When this was begun, it was without title.

Without title.

Beyond such things as poem or post, log or blog. No ink stained paper mounted to flap in the breeze. For you see, I awoke this afternoon with a distant awareness, light on the edge of things; a storm of something rising from beyond the shadows of knowing.

Copper green against iron-black anvilled thunderheads of ideography, it scratched against the glassy skin of the membrane whch envelops us in its translucent separateness. A banner snapping in the wind, ragged in its dragon-tongued whippery, all un-nailed there, not placed for folk to see, but simply to be.

Functional imagery; an eidolon of exiles – the iron-woods of gods arranged in mysterious patterns which glyph

precise aureate nimbuses found within all                                                                                                   forms

and phenomena.

So in such unusual typography I did consider the bastard\’s manifesto;\’ that  which exists in spite of patriarchal lack.

To stand alone and isolate, self-generating, and yet: to comprehend the notion of location, of how and where                                                                   first to know the knower as all one substance indivisible

For the stabbing impressions of daylight objects to which we are subjected – the slings and arrows of

outrageous fortune; the  missile-missals that give us wounds and songs of sensation; those that assault us always with the lie of relief – are soon crushed by the all encompassing density of the Nocturnal Earth.

Behold ourselves, pressed to death.                                                                                                                                                              Crushed as the Pillars kiss each other with salted lips.

Our bodies are ground smooth by the millstone and the light of the midnight sun comes from all about; heavens wreathed in robes of chthonic starlight.

Such a shine as comes from beyond all directions; the timeless cool gleam of ruddy light                                                                                             is the strangeness of an illuminated Tartarus

Seven hells now maddeningly transposed above us, dooming us to endless distant strivings!

Without title we bear our birthright engraved, charms written upon our bones in teuthic scrimshaw.                                                               Surrounded then, suffused and soaked in archaic wisdoms

So we take up arms, gird our loins for war – let fly our arrows of pestilent iron, carrying our plague of strife across the skies.

We leap. We spring. Stride on aither and ocean, cleaving and cloven;                                                                                                                           nocked in terrible harmony, bent back

so we weep                 dryly sober,  crusted in seared brine, titanic in our fury                                                                            turning our faces from heaven and swearing our allegience to She Who Lies Beyond Justice

We who have stolen                                                                                                                                                                                into the Mound

do drink the cup she offers.

And venom becomes honey.

I

Blame Gordon for this.

Actually, blame me for asking him, albeit belatedly in his AMA over at /r/occult. Because as usual, there\’s a personal angle to this – for the past couple of years I\’ve been having recurring issues with my right foot and wounds on it just not healing. This has, bluntly, fucked my life  right over and left me housebound  on multiple occasions, for durations of time leading into months.

(Yes. I am aware of the mythic resonances here. We\’ll get to the Fisher King shit in a bit, I promise.)

As the man says: \”We come to earth to learn things, not be taught things.\”

Throughout my life, I\’ve had to learn things. We all have, and what\’s interesting to me is that most of my learning has been brought on by neccessity, which alters the old saw into something more akin to Necessity is the motherfucker of invention, rather than the more polite form.

And this is going to be an impolite piece. Because the universe frankly doesn\’t give a fuck about politeness. Politeness is the series of patterns and social mores we adopt for the sake of social cohesion. By which I mean, it\’s a series of psycho-social programs which have been developed by human cultures to avoid getting yourself killed, or worse. And it truly doesn\’t matter whether the ones enforcing these mores are your peers or the Authorities, because it will still sting just the same.

In fact, politeness is a status quo weapon, a bulwark against the universe. Because it says  \’if you do this, then this will happen.\’

And contrary to what we\’ve been taught, that\’s not how the universe works – not on a larger scale. Sure, on a small localised level it might work for ten thousand years or so, but close examination will reveal that effectiveness diminishes over time, precisely because the universe really really hates any sort of status quo.

This, incidentally, is why empires fall, and any form of orthodoxy will take a kicking. Repeatedly.And why some of the archons servants are into some really weird stuff. That bit\’s another story – just look at the number of politicians, religious leaders and authority figures with unusual tastes that bring them down or are uncovered afterward.

And here\’s the flipside of that: The Archons are, in my not so humble opinion – the Maintenance Men of  Reality. Janitors and Jailers all rolled into one. For the most part, they\’re really quite good at it, and by really quite good we\’re talking about keeping a leaking boat afloat for what I\’ll arbitrarily say is around ten thousand years.

So good in fact that you hardly notice them. You see them but you don\’t recognise their implications.

When was the last time you looked at a cleaner as they wandered round your office with their cart, or paid attention to the guy doing cleanup on aisle 3? I mean really looked at them, and what they\’re actually doing?

Your office is clean. Your supermarket is functional. That\’s all you notice, or at best, you notice there was a mess, and now there isn\’t. And so you forget, except to make a comment about it in a vague anecdote some months later. They keep things running.

Nice and Smooth. (<—See what I did there?)

They\’re working behind the scenes. They\’re the ones with the keys backstage, to the maintenance tunnels and areas that are offlimits to unauthorised personnel. Did you ever wonder how you get to be authorised, hmm?

But the boat is leaking. It always has been. It\’s their job to keep us from seeing it. They\’re the guys in suits, playing in the orchestra at just the right pitch so you don\’t hear the metal groaning. They\’re the anonymous Figures in Black Who Clean Up after extradimensional incursions. They hang out in the back of our brains and appear in our blind-spots. Choose whatever you like as a metaphor.

And we swallow cultural firmware from birth, we really do. Identity. Form. Shape. The illusion of consistency. It\’s ridiculous to think we\’re the same person at 25 that we were at 6. It really is. It\’s ridiculous to believe that we\’re not impacted and changed by every moment of every day, right on down to the genetic level.

(Epigenetics anyone?)

Yet believe it we do. Ever wonder why we attach so much value to identity-signifiers? To gender expression, to skill and ability, race or creed? Ever wonder why YHVH came right out and said I am He Who Is Called I Am?

II

I don\’t really get on with angels, apart from a vanishingly few exceptions, who know who they are. There\’s an irony in this, as I\’ve been running an RPG in the In Nomine setting pretty much every Tuesday night since 2006, with a party full of players playing angels. But I have a Christian family background, so I\’m vaguely conversant with how it fits together in a real-world context as well.

Now, the story of why I and said entities don\’t get on can be pried out of me for whisky. A lot of whisky. Single Malt only.

Certain entheogens however, on the rare (now) occasions I ingest them, occasionally mean that I may, hypothetically speaking, get a drive by visit from a certain fellow who, shall we say, works on the black-budget end of things. He\’s quite famous really – he\’s in the Book under Scary Motherfucker.

And he seems to delight in dispensing \’wisdom\’, in a kind of sort of Cigarette Smoking Man sort of way.

How is this relevant? Well, consider the parapolitical situation one might at one point have ascribed to certain secret societies. Consider also that like any body, they would not be the ones maintaining their shiny buildings and temples. Indeed the turnover might be quite high, relatively speaking. But who are going to be there for a good long while? Who\’s going to have the keys?

Janitors. Maintenance Staff.

Custodians.

custody (n.)

mid-15c., from Latin custodia \”guarding, watching, keeping,\” from custos (genitive custodis) \”guardian, keeper, protector,\” from PIE *(s)keu- \”to cover, conceal\” (see hide (n.1)).

janitor (n.)

1580s, \”an usher in a school,\” later \”doorkeeper\” (1620s), from Latin ianitor \”doorkeeper, porter,\” from ianua \”door, entrance, gate,\” from ianus \”arched passageway, arcade\” (see Janus) + agent suffix -tor. Meaning \”caretaker of a building\” first recorded 1708.

In the words of  one of the apparently multiple paedophiles who I let into my childhood via the proxy of British TV in the 80\’s and 90\’s:

\”Can you tell what it is yet?\”

(I was part of the associated \’club\’ that was associated with this show. Got newsletters and everything. Yeah. Great huh?)

Keepers of the keys indeed. Except of course, official doorkeepers are only needed when the door is the only way in, not when the walls are full of cracks and holes anyway. Of course, they close up the gaps as soon as they notice them, often with extreme predjudice, but they\’re playing catchup.

After all, Who Watches The Watchers?

But, after all, we often run cleanup ourselves, often without realising. The intrusions of the strange occur, and we deny them. Or perhaps more perfidiously, for wizards at least, we try to shoehorn the visits from the Neighbours into pre-existing paradigms. Which, quite frankly?

