– Of contact, dream and memory…

…The drums reverberate through the Land. A steady pulse surges up through the layers of trodden mud and Sun-baked bricks, rising up through the levels of the place where ‘the heavens and the underworld mingle’, and through bare, unsandaled feet. They are felt within the soul, setting the body a-shudder. The torch’s descent along the darkened passageways and cavernous vaulted halls has been made. The clean clothes have been removed; the fresh scent has no place here. To the accompaniment of rustling feathers, the pit has been filled, the herbs scattered and the wine spilt. Between the cracks and hollows, the earth is good. The Shadowy Ones have been called forth. Our Ancestors who lay within and beyond the loam, speak. Speak in vision and dream. Their language cannot be learned, but it is felt. Felt in our bones and in our blood; within our soul. What made them, made us. We are created from the dirt beneath our feet, infused with star dust, and we shall return to the outer reaches from whence we came. We have done so before, we will do so again. Some patterns were meant to be repeated. Age after age, aeon after aeon, until the end of time itself. As an ancient past ever seeking to reclaim its future… 

The Gods of the Deep return at times to join with their kin in convocation, to relive the old rites, on the desolate, wind-wracked beaches, deep within dank caverns, at the midnight crossroads, upon the damp disturbed earth; old, forgotten places. It’s a reclaiming of souls that have walked this familiar path before, a chaining to Oaths that were made millennia ago; unfinished business. A re-connection of lost souls, that have been fighting their way back together, perhaps since time began. Memories drift back through the ether; our own lost memories, ancestral memories, memories belonging to others. The blood remembers. The soul never forgets. We may find ourselves walking paths we could never have anticipated in our wildest of dreams, and embarking on a journey which requires us to take a long hard look at our preconceptions and beliefs, which are more a result of years of social and religious conditioning than anything else. What may seem blasphemous to some, we will find familiar and right, comforting to a certain extent, as we have been here before; long before the dogma of a monotheistic age took hold of our consciousness. How deep this conditioning runs. Morals and standards of right and wrong, good and evil have been metered by this system for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Shadowy Ones are the driving force behind the antinomian impulses that lead us on the dark alchemical path of evolution towards the within; the pursuit of self-salvation. They are the fierce winds of change that lead us away from the passive acceptance of our social norms, imposed order, and inherited misconceptions and conditioning, which can lead to stagnation in our spiritual lives. Tamed and repressed we have become; a slave to our own minds. Here we are longing for harmony and pining for freedom, but freedom always comes at a price. How much are you willing to pay? How much are you willing to lose? How far are you willing to travel? How deep can you go? How much work are you willing to put in to see your return come to fruition?

…The waterways course and bubble through the roots of The Tree of Death which spring from deep within the earth. This water is home to the Great Serpent, She who owns the night, She who swallows all the water. She is Leviathan, the ancient chaos who lives in the meandrous labyrinths of the waters deep below the earth. And here deep within that subterranean labyrinth of tunnels and waterways, the atmosphere oppressive and heavy, she squats beside the fire pit. The air is filled with the musty aroma of death and decay, mingled with the rich, earthy scent of iron. Her moon-blood flows this night. The gnarled roots clinging to the walls of the cavern writhe; entangled and serpentine. Her feet go down to death and her steps lead into Hades. She watches as the flames leap and flicker, casting dancing patterns across the dank, moist walls. The fire spits and sizzles as she throws a handful of dust into the heart of it, sending the flames soaring as a heady perfume fills the chamber. She narrows her eyes against the smoke of the precisely portioned, sacred but poisonous wood as it curls around her, and strikes the Earth Beneath the Earth three times hard with her staff, curled and twisted; the sound reverberating across cavernous space. Some say she is a Priestess, a guardian of the deep, dark, Forgotten Gates, others say a Seeress or an Oracle, some say she is a half- mad feral woman; a black-eyed Witch, with a heart even blacker. Still some have names for what she is, and for what she does, that dare not be uttered. The hair rises over her body, her skin tingling, as she feels those familiar eyes upon her. Old eyes. Eyes that stare from the unfathomable watery chasm beneath the earth, from whence the primordial waters flow, piercing to her very core. Eyes you cannot hide from once you have revealed yourself. The air thickens still, murmuring is heard, and dark figures meander in her peripheral vision. Swiftly flickering. Entrancing. Beckoning…

The Divine Madness. The Overshadowing. The Indwellers. The Ensnaring. The Singing of the Muses. Try as we may, we cannot ever attempt to fully describe the feeling we get when standing in the shadow of Those we learn from, when realisations filter down to us that are deeper than our own thoughts. The feeling of ‘knowing’ that surpasses a gut feeling or even mere intuition – a complete certainty that may be clarified only through ongoing research and study, or by the reports of others who have experienced the same thing – which has entered our consciousness, independently, by other means.

Some of these things may never be clarified at all, but after a while a trust is built, the feeling of knowing will be easily distinguishable from idle thoughts and fancies. It comes from somewhere deeper. An opening inward is needed. Inward and beyond. Via Sinistra. Down and deep. Into the dark hidden earth, beneath the raging waves. Down and deep to traffic with the Deep Ones who stand guard, perpetually, sentinels of the Fountains of the Deep to writhe within the Waters Beneath the Earth.

 

“Reason is great, but it is not everything. There are in the world things not of reason, but both below and above it; causes of emotion which we cannot express, which we tend to worship, which we feel, perhaps, to be the precious elements in life. These things are God or forms of God: not fabulous immortal men, but ‘Things which Are’, things utterly non-human and non-moral which bring man bliss or tear his life to shreds without a break in their own serenity.” – Gilbert Murray

Their presence is heralded by certain feelings, this may change from person to person (or contact to contact), and as you journey along your path you’ll come to recognise the distinct emotions, physical feelings, even certain sounds or smells (that have no real way of being there) that They bring when They are around. They are the voices echoing, unrecognisable and indistinguishable, on the edges of sleep. They appear in fleeting, earthless moments, as hungry ghosts and spectres, and move as They once did, with agendas of their own, on old familiar ground, in and out of time. Is it the pulse of the present, or the cold scroll of Time recoiling in on itself, that causes the dead years to once again obtain a voice?

…She waits. She listens. She watches for the signals. For the right time. She is part of them, and yet alone she stands, the air growing colder. Her body undulates to the buzzing in her head, and in reaching its crescendo it dictates the precise moment for her to plunge her crooked staff into the waters. And there it stands, within her underground mirror pool. The mirror that reflects the Shadow. She recites Unknown words across the stillness, her voice nothing more than a croon, opening the Watery Gates to the Night Side; not that those gates are ever fully closed to her. And as the woman becomes conjoined with the shadow itself, she gazes into the obsidian blackness of the Waters Under The Earth, stretching out before her. They pull from behind the dark matter mirror. The mirror in which the broken howling stars reside; the edge of the abyss where all is destroyed and created, at the same time, for all of eternally. She falls. Down and deep and under. Not lost but freed, for she has embraced her shadows and knows what waits in the loamy, amaranthine gloom, at the centre of every crossroad, where the sea laps upon the sand in the night, within the ebony depths of the hidden earth, upon the bridge of nowhere and no place, at a time that is not a time, in a season without name; the places of deepest dreaming, far memory, future past and searing vision…

Contact doesn’t have to be passed along, or inherited in unbroken lines of tradition, physical interaction is not always needed. We all know that whatever we do, esoterically, sends out unseen ripples for unseen eyes. Those ripples run swift in widening darkened rings, as if over gooseflesh waters, to where They wait and watch for recognisable tremors; though the drowned stones lie still. If you have been ensnared by Them before, They will remember. You stand out like a bright beacon in the gloom; something for Them to set their bearings by. Their memory is eternal, and can be traced back to a time before time, They were part of the primordial soup from which we arose. Only part, as a balance must always be struck. The quick and the dead move in, their shapes flicker in the shadows, their voices that throng the mind sing now at a maddening pitch; there are times when the mundane world seems to have no substance at all and They are most tangible. Some of us will assign a deity to Them in order to make head or tail of the situations we find ourselves in, especially if they talk in certain symbols. Just as the early myth makers, unable to properly comprehend the forces of Being and Non-Being they experienced, cast Them into a false moulds. In consequence these unnameable, primordial forces are hidden behind masks and symbols that conceal Their true identities, but bring Them closer to us in order to communicate.

“Nor is it to be thought […] that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen” – H. P. Lovecraft

As Peter J Carroll observed, “It is man who creates gods not vice versa”. For those of you that have known me a long time, will know that I have had to reassess my personal beliefs, and have stepped outside of my comfort zone in order to grow; to trace (or perhaps retrace) a path that has opened up in front of me. I have set out on a journey which seems to have been waiting for me as long as I can remember. A pull here. A nudge there. A reopening of old links. A re-connection. My personal magic is concerned with making my Will conscious, and the developing and sharpening thereof. We must consciously and continuously strive to break away from the unconscious structures we have set in place or have found ourselves restricted by. The Fire Snake represented by various stellar complexes, the Dragon or Fire Breathing Beast of The Great Deep is the central magical force within us all. The Fire Snake/Kundalini/Dragon awakening, and its controlled ascent, leads us in turn to awaken ourselves – to see clearly. If we master the Dragon force within us, we can use this to sharpen our Will, and to cut through any resistance on our magical (and mundane) paths and to access and contact forces outside ourselves in our heightened state. The Dragon is everywhere, it is in everything, it is greater than time itself, it rages within and without, and it will take us from the deepest depths of the hidden earth to the vast reaches of space, well beyond the circles of time. Lost in a reverie and pulled into waking dream, we wander in a half-trance. Lost. Or maybe finally found again. Descending into the heart of Darkness to where ancient knowledge and enlightenment lay, to carve away the layers of my Self and release the Divine Spark within, which mankind has ceased to remember. Fuelled by my hopes and desires, and by dancing through dreams in which flitter the deepest of visions. I am deliciously entranced by its choreography, which weaves and wefts its way on its stellar current. It makes my heart race. It always has. Always.

…Caught adrift on the waves of the Opiate Ocean, deep within, one may find the darkened jewels which lurk within the hidden places. The water must be skimmed, crumbling rocks upturned, and then polished to see if they shine. Delving into Her black waters, with Her permission and aid, one may find themselves catching glimpses of fragments beyond the waking world and a step closer to the fountains of the deep – The elixir of life. The Philosopher’s Stone. Passion. Sin. Our darkest desires. Forbidden wisdom…

“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow” – Friedrich Nietzsche

AN ORACLE OF MAGICAL GEOGRAPHY:

We hear a strange hum-like chant and we awaken,
We cannot sleep, we become highly stimulated and awake;
We are awake to what is beyond our minds,
Deep somewhere this sound is pushing us upwards to speak.

We have no words for this strangeness, we forget where we are,
We feel a twisting and a kick-like jerking, that is all;
We make signs to each other, words have lost their power,
Everyone is sweating heavily, it is the way this world is.

I have been flung-out into a swamp and my breath has been taken,
Where I am is nowhere I could imagine;
If someone said it was a primordial ooze, I would accept it,
If THEY could come and guide me,
What deep parts of my mind would THEY come from?

Yes, I am everywhere and feel every part of my body,
As the most intimate of my senses I can know;
I am too intense to seek sleep,
I am too awake even to think.

Somewhere in my mind I will find my body and senses,
At some point in this realm I will find an answer,
At distance, I know we are now meeting,
I want to return to the place where we are sweating heavily.

Perhaps I am in the midst of initiation,
Is this water the primordial ocean of birth;
If THEY could come and guide me,
What deep parts of my mind would THEY come from?

Micheal B. & Stroesser Fred Williams: Chicago 1975
– Taken from “Ontological Graffiti” : Michael P. Bertiaux

Text and Images: Sarah-Jayne Farrer:

• “Into the Eye of Abzu: Things Which Are” 
• “Via Sinistra”
• “Shadows of Perpetual Twilight”
• “Looking Up Whilst Going Down”