesin shifts shapes after taking his three drops from the cauldron as Gwion Bach; Bran the Blessed\’s head is struck from his shoulders, but not before he\’s been a little too close to the cauldron that raises the dead. They bury his prophetic head beneath the tower and clip the raven\’s wings to keep London unfallen as Arthur sleeps beneath a mountain and Myrddin Wyllt loses his mind in battle at Arthuret.

On and on, aeon after aeon. Makes you wonder what kind of wizards of Westminster the Queen has on staff – because you see the Sovcereign and the Land are One, if things are dreamt one way. Another and we have  City wizards playing with the fire of the marketplace, and doors that revolve between corporate-politics and billionaires.

Because they\’ve crafted Nightmares before, haven\’t they? Stained a few dreams with fear and loathing, watched it spread. Watched the world thrash in its fearsweat, getting tangled in the sheets, and smiled as we demanded they turn more blood into lamp-oil to keep away the imending Night.

And so it was that in 2014, the people of the land of Scotland elected to remain united with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Albion is dreaming.

Same as it ever was. And not.

So it goes.

Now, if you\’ll excuse me, I have  to bang some bits of Imagination together so I can shoe the horse of the bony rider outside, y\’know?