(Also, hello. I’m not dead after all.)

A veritable horde has come together to help us manifest some of mine and Frater Acher’s words, via Hadean Press in may 2023. Below is Acher’s original announcement post:

A veritable horde has come together to help us manifest some of mine and Frater Acher’s words, via Hadean Press in may 2023. Below is Acher’s original announcement post:

Here is a sneak peak of what we are currently preparing for you: GOÊTIC ATAVISMS, Hadean Press, May 2023.

A whole motley crew of us is incoming together to bring this book to life: My partner in crime, Craig Slee and I wrote the content, Frater U∴D∴ is contributing a preface, Gianpaolo Tucci and his AI engine created the cover title based upon my design suggestion (draft below), and my long time magical companion José Gabriel Alegria Sabogal is currently sharpening his pencils to add his own iconographic visions of our joint Goêtic Atavisms.

Stay tuned via the Hadean Press webpage for further news in 2023.

Until then, have a magical winter solstice and a great break before we embark into the new year.

https://www.hadeanpress.com/schedule

So yeah, that’s happening!

“I am a cyborg in lineage with Hephaestus.” – The Cyborg Jillian Weise

Forge-fire and seafoam. They say Aphrodite cheated, that she chafed at the marriage. They wish. That she was unfaithful. They have no concept of polyamory or, radical chthonic relationship anarchy amongst the More-Than-Human, the daemonic, do they?

What they have is Ancient Greek straight bullshit. Be it homo, hetero, or eromenos-erastes? State sanctioned norms makes it straight. We don’t make the rules. We make worlds and break them. Moment to moment, breath to breath, ebbs and flows. Crip time, crip space. Illegitimate, illegible.

You want to say that Aphrodite mothered us? Or perhaps Aetna? Want to say it was Charis? Want to say we descend from the spunk left on Athena’s thigh? Oh, you abled do so love your straight lines, don’t you. Your taxonomies, categories, your specs and measures. Want a family tree, without realising the roots are rhizhomes. We know lineage, indirect, crooked paths and labyrinths to get lost in; cracks to huff the sibyl-steam, sightless spasms and katabasis-crawlings. You want chrome and shine and light; we bring you hot and cold running darkness, occult plumber-spume.

Weighty, gravitic. In your world of speed, we shuffle, we limp, we gimp, we spaz, and strut. We roll and thrash and spit. Dead weight, to you. Over we go, under the bus, into the water down, and down. Sinking like lead, bodies inevitable transports to the ecstatic; the outsides-insides which are beside the legitimate selves you would have for us.

We’re always bastards. Illegitimate, illegible.

Listen. We cripped the Queen of Heaven. We made her immobile, Gave her the throne that shone, everything she wanted; deus-gleam payback. Made Mother one of us. Gifted her the crip-gnosis  – the daemonic lived experience. Returned her ferality. What? You thought Dionysos came to get us like an obedient whelp? The Liberator comes to the fetter-maker at the behest of the would-be free?  As if we’d not been drinking, conspiring, sharing breath together for aeons. As if we’d not been shifting, twisting, out of our skulls and skins together, faster than Athena from Zeus’ forehead?  As if we’d not taken counsel from our Grandfather Kronos, legs all Saturn-bound with lambswool, freed only when the times of Misrule are upon us. As if we didn’t learn how time fucks and is fucked with when you’re leaden-made.

As. If.

Stagger-drunk, spaz-swagger as we roll up Olimpos, sniggering at the reterritorialisation, slack lips and shivering limbs. Mama’s in and under the mountain now, back to archaic times. Heaven’s revealed as the Starry Cavern, the vasty gulfs of space felt as the upward-downward path. Grandma Gaea greets us all, leader of the countless, innumerable Mothers ever-animate. Gravitational-crip sorcery is like that, profusive, multiplicitous, generative. Doubleheaded poetry. What did you expect from Dactylos-kin? Our measurements and meter is always difference.
Forge-fire and seafoam. Kybernetikos.  Who says the organisms best equipped to steer aren’t those that move cripwise?

