It’s not a Wednesday, and I’m not a chaos magician.

I do have a background in chaos magic, but the last time I identified that way was oooh…over a decade ago now. I mention this, because there’s an interesting debate going on in certain circles (and has been going on for years) about using fictional figures vs apparently ‘real’ deities and spirits.

This one’s been triggered by someone seeming to suggest that the ancient idea of Heroes and modern Superheroes are the same. More details on this can be found over at The House Of Vines

My dear beloved brother in arms Jack Faust has a post on it wherein the major positions are linked to, though I also suggest you go and read Notitiae Doctoris for albeit long but very important look at things in terms of cultus and doing honour to folks. (The good Doctor has some great points on devotion, which need wider reading).

My dear mophead brother (Who is looking increasingly like a sordid Californian Austin Spare as he ages) talks about thoughtforms and going on adventures and value judgements and stuff. Read his post, since this is a quick one from me (I hope (ETA: I was very wrong)) and draw your own conclusions. He’s not as dyed in the wool Chaos Magickey as that seems, I assure you, and in fact this post will possibly get me yelled at for the next month but sod it, I’m British and blatant mockery of friends is a veritable necessity.

Anyway, everyone loves thoughtforms. They’re relatively easy to create, with practice, and once you know how to make ‘em, it’s easy to break them. Seriously, watch people you know who have certain tendencies to fall into repetitive thought patterns/actions. They do it without even trying. Don’t even get me started on people who suffer depression and what kind of mess we can generate. Yeesh. There’s a reason mental discipline is important in magic, folks.

Anyway – as I said, I have a background in Chaos Magic, but I’m a Heathen. Maybe I’m not a proper Heathen for some, but you know what, I do not give a fig. Point is, in my experience, the world seems full of Stuff & Things, and some of that Stuff & Things fits the shapes ascribed to gods, landwights, and ancestors according to lore. Some of That Stuff & Things does not.

I’ll be blunt – I’d never ask Batman for help. You know why? Because I don’t live in Gotham. I’d never pray to Superman because frankly, he’s too much of a boy-scout. But if you want to? Knock yourselves out.

On the other hand, I’ll call on the old gods and the Mighty Dead, and maybe even the man-god that is Yeshua because dammnit I have family history, my Dad’s a bloody priest of his and I’ve been initiated into some of the rites associated with him – having been baptised and confirmed and all.

Why them? Why have I even hung with the Lovecraft squad in rituals?

Not because ‘it works’ though it does, but because of something very bloody important:

I have a relationship with them. I have a tie to them.

Cthulhu, Nylarathotep and the rest – fictional all. Yet when you call, there’s at least something that moves behind the names for me. And I hate to tell the chaos magicians in the audience, but ‘belief’ is a blind alley. It’s as nebulous a concept as prana or chi or orgone. [ETA: As far as the average Westerner is concerned [1]]

Just a name, just a story to tell ourselves, to try and get our heads round the fact that we did something weird, maybe a little kooky, and something happened.

And we don’t know why.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s repeatable, and if it is? Bully for you. Really. Let me know when your all encompassing Grand Theory Of Everything is published.

But also bear in mind this – it may only be repeatable for you. You may have a mutant nervous system, or your life experiences may have altered you in such a way as the linkage of imagery, sound, feeling, thought and memory mean you can do things other people can’t.

Or, as it more likely, it might just be a freakish one-off, like a shotglass full of blood emptying itself after a ritual.

You see humans like to know why. It’s a survival trait, and one that has served us in good stead, so we tell stories, we make shit up to fill in the gaps, or tweak theories or models to get good-enough approximations.

Do you know what a Cargo Cult is? Read the link, please.

OK?

Now, some of you might be laughing at how ridiculous that is, being modern, technologically aware folks who have probably seen The Matrix, or read Simulacra and Simulation or something like it by Baudrillard.

Except, welcome to the unpleasant notion:

Reality is a Cargo Cult. Everything you learn is by repetition, mimicry and extrapolation. The Gnostic truth of it is that you are at the mercy of your sensorium, locked into it until you die, at the very least.

I’m not saying there is no Real. I’m just saying that you’ll never,ever get to to touch it. You may experience a close approximation, but you will never, ever hit zero per cent error.

So stop buggering about with belief. Stop worrying about what’s real and what’s not. Work with what’s in front of you. Use what you have, and use it with inhuman bloody precision. Don’t ever be satisfied with it, but never give it up. Spend the rest of your life studying your Mysteries – not anyone else’s.

A blade of grass – study it. And then when you are done, abandon what you know, and start again.

There are mysteries of land and song, of blood and bone and breath, of word and deed. You are a Mystery that takes a lifetime to discover, one of infinite depth.

You are a damn rune, one that is risted with the blood which runs in your veins.

The rune-god, the Terrible One, the Father Of Magical Songs – for nine nights he hanged himself, wounded. No escape, no quarter. No bread, no mead.

No. Escape.

All that he was, burned to ash by fire, and frozen by ice. He gave it up, sacrificed it, because he acknowledged there was no other greater Mystery in all the worlds. He sacrificed himself to his Self.

And if the superheroes are part of you – if you truly bleed Gotham, if the you can hear the Joker in your own voice, feel the pain of immigrant from a destroyed world who is feared, shunned and worshipped. If you get down on your knees and weep the heartfelt sobs of an orphan boy who watched his parents get murdered in front of him, or feel the unending rage of the strongest there is, while all the while struggling not to hurt anyone?

If those are truly yours, and not just mirrors, not just reflections, because you want to escape the face in the mirror for somewhere better, then you know what, what the hell are comics creators doing reading my blog?

Me? I shall take my Mighty Honoured Dead. I shall drink with them, and laugh with them, and love with them, as I did in life, and as my kin did with their forefathers, and their forefathers did with theirs. I will take every piece, every moment of my life, every breath, and I shall not move from the centre of my Self, at the crossroads of the worlds. I will fail at looking constantly at myself, but I shall keep looking, keep seeking. I will fall, and I shall be bewitched, and in that bewitching, I shall be bound, and in that binding I will discover the laughter that breaks all fetters, and find that I never left.

And I shall burn with the light of my own lamp, which has been fuelled by my ancestors, that burns blood-red across ten thousand years. I shall eat the flesh of every moment, every experience, and every word and song that calls to that unuttereable infinite self shall strengthen me, shall echo and reflect that Mystery.

Do you understand yet? Or would you know more?

My ancestors, my heroes, my words, my deeds; my mistakes, my triumphs, my betrayals, my hopes and my dreams. My gods, my songs, my stories, my breath, my bone; my thoughts, my memories, my sex, my death.

My love, my life, my body, my mind; my tears, my blood, my pain; my despair, my joy, my agony, my ecstasy.

My fury. My wodh.

All of these and none, are doors to my Mystery. They are the bindings and the ties, the dreams that point the way, the prophetic speech that encompasses my life.

I am a word spoken, a rune sung by the voice of the All. There is nothing else for me, but me.

Austin Spare once wrote:

“However great your reach, whatever you touch, shall touch flesh.”

Perhaps chaos magicians should listen to their Grandfather, eh?

That notwithstanding, only unflinching devotion to that which makes you, you ,matters. And although you are, in some sense utterly alone, you are not and cannot exist in isolation. So I say again, learn the Mysteries of your land, of your living, and your dead and they shall show you the path. Perhaps then a god will smile out at you from the pages of a comic book, or pass you by in the skin of a stranger on the street.

Perhaps your ancestors will greet you when you look in the mirror, and if you sit with them long enough, enjoying their company, perhaps they will introduce you to long dead heroes, now so much more than mortal?

I’ll leave you with words which are not mine, and are from fiction, yet are spoken and written truly from the heart:

“Lo, there do I see my father.
Lo, there do I see my mother, my sisters and my brothers.
Lo, there do I see the line of my people back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me.
They bid me take my place on Asgard in the halls of Valhalla,
Where the brave may live forever.” -The 13th Warrior

Be seeing you.

[Addendum [1]:It’s been pointed out to me that prana and chi are not nebulous concepts within the contexts of their own traditions. This is entirely correct. It’s just the Western Materialist Paradigm that views them so within the context of not being satisfied with traditional forms of measurement, and hence would regard them as nebulous. Mea culpa for falling into dominant-culture unconscious biases. I hope the drift of the sentence can still be grokked. ]

Someone once said some things – and because they were things, there were usually words for them. That’s what words are, you see; names of things. There’s old magic in them, so much magic and so very old that we have forgotten it’s magic at all. The names of things become the things themselves, until you can speak the name and everyone knows and sees the thing.

That’s their cue. Speak the name, and lo, they appear!

(“Speak of the devil…”)

They come to life, moving on the stage, strutting their stuff, speaking their lines so that you can gain insight into their character, into what they are. Maybe they’re present for the whole of the performance, only vanishing when the curtain falls, or perhaps they’re gone after one line, leaving it hanging there as they exit stage-left. It doesn’t matter. They do their jobs, communicate what’s needed and then poof, gone like smoke, lost in the rushing stream of experience.

(“Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage[.]“)

None of what is written here is important – someone once said some things, is all. We know the map is not the territory. We know that the world of words is not an accurate representation, just some quick and dirty joining of the dots, some pattern recognition, a short-cut quickly scribbled down in blood and ink and breath.

( “O friend of man, and prophet of discourse:
Great life-supporter, to rejoice is thine, in arts gymnastic, and in fraud divine:
With pow’r endu’d all language to explain, of care the loos’ner, and the source of gain.”)

We know that, because we understand magic; we know that the line between the charlatan and the magus is perilously thin. We know that Clarke’s Third Law applies, and how, in ways that most folk do not, and in that knowing we have an edge. Magic is just a word for something vast and terrible, inexplicable and faster than quicksliver, slippery as sin and twice as sweet.

(“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”)

Techne and Poiesis. Just words, just names, just things. Arrangements of sound and thought like the posts and lintel for doors. Did you know we’re more likely to forget things when we pass from one room into another? Frames and context it seems, are key; when a word ends, it stops being. When a word is forgotten, we struggle to describe a thing, to extract it from experience, to communicate it to others.

(“Looking out over the wine-dark sea, he spoke out
in passionate distress:”)

What does it mean? No word for blue in Ancient Greek, a description of a sunset sea, or an ocean that flowed like wine? Poetic allusion, the kenning of the skald; the opaque, apophatic denial of direct representation. Would you beg Mercury to stand still? To tell wild, wandering Woden to cease his endless stalking over the graves of giants?

If so, you’re an idiot. You know, from idios “personal, private,” properly “particular to oneself.”  That’s perfectly fine, by the by – after all:

(ὁ Ἡράκλειτός φησι τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι) (“Heraclitus said that the waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”)

Rest well. No harm done, my idiot friend. None at all, for everyone wakes eventually, whether they like it or not. For the rest of us, well, we’ll keep right on with the show.

(/Come breathe with me/Breathe with me/)

I have a confession to make, and it’s nothing new, because someone once said some things. Someone once said what I’m saying, and what I’m going to say now. You see, I’m a Gnostic Agnostic. I’m of the opinion that we live in a created world, and that we can never know if the created world is anything more than a representation.

I’m of the opinion that this is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Do you see? Someone once said some things, and they built the world you inhabit. You watched them, learned how to use the same tools as them, the tools called language and thought, through mimicry and rote. There is no demiurge. Just a bunch of idiots; an interactive audience of people letting things play out; following a script whose author has been forgotten, if there ever was a Creator anyway – instead of a weird ad-hoc collaboration. A hastily codified improv session gone a bit wrong.

Do you like being called an idiot? I’ll bet you don’t, and I’ll bet it’s because someone said some things, to you, right? Spoke some words, communicated their displeasure somehow. Maybe they called you names?

Yes, there’s old magic in them, so much magic and so very old that we have forgotten it’s magic at all.

Forgotten that the tools can be used in other ways than simple maintenance; simple manual, grinding, repetition. Not simply as technologies, but as disciplines – arts even – of living. The wonders wrought by the premier thaumaturgists now appear common-place. Yes. So they appear, wrapped in the hooded cloak of the mundane, the veil of the bride.

(/Come play my game/Inhale, inhale, you’re the victim/Come play my game/Exhale, exhale, exhale/)

I’ve been an idiot. I’ve turned away from confronting the nature of things. Some days I still do, because it’s hard work, and it changes you, sometimes even beyond all recognition. Forces you to dissolve the armour that gave you shape, and definition. Turns you from automatism and the apparent safety that it brings.

Suddenly you are standing on your own. Few people like doing that; even most iconoclasts use their iconoclasm – how they are seen by other people – as a bulwark for their identity. Humans are social animals, constantly referencing their position in terms of others, reacting to stimuli. It’s a kind of homeostasis, and yet what gets lauded is the appearance of balance, stillness and peace. To achieve that, there are thousands of micro-movements, millions of tiny adjustments, and yet it is the appearance which is regarded as worthy.

Does that not seem a little odd, to you? That fixity and stability is so prized; a direct denial of how things are is elevated above others?

We all have a tendency towards idiocy, you see. A tendency to turn away and keep turning. Eventually of course, in our turning, we end up back where we started. If we haven’t sorted the point that started us turning, we’ll just keep turning. Eventually, we’ll get dizzy and fall over though, which is why you will eventually wake up – you’ll do the equivalent of falling out of bed.

We usually call this hitting of the floorboards by a familiar name:

Death.

It’s the end of the world, the place where your word stops, where you leave the stage. Where your name no longer applies to you, if it ever did. We have a less terminal concept in our spinning too – we call it failure. That thing that disrupts your plans, the thing that causes the break-down, that pulls you up short. It’s all a bit Hexagram 23 really.

(Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;…)

So what to do? What indeed, except take advantage of that natural tendency to turn, to whirl like dervishes, to willfully leap from the bed!  There is a concept here, a concept called afragility; it has  similarities to Stoic philosophy, to the contemplation of death in the Hagakure. The concept suggests, quite brutally, that in terms of the balance-sheet of the universe, many human things dislike change or volatility. There are however, things and ways that may benefit from this Nietzschean ‘creative destruction’.

Things that occur in spite of ‘success’ or ‘failure’. Things that don’t have goals, but are inevitable. Afragility is asymmetric, and magic is an asymmetric attack on ‘reality’. It does not accept reality’s terms of engagement. This is key to everything I’ve ever written; it is not about denial of reality – to do that is tantamount to signing your metaphysical, as well as your physical death warrant. A rock falling will crush you, however much you try to deny it, after all. But if there were a way to make that rock fall as ten smaller stones, you’d get out of it with a few cuts and bruises, and maybe a mild concussion.

This is of course impossible. Which makes it our business.

The possible may as well be the mandatory. If you want to do something, you must do it a possible way, or so the received wisdom says. Likewise, navigation is mandatory; all forms of navigation require external references, whether it be maps/charts or landmarks or the stars.

Over a long enough timeline, the survival rate drops to zero, the chance of a failure increases to near certainty – these are important if you look at magic in terms of probability and odds of success. Fortunately, that’s not the game we’re interested in, because the practice of subtraction, of negativity is what we want.

If we’re properly interested in asymmetry and afragility, then the principle is to put ourselves in the worst situation possible, and not just robustly survive, but thrive. To be able, with the absolute minimum of effort, benefit and increase our influence, in whatever circumstance. This means specifically concentrating ourselves, divesting ourselves of everything that is unnecessary.

Note that I not advocating asceticism here, but neither am I denigrating it – just as we take advantage of that urge to turn away,  domesticating it and turning it into an engine for finding the inevitable so we can turn inward. By doing that, in discovering the  inevitable change and volatility of ourselves, we can find  a guiding principle, an inescapable virtue which exists throughout that volatility.

Throughout all emotion, all experience, one finds a presence or quality which is unique to each of us. One cannot say what it is, only what it is not. I could waffle for ages about light in the darkness, or the Tao, or whatever. The fact is, none of these are right – all I would be doing is creating an image, a map.

I would be making it mandatory, and none of the names are it. But if you look at everything, inside and outside, you’ll find traces of it. Heraclitus would call it the Logos, and I have no problem with him calling it that, so long as you understand that the word means nothing, until it does.

But the weeping philosopher, like the poet, said that the Logos was Fire. All is flux. Yet emerging from that flux is the appearance of a principle, a principle that is seemingly inevitable and inviolate; a principle which exists through and in all things. Even you. Based on the ancient notion of sympathy there is no difference between you and it.

Suddenly, asymmetric warfare seems to be the only warfare that even makes sense. A billion sperm failed in order for that one to fertilise a particular egg which grew into you. Failure is the default state. You cannot inhale without first exhaling. Once you understand that this is so, that the condition of Fire is, as the weltfeuer, is in all things, things get easier. You understand that it’s the fire in the cave that throws shadows.

Siva dances, and the Aghori drink from skull cups. Great Mother Kali places her foot upon his heart. Mahakala is wreathed in flames.

‘”Have you ever tried to return to all this?” he asked, gesturing. Quiet, warm, inhabited houses. Late-night cars. The real world . . . she shook her head. All fire burns, little baby. You’ll learn. “You can’t. It’s one or the other. Nobody ever gets both.”‘)

There comes a point when you can never go home. Nothing is ever as it was. If you ever become Master of the Temple, in time it will fall about you, crumbling to dust, like the sand blowing in the wind. Sand that was once mountains, teeth of the dragon, things that can birth warriors;’ seeds of the battle trees that spring up making loud clangor on their shields.

D’ye ken yet? Or would you know more?

Such a whetstone it is; this jewel that slays warriors and thralls and slits their throats; the ease with which they attack each other, as it sets them to frenzy.

(D’ye ken that bitch whose tongue was death?
D’ye ken her sons of peerless faith?
D’ye ken that fox, with his last breath
Curs’d them all as he died in the morning?)

Poetic allusion, sliding past the critical factor as you breathe. You haven’t forgotten to breathe, have you – just because someone said something?  Just because the words marked out the boundaries, staked their claim to your perceptions, your knowledge?

Keep your sword in its sheath, swim like the fish in the deeps. Don’t show your cards.  You don’t need to grasp – every grasp can be broken, every weapon disarmed. That’s the black hat truth of it; everything can be taken from you. Everything. The words, the things, can all vanish in a puff of smoke.

Poof.

And there’s no smoke without fire, right?

Idiocy is separateness remember; it’s each of us believing our own worlds are just that – our own. Follow the common, says Heraclitus. So what’s the common, but loss? We hate loss. We hate it like Gollum hates the filthy hobbitses, because those things are our precioussss. We’re as greedy as everyone who ever took the One Ring.

(One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them)

Our worlds are not our own, we can’t own them, they are not possessed by us. You can’t lose what you never had. Perhaps it might be clearer to say that you can only lose something if you buy into the terms of gain and loss. Now, I can hear some of you muttering that this is all very well, but how does this apply in the so called ‘real world’?

This is where asymmetry comes in – the most afragile is that which requires minimal input for maximal effort; the action which, even if it fails, still creates options. Indeed, you should go into any afragile action expecting to lose. Walk into that job interview knowing you will be humiliated, and that you can’t control any portion of the individuals reactions. Know that you will fail;, but refuse to accept that humiliation in yourself. You refuse to accept that, and you smile with the endless smile of the death’s head no matter what.

You will break them. Trust me.

A shallow form of this can be seen in the saw: “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” Moving deeper however, cultivate your fear, turn it into abject terror. In that  grim terror, you will realise you are nothing and no-one; you are mortal. Even now you are burning on the pyre of existence. Even now you are in the common with all things, for mountains fall to dust and empires crumble.

All notions of power and strength, all the things you have been taught to crave, are empty. Value means nothing unless it moves;  the quickening is all that matters, and to draw a distinction between the quick and the dead is pointless. So, thus we throw ourselves into the fire, and amidst that fire, we become as Mahakala.

Our death produces options. We redefine and reframe. We make our own luck. We take words and shape them; fold the map up and punch a hole through, passing from one point to another without crossing the intervening space. Remember, navigation is mandatory – canals and roads, seemingly the only way. But in the quickening, the dérive subverts this; the divisive Spirit is co-opted and infused by Soul. The map is remembered as a living, organic thing – full of dancing flame.

Someone once said some things – and because they were things, there were usually words for them. That’s what words are, you see; names of things. There’s old magic in them, so much magic and so very old that we have forgotten it’s magic at all.

( I am the mighty one who possesses the immortal fire…
I am the one whose mouth burns completely; I am the one who begets and destroys...)

Remember that stone that would kill you, except it can now be broken into smaller stones? Remember the laughter in the darkness, the endless upwelling feral joy of it?

Yes.

That.

So, I finished a book the other week. Not so unusual, except that it was one that I wrote myself, in response to a very clever fellow askling me to tell a story. I’ve pimped it enough for now – indeed it’s not actually finished, because it’s sat with the publisher ready to be edited. Now, you might be thinking, why don’t I shut up until it’s ready? The answer to that is that, in fact, this has nothing to do with the publishing process, and everything to do with the writing process.

Now, I don’t know if the book is actually any good, and I know that it’s full of typographical errors, and the odd missing word; the speed at which you think is often rarely matched by your fingers, and even the fastest typist will often get carried away. So, given that, what’s the initial maneuvering for?

Let me put it another way:

The final manuscript comes in at just over 100,000 words, and I have no idea what it is. Honestly, it’s like the thing came to life on its own, and as I wrote the last page – which incidentally, returns you to the first page, because I’m clever like that – I realised that it was an impenetrable thing.

A bloody slab of something that requires participation and in return exerts an odd influence on you. I say this because in the latter stages I spent 18 days, 8 hrs a day hammering out words. One after the other, again and again, and do you know what that does when you do it day after day?

It. Rewires. Your. Brain.

Even uncle Aristotle knew that, despite being a bugger for the bottle:

(I was considering including the full Bruce sketch but I thought Gordon might kick me.)

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

I could point you to all kinds of evidence on neuroplasticity, or pretty MRI pictures, and I could equally spout some bollocks about expert-hood taking 10,000 hours to achieve. Yes, I could do that, and I’m not going to, because if you are really interested, then you’ll look it up yourself – and if you’re not, I’m wasting my time typing them all out. It’s a bit like summoning witnesses to prove a case, and honestly I’m not interested in that, and nor, I think, are you.

Instead, I’d ask you to picture this:

A chap with long tangled hair and a prodigious beard glares at the monitor, swigging coffee and gulping it down so fast that it might be bruising his gullet. Hunched over the keyboard, he hammers away, hearing the voice in his head conjure up emotions and experience; crazed juxtapositions and frenzied metaphors serve as door into recalling and recombining of sensation and experience.

You see, you can’t expect to have an effect, unless you are affected. It’s not simply about stringing words together, and indeed anyone who tells you that is lying. Think of the last time you spoke to someone more than in passing, of how the conversation takes you through a range of thoughts, and how the other other person’s responses shape what you’re saying and the emotions you’re feeling.

Imagine summoning them up, before you put them on the page – imagine going first – never expecting anyone to feel something you’re not capable of feeling yourself, because that’s what you’re trying to do – you’re trying to share with the other person, with your audience, with your co-conspirator.

Of course, you can never be sure how they’re going to react, can you? They might have had a bad night’s sleep, be annoyed at their partner, or perhaps have something so awesome on their minds that they’re only listening for long enough so that they can get a word in edgewise.

Such things are pretty much beyond your knowledge; the complex interactions and circumstances are just that – complex. So all you can do is fire them up and cast them into the void. Which, in a way is a bit like sigils – you fire ‘em and then you forget. Except a lot of people have a problem with the forgetting, and understandably so.

After all, if you’re going to use magic, it’s probably either to get you that extra edge, or because you’re hitting a wall and want to bring out the big guns, right?

So you’re invested, quite obviously, and sometimes that investment can get in the way – your striving for a particular outcome can screw things up, narrow your perception and mean you miss precisely the opportunities you need to achieve your goals. One of the ways around this is the practice that Gordon refers to as shoaling where you break down your goals to maximise their potential probability. It’s a bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if its done – eventually something will stick.

It’s a useful technique, and one that I’ve used before, especially when applied with the other kind of work – the laser-focused statement of intent.

One thing writing this book has taught me is that, on a long term project like this your emotional relationship to it shifts. You can love it one moment, and hate it the next, and it doesn’t matter because if you’re doing it right, you can’t not work on it. It literally becomes an habituated obsession.

You bcome literally obsessed, fudamentally occupied and beseiged by the idea, by the project, and here’s where this sort of thing gets deeply interesting.

Because you’re suddenly not doing it for any goal except itself. I was asked to tell a story, but soon enough that was not the goal – I wasn’t telling it for my audience. I wasn’t even telling it because I liked it – indeed I often hated it. It was, at points, the vilest most disgusting piece of excrement ever to be produced by a human mind.

Understand, this is not a metaphor. There were days when I felt literally sick as I sat down to work on this monstrosity, but I did it anyway, because I couldn’t avoid it. I’d been doing it so long that thinking thoughts which were not connected to it became impossible. It was in me like an invader.

Like a disease.

It became the ground of my existence, this story, until it was telling me what to write, and there were loops and whorls and repetitions and oddnesses galore; until at last I began to realise that this stream of conciousness was revealing the oblique, the hidden thing behind and beneath it – as if the words were but doors to something incomprehensible, like 100,000 fingers pointing at the moon in the zen koan.

I mention this because the project becomes a thing in-and-of-itself. It doesn’t matter if it’s succesful or not, doesn’t mater if it gets you fame and fortune or leaves you penniless in a ditch. It’s simply is – an event in  space and time. It doesn’t matter if those goals are even possible, because the goal is irrelevant. You’re not doing it for a goal.

You are doing it because your doing-of-it is an inevitability.

It is habit squared; you do not have anything other than it. Or as Spare puts it:

Does not matter – need not be

The result does not matter, and need not be in any particular form. Think of how many times your emotions shift, and how they influence your actions – think how easily your thoughts are capable of carried like tumbleweed from one thing to another. Many schools of esotericsm require the development of so-called ‘thought-control’  to create a disciplined focus, yet I’d argue it’s a misleading misnomer.

If the idea is to silence the mental chatter, then people are often taught to squelch it – yet in writing a book that originates in that stream of chatter, I’ve found that it’s far better to let the chatter proceed unresisted, because eventually its underlying structure is revealed. Or to put it another way, our inner storyteller spouts a load of shite but if you do not react to it, it eventually starts producing gold.

Without external stimuli, things smooth out – the emotions and worries, the loves and the hate of it rise and fall, and all that matters is the writing itself. Is it any wonder perhaps, that Spare’s major written work is The Book Of Pleasure (Self-Love)?

There is no-one involved but the Self – it pays no attention to external stimuli, is heedless of possibility, or probability.

Bringing this out of the realm of high concept, consider the idea that probability manipulation is by its very nature, referential to an external source – that of reality. Circumstances may change, and due to the sheer complexity of the universe, what’s possible may change from moment to moment.