Is Fucking Stupid.

At best, the systems received from the Neighbours are interfaces and/or maps. And what do we know kids?

The map is not the territory.

What\’s more, the thing about maps is that they are always created after the fact.  These disruptions, these intrusions are Black Swans

And while we\’re on Taleb, let\’s consider the notion that certain investments, while they may produce steady returns, will eventually exhibit catastrophic crashes. In short, You Will Fail.

And funnily enough, do you know what they call a hedge against such things? A Holy Grail distribution.

Black Swans, hedges and Holy Grails. Oh my!

Because here\’s where the Fisher King comes in. In grail mythology, this poor bugger takes a wound in in the thigh. Euphemistically, this could very probably be a wound in the genital area which impairs the king\’s fertility and messes up the sacred bond of land and king – meaning that there\’s been no hieros gamos to keep the bonds of sovereignty and fertility going. The land is consequently suffering, and the healing properties of the Grail aren\’t working.

In some legends, it\’s the Spear of Longinus that wounds the king – yes, that Spear  which plays nicely with the fish-Christ mytheme too. In others, the grail itself isn\’t the traditional cup, but is in fact a severed head. And there are myths with severed heads and cauldron-cups that resurrect the dead too, to say nothing of John the Baptist and the Mandaeans – the latter group having to flee Iraq in droves since the Iraq War.

And the wound won\’t heal.

Now, notwithstanding that my own unhealed wound is truly in the foot, rather than my nethers, here is where we can really begin to circle in on this. The grail, in all its incarnations, is associated with healing and/or rebirth. In the Arthurian myth, it requires a youthful figure to find it. In the severed-head mythos, most of them speak prophetically.

What do these themes have in common? Look in the PGM and you\’ll find a chunk of the rites require a young boy – to serve as vessel for the god or as oracle. Likewise, even Jesus had things to say about the positive mystical abilities of children, in three separate Gospels:

But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. – Matthew

Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. – Luke & Mark.

And lest you think my poking into things Western Philosophical doesn\’t apply, I shall just quote from Kingsley\’s In The Dark Places of Wisdom:

As soon as she has welcomed him, down in the world of the dead, the first thing the goddess does is call Parmenides \’young man\’. That\’s just one word in Greek: kouros. A kouros is a young man, a boy, a son or child.

Kouros is an ancient word, older even than the Greek language. Often it\’s a title of honour, never an expression of contempt. When the great poets before Parmenides used the term it was always to communicate a sense of nobility. It was the kouros, more than anyone else, who was a hero.

In terms of physical age it could mean someone under thirty. But in practice the word had a far wider meaning. A kouros was the man of any age who still saw life as a challenge, who faced it with the whole of his vigour and passion, who hadn\’t yet stood back to make way for his sons. The word indicated the quality of a man, not how old he was.

It was also closely connected with initiation. The kouros stands at the borderline between the world of the human and the world of the divine; has access to them both, is loved and recognized in both. It\’s only as a kouros that the initiate can possibly succeed at the great ordeal of making a journey into the beyond—just as Parmenides does.

So what\’s this obsession with young boys? Is it the paedophilia again? Or is it something else – some quality of youth which is preserved no matter the age? Some initiation that the Lady Underground of Parmeneides imparts?

Recall then, that we will fail. Recall that we\’re talking about katabasis, descent into the underworld. Into the realms of the dead. The place where all our maps ultimately mean nothing.

Who\’s the one who notices the Emperor has no clothes on? A child who simply doesn\’t get why everyone is pretending the monarch\’s new duds are the finest thing ever. A child who\’s not been indoctrinated to ignore the disruption.

After all, how many times have we seen children point out the inherent ridiculousness of our existence with three simple letters?

Why?

And this is the wound that does not heal. Not without the youth and the grail. Not without the prophet inducted into the mysteries of death, who comes back with new words and ways, but who also understands that ultimately, the skull will reduce them to dust.

We are here on this earth to learn, not to be taught.

And that means seeing the world as it really is, and sod our pet theories. In my case, the very fact of my unhealed wound burns and bites and upends my life.  It fucks me up with its inescapable nature, just as my disability holds me in place like old Titurel on his palanquin. Because there\’s an undeniable reality to it – one that has me up against the wall and wishing that it isn\’t so.

My wound is not teaching me. It does not speak, does not tell me how to see the world.

It simply is. An undeniable disruption that  sometimes drives me deep into depression, but along with my disability, liberates me in frightening and exhilarating ways. That means I don\’t get to use the stairs, that I often have to literally use the back ways – I could tell you horror stories of airports, let alone the tunnels under Brompton Hospital in London, or being caught up three flights of stairs during a fire and having about fifty doctors and nurses completely ignore me.

Does this make me better? No, but it does make me more likely to be confronted with the same passages as the maintrenance men and have to use the exploits that are there for only a moment.

So let me ask you, when did you last change an opinion, really and honestly? When was the last time you honestly and nakedly had no fucking clue what you were doing or what was going on? When was the last time you had something of high weirdness occur and you just let it be itself, and didn\’t immediately start running to work out what it was or how it fit?

Because it seems to me that much of the world  – occult and otherwise – is bloody desperate to make things fit together in order to salve the terror and pain and sheer raw what the-fuckery of life.

We want the grail without the wound. And even if we become aware of it, gods forbid we look at it and study it, this vertiginous hole in things, which we\’ved tried to fill in with detritus of broken models that are half decayed and septic.

There\’s a reason healers like Asklepios and his father Apollo were also bringers of death, and it wasn\’t because they were bad at what they did. On the contrary, that what was made them the very best at it.

So you have a choice. You can ignore the maintenance men, and carry on. Or you can start paying attention, and face them and the messes head on without maps. It\’ll probably hurt, and definitely kill you, but then again, so does everything.

Be seeing you.

1. First worship the Immortal Gods, as they are established and ordained by the Law.

2. Reverence the Oath, and next the Heroes, full of goodness and light.

3. Honour likewise the Terrestrial Dæmons by rendering them the worship lawfully due to them

4. Honour likewise thy parents, and those most nearly related to thee.

[…]

55. Unhappy that they are! They neither see nor understand that their good is near them.

56. Few know how to deliver themselves out of their misfortunes.

57. Such is the fate that blinds mankind, and takes away his senses.

58. Like huge cylinders they roll to and fro, and always oppressed with ills innumerable.

59. For fatal strife, innate, pursues them everywhere, tossing them up and down; nor do they perceive it.

60. Instead of provoking and stirring it up, they ought, by yielding, to avoid it.

61. Oh! Jupiter, our Father! if Thou would\’st deliver men from all the evils that oppress them,

62. Show them of what dæmon they make use.

63. But take courage; the race of man is divine.

64. Sacred nature reveals to them the most hidden mysteries.

65. If she impart to thee her secrets, thou wilt easily perform all the things which I have ordained thee.

66. And by the healing of thy soul, thou wilt deliver it from all evils, from all afflictions.

67. But abstain thou from the meats, which we have forbidden in the purifications and in the deliverance of the soul;

68. Make a just distinction of them, and examine all things well.

69. Leaving thyself always to be guided and directed by the understanding that comes from above, and that ought to hold the reins.

70. And when, after having divested thyself of thy mortal body, thou arrivest at the most pure Æther,

71. Thou shalt be a God, immortal, incorruptible, and Death shall have no more dominion over thee.

– The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

Ah, Pythagoras, you were one most excellent bastard. The fun of it is? Although this is rooted in certain groundings of Hellenic Polytheism for want of a better term, this stuff is the basis for the Western World. The world in which we live had a Soul-basis from the beginning kids.

The horror of today’s world, which causes that ache deep inside, that sense there is something missing? Is there because something is missing – the very Soul has been forgotten.

Without its endlessly regenerating upwellings, without the interfacings of our selves with the nimbus of damonic Being which surrounds and iinterpenetrates and suffuses every single phenomenon – then we are left at the mercy of separateness induced by the counterfeit Spirit which has set itself up as Supreme.

That which denies the Pleromatic, vitalistic nature of the kosmos, which sets up Reason and-Rationality-as-Logos is  our enemy, but more than that, it is in total and utter self-denial of its mystic ancestry.

Our world, our science, proceeded from the deliberate descent into the realms of the Soul, where Wisdom itself spoke with those who had died before they died, and uttered the truths and planted the seeds which would blossom most appropriately in our limited localised space, time and culture. To once again reinvigorate the paths that would allow us to regenerate who we were and are and will be, providing us with technologies and practices so that we can mate our own selves with the Soul of the kosmos. To give us a way to always remember what we are.

But what has happened? Who now goes down to immerse themselves in the Soul, who enters the Hall of Night, seeking the star at the centre of the Labyrinth?

Who rides the very World-Tree, sacrificing all they are for gnosis, for those runes, those mysteries, those secret songs?

Hardly anyone.

And so, our world has forgotten its own Soul, the source of its Being. That is the ache you feel, the terror that makes you sweat, the mewling and thrashing of distress – a species acting out against itself, not realsing that its abandonment issues are self inflicted.

But that ache? We have tried to numb it for thousands of years, yet it has grown worse – leaching into every expression of holiness and wholeness. Vehicles and machineries of ecstasy and connexion have become rote mumblings, brief sparkings of long-drained batteries.

And the ache remains. It is a wound that will not heal, scarring our psyche and leading us to scar countless other cultures; systematically and instinctively severing connexions of indigenous peoples from their lands, their living links to the vastness of their own awareness of the kosmos.

In our own sadness and hunger for meaning, we pillage anything that we see gleaming with the light of the numinous, and then wonder why they become dim and lustreless in our grasping hands. Then we throw it away in disgust and ridicule, the hollow bitter mockery of ‘superstition’ and ‘primitivism’ curling our lips into supercilious sneers.

But that ache? It is our salvation, our path to healing. By embracing the pain, the agony of utter helplessness, we plunge into the deepest  of abysses. Howling, we fall down and down, descending into darkness.

.(A secret: They called Herakleitos \”The Weeping Philosopher”, did you know that?)

Into the vastness of infinite emptiness, the pitiless slate-grey of imprisoning meaningless, we are beseiged by voices, torn apart by wicked tongues speaking in well-loved voices.

(And somewhere, young Friedrich suffers at the end of his life, doomed to know the death of God will be hoisted up up as a blank-faced eidolon, instead of the fierce-faced daimon that drove him to call up Zarathustra’s mask and wear it to the revellries of Dionysos and Apollo…)

For the pain leads us home, though at first its sights be obscured by veils of tears. We are lost and fleeing, running pell mell into the Primal Night. Devoured by it a thousand-fold, torn apart by lions and strangled by serpents – stalked by night-black panthers in ruined cities, our passage marked by strange gods with feathered heads and animal bodies pierced over and over with ancient tribal taboos.

We are hollowed out, our flesh opened up to bare the Soul we carry, so long isolated that it flinches from the numinous; even the gentlest of touches sets it shrieking as if it has been set afire.

There is no escape as the daimons ring us all about, as we are passed from hand to hand by most frightful of wights. Bone-weariness assails us; anxious weight crushes implacably down, grinding our hearts.

Pressed into death, we are unaware of the wine that is released, the blood of the grape still ruby red from our own marrows, sweet as honey. Gripped by desert thirsts and scoured by northern winds, we who are slain again and again,cast down to crash to earth, to be swallowed by subterranean realms, are soon guided by soft hands.

(Beaten, burned and blackened, so the hero passes the ring of fire, to greet the maiden so lately risen from sleep. She hands him the meadcup, this honeyed grail of his own own blood. For the hero and the land are one. This a sovereign truth.)

So we suffer, so we smile. So we endure, as we begin to recall the old familarity, the themes that shuck their clothes to reveal their status as Primordial Images. And, wonder of wonders, we are welcomed amongst them!

Presented with the mirrors that smoke, welcomed with brassy pipings, so the vaguenesses of our notions are lifted, our own daimonic nature revealed  as we are ushed in by an honour-guard of kin.

It is the ache that has led us here, the suffering that brings us to the nameless, wordless wisdom. To rediscover our Soul, to become embodied anew as resurrected, restless beings who speak and howl and split open the very secrets of the world.

Nothing is ever lost. Nothing is ever forgotten. Not really. It is our doom. Our wyrd. And wyrd always goes as it should – for as we are enSouled, so are all things.

And in all things, we can bring it forth, because it is inevitable. Because it is Necessary. Because we have no other choice.

This is somewhat of an experiment, so you shall have to forgive me. Forgive me any mistakes, any wrongnesses or distortions – purely because, you see, I am proceeding in darkness.

The knowledge we are seeking with this experiment is found in darkness and rich blood. It\’s found by going back to the roots of logic, in tunneling deep into the soil beneath the constructions of a world bound by the Spirit of separation. Analysis has left us with particulate, quantised realities; striation of number and discrete variable.

Thought, power, form – all channelled into line, canal-ised units bumping up against each other, face to face as the boundaries of our spheres of influence, our envelopes of skin press against each other.

Touch. That\’s what it\’s called. The impact, the weight the force of of it; pressure where one thing senses another. Back and forth, adjusting or overpowering as is decreed by a thousand different conditions.

But in this experiment, this notional extension of the senses – desirously we look to the spaces in-between. The charge that thrums there, the polarity of pulse, the very rhythm of breath; an endless becoming-as and blending with, a subtle dynamism.

The storm rumbles with its iron-black cloud wreathed in lightning, and thunder unfolds, the noise itself evoking the wash of sound; an ocean of experience that engulfs us. Crucified, strapped to the mast, salt-stung on the axis-mundi we are surrounded by mountains a hundred times taller than our humble vessels. They peer down upon us with brine-ridden gaze, piercing skin with salt encrusted nails, opening us to the air.

Down even to the marrow, we are revealed; the rusting revelation borne forth by ocean-spume. Aphrodite\’s foam arises from a dismembered heaven, but take heart! Old Saturn-Kronos has re-emerged from the Caves of Tartarus, Kouros once more – and how brightly he leads this coterie of heroes! Wolves all, these Lords of the Lair, these dreaming singers, Ouliades – son and daughters of sun-bright Apollo Oulis and his endless golden arrows.

Deathbringer. Destroyer. Healer. Helper. Oracle. Prophet.

Annointed, initiated – son and grandson in endless line, bearing in blood and word and song the inner knowledge of gods. In the midst of the storm, so we raise our hands and calm falls upon the earth. The noise of primordial silence falls upon the perception of those who have ears to hear, and so we may walk upon the stilled waters while all about us are deafened by the roar of the everyday.

This is an experiment, dear ones. A following of the thread left for us left in the Labyrinth. Alone we may seem, besieged by echoes of banished images and forms; wreathed in mists, surrounded by the hiss of nested serpents, so we believe we wander unaided. We believe ourselves lost, dear ones. But how can this be we so, we who breathe and hear its whistle betwixt our teeth, who listen to the winds sing through the hollows of cavernous spaces that once seemed so crowded?

We, who stand at the crossroads, who gather up the dismembered trivium into its wholly mystic self. We who hear the syrinx, the piping of unknown and half-forgotten gods, their Images long devolved and stained; we who plunge laughing into the deepest Night in search of the golden immortals?

Listen then:

For we too are carried. We too are guided by the charioteers, the riders, the choosers of the slain. The Daughters of the Very Sun lead us to the gates of Beyond.  Come lately from the Halls of Night, wishing swiftly to return there, so  we are guided to the one who has gnosis – nameless in her beauty.

1.21 the maidens held the chariot and horses on the broad road.
1.22 And the goddess received me kindly, took my right hand in hers,
1.23 and addressed me with these words:
1.24 \’Young man, accompanied by immortal charioteers,
1.25 who reach my house by the horses which bring you,

1.26 welcome – since it was not an evil destiny that sent you forth to travel
1.27 this road (for indeed it is far from the beaten path of humans),
1.28 but Right and justice. There is need for you to learn all things –
1.29 both the unshaken heart of persuasive Truth
1.30 and the opinions of mortals, in which there is no true reliance.
1.31 But nevertheless you will learn these too – that the things that appear
1.32 must genuinely be, being always, indeed, all things.

– Parmeneides, On Nature. trans Richard D. McKirahan – Philosophy before Socrates, pp. 151 – 157

Far from the beaten paths of men, we are received most kindly; here at the roots of mountains, given access by soft words of maidens, our hand is taken and we are led to most furious inspiration. The glorious madness of existence, vibrant in its rushing, intoxicating glory surrounds us. Like any storm,  as singular in purpose as its sole eye, so we are brought to the mysteries of death. In this, it is the cool hand of the nameless which calms our fractious horses and transmits its wisdom.