(Disclaimer/CN: This post discusses such things as depictions of rape, theft, murder, kinslaying and incest. None of what of what I write here should be taken as approval of, or apologia in relation to these acts.)

“You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ ‘star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien 

The above quote is a charming one, isn’t it? Tolkien’s invocation of another way of seeing, of existing, beguiles us with its sense of possibility. It is, like much of myth and story, fundamentally conservative – not in the political sense, but in the conservational sense. As an attempt to preserve, or at least, keep possibilities open in the mind of the reader, it’s pretty good. Of course, the wrinkle is – or some may say – that this took place in the distant past. Nobody, they might say, sees the world like this – or if they do, then their perception is deluded – because we are past that. We see the world representationally now, striving towards accuracy. Anything else is just superstition, is it not?

The mistake these stereotypical straw men make – within the context that I have breathed life into them for – is to suggest that a linear path between “then-now”, and “past-future”. Actually, they make several mistakes, not least because of their unexamined bias. I’ll not elucidate them all here, but suffice to say that our vegetative friends have not considered, amongst other things, the role of the cultural, historical, and philosophical structures which influence how we perceive and know things. In philosophy, such consideration of knowledge and how, why, what, and where we know things is called epistemology.

The thing with philosophy is that it covers many things: morality, ethics, metaphysics, linguistics, epistemology, sociology etc. We have words for all these things, and they are often their own disciplines. Philosophy – literally descending from “philia” + “sophia”, meaning affection or love for wisdom – can cover a kind of work in them all them all, precisely because understanding and using what is learnt in these many and varied arenas, and dong so well? Understanding the implications? Knowing that we know nothing for certain and that things are seldom as they first? 

This is wise, these things are wise, and so: wisdom is the useful, sound, and valuable deployment of knowledge and living life itself well.

Our straw men, conjured into existence by the magic of speech and words – shapings of breath digitized and transmitted across the planet to you, dear reader? They are brought forth into a world where the majority of its unexamined structures descend from the cultural shapings of men with pale skins. Dig further back, and deeper, and you will find that those men re-ordered, restructured and built upon the knowings and experiences of people who were not white or male. 

The structures of how we perceive, how we know what we know – even how we are taught to think, and express and feel? These did not come from nowhere – unfiltered and whole from the mind of one omnipotent, omniscient, Creator. Rather, many powers and potencies, principalities and agencies act all together. 

The flows of power, influence, propaganda, social and economic capital; the emotional and cultural response to events and experiences. All of these are contoured and shaped by the many. That many of the pale-skinned men shaped much of our world today is an accident of birth which is then compounded by economic and social factors based on climate, trade routes, geography, resources etc. This acquisition is then compounded  and backward rationalized – the accidental conflux of factors becomes a self-justification for ideas of false superiority, which drives behaviours which weight things in the favour of that group.

Make no mistake reader – there are still many worlds, even today. Bounded spaces, their boundaries staked out by those with the influence and ability to enforce them. That this is being written by a pale skinned man from North Western Europe is no coincidence. Nor is the fact that many will be able to read this, though my tongue is not what they speak natively – their first words carried a history different to mine. For various reason those people learnt my language which sneaks up behind others and mugs them in dark alleys, or engages in savagely lucrative trade deals.  

History literally is an accounting what has gone before, thus recounted by those later to be reckoned as accurate sources and authority. It is not all violence, theft and brutality. It is cultural exchange, trade, sharing, incorporation and diffusion also. All these things flow between in flux – this is influence. Influence is often codified and commodified under the rubric of power in an attempt to wield it more universally – which inevitably divorces it from its original context and forces a more acquisitive mindset amongst those who seek it, rather than seeking out points of influential confluence and integrating oneself within that.

The orality of history, and cultural transmission, is not something often thought of today. With the advent of writing, information and knowledge conservation shifts to the texts themselves as authority – the metaphor of something being “there in black and white” refers to newspapers, but the sense of it descends from textual authority. 

Perhaps not so coincidentally, the historic belief structure of those pale people is rooted in a distortion of a heresy of a Middle-Eastern monotheism, which in itself seems been an offshoot of various Middle-Eastern polytheisms. That Judaism has a central authoritative text, leavened with thousands of years of oral and written commentaries and arguments should be noted. That this text was itself an edited version which scholars believe contains multiple texts, and was added to and redacted from, in response to socio-political and religious reasons over time,  is also of note. That that text was selectively edited and canonized, before being translated in various languages in response to socio-political and religious reasons over time, is worth further note. 

That this collage of ancient material is elevated to holy scripture and used as basis for moral authority for the majority of the pale people for over a thousand years, and used as justification for imperalism, rape, murder, theft, oppression, oppression on grounds of sexuality, gender – and was a fundamental source of, and during, the social construction of the concept of race – would be shocking, were it not for the desire for that which is referred to as ‘power’ and ‘authority’. 

The singularity of authority and power presupposes scarcity. This is to say that fixed, codified protocols of behaviour, perception, and emotional affect allow definition and navigation in an unpredictable kosmos. By structuring experience, we make sense and it is by sense that we structure the world in a feedback loop. 

In a society based on orality, it is the stories that are told which preserve, iterate upon, and transmit knowledge and culture. In this, it’s worth quoting Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.”What this means is that how a message is transmitted influences the message content and context. Similarly, it is how and by whom-as-medium it is transmitted which influences the message. Oral societies are often conservative in nature – there are ways things are done, and for reasons. Thus, to deviate from that is dangerous, precisely because things are done that way for a reason which benefits certain people.  Whether those certain people are an elite or a society as whole varies according to societal structures.

Those who deviate are dangerous for several reasons – they are unpredictable, which in many societies at one time meant that they are or were a potential threat. They are non-conformist, which implies they may not honour the social contract which is supposed important in keeping everyone safe and keeping the world-order-as-society knows it running.

Recall Tolkien’s charm? His elder possibility is a world-order or worldview (weltanschauung) which sees the numinosity in all things. It thus sees flux and agency and multiplicity.  In the case of polytheism and animism, the multiplicity of agents  and powers suggests a multitude of agents all acting on one another and interpenetrating – rather like ripples or interference patterns. Gods and “Big spirits” ( terminology that is pretty much synonymous in the mind of this author for the purposes of discussion) can be said to have mythic “mass”. A large stone dropped into a pond will make bigger ripples and cancel or interfere with smaller ripples generated by smaller pebbles. 

When considering gods as establishers of world-order – or even creating worlds, it’s instructive to consider that in many mythologies, this is accomplished by the overthrow of a previous order or set of structures, and their reconfiguration. Which is usually, to judge my many world mythologies, a polite way to suggest murder and butchery; fundamentally catastrophic  in all the linguistic and etymological senses of the word.. Once bloodily established, it is usually the actions and processes of the gods which keep the kosmos running. This accreted behaviour forms mores. Myth is thus a recounting of these behaviours and deviations therefrom, not simply as dry recounting but as felt experience which stimulates emotional and psychological affect which joins all participants (human and otherwise) into a shared epistemological framework.

In any society, the element of performance is key in any media – not just what the media ism but how it does it, as mentioned above. In an oral society where knowledge is shared through speech, whether by poetry or storytelling, the performance of the teller is key, as is the setting and context of the delivery.

Many myths depict rape, murder, theft,  trade, sharing, incorporation and diffusion. In this, they are as much like other forms of media as anything else. Likewise, it of course is the choice of those personally affected by such things not to engage with such things if they feel it would be detrimental to them. Yet, in dealing with myth, particularly if one views it not as synonymous with falsehood, but in fact expressive of some world-reality which forms the root of of our perceptions and experience, we often have questions of morality.

To say that myths containing rape, incest, murder, theft etc “offer a window onto a different time” or to suggest that the actions of a mythological figure are literally representationally true and thus that figure should be hated and despised is to present only a fairly shallow reading in the view of the author.

Let us take the Norse god Odin – he who, according the texts we have, committed near- genocide against giant-kind; slaughtering his own kindred the god (along with his brothers) butcher the primeval giant Ymir and use his body to make the worlds. The brothers then create humans by breathing life into two logs/trees found by the sea shore – far better then men of straw, no?