The only thing that is inevitable is the impossible. Black Swan events are events with near-impossible qualities which are rationalised in hindsight as probable. The mob-spectacle of perception known as reality tries to rationalise them afterwards – to provide causal links, to render them stable, rather than feral events.

Think back to that image of the frenzied writer, posessed and obsessed by a story. It does not give a monkeys for ‘reality’ – the book, once produced, does not change in reference to stimuli. It is, in the McLuhan sense, a colder medium.

Just like a sigil, it is itself – and the whole point of scrambling the statement of intent in modern chaos magic is to obliterate meaning, to render the sigil into an occult glyph, an unintelligible thing. The sigil doesn’t give (another anamalistic metaphor)’s for your goals. It does its job, as best it can given the environment.

There’s a problem, I think, in casting magical work into the realm of probability – but that’s not to say one shouldn’t take advantage of it when it benefits you. No, instead, perhaps you should instead acknowledge that what you are seeking to do is impossible, and that you’re deliberately attempting to induce events which reality will almost instantaneously attempt to co-opt with its ration-al-isation.

Do what you do, and be cold about it. Be obsessed by it, not for what it can do for you, but what it is. Get into the habit of being impossible

Now listen, or as they say:

Hwaet!

We are passing through corridors of stone; routes of labyrinthine complexity filled with hollow, echoing ghosts – phantasmal strains and thin snatches of half-remembered speech. Perhaps there should be dust, and maybe, in the darkest corners, the compressed and most unseen crevices, there is.

But even a place like this must conform to certain biological processes – for there to be dust, there must be human skin to flake and to float, in the air that is so awfully still. And there hasn’t been a human presence here for an extraordinarily long time.

This is not simply a poetic way of describing a blog that’s been quiet for the past six months or so, while I’ve been busy doing other things. Nor is it distinctly evocative of a particular milieu – no grandiose visions of primordial places,  with hidden treasure glinting in subterranean splendour, all unseen by the eye of mortal man. No slumbering warriors lie in wait; an army of metaphor does not listen for the clarion call to reach its ears, rising with an inhuman swiftness; it is not charging into battle to engage in the struggle which we laughably call communication.

No. Because this is Cold Albion, and like all cold things, it exists at a remarkably low-energy state.

We have all met people before, and we have interacted with them – every look you give, every glance you receive, engages the neurology of those you contact, as well as your own. You carry representations of things, linkages and patterns, and all these are arrangements of energy.

When you see your loved ones, certain arrangements and patterns fire up. A great deal of the time, if you compared these arrangements -these perceptions – with a kind of nebulous ‘actuality’ you’d find pretty major discrepancies.

This is because it’s less effort than constantly re-analysing things. In short, it’s an evolutionary hack. It uses less energy and  means we can move faster, and do other things with that energy, because, apparently like every other organism on the planet, we are biochemical in nature.

Molecules shift and move, obeying particulate rules and concentration gradients – diffusion and pH – principles and contacts, meetings and transferences via chemical pump; these are the methods which produce the electric surge, and the crackle of lightning that runs along your nerves and the neurotransmitters that carry the messages over the synaptic gap.

Heat the body up too much and the enzymes are denatured, the bio-machines cooked into uselessness. Too much energy and radiation warps your DNA, or burns your flesh and bone. All fire burns, and what’s fire but the fastest thing; the hungry flame that consumes the fuel?

Imagine having that energy within you, the metabolic processes constantly running; proceeding endlessly until your systems begin mutating or degrading, worn by years of replicating ceaselessly while you are  unaware of the lion’s share of it, as you are going about your life. Does it feel like anything familiar, that sense of rushing existence?

…

And in that feeling, maybe we are considering something, you and I. Perhaps we could be considering the implications of the heated meat package that is our corporeal selves.

Because we’ve stood in the cold, haven’t we? It’s a sensation you’ve no doubt had – the heat of yourself bleeding away into the vaster space, spreading out and becoming diffuse. The way the chill is beginning to set in – except of course you’re losing heat, not gaining cold.

It’s not as if the cold is penetrating you, piercing you like a knife. It’s not as if the chill bites with sharp teeth, right before the numbness is beginning to set in, is it? In actual fact it’s the comfort that is leaving, dissolving; becoming threadbare as the body begins attempting the desperate process of  conserving heat, of keeping things moving. Withdrawing to the centre, protecting those vitally important organs, leaving extremities to their fates.

Yet actual facts of biology have little to to do with language and how we go about perceiving. The metaphors are those of disruption and attack, instead of an apparently natural adherence to basic physical-theory.

So what happens when you start considering the fact that energy is finite, that all fires exhaust their fuel eventually? We’ve discussed this before, and it’s fairly implicit in my philosophy and words. As  I say over in my latest essay on  Modern Mythology – Toasters, Bladerunner and Schizophrenia:

We can’t even tell if we’re Replicants. Can’t trust our memories, or our assumptions, or our senses.  All we have is now, this moment, and even that is being filtered by our imagined pasts and futures.

There is no escape; no external environment wherein the processes of change are stilled and all is in perfect repose, perfect balance. So instead, we wander these corridors and halls, chilled by the notion of eventual decay.

Gordon said I should write more, that there had been too much of silence in the corner of the blogosphere we inhabit. He said it, and admitted it was for purely selfish reasons. Since he’s back posting, I’m picking up that gauntlet: I respect such admissions, and that’s why I would like you to begin accepting the chill as we continue on, because in a sense it is somewhat necessary to what I’d like to give you.

Because I want to talk about trolls.

Not your internet trolls – this is not about griefers or 4chan – but the creatures from Scandinavian folklore. The monstrous beings that lurk in dark places and hidden caves, and who become quite literally petrified by sunlight; turned to stone by the dawn.

The heavy and unwieldy media, such as stone, are time binders. Used for writing, they are very cool indeed, and serve to unify the ages – Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media.’

Past, present and future, all emerging, swirling from the stony well of Urðarbrunnr. The woven web of wyrd, reaching back and forth, warp and weft and threads  a-binding; up and down, left and right, ana and kata.

Down at the roots of mountains, back along paths of memory, might you know the music of trolls?  If you’re of a certain age and from the UK, you might recognise it from Alton Towers adverts:

The well known piece, written by Grieg for Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, occurs when the protagonist falls and strikes his head on a rock after chasing three maidens. Three maidens who claim to have got rid of their useless human lovers and are, to put it bluntly, hot for a little…troll-based action.

Peer, being a braggart and womaniser, claims he has enough troll-like stamina to satisfy all three, and so the chase ensues. Knocked unconscious by his amorous quest, he dreams of a green-clad girl who he pursues, eventually realising she is the daughter of the Old Man of the Mountain – specifically the Troll-King of the Dovre mountains. Lured by lust, as they travel to the Hall of the Mountain King, Peer comments on the clothing choice of his would-be shag:

THE GREEN-CLAD ONE

My week-day gown is of gold and silk.

 

PEER

It looks to me liker tow and straws.

 

THE GREEN-CLAD ONE

Ay, there is one thing you must remember:-

this is the Ronde-folk’s use and wont:

all our possessions have twofold form.

When you shall come to my father’s hall,

it well may chance that you’re on the point

of thinking you stand in a dismal moraine.

And here’s where things get interesting – the land of the Trolls seems to require a different way of looking at the world, of perceiving objects, and indeed, like many Otherly spaces, perhaps time itself. For when Peer arrives in that stony hall of the Old Man, far from being torn apart as the troll-courtiers would like, the King asks him a series of questions, questions that seem faintly ridiculous, albeit probably harmless – and the answers are even stranger. Take for example, the exchange that occurs when the Old Man asks what the difference is between humans and troll-kind:

PEER

No difference at all, as it seems to me.

Big trolls would roast you and small trolls would claw you;-

with us it were likewise, if only they dared.

 

THE OLD MAN

True enough; in that and in more we’re alike.

Yet morning is morning, and even is even,

and there is a difference all the same.-

Now let me tell you wherein it lies:

Out yonder, under the shining vault,

among men the saying goes: “Man, be thyself!”

At home here with us, ‘mid the tribe of the trolls,

the saying goes: “Troll, to thyself be-enough!”

Now, Grieg himself wrote of the piece:

“For the Hall of the Mountain King I have written something that so reeks of cowpats, ultra-Norwegianism, and ‘to-thyself-be-enough-ness’ that I can’t bear to hear it, though I hope that the irony will make itself felt.”

So we can see that he felt the piece summed up something negative, brash, and we might even say…trollish. Yet when you look at the Troll King’s remarks, you can perhaps feel a deeper meaning.

 

THE OLD MAN

My son, that “Enough,” that most potent and sundering  word, must be graven upon your escutcheon.

Further trials  await Peer – he is presented with music and dancing which to him is only a cacophony, and feasting which is only offal and gore. As he balks, the trolls  cry out for him to be torn apart, but the Old Man cautions them that he is, after all, only human, with human senses.

The proposed solution is grisly, involving a scratching of the eye and the wearing of blinders to rid Peer of his human perceptual biases. Presented with the notion that his human sense may never return after such an operation, he flees from the hall, giving up on his paramour and returning to the waking world of men.

While a classic mythical narrow escape, here we’re more concerned with the inescapable. Peer’s human perceptions render the world a certain way, and the ambivalence of trollish existence is abhorrent to him. So the question then becomes, from whence did Peer Gynt gain his humanity that it is so easily removable by the Old Man?

There are some that might argue such things are innate, but if so, how is it that his senses would not heal?

It’s that enough which concerns us. If we contrast this with chase of Peer Gynt after his women, then might we look at the trolls as those who are capable of perceiving what is dross and foulness to humans, as things of great joy and beauty?

Imagine if you could modulate your perception in such a way as to gain exactly what was needed from things others could not process or deal with. Not simple contrariness, or even ‘settling for less’, but having different requirements?

Suddenly the claims of the Yogis, the magicians, the Tibetan Masters – they start to appear as something other than mere hyperbole.  If you could change your perception, you could change how you react to things. What was once hostile and fearsome might now be known as a fierce protector or enthralling companion – phobia shifting to fascination, for example.

We are biochemical creatures, as  I’ve said. Our emotions are made manifest by chemical and hormonal shifts in response to stimuli. You swim in a soup of neuro-transmitters, our veins and arteries rage with chemical fury. Born from that amniotic ocean, you are briny seas suffused with lightning – an plethora of complex systems operating in concert to produce ‘your’ existence.

Where does this roaring creature gain its shape? Where does personality come from, its name and sense of self? Do you know where you begin, and where you end?

There’s a dilemma here, because every thing is defined by what it is not. If you are human, there must be something that is not human. For there even to be a ‘you’ as a distict thing, there must also be that which is not-you.

Can you remember where you came from?

Marshall McLuhan wrote of a spectrum of media, from hot to cool. Hot media requires little participation – it is delivered rapidly and possesses its own energy, its own structure and arrangement, which is impressed upon the recipient.  Film, for McLuhan, enhanced the visual sense – the spectacle is pre-delivered, it’s informational content designed to evoke specific reactions and resonances.

“The passive consumer wants packages, but those[...]who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in seeking causes will resort to aphorisms, just because they are incomplete and require participation in depth.” - Marshall McLuhan

How much energy is spent, how much time is used, in the construction of identity? How many packages have you received before a personality emerged, and hence, how much of ‘you’ is a product of environmental shaping? Multi-billion dollar corporations are founded on the presumption that the consumer wants to be kept in-formed – hot off the presses comes the gossip, the news, the celebrity hijinks!

The trolls come from a cold and snowy land – their way is colder, slower. The Old Man’s aphorism is an incompleteness, an indefinite ambivalence that Peer cannot stomach – he’d rather be off chasing hot young wenches!

(Can’t fault him there, actually.)

The cooler media that McLuhan speaks of requires participation – cold media is incomplete and requires interaction to access.

We’ve all been in that situation – you know the one – where we’re presented with someone who we know nothing about, at a party, some sort of social gathering, or a business function. Striking up a conversation often requires more energy from the initiator than the recipient at the beginning. Once both parties are comfortable with the level of communication and interest, communication starts flowing easily and time can just fly by!

Things that exist at low energy states, such as this place, can lie quiet for a long while, and as participation increases, the level of energy increases dramatically because of the incompleteness.

It takes more energy to define, and maintain those definitions, than it does to allow ambivalence and incompleteness. More energy is expended in maintaining the status quo, than is accepting and utilising changing conditions. I’ve touched on the subject more narrowly in this post about the power of absence and architectural decay as regards creativity.

The coldest medium is apparently the environment itself – the mountains so beloved of the Troll King and other natural phenomena. They exist independently of the human sphere, indeed the majority of human culture seems to be about heating them up – defining and making sense of them. Even with modern technology, their contouring – or rather their need to be defined and mapped in the human mind, they generate more energy than a thousand scientists and poets in the silent inscrutability.

They do not require rapid, hot, energy to maintain some notion of integrity, unlike most of the human sphere.

And if cold media requires participation, then the earliest form within that sphere would be storytelling – a shared experience which the audience experiences and co-creates to produce something richer than its constituent parts. What’s more, the art is not lost – many are waking up to this fact, and I’ll even point you to some.

Foolish People are producing an independent film that’s certainly cooler than the films McLuhan knew of. Crowdfunded, “Strange Factories” offers bonuses and artefacts which draw their funders deeper into the world. But rather than just being a simple film, Strange Factories will have a live component, with the characters directly interacting with the audience. You can read more about it in this Wired article.

And if there’s anything of a magical persuasion about cold media, it’s this – a seemingly inert or innocuous word, object or gesture, possessed of low energy or apparent significance, can  achieve a stronger affect than a drug regimen or therapy. It can even kill.

Now, as I said earlier, the coldest medium is the environment, except that’s not true.

The coldest medium is the self, that same roaring creature you were considering earlier. Because it is an indefinite thing. Why else would humanity be so desperate to define and name and package you?  How do you perceive the self? Imagine if you could perceive all those processes, and modulate them.

Imagine what kind of being that would be, perceiving and participating in itself; how very vast and terrible it might be to have the knowing that you were enough, and knowing that you were all you could ever know.

Coldly aware that the rune of your self, risted with your life’s blood, was the only thing that was yours. That your name and everything you were taught – along with half your thoughts – were not actually native to you, but an attempt to confine you, to complete the incomplete, to cook you until you were palatable, and not raw and indigestible.

…

Yes. Welcome back to Cold Albion.

 THE GREEN-CLAD ONE

       My week-day gown is of gold and silk.

  PEER

       It looks to me liker tow and straws.

  THE GREEN-CLAD ONE

       Ay, there is one thing you must remember:-

       this is the Ronde-folk's use and wont:

       all our possessions have twofold form.

       When you shall come to my father's hall,

       it well may chance that you're on the point

       of thinking you stand in a dismal moraine.

 PEER

       No difference at all, as it seems to me.

       Big trolls would roast you and small trolls would claw you;-

       with us it were likewise, if only they dared.

  THE OLD MAN

       True enough; in that and in more we're alike.

       Yet morning is morning, and even is even,

       and there is a difference all the same.-

       Now let me tell you wherein it lies:

       Out yonder, under the shining vault,

       among men the saying goes: "Man, be thyself!"

       At home here with us, 'mid the tribe of the trolls,

       the saying goes: "Troll, to thyself be-enough!"

So I’ve not posted here in a bit and there’s a reason for that. I’ve been getting a few articles under my belt at the Modern Mythology blog. It’s run by the editor of Immanence of Myth, the multi-faceted James Curcio, and he’s assembled quite a pack of extremely smart and erudite folks there.

So if you want to see posts that dig into the guts of the human narratives, I advise you to head over there. We’ve got some lovely surprises coming in the next few months, trust me on that.

And if you’re missing your fix here – don’t worry – I have some blinding content brewing in the back of my fevered brain just for you lot!

Until then…

Be seeing you.

Blatant Whorebaggery below. I’m proud to be part of this, even if I might disagree with some of the other contributors. Because that’s what keeps minds open. Additionally, from February I will be contributing to the ModernMythology.net blog, which I hope my readers might like to comment on and get things really going in the comments section!

______________________

For Immediate Release: London, 17th of January 2011

Weaponized is proud to announce the publication of ‘The Immanence of Myth’, an anthology arranged by James Curcio of Mythos Media. This anthology includes conversations, art and articles with those in the process of creating myth now, from up-and-comers and long-time underground myth-makers to celebrated artists such as Laurie Lipton and David Mack.

It will be published by Weaponized and available in print through major retailers and in Kindle and other eBook formats from July 2011.

About ‘The Immanence of Myth’:

Thinkers such as Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Karl Kerenyi, and many others have helped to popularize an awareness of the psychological significance of archaic myth inside, as well as outside, the ivory tower of academia. However, the vast majority of their work has been focused on understanding and legitimizing the myths of the past.

Yet myth is an immanent, ongoing dialogue, an assemblage that interconnects us all. Joseph Campbell made it a part of his life’s work to emphasize the central importance an understanding of myth plays for the artist, and it is a perspective that arguably has been lost in many corners of the modern art world. This makes this investigation essential for artists (and would-be artists), regardless of their medium.

However, myth’s central importance does not end with art. Our beliefs and ideas about the world determine how we treat the world, how we engage with it and enter into it. Far from being archaic relics of the past, myths will affect the future for all of us. Even if we are unaware of them, they will continue to affect us.

Nearly half of this five-hundred page book was written by James Curcio, a writer and art director with extensive independent media experience. Since getting involved in media production as co-founder of Evolving Media in 2000—the first in many media/arts collectives he helped organize—he has built engaging narratives, utilizing the mediums best suited to the task.

He says, “I am excited to be building a platform for the exploration of the subject of mythology in a modern light, both through the release of this book and the website modernmythology.net, and believe that Weaponized is the perfect partner to bring this to fruition. I hope that this continues to be a springboard for the much-needed discussion of the role that myth plays in all our lives, as well as the creation of new media which builds upon this knowledge.”

John Harrigan of Weaponized says “One of the key reasons FoolishPeople founded the Weaponized imprint was to ensure that important works such as ‘The Immanence of Myth’ are published and made widely available. Now more than ever the subject of Myth is of vital importance to the very nature of humanity and we’re proud to publish this book.”

We must invent our myths—or re-invent them—ourselves. If you haven’t already, take this as a wake-up call to join in and become a myth-maker of the 21st century.

About Weaponized:

Weaponized publishes experimental forms of fiction, prose and art that offer new ways to experience stories and myth. They are passionately committed to finding unique narrative hybrids that challenge, engage, inform and inspire readers.

The imprint was founded by FoolishPeople, a group that has been creating theatre, collaborative events, live art, books, music and film for over fifteen years. FoolishPeople combine mythology, shamanism, drama therapy, strategic forecasting and open source collaboration in the creation of this work.

Since its launch in August 2010 Weaponized has  published FoolishPeople scripts ‘Cirxus’ and ‘Dead Language’ by John Harrigan, ‘The Sparky Show’ by Xanadu Xero and ‘Forum’ by Richard Webb.

Amongst other titles scheduled in 2011 Weaponized will publish ‘Citizen Y’ written by John Harrigan and James Curcio in April.

Starting in February and leading up to the publication of ‘The Immanence of Myth’ in July, James Curcio’s ModernMythology.net and weaponized.net will feature writing and interviews with contributors featured in ‘The Immanence of Myth’.

www.weaponized.net

www.modernmythology.net

PRESS CONTACT

For further information please email

press@weaponized.net

Do you know something? I never had an invisible friend as a child. Not so strange perhaps, except there’s this thing about me. I’m fairly certain that if you have read any of my stuff, you’ll know what that thing is so I’m not going to say exactly what it is yet. Hell, you may even work it out as you read on, on the off-chance you don’t already know, or this is the first time you’ve read my words.

But, as a child, I did as most children did, and played games. I imagined things, played out stories in areas that weren’t necessarily conducive to being a cowboy, a super intelligent android, a barbarian hero, a starship pilot or a being of phenomenal cosmic power.

(Cardboard boxes, behind the sofa, in concrete playgrounds and under the dining room table for example).

The raw power of this always amazes me now, the fact that children can manufacture and incorporate disparate pieces of environment into a coherent whole. The creativity of it is stunning – the effortless conjuring up  of alternate existences for the purposes of exploration, understanding, and above all of these, sheer unadulterated fun.

Of course, adultery, adulteration; all these words have their roots in violation, alteration and corruption. Etymologically they emerge from alter:

alter (v.)

late 14c., “to change (something),” from O.Fr. alterer “change, alter,” from M.L. alterare “to change,” from L. alter “the other (of the two),” from PIE *al- “beyond” + comp. suffix -ter (cf. other). Intransitive sense “to become otherwise” first recorded 1580s. Related: Altered; altering.

An adult world is a complete world. Adulthood is the culmination of development, the completeness, the crystalisation of a full person. This is what is subtly taught in our culture. School trains us to think in terms of ‘work’ and ‘play’. Play is something children do, permitted because you are incomplete. It’s seen as a trial stage, a way of learning before the actual business of life begins.

We even ascribe play to juvenile animals, as practice for hunting or social interactions. It’s a dry run, the testing phase. To play as a child is acceptable, and as we grow older, the time for play becomes smaller, eventually morphing into a ‘break’ from work; a necessary sanctioned interrupt, rather than what it was before.

It’s interesting how things change, isn’t it?  It’s okay to goof off on your break, but not too much because you’re still at work, right? Certain things are Not Safe For Work, and I’m not just talking about porn here, am I? For some people this blog is NSFW – being spotted reading a site like this might range from the totally fine to outing one as alternative and slightly odd, or.at worst, some kind of crazy person or sinister black magician.

Exposure of one’s nature as an alternative sort of person isn’t always the best thing – everybody knows that. From pogroms to social snubbing and mockery, the gauntlet can be a little annoying and frankly unpleasant. Not ‘taking things seriously’ can be levelled as an insult, a criticism or worse.

Have you ever been in a situation when the word ‘immature’ has been used? I’m sure you have, haven’t you?

Because:

You’re not old enough, ready or willing enough to understand what I’m talking about.

Really.

You have yet to reach the level of understanding and advancement that I have, have you? You’ve not gained enough experience to level up.

This is a grownup thing, only discoverable by highly spiritually aware persons…

(Even writing that made me feel dirty, that and want to laugh, by the way).

You get the idea though, don’t you? This is the kind of thing that’s there all the time, the glass ceiling, the pay grade barrier, the security clearance. Sometimes, there is honestly a reason for it – certain information is necessary or maybe specific training. That’s not what we’re referring to though.

No, what we’re talking about and thinking about here, you and I, is the way there’s always another hoop to jump through, some illusionary threshold held up.  Once you cross it, you’ll be OK. You’ll be there, you’ll be accepted.

And to do that, to form yourself correctly, you accept certain things as true. It’s a social reciprocity. We learn it as kids, collaborating with others if we play with them. For the duration of the game, we accept that the cardboard box is the fortressspaceshiphousegaolbedroomspaceofinfinitepossibility.

But to echo the late, great, Bill Hicks:

“It’s just a ride.”

Just a game, and when it’s over we can do something else. Except people forget, don’t they – and they forget because they’ve been trained to look for the next stage in some kind of progression towards…something. Something complete, something ultimate. Something ripe and ready that will answer all your problems.

And you know, that’s how power works.

“Stick with me kid, and you’ll go far.”

Mimic the cool, the successful the wealthy; strive towards some halcyon thing that allows you to entertain the reptile-brain dream of a post-scarcity existence; essentials whenever and wherever you want. Glorious unaging immortality, avoiding the nasty business of flux and struggle and eventual death.

Ah, promises, promises.

Kids know the game ends eventually, because their world is one of eternal incompleteness. That’s fine, because they fill in the gaps with will and imagination. You were a kid once, and you know what it was like. Remember that simple decision to treat something in a particular way, just because you could?

I’m a trained philosopher – undergraduate and postgraduate too, and I’ve studied Aristotle, Plato, and a host of other dead people from various places and times. I’ve even done it with some living people too.

That was fun.

Really fun, playing with the fundamentals of the universe, chopping and changing premises like some manic six-year old who’s found the joy of playing dress-up in their elders’ clothes.

It’s so much fun, I do it all the time. I’m doing it now. That’s what this is. That’s what I’m about, and you’re here with me, playing along.

Are we having fun yet, or do you want to look away, to stop reading because somewhere, there’s an itch in your mind? And that’s part of it, that itch.

The very concept of ‘Is’? Blame Aristotle for most of the roots of thought on Being and Is. That’s a game too, by the way. It’s not even neurologically accurate. If we wanted to be accurate we’d have to say ‘It seems to me.’ every time we use ‘Is.’

What a mouthful. It’s a pity we don’t have a ‘Find and Replace’ mechanism for our thoughts, a Copy ‘N Paste Brain. Or is it?

Austin Spare would talk about the power of ‘as if‘.

Suppose you treat everything as having a goal? Wouldn’t that mean that rambling, labyrinthine posts have a point? And that reminds me of a story.

This is how it goes:

Once upon a time, there was a King and there were some gods. These gods, being much less ineffable than the one that lurks in the back corner of the modern Western mind, liked gifts. We can all get that, right? We’re all aware that we might be more kindly disposed to those who just plain nice to us, yes?

And just as we like gifts to be unequivocally ours, so these gods liked that too. They had certain things they liked humans to do, so that the gifts were marked as theirs. So these marks were obvious to the universe, like a nametag, or a sticky label on the tupperware box which your lunch is in while your store it in the fridge at work.

One of the gods, Poseidon, was rather nice to the King, who happened to be called Minos. In return for being rather nice, there was a great white bull which the god liked very much and put his mark on. Now, this was an extraordinarily handsome specimen of taurean flesh. Snow white it was, and shining like the seafoam; its breath was as fierce as a roaring storm and the sound of its hooves was like the crash and boom of a thousand thunderous breakers

This bull was, in short, the shiznit; it was the zenith, the veritable peak of bovine brilliance, trust me on that. Its flanks gleamed brighter than the moon. It was tasty, tasty, very very tasty, if you catch my drift? Everyone knew it, even King Minos, in fact, especially King Minos. It was the gourmet leftovers in the fridge of life, the ones that somehow smell and look delicious despite being neatly sealed and tidily labelled. Makes your stomach growl so it does, sets the mouth to water like a stream. We’ve all been there, and it’s all the more delicious because you can’t have it, because it’s just beyond your reach, isn’t it?

Sometimes people idly entertain nicking a little bit don’t they – the owner won’t really notice a spoonful gone, that sort of thing. It’s a very human thing to do. King Minos was very human, which is always nice because that means you have someone to identify with in this story, and that always helps. Plus, humans do slightly silly things when we’re enamoured of something – and we’ve all done that.

Now, Minos was a King, and by ancient definition, being a King meant you were a bit larger than life; you turned things up a notch or six. In fact, you might say Minos turned it all the way to eleven in the silliness stakes, because despite that bull being marked, very clearly, in big black capitals as POSEIDON’S BULL  – DO NOT TOUCH: MORTALS THIS MEANS YOU! Minos raided the divine fridge. Not just a spoonful either.

No, Minos pilfered the entire lot for his very own self.

(Many a courtier was plagued by the sound of nonchalant whistling from the royal chamber for days after, let me tell you!)

Having brazenly stolen from a god, well, as I’m sure you’d understand if some uppity git had nicked your gear, King Minos’ name was mud as far as your average divinity was concerned. So much so that Aphrodite, stunning, beautiful, vindictive, vicious Aphrodite – the lovely lady who emerged from the sea-foam, decided to give King Minos a bit of a slap for his temerity on behalf of her oceanic colleague.

So it was that goddess of love did her thing, wove her way over King Minos lady wife – who since you ask, was named Pasiphae. For if Minos so desperately wanted god-stuff in his life, she’d give it to him – and how! Gods you see, though they walked among men, were way beyond what most mortals could handle. They sort of made normal life impossible if you bumped into them. Your average mortal just went pop – mad, dead, cursed, or all of the above and worse, times ten.

Let me tell you, many’s the folks been changed by contact with those things that lie beyond the human world. Divine attention was not necessarily what you wanted. Most kept their head down and made sure they did enough to keep the folks on Olympus pleasantly disinterested. Rare was the individual who stuck their head above the parapet, y’know?

King Minos however? He’d not just stuck his head above the parapet. No, he’d dropped his trousers and hung his naked arse over it for everyone to see. Not, as I’m sure you’re aware, the best thing to do when there’s an inhuman immortal who nurses a grudge looking your way, is it?

So Aphrodite, she caused Pasiphae to find the bull mighty fine, if you know what I mean? If there was anybody around then and there who could make you want a bit of bull in every way you could, and several you couldn’t but were going to try anyway, it was Aphrodite.

But Pasiphae, she wasn’t some empty-headed bimbo. No, she was one smart lady, albeit maddened by divinely inspired lust. She knew there were going to be some anatomical…issues. So she commissioned Daedalus – yes, that Daedalus – to make here a hollow cow she could be inside so that the whole business would be…more interesting.

And Daedalus, more of a mechanical genius than Leonardo Da Vinci plus Archimedes, multiplied by the incomparable Montgomery Scott, does so. It’s a mighty fine cow, for a mighty fine bull, and the inevitable soft focus and seventies soundtrack occurs. In due time, there’s a child, a sprog, some bullspawn.

These days he’s mostly known as the Minotaur, but his name is Asterion and his mother loved him very much, despite the head and the tail of the bull poking from his little bastard rump. Now you may think a bit of adultery is a mild punishment for thieving Minos, but there’s more.

The divine violence wrought on Minos continues, for ickle baby Asterion not only provides a reminder of his wife’s infidelity and rampant zoophilia, the  little star – for Asterion means ‘starry’- possesses some distinctly inhuman appetites. Asterion you see, grew not by normal human methods of nourishment. Mother’s milk did not sustain him, no. He grew and grew and grew, becoming huge and terrible and hungry for human flesh.

Such a thing was really rather unpleasant for Minos, as the hungry beast seemed never to be sated, and if there’s something worse than a bull in a china shop, it’s a monstrous hybrid spawned by divine ire and lust. So Minos, thoroughly sick of his impossible stepson and his violation of human order, called on the supergenius Daedalus, who built a prison for Asterion in the form of a maze – the Labyrinth.

(You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. They have nothing to do with David Bowie or his sock. Or maybe they do…)

Asterion is killed by Theseus after Minos’ daughter helps him through the Labyrinth, but that is another tale, to be sure, one which precedes the flight of Icarus. The events continue on, there is never really and end to storytime. It is endless and shifting, nested, layer upon layer, spooled like a ball of twine given to Theseus by Ariadne.

So lets play in storytime.

Imagine yourself in the Labyrinth; at the centre sits the Minotaur Asterion. In the night of the looping tunnels, the enclosed, claustrophobic spaces, air stirs. The echo of his father’s breath roars past your cheek, warm and stifling.

> N

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> what is a grue?

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

Is the  Minotaur a grue? A monstrous star in the dark? Why put such a bright thing in the mazelike place? Are you fearful or are you an adventurer? What secrets might Asterion hold, his feasting never finished, his hunger never sated, where might the endless tunnels lead?

The Labyrinth holds endless potential in its darkness, just as the blank page or badge conceal possibilities. If the senses are deprived of things to grasp, what then? A half-seen, twilight world, phantasmal and yet absolutely real and totally immersive when experienced. Such is the stuff of dreams, of hopes, of aspirations and of nightmares.

Incomplete and in total flux, Heraclitan in the extreme.

For those of you who have read The Invisibles, there is a reason I go by VI. The elegant turncoat.

“I just met the Secret Chiefs of the Invisible Order. They’re as alien as the space between your bloody fingers and I mean that.”

The space between, the potential multiplicity. What happens if we introduce many gods instead of one, just as an idea, just as play, just as a method of exploration. Play with serious things, like Love and Justice and Honour and Integrity. Especially morality. What if we could imagine that all the gods that were, in a vast company, at a party?

Allah and YHVH discussing literary criticism with Vishnu. Dionysus and Tammuz chewing cornstalks and getting drunk on homebrewed beer? What if, after thousands of years, the Devil picks himself up from his prat-Fall and twirls his Chaplin umbrella? Or Jesus and Astarte nip off into a corner for a spot of tantric sex?

If you don’t exist, then what’s wrong with dying? If nothing is what it seems then a thing can be anything and everything. The flesh and blood of man can embody the entire universe, after all – the incomparable vastness of the All present within the space of a hands-span.

Aristotle gets drunk, and IS shifts into SEEMS TO BE. It’s all bleary and smeared and I LOVE YOU MAN.

Let us experiment rigorously, ruthlessly, for SCIENCE! Let us experience completely and furiously, caught up in the awe and terror of Aphrodite, the rage of the roaring sea  – the hieros gamos – carnal and full of lust.

Experi! Experi! To Try, to Play!

The same word root, the root of being human. And that’s not human is, it’s human-seems-to-me! Come dance in the Harlequinade – turn your coat inside out and stand on your head.

“The Invisibles is an immune program: triggered by the Barbelith buoy when the game crashed and embedded the player.”

Do you know something? I never had an invisible friend as a child.

Would you like to come and play with us? We’ll back in time for tea.

Be seeing you.

Restoring mental health does not mean simply adjusting individuals to the modern world of rapid economic growth. The world is ill, and adapting to an ill environment cannot bring real mental health. Psychiatric treatment requires environmental change and psychiatrists must participate in efforts to change the environment, but that is only half the task. The other half is to help individuals be themselves, not by helping them adapt to an ill environment, but by providing them with the strength to change it. To tranquilize them is not the Way. The explosion of bombs , the burning of napalm, the violent death of our neighbors and relatives, the pressure of time, noise, and pollution, the lonely crowds; these have all been created by the disruptive course of our economic growth. They are all sources of mental illness, and they must be ended.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist peace activist (Emphasis mine)

I’m no psychiatrist, no counsellor, no professional trained brain-shifter. Well, that’s not strictly true – I don’t have qualifications ratified by some external authority, however, I have well over a decade of poking my own head under my belt and also the knowledge that I’ve helped more than a few folks over the years.

I know this because they’ve told me, and it always surprises me. I like that surprise, because it actually tells me that I’m not set in my ways when it comes to talking to folks. Which is great because it means I’m still learning, still adapting, still becoming better at what it it is that I am.

Now, I am by no means perfect; I have my flaws, and many of them are fairly obvious. I’m still working on them though, which is the point, isn’t it? Because if we stop, we’re dead, to put it bluntly – everything moves, everything shifts, flows, changes, eventually decays and is recycled.

Nobody wants to be dead – at worst they just want to die, which is really an exit-strategy against pain and suffering or other pressures, be they internal or external. That’s completely understandable. My cousin took that route, and I won’t fault him for it; it was his choice and despite the fact that it led to a great deal of pain for his family and was, essentially, what broke me and began my descent into the depths.

I won’t fault him, because without that, it would have been far harder to break myself. Instead I shattered and found myself in some pretty dark places, and I learned some terrible things and experienced the nadir of my life to date. Without that, and without the love and support of my friends, I’d never be where I am now.

I wouldn’t be able to grin at death, smile at the grim and mind-numbing and find fuel for my dreams and thoughts in almost anything. I wouldn’t have become the peculiar person you all know and love, or at the very least are oddly fascinated by.

I have the quote at the beginning of this piece emblazoned on my brain, and as I’have already said I’m no psychiatrist, no counsellor, no professional trained brain-shifter – and that’s great because I can put all my effort into the second half of that equation, the section I have emphasized:

The other half is to help individuals be themselves, not by helping them adapt to an ill environment, but by providing them with the strength to change it. To tranquilize them is not the Way.

By now, if you know me at all, you’ll have become aware that I spend my life trying to be myself completely and that I don’t esteem herd behaviour that much. When I catch myself at it, I grow faintly annoyed, because I should know better, and actually do more than 80% of the time.

I’m not big on tranquillization – I dislike numbness and somnambulism and it actually makes me feel a little ill. I was talking to somebody the other day, and she knows who she is, about the numbness and lethargy. I was most impressed and gratified by the notion and demonstration of screaming for stimulants, let me tell you.

Stimulus is important and more than that, it it is vital because it is contact with the world. When I take part in a stimulating experience or conversation, the action it engenders reminds you that things can change and become something else.

It has been said that my writing has an intoxicating edge, and that that is wonderful to me, because it means that when you read it, you can become aware of things – you are stimulated and presented with options and choices that you were previously not aware of.

Yet somehow you could become aware of them, or at the very least you can recall times when you’ve been enlivened and stimulated, can’t you?

Times when you’ve felt so very vital and full of possibility that it feels like you might overflow and break your boundaries, move beyond other people’s image of yourself into something greater. We all have them, and for some they’re distant childhood and for others it’s just yesterday. It doesn’t matter when it happened to you, what matters is that you know what it felt like, doesn’t it?

Amidst that feeling, anything is possible, and that’s the key to it all. Amidst the thrill, the intoxication, the sheer inspiration – which is echoed in the constant everyday action of breathing; the act of inhaling. You are dead if you have expired, and so long as the possibility to inspire and be inspired exists you are alive.

That’s the thing you need to remember and consider at all times – every thing in all the worlds proceeds from that.

Because of that fundamental fact, I can quite honestly tell you that I don’t rightly care that no external body sanctions my actions. Nobody gave me leave to start breathing, did they? You’re supposed to keep breathing until you die, so they say.

Well I didn’t.

I stopped. I tasted death, and I started again. This is, needless to say, not normal, is it? So I’ve been flouting that since day one and there’s no reason to stop now because it’s easier or less painful. Thus, consider me a renegade when it comes to that, and that means I’m not exactly bound by conventional forms of morality.

This is of course beneficial to me, and hence to you, because I can do certain things far more easily than those tied in knots by certain moral qualms. When I communicate with people, everything I say or do arises from the notion that the universe is ambivalent and that the world is a constructed thing -built by people and their ideas.

All it takes it to disrupt the world, the everyday business of life, is to inject something odd, something different, something extra-ordinary into the system. This is easy for me, because I make it my business to find the extra-ordinary, to hunt it down in the wilds of the mundane, to bring its secrets up from where they have lain hidden.

Literally as well as figuratively, I’m an occultist – from Latin. occultus “hidden, concealed, secret,” pp. of occulere “cover over, conceal,” from ob “over” + a verb related to celare “to hide,” from PIE base *kel- (see cell)

So when it comes to people, everything I do is specifically designed to help you do the same, to open the cellar door and descend to find yourself. To give you the wine that intoxicates you, takes you across the threshold to the Otherland; to breathe enough breath into your lungs that you can dive into the depths of the ocean that birthed you.

All these things are metaphors, paths and ways  which can be used to find your own runa, your own Mysteries. When you find them, you will begin to change your world, because you will understand how to do so. This is what I am absolutely certain of, and that’s because I’ve done it, and it has enabled me to do things thought impossible.

Gordon has an interesting post entitled The Doc Brown School of Self-Improvement which you should read, about the dangers of inductive reasoning and gives an interesting method of keeping tabs on your own processes. Because I’m a contrary sod, I’m going to take issue with a possible interpretation of the post, rather than the post itself.

The issue isn’t really the traps of inductive reasoning – in actuality the issue is that the past is not fixed, nor that the future is a plane of possibility. It’s an issue of propulsion here; if one is to project into the future, a kind of physics still applies. To get to this future requires energy, requires fuel – the plutonium for your flux-capacitor which, combined with the speed of 88 mph catapults you elsewhere.

Where does this fuel come from? How exactly does future-you come back? More to the point, how do you go back and tell your past self what they need to know? You’d have to have the fuel in the present to do it. Now, before you get us all in trouble with the counter-terrorism bods in your search for nuclear material, I’d like to invite you to consider another option.

Suppose, just for a moment, that your future, your extrapolation, is completely unnecessary. That in fact, all that exists is you now, that you are newly emergent from the maw of chaos, and that all your past was created to give you an identity to stop your newly formed consciousness from falling apart, or so you’ve been informed/discovered.

Both future and past are manufactured, born of the same stuff. Thought and Memory drink from the same skull – yours.

If that’s the case, if the terminals of your awareness are not fixed, then what of the awareness itself? Might not it be plastic and far more malleable than first thought?  What would you change if anything was allowed and all was tabula rasa?

How might you become a fundamental thing, an axis mundi, the centre of the worlds?

I’m utterly selfish and that’s because I wish to be surrounded by people who have found themselves. I know what one man can do when he embraces his runa and focuses on becoming it in totality – what could a band of such souls do, working together – ask yourselves that!

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.”

They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?”

Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.” -Gospel of Thomas

Let me tell you a tale as it was told to me by an Initiated Man; as it it passed from his lips to my ears and beyond, into the very Foundation of my being.

Let me tell you a tale, by wyrd words and Art; a tale that is true when the rain falls and the thunder rolls, when the lightning flashes and the night is dark; when the sun is but a hope in the winter’s cold, a dream of warmth, and the cool of the evening is a balm from the blazing pitiless sun!

Let me tell you a tale dear friend, as you read my words and hear them spoken by the voice within, shape traced by eyes now long used to the task – for you know how easily you read all the letters placed before you, don’t you? You know how reflexive that has become, and hence how you draw near to listen even now, as I am about to begin.

How well you recognize the storyteller’s flourishes! How excellently you can perceive the hooks in the preamble, watching as they sink into place, flowing like a river as it enlivens a dry stream-bed. Drink deep therefore, and if you would, allow yourself to see, to feel and to experience all that is to come – listen good and well…

For he waited there, in that room alone, until they came for him. Dimly, faintly, he heard them moving in the temple; preparing with word and voice, with barbarous names whose syllables slid across his awareness like raindrops on glass. He sat alone and prepared, stilled his mind and opened his heart; he matched his breath with the beat of his heart as sand moved through the glass, a dry rustle of the desert there inside that place.

When they came, when the door opened and they asked if he was ready, he spoke:

“I am.”

So by those words he gave them license, commended himself to the hands of those who would work upon him on that night. First to depart was his vision; a blindfold made him sightless as he was led through the corridor. The temple door was opened, and he was announced. Where before there had been only darkness, now light lay just beyond his vision; flickering firelight and the thick, warm, scent of frankincense hung in the air, flavoured with further fragrances that were unknown to him.

They were others there, as he was drawn into the rite – a voice spoke of Earth; a crushing weight placed upon his head, the inexorable nature of that element brought forth; flesh yields to Earth in the end after all – it provides us our final home, our base and ground. So it was that Earth was laid upon him and he was bound with rope, the hands of man forcibly stilled by fibre and weave.

On then, to the spirits of Air; all-present and all-penetrative comes the whispered word, the touch of blade marks the way on skin as the sharpness cuts away the gross matter. He flinches at the cold kiss though he has steeled himself for such an ordeal; the sound of his breathing harsh, the bite of the bindings about his wrists a constant presence as Air passes through him in sharp purity, like the wind through the hollows of his bones.

On then to Fire as dim candle-flicker marks the path; a shrieking voice assails him in an alien tongue and the sting of agony announces his arrival. Scourged and assaulted again and again, until the skin of him is burning and that shrill shrieking sears his nerves as the blows seem to come from all directions. Fire is hungry and pain blossoms in scarlet flame, alternately soothed with scented oils of heated places; soft hands touch skin and wield the way of pain against him, until at last it passes.

At the sudden urging of Silence where before stood Rage and Passion, so passes he into the cool of the Deep Waters. Here his wounds are bathed and sweet refreshment is raised to the lips of the blind and bound figure. Sweet it is, this water, this mead of inspiration, these slow dark rivers made from the blood of gods. Calmness descends then, the calmness brought by the awareness of the vastness arrayed all about him; a single drop in the great watery Abyss.

Cleansed then, he returns to Earth to find the ground of all Being, to emerge and stand naked upon that distant shore which lies beneath all things. He moves with it beneath his feet, strengthening his every movement; he moves to stand amidst the roaring storms of intellect and thought as they batter his essence with their crushing fury.

Yet still he endures, and endures as he passes beyond into the burning heart of flame, and as the pain comes, as the agony hungrily plays across his nerves, he answers it with a hunger of his own. Greedy, he burns with it, draws the flame within, ignites himself, burns joyously on the pyre – a laughing conflagration descending from the Aether to plunge into the Beyond.

Amidst that nightblack place he swims, its crushing depths and pressures reconfiguring his shape and form, until the salt water in his blood matches that great and awful sea. Strange company he keeps there in the sightless gulfs, antediluvian creatures well at home beyond the realm of concious awareness.

Swims down deeper then, until the pressure compresses, until all that remains is diamond hard and shining with the light of a sun that dwells at the centre of the Earth. Thrice then has he walked the path, thrice judged, thrice refined; thrice and finally triumphant, he gains the right of vision.

Blindness disappears in and instant, the temple gleams and those present encircle him. They make the signs and ways of LVX and NOX; with words of power they send forth and awaken he who stands at the centre. Thrice again, aye thrice this is done, until he who is the centre beholds the shining reflection and ascends by descending!

So it is that he stands within the sphere of the Moon, at the Foundation of all things, who walks amidst the gardens therein, where all others see dry dust and airless cold. Walks aye, as those who wrought this work sink to their knees to hear his  worlds and words. So it is that he walks in the roots of things, beyond the sphere of man. So it is that he stands with gleaming figures, elegant and slim, spindly and fierce – towering in cathedrals of the stuff that men foolishly call dream.

For that salt blood that runs in his veins is the same salty sea which roars and thunders along the shores of awareness, that shining ocean, that silver gleaming cornucopia of creativity!

“Behold then.” they whisper, these spirits born of star and moon, these gigantic astral presences, “Long locked away have been the thorns within the blood. And beneath the roots of things stirs thunder, for that which is forgotten does not lie quiet, nor shall memory buy you safety. Long lost be the powers, though we come again, for upon our backs mankind has built its world.”

Fierce the pain within his veins as thorns unfold, pierced from the inside out. Blood flows, and where its droplets fall, so spring up countless universes. With sharp inhuman smiles and fathomless ancient eyes full of the light of long-gone galaxies, they stretch out needle-thin fingers and he meets them with his own, all gleaming silver-bone and clothed in deep kosmic blue.

“The essence of power is this: Make your Lies into Truth and the Truth into Lies.”

Understanding blossoms then, a bittersweet fruit ripening in an instant, its ashes the base for an elixir of paramount wonder…

II

“Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted.” - Hassan i Sabbah

Thus spoke the Old Man of the Mountain, or so the legend goes, in the days when his fortress at Alamut was the nexus of lines of flight and burrowing both. The Hashashin roosted at the Eagle’s Nest; masters of asymmetric warfare they struck in ways which hit the hearts and minds of their enemies.

I have long written about war machines within the context of Deleuzian philosophy; particularly highlighting the notion of exteriority, I have suggested that the extra-ordinary is possessed of a greater variety of potentials than the ordinary. The well of potential is what makes a thing powerful, and while the words of the Nizari master echo down through a thousand years, it’s true that they have become almost a cliche amongst certain types of magicians and philosophers.

Yes, ‘Orthodox’ Chaos Magicians, I mean you. Do please stop parroting it – you’ve relegated it to a distasteful sound-bite, right up there with management buzzwords and things like synergy and paradigm. I mean, come on – paradigm? Have any of you even read Thomas Kuhn? I know I have. So hush, would you?

(I may feel strongly about certain things, can you tell?)

However, for all that it has become a tired old saw, I invite you to consider the statement in relation to the events I recounted above – to consider that the Weltanschauung – the wider world-view may be understood in terms of language and dreams, that the fundamentals of what you consider reality are inherently based upon the episteme born of your culture – and here I give a nod to Foucault, thus pleasing Jack and Gordon at least!

Consider if you will, that the very notion of that phrase implies possibility. I raise this because of the notion of things brought up by this post of Jack’s, in particular relation to this one over at Strategic Sorcery. The distinction between Truth and Lie has ancient roots – deeply rooted in survival processes. The words phantom, phantasm, fantasy and fantastic spring from the same source:

An apparition, a spectre then – a sight seen with the Imagination. Compare this to the etymology of ‘false’ and ‘illusion’:

false

c.1200, from O.Fr. fals, faus, from L. falsus “deceived, erroneous, mistaken,” pp. of fallere “deceive, disappoint,” of uncertain origin. Adopted into other Gmc. languages (cf. Ger. falsch, Dan. falsk), though English is the only one in which the active sense of “deceitful” (a secondary sense in L.) has predominated.

illusion

mid-14c., “act of deception,” from O.Fr. illusion “a mocking,” from L. illusionem (nom. illusio) “a mocking, jesting, irony,” from illudere “mock at,” lit. “to play with,” from in- “at” + ludere “to play” (see ludicrous). Sense of “deceptive appearance” developed in Eng. late 14c.

I am sure you might begin to spot what I’m getting at here: that the issue is not one of truth, instead it is of deception and seeming. If one cannot trust something to act as it is obliged to by its definition, that thing becomes dangerous. It might do anything, and this possibility is something that requires that we keep an eye on it, just in case it tries to harm us.

This is a survival mechanism folks.

By nature, survival is easier in stable conditions where predators aren’t an issue and resources are plentiful. The shortcuts taken, the agreed upon assumptions about the environment which are shared by a group; these form the roots of the social contract – the bedrock of any given society.

The weltanschauung, the Focault-episteme – these give rise to taboos and laws which are rooted in survival in the environment that a culture inhabits and emerges from. The interactions of all forms of perception and understanding come together to create a pattern which informs and influences any given reality.

At the root of Indo-European culture – and others besides – stands the conception of a righteous order, opposed by a deceptive influence. In Zoroastrianism, this is manifested as the  Asha opposed by the Druj, or the Truth vs. Lie. The fundamental distinction between the two can easily be traced to that which maintains the integrity of the status quo, as opposed to the deception which undermines it and threatens the integrity of the world – literally the ‘age of man’ or group.

Think about that for a moment, and then turn over the concept of an assassin in your mind, yes? What images does it conjure, what associations? I’ll lay good odds there’s an element of stealth, of dressing in black and moving unnoticed before striking and vanishing like a ghost. Or perhaps it summons images of poison, a knife in the back, sneaky indirect wet-work of dubious morality – a Black Operation par excellence.

Now, if you haven’t read that link to the article on the Druj – and you really should, trust me – then I’ll give you a supremely relevant quote:

Druj-, Avestan feminine noun defining the concept opposed to that of aša- (q.v.). Controversies about the meaning of the latter word have naturally had implications for the understanding of druj-. The corresponding verbal root in Indic (druh: dru‚hyati) seems to have the basic meaning “to blacken” (Mayrhofer, Dictionary II, pp. 79 ff.), perhaps preserved in Avestan in Yašt 5.90 and 8.5. In view of the opposition of the two words, if the meaning of aša- is “truth,” then that of druj- must be “lie,” but, if the meaning of the former is “order, justice,” than druj- must mean “error, deceit.”

Christian Bartholomae prudently gave both meanings: “falsehood, deceit” (AirWb., cols. 778-82). Considering that the meaning “falsehood” corresponds to a certain kind of derivation (see the discussion of draoga-/drauga-, below) and that the meaning “deceit” results from a specific contextual usage (cf. the verb druj:dru‘a-, below), the opposition was probably between “real order” and “illusory, deceptive order,” the first being linked to the lights of the day, the second to the shadows of the night (Kellens, 1991, pp. 46 ff.).

A black thing indeed then, this Druj – this vision which ensnares and draws away from the Truth; a distorted mockery which sets you to question, to wonder if  perhaps the fundamentals of the world are not as they have been illuminated before you. A garden of temptation, full of houris and rivers of milk and honey.

They say many things about Hassan i Sabbah. They say he would dose his acolytes with hashish and make them believe they had died, only to awaken in a garden he had created to present the illusion of Heaven. Then, once returned, they would be fanatically loyal to the cunning Old Man of the Mountain.

They say he could command his man to throw themselves from the parapets of Alamut, plunging downward to their deaths all unconcerned. But they also say he beheaded his own son when he found him with a bottle of wine in defiance of the laws of the Qu’ran.

They say a lot of things, don’t they? Did you ever wonder who They are, and where they get Their unimpeachable information?

It doesn’t come out of the Black Night; doesn’t emerge from the sightless, senseless gulfs. No, it comes out of the streetlight, the neon and the campfire, the fierce glow of rationalism and progress. From repeatable results and the bedrock of reality and generations of assumption that the chair you’re sitting on is solid and you won’t go through it.

The flaming sword guards the gates to Eden, held in the hands of an angel. Paradise is but a memory and mankind tills the soil and lives and dies, trying once again to bring it to being. It builds and creates, one thing on top of another, layer upon layer of solidity and structure. The blade cuts the black earth and the seeds grow.

What of the assassin then?

What indeed! For he too has a blade, and it is swift and silent in the night. He strikes and brings forth blood that falls upon the same earth. Cain slays Abel and is marked by YHVH – the first killer, now rendered untouchable.

There’s iron in the blood and the metal in your veins may gleam, oh so bright; opened up by the assassin as he moves unseen amidst the sheep – for as I’m sure you know, Abel was a herder of livestock, and Cain a grower of crops. So here we find the asssassin’s way in an interpretation of the doctrine of taqiyya – strategic dissimulation.

By taking on a seeming, the practitioner survives amidst the hostile or larger population, to perform in secret those things which are unacceptable to the masses. By embracing the lie, the truth is preserved – the truth of the inner nature. Without it, those that follow the call of that nature would be destroyed.

Thus we find a secret hidden in the heart of all things; that the notion of Asa-as-Truth and Druj-as-Lie are contingent each other for existence. You cannot have one without the other.

In the Black Night one finds the inner Light gleaming, shining silver in every cell. There is no neon, no street-light – no external source of Illumination. As the assassin strikes at the fundamentals of existence, his blade cuts deep into the heart of the world itself. He murders all that is known and understood, until all around is an ocean of shining blood and the sun and moon are eclipsed and torn down.

By now, you’ll have begun to notice the leaps and connections I’ve made, the associations and links – vaulting from one thing to another, a path that’s easily traceable across the rooftops of your mental metropolis. The use of metaphor to slip sideways through the cracks, easing behind your mind to stalk the shadowed corridors of your subconscious; the evocative conjuring of scenes – of souks and bazaars heaving with myriad ideas beneath minarets from which the wail of the muezzin calls forth strange things in the night.

Can you comprehend what phantasms and images might emerge in the darkness, what horrors and glories might be revealed at that time? Or what strange and terrible forms might wake from sleep and stretch out their hands to you; might speak in tongues no human mouth has ever uttered?

This is the essence of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights; Scherezade’s perfume fills the air, exotic in the desert heat. Stories within stories, concepts within concepts and words within words. Such power it has, the power to stave off even death itself, to ensnare even a king, to draw ever in, and ever deeper. A Labyrinth in the dark, and at the centre the monstrous Minotaur, born of Woman and Beast.

Will you walk those passageways, those paths guarded by djinn and ifrit, those netherworld paths buried deep within your consciousness?

Try it. Reach inside yourself, into the dark of your body, the space between each thought, voyage deeper and deeper, and do it now. Navigate the Labyrinth, sightless and blind. Go on, I dare you.

I’ll be here when you get back…

III

The chair is solid, isn’t it? The seat you’re sitting in is going to hold you up and the business of life will continue on, yes? After all, if things were different, that would be crazy talk. Certainly, you wouldn’t sit on a chair with holes in that you can fall through, would you?

Except you are sitting on a chair with holes that you can fall through and what’s more physics agrees with me. So, if you think I’m crazy, if you think these are purely the ravings of a madman, then please consider how much space there is in an individual atom, and how many atoms make up your body.

After that, move on to your seat, and when you’re done, I’m sure you’ll join me in praising the charges on the particles for their sterling work in keeping things repulsed, and making everything seem solid. Because actually, there is an extraordinarily small chance that all the space and charges could align in a certain way and you and the chair might pass through each other.

It’s all right though, it probably won’t. So that’s fine…isn’t it?

Wait a second though, if that fundamental is only a seeming then what is the truth?  What actually is? Honestly, several millennia of philosophers and scientists are still scratching their heads about that one. Some of the really clever ones have come up with good workable theories which have enabled many wonderful things – but all these are based on some fundamental assumptions.

I spent both my undergraduate and post-graduate time at university studying philosophy – and that certainly counts as being trained. Four years (3 year BA and 1 year MA course) learning how to think. It’s not as easy or as reflexive as you might believe, this thinking business. Along the way, I went a little mad and something broke. The apocalyptic and terrible visions of worlds burning, of millions marching in lockstep to unthinking doom that I have described here and in other places, were not simple metaphors.

They were things I actually experienced.

The bedrock of the world fell away, and I was insane by most standards. Yet somehow, I survived, and the transmutation into a kind of combat philosopher began like an alchemical process. Your fundamentals are not mine – the heritage of the epistemological assassin awoke in my blood.

Why am I telling you this?

The answer is simple – Jason’s post makes the interesting point that certain things work whether or not you believe in them – that the efficacy may very well be in the operation itself as opposed to the primacy of belief so beloved by modern magicians, particularly of the CMT variety.

At first glance, this is a step forward – an attempt to break free of the idea that we are at the mercy of external powers that require bowing and scraping. On the second glance, it’s only one step – and though its regarded as post-modern, we must remember that post-modern is the child of modernity, and that modernity is inherently anthropocentric (human centred).

Which, while a shiny view, does not take into account the interrelation of humans with the environment they inhabit. It’s a thing of narrow focus, and as anyone who’s been watching the news lately will tell you, this way of doing things has caused…problems.

But for all of you who hold to the view that belief is primary, and that changing beliefs is powerful, I’d like to smile and draw my blade. What is belief? What is this thing that supposedly gives such great power?

How can you use it, how does it work – these are things each of you needs to sit down and consider for yourself. Equally, for those who choose to hold that there is something inherent in a given thing which lends it power, I ask you, what is that?

Think on these things, and think hard. Reply in the comments if you want. If you’ve read this far, I know I have your interest and as such, I’m going to offer another way.

The way is this:

Neither operere ex operato nor belief are what you think they are. Truth, Lie, Asha, Druj - all these concepts have definitions and borders. Walls between them.

Imagine if you could walk through the walls or pull back far enough to see them laid next to each other as part of a whole. Picture that, and if you have a moment of psychic vertigo as you allow yourself imagine them as parts of a larger thing, then you’re with me and I’d advise you to keep doing it.

What if it is all seeming - what is solid then?

If you can imagine all things, everything you know, as a phantasm that shifts and dances and is always ever changing; if you can hear the roar of chaos all about you, primordial and protean; if you can feel the thunderous silence at the heart of yourself, the Black Night when there is the Void, and there is you; and if that same infinite Void welcomes you and you can begin to realize that you are a shifting phantasm with boundaries and definitions that can be passed beyond, then it has begun.

When understanding dawns and the vastness dwarfs you, the nature of yourself as a grain of sand on that kosmic shore, and what you call ‘belief’ is nothing of the sort, but is instead a grasping for the ungraspable. When the Self is known as as that which gives rise to you, that the personality which is considered you is but the tip of a nigh infinite iceberg?

Then belief becomes irrelevant, and all things brim with potency.

The chair is allowed to seem solid. It is allowed to be a chair-shaped space and also a symbol and a word in your mind. All these things and many more besides, nigh-infinite in its variety. All are permitted and none are exclusive.

Nothing is True, and Everything is Permitted.

So spoke Hassan, he who they say gave men licence to do impossible things. Think on that, would you; and then understand that the essence of doing the impossible is doing what others cannot…

And the 3rd Angel sounded
And a star fell from heaven
Burning as it were a lamp
And it fell upon the 3rd part of the waters

Asteroid

I’m a ball of fire
Fire from heaven
Terror from nowhere
You’ll never shoot me down
Days turns to minutes
5 seconds till it hits us
3 seconds to ground
1 second to ….

Asteroid
Coming in from the void

On the bed of the ocean
Where history lies
Strange civilisations
Vapourised
Days turns to minutes
5 seconds till it hits us
3 seconds to ground
1 second to ….

Asteroid

I.N.R.I
Nature renewed by fire made whole

And I climb to the mountain
Light to dark
Behind time and space
A hole in your Ark
Days turns to minutes
5 seconds till it hits us
3 seconds to ground
1 second to ….

Asteroid - Killing Joke

It’s been interesting reading blogs over the past few days, and not least because it’s quite obvious how interconnected ideas can provide inspiration and comment. I always find it extremely intriguing that certain subjects appear to suddenly well up and and flow as currents through people’s thoughts and actions.

I say this because, just like physical currents, the currents of thought and idea can vary – some can be deceptively placid and yet exhibit a vicious undertow that leaves you struggling to break free. Others are powerful streams that move within larger bodies of work, of thought and memory, or gentle journeys that take you on meanderings into the vast sea of imagination and possibility.

Let’s take for example, three blogs that I’m fond of reading for their varying perspectives:

On Rune Soup Gordon’s put up two posts which I greatly enjoyed. In this one, he goes into detail on his thoughts regarding Holy Places, in particular a site associated with St. Nectan, down in my native Cornwall. The notion of landscape and environment as sacred, combined with a focal point of veneration has always struck me as peculiarly important. Gordon’s words reminded me of an article I occasionally return to for inspiration – THE EROTIC LANDSCAPE written by Mogg Morgan.

It has repeatedly struck me that the notion of embracing the landscape, the spaces we move through, is a spectacularly potent technique. Rather than viewing it as a thing to contour and control, if we view it with the range of emotion and action one would allow oneself when engaging with a loved one, we can be presented with a level of nuance and subtlety which goes beyond the level of appearance and into the realm of deep understanding.

Further, if we cultivate such an understanding deliberately, if we allow ourselves the pleasure of being within the environment, being open and accepting to it, as we would a lover, we engage in a communion and communication with that which lies beyond the confines of the civilized ‘human’ world.

“We who are about to partake of each other, shall walk past all amorous sickness and deaths, for we are within the magical equinox.

Amen

We who proudly make unto ourselves every graven image, shall have great copulations and are allowed to love our Gods, for we know the Sacred Alignments.

Amen

We who do not crucify – nothing shall hurt us that is of the ‘Nature’; neither our comings and goings from the womb, for we have the Key to all aesthetics.

Amen

In this sacred moment (here occurs the symbolic eating of flesh and blood) we forget our enemies: therefore let our dead children sleep. And let our dead loves arise, so they too may watch and enjoy our ecstasies. Let their animation be power to our memories and so resurge all ecstasy, for in this day there shall be no inhibitions.

Amen

Thou insatiable peripheral quadriga of sex.

Amen.” - THE PRAYER OF COMMUNION, Zoetic Grimoire of Zos

Above we see the words of Zos vel Thanatos - the sorcerer-artist Austin Osman Spare, honoured ancestor and geezer to a million chaos magicians, whether they know it or not.  Spare’s erotic exploration of aesthesis has a great deal in common with the Cosmogonic Eros mentioned by Ludwig Klages, and for Spare, the highest principle is that of Self-Love.

Such a principle is not solely masturbatory; rather it is a recognition, through Eros, of the multitude and variety of beauties and grotesqueries which the individual is capable if containing and expressing innately! To engage with all things in a Sexuality which has only a tangental relationship to the act of copulation – an erotognosis as it were; enabling a knowing of the world in its totality, a knowing in the Biblical sense almost.

If we are speaking of flesh and blood forming a carnal gate to the soul as we have been, if we are suggesting that body and soul are, in fact, not at all separate, then Gordon’s second post quite neatly backs us up, doesn’t it?

Here, he recounts the conception of the blog – the incarnation of it, and his return to doing magic. I hope he won’t mind me quoting a portion:

“Then at the end of the tomb I arrived at St Peter himself.

It bowled me over. I almost cried. The energy emanating from this tiny gilded casket was like nothing I have ever felt. Something had happened to this man.

So I stood there and thought about what this something might have been.

• This man may have met something divine that we can still feel two thousand years later even after his bones have turned to dust.
• He was somehow raised up or elevated about normal human status by… Something.
• The faith of more than a billion people currently living on planet earth converging on this one tiny chamber have built something.

Whichever way you look at it, this was magic.

And this is what I love about chaos magic. The explanation doesn’t matter in the slightest. In fact, it’s probably speculating beyond the data. All you can know for certain is that something magical is happening.

The universe is magic. It didn’t matter that I currently had no ‘use’ for practical magic. Magic’s existence is too important to ignore. If magic exists -and it does- then that colours everything about your life.

That was it.

In that tomb I committed to pulling the sheets of the furniture in the wizard’s tower and firing up the octarine generator.”

The bones of St Peter, the flesh and blood focus of the Catholic Church, had an effect. A contact was made, and it wasn’t with some ethereal thing, but a very real and physical object. Now, we can argue for ages about whether it was directly the object, or something more subtle – that’s not the issue though.

The issue is that, by interaction with the physical, Gordon’s awareness shifted and he was spurred into becoming committed  while he was in a tomb in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. You know the one, the sprawling edifice of Empire which has millions committed to it. The same Church that had the pagan temples shut down and regularly used to execute people on grounds of heresy!

Think about that for a second, and as you do, as you ponder the strangeness of that fact, have a read of Jason Miller’s posts on the Strategic Sorcery blog and the comments they’ve engendered, here and here – also here.

Are you done yet? If so then, you’ll have no doubt noticed that a lot of strong feelings are engendered by the subject matter, and the way it’s quietly connected to Gordon’s posts too. Perhaps you’re not so sure what I’m alluding to, and if not then I suggest you take a look at this post, or this one from Frater R.O.

I’m sure you can see both the similarities and differences in all these perspectives, can’t you? After all, that is what blogs and the internet are about – communicating ideas as we surf the web by hyperlink, moving hither and yon in a veritable galaxy of information. Now, you might have worked out by now that I’m a polytheist – the world is full of gods and spirits and other wights.

Personally I have no problem with people choosing to be monotheists, henotheists, monolaters  atheists, agnostics or just plain confused - that’s their look-out. All that matters to me is that possibility is allowed, that the sheer multiplicity and variety of ways of being is acknowledged.

In all the posts I’ve linked so far, what should become obvious is that there are icebergs in the current, that each of the ideas discussed, each opinion expressed, is somehow connected to each other by the web, by the people behind the keyboards. Many people see only the surface connections – the obvious contact points, the pins and holes as it were.

I say there are icebergs in the current precisely because the lion’s share of a given idea-stream occurs beneath the surface, just as the majority of an iceberg is said to dwell beneath the surface of the freezing waters. When I and the other chief contributors of The Sutra Of the Poison Buddha - say hello Jack and Ryan, there’s good bastards – wanted to take on new material, we’d look at our lives, our works, and our thoughts. Then we would literally free-associate without censure, following the maze of twisty passages as we rode the Synchronicity Highway at breakneck speed, laughing all the way before the shock of it would sober us up.

The same technique can be applied to enter a current from any of the tips of any of the icebergs, until suddenly one is washing up on strange shores which seemingly have no connection to where you were before. The key is to abandon any notion of cause and effect, and instead become aware that connections are multiple-way, that meaning may be manufactured, and to realize the ability to make connections is in actuality the fundamental Arte.

II

If you’ve read this far, you might be wondering what this has to do with the song lyrics I’ve used as an opener. I suppose it depends how much you trust me, doesn’t it? Ask yourself if I would  waste time on such a thing without there being a purpose, given what you have previously known of me – and if you know little, then perhaps you should read the things I have  already written with an eye on what’s between the lines, yes?

Once you’ve answered that question enough for your own satisfaction, I’d like you to re-read the lyrics and drink them in; think of them not as dry words, but things that are wet with salt water; with sweat and blood and burning fire borne from the celestial sphere down into the realm of men.

An incarnate ecstasy, alive with the fury of divinity, with the fellowship that comes from the fire and the sword brought to men, to reveal the Mysteries to those half asleep. drowsing in their rote definitions of existence. Read those words, and imagine how they might inflame you, how you can allow them in to ignite your heart and sear your soul. Can you see the look upon the faces of those who watch it fall from heaven, a burning thing with the body of a star descending to you across the ages?

Watch the way their features shift as its light washes over them how their bodies rock and sway in glorious anticipation and growling thunder announces the coming, how the electricity sizzles in your veins and your heat leaps. How the silence falls and the voice speaks, as the tension grows.

You know this.

And if these things are difficult to conjure and comprehend, then watch and see the video below. Embrace it as a living thing, watch it as many times as you like, so that with each run you become more aware of what lies behind the simplicity of a song…

Now, regardless of what your taste in music is, I am sure you saw that the crowd were extremely into the experience, and I’m absolutely sure you can appreciate the sense of theatre that Jaz Coleman and the boys have, and equally that you can begin to see the connection between that and what I’m saying, right?

Given that that’s true, I’m fairly certain that you can join me in following through on that and the other connections which I’ve illuminated earlier, in spite of the fact that they might not be obvious at first glance – after all, if they were, I’m sure each one of the posters would have written about it by now because well, duh.

If we’re going to take a dip in that stream, to dive off the icebergs and swim down to find the structures and connexions, then I’d ask you to pause a second and consider what all these things have in common; the shared figures and symbolism, the distinct notion of an esoteric gnosis which has been either lost, or hidden over the years.

There is definitely a division between the people who simply accept what they are told, and those who explore it for themselves, isn’t there?

There are those who delight in being guided, in having the yoke lifted from their shoulders, in giving themselves over to something larger then themselves, and of course, there is nothing wrong with doing so provided that the thing, person or group they submit to doesn’t abuse that trust.

There are also those who are drawn to experience directly, to seek out what lies behind the ideas themselves, searching, always searching. I’m sure you can tell which  of the two I am, but what about you? Would you leave behind all you knew to seek the truth, and live the Life – knowing that you can never go home again?

Most wouldn’t…

Except, Simon the fisherman and his brother throw down their nets and follow, don’t they?

“Unless you want to believe the fairytale…”

III

The crucified serpent is alchemical symbolism for the operation known as fixing the volatile - transmuting mercury into a usable elixir. Add to this the revelation that nachash or serpent, in Hebrew Gematria has a value of 358, the same value as mashiach or messiah. So we have the image of a serpent that, according to Genesis, brings mankind to knowledge it wasn’t strictly supposed to have, elevated beyond its original design. As well of this, there is the erection of a brazen serpent on a pole by Moses in response to a punishment set upon the Israelites by YHVH, in the form of fiery serpents. The brazen serpent would cure all those bitten by the fiery wyrms if they looked upon it.

In terms of symbolism then, the notion of Jesus’ crucifixion may be squarely equated with fixing the volatile – the transmutation of a figure into a Saviour – that’s to say a healer and preserver. This fits in well when we consider the Christian Communion and the Catholic notion of literal transubstantiation, or the symbolic version  of the same in other denominations. The congregation partake of the body and blood of the Saviour, consuming the elixir which gives them access to the Kingdom of Heaven.

But let’s consider the notion of a descent from that place a second – orthodox Christian Doctrine claims Jesus was sent from the Father, and the more Unorthodox versions have a great deal to say about who/what that Father is – be it the Logos or the Nous. The word asteroid is composed of roots aster and eidos – making it literally an object that has the form of a star.

Crowley said that ‘every man and a woman is a star.’ Might we then be able to suggest that Jesus-as-Saviour might have provided an intercessory method of finding the Kingdom of Heaven within mankind, instead of the standard exoteric  notion of a post-Apocalyptic bliss-fest?

Let’s think back to the imagery of fire, the sensation of the electricity in your veins, remembering the ecstasy, the immanent otherworldliness as it crawls up your spine and seizes your lungs; as your skin crawls and something uncurls at the base of your spine, hotter than suns as it twines through your body, energizing and strengthening you, unlocking centres of excellence and terror you didn’t know you had.

It immerses you in the awareness of something beyond your skin, a billion eyes opening and looking right at you, and for a moment you think you might shrivel to nothing, be blasted to dust before that gaze, as the wings are removed from their places and you are struck by the Truth of the serpentine choir.

Can you survive such a transition, or are you clinging on like grim death to your humanity? Do you fall sick, your soul burned to naught by that fire, cast adrift and drifting towards the grave as the source of your identity is shattered?

Or do you exult, and join your voice with a thousand others, tongue dripping with glossolalia, eyes wide and unblinking, full of shining ophidian gnosis which whispers of the days in Eden? Does Moses’ Egyptian wisdom give you the way to survive, imbued as it is with ancient sorcery and power?

In a small room over Jerusalem, can you hear the rushing wind and see the flames leap from the crown of your brethren? Can you feel the urge to speak in a tongue like rain, to pass on the gnosis by sound alone, knowing full well that it lies beyond language – that the wisdom passes on like a contagion, from one person to another. The Master’s words echo in your ears:

“He who has ears, let him hear!”

Now you may begin to see what’s here – the notion of scriptural lore as a transmission method, an encoded symbolic language capable of altering someone’s thought processes to enable proper integration with a new way of being. Is it any wonder that this might become exoterically misinterpreted?

Just think about that – when consuming psychoactives, one of the important things to remember is set and setting – how things are framed dictates responses and that means a great deal.

Now, as a dirty heathen, I’m apparently a prime target for evangelizing – except in my case, I’m actually an apostate. As such, when I am evangelized at, I actually smile, because many of those who others find so irritating are wielding their words with no skill other than fervency. The heat of what they are saying is like a candle-flame when compared to the blazing roar of nature.

That’s not to say its without value – it’s prime setting material, a psycho-social grounding framework that enables them to function, and that’s right and good for them. Similarly, the hateful fundamentalists provide me with (g)no end of amusement – they’re waving around the equivalent of a twenty megatonne gnosis-bomb and clocking people on the head with it as if its’ a club.

(Mind you, a person with a club can still knock your brains out, so it’s best to keep an eye on them and either disarm them or find some way to avoid their attention!)

Then there are the honest ones, the ones who have faith and attempt to love their neighbours as themselves. Wait a second…Love one another – isn’t that what the Man said? Love thy neighbour as thyself!

I’d like you to see the grin on my face as I write this, bearded and evil-minded though I be. I’d like you to picture the gales of laughter that shook me as I realized the way this post was  going, because you’re probably going to want to go back to the beginning of these words and look for it, stated as plain as day.

I couldn’t be that devious could I? That would require precision, hidden in all the verbosity, surely? To do that, to dive into the current and end up connecting things which supposedly have no connection at all, and hence start you thinking about the deep structure within it all. Because once you start seeing the deep structure,within any given current you can recognize it, and spot it, even though it’s cloaked in a form that bears no direct representation to what it reveals.

Go back if you like, with that new recognition, that texture in the dark, that scent on the wind, the string in the labyrinth that spirals on through infinite eternity. Go back over it all in your mind and let me tell you a bit about my past, and allow me to show you something…

IV

I have priests and preachers in my family, missionaries, lecturers and political activists on both sides; this is a true fact. The drawing you are  seeing is a depiction of the village church of which a close family member was Rector – an ordained Anglican priest. I spent much of my early life in a family where the symbolism of Christianity, and the twin poles of church and pub were central to the Cornish village in which we lived.

Imagine a Sunday if you will, the bellringers standing at the Lychgate – the gate to which corpses were brought – filing the air with fragrant blue pipe-smoke, the Cornish drawl and lined faces, the smell of the wild garlic growing greenly as it festooned the old stone wall. I used to pause there when I was young and pluck a few leaves to chew in the service. The moss on the gravestones seemed to bristle and flex as you made your way up the path through the graveyard and round the tower.

Pausing now, you take in the war memorial, the worn stone steps that lead up and further into the graveyard that’s been open for as long as the church has been here, way back in the 13th century.  Feel the weight of eight hundred years of folk, of living and dying and praying and laughing.

It wraps around you, the green does, and if you were to move on, you might find the holy well said to be where the Celtic saint for whom the church and village are named began to preach when he first came to this vale. If you’re so inclined, you might fall to wondering if there’s another layer to the tale; whether that well might have held offerings to some pagan god or spirit long before the coming of Christ – and truth be told you would not be the first to wander along those paths of thought, I assure you.

For now though, you might open the heavy wooden door inside the porch and step inside the church, immediately struck by the scents of old wood and the faint tang of polish as you pass by the font where generations have been baptised , running your fingers over the intricate carvings on the pew ends, just like I did as a boy.

Stand in the nave then and look past the rood-screen to the altar, topped with slate and supported by weighty Cornish granite…

And now, we’ll shift and it’s not a Sunday but a Friday, a Good Friday – that day when a man-god died and descended into the grave to preach and pass the gnosis to the dead so that they might be liberated.

Picture the scene; that same church all unlit as the priest of your blood leads the way through the Stations of the Cross halting to read the tale of Christ’s death, mimicking the journey through ritual and meditation as the voice rings out and though it’s a spring day, the place feels hollow like a ribcage and the light is thinner somehow.

And as that familiar voice, the one you hear every day, speaks the words and weaves the way, you see all the falls, all the stumbling on that day in Jerusalem, so very long ago. You can smell the sweat and the blood and the roughness of wood against your skin, the gape and flex of broken flesh from the scourging. Your vision wavers in the painful heat, blood trickling into your eyes and mixing with the unshed tears as the thorns snag your scalp.

One foot. Then another. Then another. It seems endless, this path of sorrows. You are so very weary – all you want to do is rest, to flee the agony and the jeering. But you can’t, though you know there’s far worse to come yet, a terrible darkness as you are drawn to the place of Place of the Skull, as you stumble to your knees, and are almost immediately dragged onto the wood by the soldiers.

The cross tears at your skin, and you give it blood in return, staining the grain with your blood, the blood of a man and a god, son of your Father. It’s your lover now, that rood – it will be with you until death you do part; you are wedded together in pain.

Hoisted into the air then, part of a stand of trees, a  grove of execution. Somewhere in the back of your mind, amidst the spiralling and narrowing of your vision, the painful pounding of your heart, you are aware they are nailing you to the wood. It might strike you as funny – how many times in your younger days did your carpenter’s hands drive nails into wood, loving as you did the crafting and making of things? Yet now, it is you who are being crafted, made holy by the sacrifice.

Some part of you, the part that was something other than flesh and blood, remembers that you are not alone, that you partake in all the sacrifices that have ever been made since the dawn of time. Bound and brought to death, all of you have done this, do this for others, be it willing or otherwise. Yet still you wonder, as it becomes harder to breathe and  you can feel your lungs filling with fluid, feel something tear in the shattered remains off your palms:

“Why am I doing this?” You cry out, wondering if the Father has deserted you. “Why have you forsaken me?!”

The doubt tries to blossom, but it is choked like a weed by the agony – the blessing of flesh – until all of you burns and there is nothing at all but fire. You try to scream but your lips are dry, your breath weak.

The moments stretch on, until bitter vinegar is pressed to your lips. You suck without thinking, glorying in the bitterness and the sting as it spills into your cuts, knowing that it is merely a matter of faith and will – how else did you turn water into wine at Cana?

What’s left of your human mind embraces it, embraces the whole world, and with the strength of the rood at your back, with the power of your pain and suffering, you love them, you love the whole world because there is no other option. You love them with the fierceness that only a dying man may muster, you love them with the infinite, furious and all-encompassing love of the Divine.

You beg forgiveness on their behalf, you grant the thief a seat at the Father’s table, you forgive all their sins and secrets and their lies and their petty vindictiveness and all the horror that has been and is yet to come; to unborn generations and those gone before, you give the gift of your blood and the forgiveness that it buys.

Your last act as a mortal is to cease to be human, to commend yourself to that daimonic realm from whence you came. As the sky turns black and the force of the sacrifice ripples out through all there ever was, you descend into hell and open the way to heaven, your immortal form a way and a road, the cross an axis mundi to climb upward once more…

And now, back to that church back to the silent staring at the wooden cross which stands in the nave on this day, taller than a man. It stands there stark and empty as you realize its nature, not as an instrument of torture and execution, but rather as an icon, a key to unlock the deep Mystery of death and sacrifice.

As you sit there in the pew, surrounded by the accoutrements of exoteric Christianity, the fine work and hollow building, the silence of meditation all about you, notice something. Notice, as I did in those moments, year after year, that the gnosis of blood and love is combined with the gnosis of death and words.

Think on this deeply then, as I did – until I walked away, until I began to take the steps which ultimately led me to throw down my nets and never go home again. For though it has taken years and I no longer sit before that cross on Good Friday, I owe a great deal to the things it taught me.

Perhaps you know a little more now, and perhaps you can allow yourselves to navigate with your eyes closed and follow the streams, and see where you end up. Go on, have a wander – I’ll still be here.

Be seeing you.