For the sun, most vaunted of holy bodies dwells not in light, but in darkness – not in the land of civilisation, but those of the barbarian. Beyond the limits of maps lies the truth – for ever-youthful Apollo held his home far beyond the limits of the North Wind.

This is an experiment, full of Midnight Light and burning skies, of hordes and horses. Of grizzled horse-hair moustaches and thundering mounts. Of ten thousand drum-beats calling black birds to feast on flesh; skull-gleam wink from empty socket. Of a god of ten thousand forms and shapes, inhabiting a billion bodies all at once where time means naught: where the All at Once is contained in a single note droned from an endlessly open throat.

Of iron nails pinning myth and daimon both to the very earth, so that the blood may well up and refresh them endlessly anew. Where a tree supports the Heavens and the Earth in worlds that are thrice on thrice; where the sacrifice of self to the unbegotten pleromatic Self sets us free from our fetters. Where our every wound may be a wellspring that cleanses us from doubt, our every suffering remind us of our mortality, our congress with the Lady in the Mound. Only then will we be able to heal and sing away the agonies of others, to ease their passage and lead them to drink the waters of their own Soul.

Only then may we comprehend Christ with his warband of disciples, Wodan with his harriers and Apollo and Dionysius with their frenzied initiates. Only then may Kronos greet Mahakala in the tent of the Khan. There, Bolverk and Gunnloth lie in the calmness of the afterglow, listening to the whirl of Kali\’s knives as she dances with Shiva, he white as a corpse in the charnel grounds, all dreadlocked and garlanded with serpents.

Only then may we witness the termas given by scorpions, or we dragon-slayers take shelter from the storm beneath the hood of the King of the Nagas. Only then shall the vital, Primal Images  unveil themselves from ten thousand years of dry dust and half an aeon of separation, becoming a blossom of infinite difference and variety.

As Rudra and the Maruts stalk the stormy sky and black dogs pad the corpse paths on soft paws, we plunge down to the very roots of the tradition which was subverted, separated and peeled away by counterfeit self-agrandizing Spirit. We greet ancient Pythagoras as kindred spirits, hail Parmeneidies as brother, and lift our voices to the Aither along with Empdocles. And Heraclitus, he who died beneath the midday sun?

We weep sweet tears of joy to see him rise up once more upon the downward path, mixing our tears in with his at thousands years of seeming loss.

This is an experiment.

Throw yourselves back, back into the arms of heroes! You are whole, you are complete – simply recall your ancestors and you will begin to understand the  truth of this. You have your grandfather\’s eyes, your mother\’s smile, your child\’s laugh. Any and all and many in between!

Listen, learn and watch!

Golden-thighed Pythagoras was visited by Abaris the Hyperborean, arrow bearing healer. Pythagoras, he who recalled many lives, given such recall by Hermes – his soul\’s lineage bore the marks of Hermotimus.

Hermotimus of Clazomenae, whose soul would voyage far and wide while his body lay as dead! Hermotimus, who identified the shield of Menelaus in the temple of Apollo, a feat worthy of any tulku, would you not agree?

Pythagoras and he, one and the same – the name that every child learns, yet does not know. It is everywhere, all about us and invisible to all those who do not have eyes to see.

The Golden Chain is full of nomads – for Abaris was a Scythian, and a wanderer far and wide. Slip into the dreams of in-between and you shall see the steppe and its wide open skies. Further back, amidst the biting cold and snow, fur and iron and eagles, the living wights are revealed, long before Siddartha entered the Lotus. Perhaps even earlier, across the ice and lands now subsumed by seas, beneath the light of the circumpolar stars, there were faces raised with streaming tears of joy in the clear crystal night?

This is an experiment – for we restless ones are entranced. From Black seas to  frozen North, the transmission of in-betweeness spreads like a bloodstain, setting the prisons of iron to rust. A cornucopia of Mysteries emerging from the hollows of the earth. We who are wounded, pierced and nailed in place. This is the nomad secret – those who  move without moving.

Such stillness is only achieved by Being, rather than doing

Be. Seeing. You.