He steals the Mead of Inspiration (itself brewed from the blood of a murdered god) after seducing and tricking its giant-maiden guardian, but not before killing nine thralls in order to get close to her father – bearing the name Bolverk (evil-doer). He uses magic to impregnate Rindr after she turns him down repeatedly, making it so that Valli, the agent of vengeance over thr death of Baldr, is a product of rape – regardless that he is in the shape of/dressed of a woman at the time.

He attempts to have his way with Billing’s daughter, but is discovered and chased away by a pack of angry men. He sets up heroes to die in the midst of battle, abandoning them at the precise moment they need his aid. He is, in short, a major bastard. 

Did the Norse enjoy stories of rape? Was it a particular genre that pleased them? We have the images of Vikings as raping and pillaging, after all?

Certainly, there are texts that suggest they had a different view of sexuality and violence than we do today. But is perhaps our take on Odin in the myths we have had passed down to us heavily biased? Of course. For one, it appears the idea of Odin as chief god in Iceland was due to the preponderance of preserved texts. Archaeology suggests Thor was more popular with the population-at-large than the weird and terrible bastard wizard Stabby McOne-Eye the murder hobo. 

But Odin is the Master of Inspiration – and both kings and poets were buoyed by his patronage. That this is passed down, collected and written down by a Christian after Christianization of Iceland, and then translated to English, some eight or nine centuries later?

This influences the medium and message. Further, amongst certain neopagans and heathen polytheists, there is a tendency to look at the preserved texts in a similar way to the Bible. This is a product of the mutations of that North West European brand of heresy we mentioned, contextualized in sectarian manner (Protestantism has a lot to answer for).

Even if the myths are treated not as literal, we have been culturally contoured to look at myths which describe religious and numinous experience as exemplary. That’s to say, things that serve as examples or moral models, illustrations of general rules. In a sense, that’s akin to looking to police procedurals or popular movies, or 24hr news channels for a sense of morality today. Such things do contain troubling assumptions today – valourisation of violence if it “gets the job done” in movies, or  news stories inciting rage for political or social gain as example. Yet their key raison d’etre is experiential affect. Information and mores may be passed on and inculcated unconsciously, yes. But to view their content as explicitly and directly representational without bias? This is surely dangerous.

Furthermore, our attitudes to sexuality and violence, both as distinct groupings and how they interplay in all forms of media are worthy of critique – exactly what is acceptable and why? What is the historical and social context for this?

So if myth is not to be read as moral exemplar, what then? In this we must engage beyond a surface reading, if we so choose. As method of epistemic transmission and framing, myth is is not exemplary, but does aid in modelling. It is the response to myth that aids modelling not the myth itself. 

To say Odin is a rapist, a murderer, and thief is important – not because he is, or is not these things, but what that means  to the audience participating in the myth, both historically and currently in context. This is why his self-naming as Bolverk is so important, within the context of the myths. Performer and audience and mythic figure all acknowledge this behaviour as unacceptable to humans. 

Throughout the myth cycle, the “morally dubious” stories illustrate deviance from acceptability is only viable longterm if one is influential, and this motif exists across cultures. There are always consequences for such behaviour, whether it be the dooming of the world, or more subtle responses. Yet they serve a doubly illustrative function in the case of Odin, and other such figures (often Trickster or magical figures) wherein their behaviour and character is ambiguous precisely because of that nature – existing asocially, breaking rules and remaking them, surviving and prospering in impossible ways, in often hostile environments. This renders such figures “unsafe” “criminal” or “unnatural”, perhaps even queer in relation  to wider society. For such figures, it is the transmission of this quality via the myth which the narrative preserves, even when preserved and iterated upon by time. 

In this context, to state again, solely literal representational readings of myth are mistaken. This is not to say it is all symbolic, but rather that metaphor transmits information – an Iroquois story says their people learnt to tap maple syrup from squirrels. 

An Iroquois boy  saw a red squirrel cutting into tree bark with its teeth and later returning to lick the sap; the young Iroquois followed the squirrel’s lead and tried the same technique by cutting into the tree bark with a knife, thus discovering the sweet sap. Long derided as mere “myth” or “folklore” it took until the 1990s for a scientist named  Bernd Heinrich to observe and record it, publishing in a scientific journal – thus ‘legitimizing’ pre-existing indigenous knowledge. 

That such knowledge only became ‘acceptable’ or ‘real’ when performed outside of its original form tells us much about the biases of so-called ‘Western Culture’ as regards myth and folklore. Yet, this example proves the utility of such transmissions, existing over the centuries. That Iceland’s corpus of myth (even in those tales that remained to be written down) may contain metaphorically encode experience which can be re-experienced through felt-sense is made all the more likely, given the preservation of highly localized folklore and histories.

Questions of legitimacy or lack are defined by flows of influence and power – inextricably linked to agency and consequence. Myth is therefore conceivable as a manifestation of currents of social influence and should never be held as a fixed thing, whether or not one has positive or negative emotional response to its figures

Hello folks. I’ve been extraordinarily quiet, but some of the things I’ve been working on will soon be available to the public. Tonight I was interviewed by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair for the RENDERING UNCONSCIOUS Podcast. Join us, herein, where I she lets me talk, ramble, loop and riff about #cripkult, myth, disability writing, and things that are my jam.

More soonish. Promise.

Gentlefolk: It is with great honour on this strange day that I announce the birthing of SANCTUM. Mine is the sixth(!) of twelve officially commissioned pieces, but there are 13 voices. In the words of the editors:

“As you follow us into these pages, the path will take you along the wild edges of belief, through the dream-space of myth and down the back alleys of history. A cave mouth stands open: enter it and you may find an entrance to the underworld, a philosopher’s allegory, or a woman who sits in meditation. The book itself becomes a space in which sanctuary is offered to parts of ourselves which we grew up learning to suppress.”

My piece entitled Cripples & Crooked Paths speaks about disability, Norse myth, and landscape.

The book as a whole is DAMN PRETTY. as you can see here. If you want to buy it, then click here.

As the blurb says:

What, if anything, is sacred?’ This is the question that opens SANCTUM, the twelfth Dark Mountain book – and, in the pages that follow, the reader is led along the wild edges of belief, through the dream-space of myth and down the back alleys of history.

The words come from the darkness of Rikers Island jail, where Sara Jolena Wolcott serves as a prison chaplain; from the Burmese monastery of Pa Auk Tawya, where Sayalay Anuttara uses meditation to investigate direct experience; and from a Cumbrian hillside where Craig ‘VI’ Slee’s friends lift his wheelchair over a locked gate to reach the site of an ancient ruin. John Michael Greer confronts the Cthulhucene and contemplates a future in which Man is no longer elevated to the role of deity, while Elizabeth Slade investigates the ‘god-shaped hole’ left by the collapse of institutional religion in much of the West, another set of ruins within which strange possibilities are growing.

Meanwhile, Thomas Keyes has brought together a gang of artists – part monastic scriptorium, part graffiti team – to illuminate the letters of the writers on parchment he has made from the skin of roadkill deer. And the margins of the book are taken over by Sylvia V. Linsteadt and Rima Staines, whose words and images summon the voice of the Sybil of Cumae to offer a commentary on the main text, before claiming the final words with her vision of the cave at the end – and beginning – of the world.

I’m extraordinarily glad to be part of this project, and hope mine and other voices can provoke some deep thoughts in all who hear them.

This came to my attention earlier, on this scorching hot day in Albion. So as my first faltering steps towards Occult Uncle (Agony)¹²³⁴ , here’s my slightly sweaty response to a rather important question that’s close to my heart:

So I’m curious, how does a person with physical disabilities perform movement intensive rituals like the LBRP or Pyramidos? I get that these can be performed astrally, but are there methodologies that can make these rites accessible for the physically disabled?

