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

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

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

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

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

Lived experience again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Urðr,  from which we derive wyrd, and weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then:

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

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

Except..where did that grass come from?

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

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

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

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

Wyrd, innit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There\’s an awful marvel here, friends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gordon again: