no art without shadow

I think there are two sides to what I have learned throughout my life spiritually, and those two sides see things very differently, but ultimately they are one thing. It’s just a little difficult to see that when you’re immersed in the exploration.

One relates to what I believe is referred to as the Oneness of Being. This is a deeply liberating experience, joyful, blissful but stable, free. You realise there is only one essential quality and substance of consciousness throughout everything (at least everything that lives), and that it is not separatively located in space and time. All your ideas about causality are instantly seen as back to front, upside down. I doubt that anything refutes materialism as effectively, or makes you as humorously aware of just how hopelessly materialist our common assumptions are. It’s free magick, and it’s how thing really are. The enigma is why you still see things the same way through this body, as if this were you. An understanding of intention, energy and time, and an understanding of being as a continuous phenomena, are some of the things that seem to come with this state of surrender and release.

The other thing seems more obscure, but it catches up with you. It is a different magick. It’s why “you” are “here”. It’s Life, with the roots that go down into all that obscures the aforementioned realisation, and makes it possible to be as a unique, separate, creative individual. Here you understand will, and embodiment, and myth, and sex and work and loss and suffering, and the possibility of wisdom. Not some fake “channeled” wisdom, but the stuff that ferments in experience and failure and eventual knowledge of the self and the repair of life. This way introduces you to your monster. The rejected, disguised and despised means to becoming.

If one world was a Heaven, as the dance and play of energy and consciousness, the other is a Kingdom of Hell in which your divine parentage, however distant, is only temporarily hidden. Just not the divine parent in Heaven, because obviously there is no separation in the blissful Oneness of Being for there even to be a parent or a divine other than everything.

These two are really not two.

As Crowley would have said, one is two, the other in none.

the nameless video

Back in December of 2018 I uploaded a video to YouTube called “Art, Porn and Puritanism”. It was on the subject of increasing restriction by moralistic and puritanical tech companies and platforms, and what I considered the infantilisation of the internet public. We had just witnessed the creepy CEO of Apple talk publicly about “sin” on the internet, and the need to take a proactive stance on this.

Note, not crime, but sin.

This initially got hit by YouTube for being an adult video, despite there being only opinion and critique, plus mention of artistic blogs marked as adult, and how censorship inevitably would drive artists dealing with the erotic towards porn platforms as the only ones that would host them. Maybe it was the cover picture:

It would have been pathetic of them, but I changed that to a picture of DH Lawrence.

The video (again, it was opinion and critique, no interesting visuals!) became not only unembeddable, but also was blocked from being connected to from outside of YouTube.

I rest my case.

Here is the audio, once more, just for the record, from 2018:

unkinked

What was it that I really loved about being in contact with the “kink community”? Mainly I’m thinking about being on FetLife if I remember rightly, though there are many conversations with people beyond that. I never liked the specifically LGBT websites. The “culture” always got to those, the politics, the conformity in the name of difference, the brittleness.

But the general ones, they had something. It didn’t matter if someone was heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual etc. It was an individual, candid act of being, to share. I loved that possibility of unguarded communication.

A liaison did come of my participation on one site, one that I’m very grateful for, for while it lasted. And the sharing I was able to do online, and have appreciated by some, was an expression of what I was, and what I was discovering of myself as a sexual being. These things had a sacredness to them. They weren’t about ego, or “getting off”, and of course they were all freely given and received.

I withdrew from FetLife just a short while before coming together with my partner, who is not interested in BDSM at all as it happens. Premonition I expect. It was appropriate. I made my Magick Pig blog private (I’m not sure if it will be relaunched, or in what form). It had been devoted to sexuality and spirituality, and especially my own journey.

Being with someone changes you, and having a good sex life alters the way you relate to desire and sexual imagination. I am in a healthier place now, not because I am not actively involved in BDSM, but because I am so much happier, and not just sexually.

What I discovered during that time is still me, still what I am, but it was always about something of depth. Being in community with others sexually in that way was joyful in an area which for all too many people is shadowy, but need not be. It was also responsible, respectful and kind. It was not and is not about “just sex” (there is no such thing as “just sex”), unintelligent desire, “getting off” or hooking up. It was about sexual being, individually embraced and honestly shared. It was not about collective identity in the way that conventional “sexual politics” so often is, but an area where grown men and women could with candour reveal and offer freely and plainly, the company of who they instinctively were. It’s difficult to express how subtle a thing that is, how tender and at peace.

What was it I brought with me from that place?

Well it wasn’t just a place, or a time. It was a process and a journey I was going through in myself, one which became very conscious and manifest at that point. It was the realising of what you could call my sexual soul. Something in many ways best understood through poetry and art, magick, drama , ritual, all the creative arts. It is so animal, so human, touched by the divine (and there’s the hazard), and absolutely bestial. As if between the worlds of dream and naked flesh, we are one thing, a thing utterly you. In some way it is the what of your individual self, with it’s great deep root, in a world so obsessed with who.

I think it’s very valuable to have a sense of what you are, as an individual. Identity is the new currency of controlled consumption. “In a world where you could be anything … “. But you’re not anything, and you’re not going to be anything, you’re you. It’s in your flesh, it’s in your desire, your inner yearnings. It’s your value, and though it can be owned with your consent, it can’t be bought.

We are subject to the world, mortal, bound in so many ways. Just like mud, fruit, cattle. Things of fertility and value. I can’t tell you how other people relate to these things (without presumption), but I know what they mean to me, and that between the fire of sexuality and the clay of flesh is found a tablet written by the hand of Nature.

Die Welt

The Fairy Tree

I have been led to reflect on our connection to various things recently. Nature, the spirits, and those who have left for the other world, most especially the loved ones we have lost.

When you lose someone in this way, and I mean for instance a spouse, it is difficult to describe what happens to you, and where you go, but you are not “here” in the same way, or here is elsewhere, and the waters close over your head so completely that there is nothing to do but accept the other world that you inhabit, now as your only world. From the outside this probably looks like a jumble, the idiosyncratic dance that we diagnose as “grief”, but it is something more profound than a psychological process.

You can return eventually, but something there always is inbetween. Spaces, doors and passageways to the old friends that kept you company in the water wasteland. You carry a part of the marsh with you.

Like a tree that has a part blasted history (and these things are quite natural), your life grows again, with a twist. That twistedness is your survival, your face beyond yourself, the understated testament of soul sunk in root, of sex and belly fire beached and recalcitrant, of flower and bee, starlings drunk on over ripe cherries.

You walk dry on dry land, breathe air, greet sunlight, and are at peace with the damp foot prints behind you. You live in memory and imagination, and the meaning of story, as all people have. And you live here again. You see that we change the past by not leaving it, but keeping on living. All things grow.

So your life grows again, with a twist. The twisted tree is the magic tree, everyone knows that. The strange form is how Nature mends, and the wound how She makes strangeness.

And in all these things there is beauty, and there comes new desire, the pulse of life through all.

sticky interwebs

It’s obvious that the media we use in our lives can have a profound effect upon the societies we live in. We only have to think of the impact of the moveable type printing press which Johannes Gutenberg invented in 15th century Germany. This alone wrested a kind of power away from centralised control, and would make the dissemination of ideas, knowledge and written creative output accessible to so many more people.

Jump forward about five centuries, and think about Television. I’m old enough to remember it still being cool in black and white, and conjectured as being a destroyer of family life. Television was a really different animal to printing though. It took the dream quality of film (which had only gained sound a short while before really) and increasingly democratised access to it, while also bringing it more down to earth in its content, from its more humble studios, with its sports and news and variety entertainment programs. Film was film, TV was TV, and they only overlapped after a decent waiting period, where film still resided at its true home in the temple of the Cinema. Though television was in your home, and you could watch it on your own, it was still at some level a communal experience. TV film premiers were a thing, they happened once, at a specific time and date. So you had to all be doing the same thing at the same time (watching TV) to catch them. What happened on Top of the Pops on Thursday night was talked about at school on Friday morning. It was a shared experience, with a solitary option.

Jump 60 to 70 years and the Internet arrives. I had actually been “off” any kind of engagement with TV for almost 15 years when I had my first real contact with the internet in the mid 90s. It was an Aladdin’s Cave. Above all else, here was people. I can’t emphasise that enough. It was contact with the stuff of people’s lives, loves, interests, reaching out, inviting in, across distances. Space was transcended, and a new kind of creativity came about, very personal and idiosyncratic, and I loved it. It was largely unregulated and non-commercial. Now everyone was their own studio in some small way, their own printing press, their own gallery, but it wasn’t about product. It was about connection. It wasn’t communal, as TV has been (in fact it would dissolve real community after it had initially helped some communities to form), it was interpersonal. This wild interzone would not last though.

Since the start of the second decade of the 21st century a corporate intelligence has caught up with this development. I think I’d probably time it with the rise of Apple as a slicker, more successful brand, that got the knack of selling its fans to its products. The supposed geeky hippie underdogs got a smooth, brushed steel makeover into the yuppie tech product of choice. Like nothing had changed, except everything. Apple became an identity brand. And just like Nike became the identity product of conformist physicality in the 80s, Apple became the identity product of aspirational hip. Things were getting softened up, but there was way more to come.

The smart phone and social media between them really formed the vanguard of the corporate plug-in to popular psychology. Of course the corporations had always been there, but there was a point at which their tendrils sunk deep, and what had been an interpersonal medium that had already started to dissolve organic social reality became an intimately personal corporate medium, selling facsimile selves back to owners of tech products.

Everything that anybody ever feared about the detrimental influence of television, violence in films, video games etc now looks incredibly innocent and harmless compared to what now presents itself as an inescapable norm, not just for adults, but every human being that can see a screen and swipe or tap, no matter how young. No one even knows where the tendrils have ended up, but when they twitch, people twitch.

How could we have traveled here, from Johannes Gutenberg?

Did even the Catholic Church dream of this kind of power to control?

generation

generation

things I cannot stand, things I will not lose

I was born with Saturn in the 8th house, Scorpio’s house, ruled by Pluto, and I think it probably gives a certain bite to your view of life. As in, you’re very aware of the poisons that life could hold for you. It’s not the most trusting placement in the world, and I’m guessing it loads the reptile brain in a certain kind of way. I never feel very far from that reptile brain somehow.

Childhood is another land, and a land I refer back to in myself often (as in the things that meant something to me during childhood, and adolescence, the time during which childhood is dying so fragrantly), but in adulthood I have often been faced with an abiding dilemma, one which I have tried to evade often, or in most recent years grapple with directly.

I long for a whole world of relationship, love and freedom, at least in human terms, a world of the luminous and multivalently possible, a world in which one could let out one’s breath finally, in a sigh not of coming home, but of arriving at the intuited and looked for destination.

I have found again and again though (notwithstanding my beloved partners, another story entirely), that at the crux of it, in the relation between the really really me and the world, there is a mismatch always. At least eventually. It’s not that there is no place for me, and not that there are not great relationships with individuals, but that at some level there is no rapprochement between me and the collective reality of humanity. Where that mismatch has been most persistently distilled is in the matter of sexuality, gender and embodiment.

When I say “gender”, let me be clear, I am being quite unreconstructed. I mean male and female, even with the masculine and feminine which flow between the two within one person (and no, that is not “non-binary”, it is clearly very binary). But there is a knot here, for a homosexual such as myself. There is a dilemma for the feminine within a man and (I presume) the masculine within a woman. And that isn’t about Nature, it’s about how people treat you, see you, value you. And your reptile brain knows all about it.

These are things which are not touched by the risible edifice of things like “queer theory”, or the academic power-hunger of post modernism. Let me be frank, these things are complete fakes. The most fumbling, bemused attempts of supposedly “ordinary” people to relate to others are closer to the mystery than those intellectual vampires will ever be. And that brings me on to what I consider the greatest modern enemy of human life and peace: politics. Politics is war. War without the honesty of combat. All that talk of “justice” and “power”, and what is it? A craven hunger held in the head. A thief in the temple.

What has helped me, throughout my life, is spirituality. Spirituality was the one thing that could nurture my soul, sustain my hopes and my patience, and help me accept the world as it actually was, while magic allowed me to live and survive. It’s not a big surprise that I ended up a Witch. I met Witchcraft in the 70s when it was to me the religion of love, with my most beloved Horned God at its centre. But even here there was a catch, the heterosexual roles catch that would leave me an onlooker. But I still heard its call and answered inwardly.

In Satanism I think I faced my animosity towards the whole thing. Humanity, Nature, everything. Pretty Saturn in the 8th house really (in the religious sign of Sagittarius!). Pluto was also crossing my midheaven at the time. Invaluable. Believe me, the spirits don’t care, they only care about what’s in your heart, and that you’re honest. I did learn an honesty through all that, and to expect nothing as any kind of entitlement in life. It doesn’t make anything hurt less, but it sure waste’s less of your time on moral pretense.

Because it doesn’t make anything hurt less, and because I actually want beauty, love and peace (Venus is my chart ruler), and because modern Satanism is an ill-educated cartoon, I left Satanism. I called myself a Diabolist instead, and believe me, I do love beings that others call Devils. But what I actually am is a Witch, just not the kind that drive me up the wall.

In the last two years or so I have been taken back to that time when the late 60s decayed, with what now seems like an archaic charm, into the first half of the 70s, like fruit ripening unnoticed in a timeless present. At that time, when I was discovering witchcraft, tarot cards, black candles and joss sticks, someone gave me a second hand book by the maverick esotericist Richard Gardner, who I would go and visit in Brighton about 5 years later. Richard was much concerned with the elements and their energies, consciousness, the teachings of the tarot, and magical love making. I knew his world was important and held essential keys.

What has taken me back there is my friend Brent organising a weekly group to discuss the elements and their archetypes, work I first learned of through Richard.

So here I am, at 65 (give or take a few days), with a new road unfolding. Old, new, perennial. Back to the path of childhood’s long end, always backwards, to the first vision.

the long hello

There are things which you can only see, or feel, over time.

It takes time to see the ways in which you don’t change. Time, and experience that is rough enough to defeat your “self-fictions”. Thankfully the nature of experience itself is rough, so it’s just a question of living long enough.

Your life, as it arcs towards its circle, is a dark glass into which you at times get to gaze, and there are times when you get to look in the mirror and say “oh, that’s what I’m going to look like”. And it’s funny, because something as literally superficial as that is the actual face of all the crises and irresolution and getting through that a person does.

“Failure” is a really interesting thing. There is nothing more sterile than perfection and “unlimited” fulfillment. It’s one of the things that makes so much of the West Coast New Age ethos so repulsive. It’s a Kardashian Enlightenment. It’s the luxury suit in a corporate spirituality. It’s cosmetic surgery.

Failure is your saving grace. Your humanity, your mortality, the place you were meant to start from. With time you see the patterns played out, and that there is value in that very stuff. A value that is not about you. Not the prosaic, utterly conventional, riskless agreements of workshop nirvana or run of the mill esotericism, but a much more troublesome, unresolved thing, a poison that in being held and borne eventually reveals itself to be a medicine.

Only such a poison could answer to this world, to being born, to the great monster that is life. That is the great joy and life of age, as wild as the baby’s rage and hunger.

That is something to make you smile, and laugh warmly, as the gods and spirits draw closer, one by one, in reverie.

Summer Thunder Podcast, Episode 6 – Intuition

the substance of witchcraft

If there is one spiritual term which is abidingly dear to me, it is the term “witch“. Not that I have any great desire to “qualify” for a designation. Beyond a certain point, I find complex realities better served by description rather than definition. I’m not interested in the public declarations of identity, and of all things, witchcraft I feel points to a work of shadowy and luminous grace which surely defies ownership. It is a private garden of uncommon peace and strength, in communion with the world of spirits, magic and Nature. There are doors in the wall of that garden, hidden amongst the ivy and honeysuckle, which open onto darker, wilder climes.

I am not an unreligious person. I value and respect religion. I rather say that I am religious in my own way, rather than “spiritual but not religious”. But there is to Witchcraft an undoubted individualism of orientation, which I would not give up. I don’t celebrate the decline of religion, though I have personally benefited from the decline of some of them. I see the ill effects of these and other drives to destroy tradition without seriously seeking a replacement, and I see the corrosive malaise of materialism multiplying. We still seem to be undergoing the replication of a philosophical hedonism. An anti-heroism now watered down to a lazy sneer, delivered to a million devices, one for every man, woman and child on the planet. So goes the “humanitarian” vision.

We are at an odd place, and not just in Europe and North America. But what kind of religion can you have as my kind of witch? It’s a very romantic idea, this kind of individually (largely privately) declared religion, something for the artist, the bohemian, the Nature lover, the “free spirit”, the comfortable suburban liberal. But I have to in that case declare that it is also more. If it is a religion without dogmatic belief and without fixed rituals and scriptures, then what is it? What does it have?

It has relation to the spirits, and it has magic, and it has the human psyche. If these things are not “fixed” as say the King James Bible is, they are nevertheless not without form and law. They have their ways, to be discovered and honoured. They are real.

Doreen Valiente once wrote that Witchcraft could be a religion for the coming age of Aquarius, that it could answer the needs and characteristics of the time, in the way that it looked back to the ancients and their wisdom and traditions, and looked forwards to the new and the liberated. This reflected the dual rulership of Aquarius by both Saturn and Uranus.

As we now seem to be nearing the astrological beginning of the Age of Aquarius in earnest, I am inclined to cast my vote in favour of Doreen Valiente’s optimism.