Short answer? Do the bits you can, and then work on sensory control so you can feel/see/hear yourself doing it with 90% ‘reality’ (the number is arbitrary. There’ll come a point when it ‘clicks’ and you’ll know)

Long Answer:

I’ve not done Pyramidos myself, but have used the LRBP and use the following technique myself as a physically disabled wheelchair user for various rites, and it seems to work:

Do this, [the bits you can] repeatedly, even if you don’t get results the first few times. I’m talking about doing it your temple space, not astrally. The point is to connect the body as much as you can. Do it on multiple occasions, even if you don’t get contact

After a ‘bit’ (a handwavy period of time) after those repetitions, you’ll get some kind of spirit contact. That is when, quite bluntly, you ask the spirit(s) what to do to improve contact.  They will usually give you some tweaks. Then you run the rite with the tweak, asking again. Repeat as many times as needed.

After a bit, (lovely time period, innit) when said spirits are satisfied with things you should have a workable rite that’s viable for you and they, even if there are significant changes made to the original.

Now, the reason I say run said rites ‘as much as you can/are able, then fill in with Imaginal fill-ins’? I think it’s Josephine McCarthy who has said (and I’m paraphrasing) that the ritual begins the moment you decide to do it.

Now, I could quote you some studies on psi, or even current neurology which suggests that decisions and actions are begun before we are consciously aware of it. I could do that rather than waffle about ‘the power of intent’, and I probbaly should, but here I will say something perhaps a little heretical to acertain brand of chaos magician:

MAGICAL INTENT IS BULLSHIT. 

Those Statements of Intent? Mean next to nothing. They’re just focusing tools for your consciousness. Intent has no oomph, no impetus at all. It’s just backward rationalization.

Now, apologies to Josephine MCarthy if I’m misunderstood/misquoted her ideas, because I’m sure it seems like I’ve just contradicted myself. After all, if Magical Intent Is Bullshit, then how can I say that the ritual begins the moment you decide to do it?

There’s a certain ambivalence towards the Arrow of Time in magic. On the whole, a magical universe tends to operate on circles, spirals and fractals, rather than linearity.

So when I say decide to do it both the decision and the action are ratified by the action. To quote a certain someone Do, or Do Not – There is no Try.

I could waffle on for ages, pontificating about retroactive enchantment, but, bluntly, it boils down to this The decision to do it, the ritual actions and the results themselves are a whole magical act.

They. Are. Not. Separate. Things.

Anyone who has had a bit of experience will tell you of rituals, the results of which, still reverberate years later. Across space and time, the act continues.

See, magic, in my experience, tends towards Wholeness, to Maximal Expression. This Wholeness is not a Singularity, but is in fact manifold, and varied. There’s plenty of coming-together-and-breaking apart.

So when dealing with physical disability and magic, well bluntly, in terms of population, there aren’t that many of us, which is to say, there’s more than you realize but perhaps less than you might like.

Secondly, and equally bluntly, if you’re physically disabled and doing magic, well, you’re kind of at the sharp end in terms of R&D because of the vast variety of differences in disability. Which is kind of cool, because there’s literallyno one like you in the game, except you.

(Until of course there is – or rather, was – but that’s another story)

Yes, yes every Man and Woman is A Star. We know.

But you, friend, suffer unique challenges, and have got round them in a statistically variant manner to the norm. Celebrate your difference.

Which leads me on to the fourth point – those repetitions and ‘make do’ imaginings? Waste of time. Except, y’know, NOT.

They are part of the magical act. But they’re also there to show the spirits involved that you’re serious, and you are trying desperately not to half-arse it. That you’re not some arsehole who thinks they know better.

It is, for want of better words, a show of good faith, with the added bonus that you develop your skills and begin the process of turning your body into your own particular magical machine/temple.

Always remember, humans are not the only ones playing this game, and sincerity goes a long way.

In 16 years, I’ve only ever ONCE had a spirit that wanted to work with me, and I it, insist on impossible so-called ‘traditional’ forms. In the end, I found another who was more willing to help me rig something up for the benefit of us both.

I’m not a ceremonial magician by nature, mind you – precisely because of such difficulties. That and I tend to ascribe to the notion of spirits having a stake in working with us, just as we do them..

Hope this helps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our earth, our dirt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: