Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

Photo by Chris Carter

Via Strange Attractor, the sad news of the death of Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, of music legends Throbbing Gristle and Coil, at the age of 55.

I was lucky to move to London in time to catch most of Coil’s phenomenal 21st century gigs. Last year, at an occult festival in Conway Hall, I caught Sleazy doing his solo turn as the Threshold HouseBoys Choir. Bereft of long-term collaborator Jhonn Balance since his death in 2004, Christopherson nevertheless turned in a beautiful, provocative, outrageous, and fiercely interesting performance. Perception and preconceptions were tweaked and unravelled with abstract footage that supposedly appeared in different colours according to your sexual orientation, and footage of an execution in the forests of Thailand supposedly found amidst the trade in videos from old mobiles by one of his “house boys”. He confronted us with an unapologetic but humble window into his sexual preference for young men, and with the devout Buddhist piety they inspired in him. He spoke candidly of weeping in public on a train in England, crushed by the beauty and sadness of existence.

Fare well.

Asklepius visits a dreamer. Epidauros, Greece.

by Gyrus

The realm of dreams is perhaps the most ubiquitous, fertile, and alluring place that we look to for inspiration. Whether we’re craving new creative ideas or insight into ourselves, our night-time excursions to this mercurial land of multiple meanings, shifting landscapes and beguiling mysteries seem to dangle endless fresh possibilities before us. What if we were able to discover techniques that allowed us to easily reach out and grab these possibilities? What if tools were available that could haul this submerged inspiration out onto our all-too-dry land, ripe and ready to refresh our vision?

This kind of hope is the fuel for most of the prolific literature on “using” dreams, some of which is hugely important and powerful. In particular, lucid dreaming (a state in which you become aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming) can exponentially increase the access you have to the dream state’s treasures.

However, just as individual dreams are never of simple significance, and only yield their true nature through multiple perspectives, our general interaction with dreams is hampered if we maintain a singular overall attitude towards them. Here I wish to dwell on an approach to dreams that—for obvious if not always good reasons—is rarely voiced. It has more to do with attending to dreams than using dreams. It is tricky (certainly not to be captured in a short essay like this), and vexes the results-hungry ego.

It is most forcefully expressed in The Dream and the Underworld by James Hillman, a brilliant and provocative psychologist whose work has endeavoured to revive the classical Greek sense of “soul” (psyche). Not the personal atom of spiritual being that our Christian heritage has left us with, but a liminal, polytheistic, metaphor-loving aspect of our being, which we dwell within as much as it dwells within us, and which resists all attempts to pin it down for service to pragmatism. Hillman calls soul “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.” (Re-Visioning Psychology)

This perspective, Hillman argues, is expressed most accurately in dreams. Freud famously claimed that dreams are the “royal road to the unconscious”. Hillman shares Freud’s high estimation of dreams, but differs subtly and crucially in his approach to them. Freud may have talked of a road to the unconscious, but his avowed project was for traffic to move the other way—and to be disarmed of its irrational power en route by the process of interpretation. Freud wanted to move the contents of the unconscious into the realms of the rational ego, on the ego’s own terms. His landmark work The Interpretation of Dreams contains much respect for the dream, and is essential reading; but in the end his allegiance was to the rational project. “Where id was, there shall ego be.” Where exactly this process might stop isn’t made clear. However, a quick contemplation of handing over the control of bodily functions such as the heartbeat and cell repair to the ego should give you a good biological example of the limits of consciousness, which can trigger a sense of how vital unconscious processes might be for the psyche, too.

Hillman sees dreams less as a road to the unconscious than as the unconscious itself, “the psyche speaking to itself in its own language”. He resists the urge to interpret, to translate the psyche’s language into the ego’s language, with a characteristic lack of compromise:

[T]his dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—[...] must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn.

How to do this? Hillman’s key framework is psychotherapy. Although he is often harshly critical of the practice (one of his books is called We’ve Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World’s Getting Worse), it is his long-standing, embittered but loyal ally. He envisions it as an alchemical process, the classic 50-minute session acting as an enclosing container for the psyche, an alembic stretching through the weeks to hold and slowly refine the soul’s processes. Importantly, the finitude, that often annoying awareness that the clock’s ticking away, constellates death.

Hillman takes the dreamworld as the underworld—Hades. Not the literal underground into which the bodies of the dead slowly dissolve, the dark and earthy realm of fertile, composted death that the earth goddesses rule over; rather, Hades is the spectral realm of metaphorical death. Death as psychological depth. Not death as a literal biological event, but the death of the ego’s rational solid grasp of “hard facts”—the death of simple, singular vision.

It is not bodies that dissolve here, but mental constructs. Hillman takes interpretation as a colonial act of the dayworld ego, but analysis (from the Greek for “breaking up” or “loosening up”) he sees—despite our association of it with the rational intellect—as the natural movement of the psyche in Hades. In therapy, the constituent elements of the psyche, which are expediently joined together for effective action in the world of the reality principle, are separated out, revealing the multivalent (Hillman would say polytheistic) nature of the psyche. Dreams directly show us the manifold substructures that govern us; therapy, in teasing them apart, hopes to give each aspect of the psyche enough definition and confidence to make healthier pacts and accords with other aspects than were previously possible in the cramped and often hastily arranged space of the “personality”. The falsely unified persona of everyday life dies to the truth of the masque of death, the parade of numinous shadow figures that constitute the psyche’s depths.

Obviously here isn’t the place for outlining the actual techniques and craft of therapy. But how might this approach be applied in our lives, to serve our creativity, to enrich and inspire us? I’m returning to this question—”What to do?”—partly because the form of this type of essay gravitates in this direction, but also deliberately, to foreground this movement. And then, to undermine it. Specific practices are copiously documented in any number of dreamwork books or websites. But here, I’m trying to follow Hillman by initiating our approach to the dream with an attitude that, firstly, pays homage to the dream. Rather than be lead by the dayworld urge to get something practical, literal and utilitarian underway, perhaps we can try starting with the dreamworld, and cultivate a love for it that refuses expectations.

The most crucial element in approaching dreams is attention. We must attend to dreams closely; sustained attention brings sustenance. Keeping a dream journal is an essential discipline, but perhaps not a discipline to be “pushed”, like jogging. The muscular effort of exercise, as an attitude, is a great way to repel the images of the dreamworld; they appreciate less strained and direct effort. Indeed, an attitude of service rather than discipline is more appropriate. “Therapy” is derived from the Greek for “to wait on, attend”; the priests or attendants at the ancient Greek dream incubation temples, where the healing god Asklepius worked his wonders, were called therapeutes. This Greek root in turn stems from the root dher, which means “to support”. Psychotherapy, then, is to wait on, or attend to the soul. Both the therapist and the patient (who must be patient) are, in their dialogue, actually waiting for the impersonal soul to reveal itself through their interaction.

Paying attention to dreams can be fuelled by doing certain things, doing dreamwork. But the real trick is to slowly, with patience and persistence, cultivate a caring love for dreams, alert to their textures, movements and details for their own sake. I don’t see this as some kind of flat phenomenology, which cautiously sticks purely to the surface impressions given by dreams. The very nature of the impressions created by dreams, if examined closely enough, elicits a dynamic process of associative thought. As discussed previously, avoiding interpretation does not preclude analysis; dreams welcome a caring dissolution of any apparent coherence into multiple perspectives and trajectories. Indeed, as “a dream”, phenomenologically speaking, may just be our waking mind’s memory of a dream, perhaps this process of carefully mulling over the dream, not wrenching its secrets out on the rack of rationality but letting its structure unfold its ever-deeper recesses, is the basis for returning to “the dream itself”—whatever that may be.

We must bear in mind that when patients at Asklepian temples were cured, the visit that the god paid to them during their slumber wasn’t made in order to give them something to do, something in the waking world to obtain or pursue in order to be cured. The dream itself was the cure. What we do with the dream in waking life (if anything) should be a careful extension of the principles of the dream itself; any slip into the habits of translation or principally pragmatic exploitation could banish the mysterious power of our brush with this imaginal underworld. In attending to dreams, we need to cultivate the waking life traditions that share close affinity with dream logic—art, ritual, some psychotherapies. Only in these activities can we find containment that is sensitive and strong enough to accept the powers that dreams bestow.

Over many years, a prolonged devotion to these peculiar dips into the psyche’s native land does indeed transform your life, creating subtle and inexpressible currents of mental, emotional and spiritual nourishment. A certain stability—still mutable, but more coherent within the context of the dream—may arise in particular dream landscapes or characters that populate that world; the dream grows more assured and trusting in your presence. Patterns can span months, years or decades, and mature into a form of personal mythology; the dream is pleased with your patience, and rewards you with a more sophisticated knowledge of your depths. Terrifying encounters can open to reveal an indestructible concern for our well-being, and images or situations that seem intensely personal can give way to a much wider sense of the world beyond us.

We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us … It is like the love of an old man, the usual personal content of love voided by coming death, yet still intense, playful, and tenderly, carefully close.

— James Hillman, The Dream And The Underworld

J.G. Ballard, a hugely important writer and considerable influence on my own thought, has died.

I spoke to him once. In Leeds, 1994, I decided to start publishing a zine about dreams, and loved the mock-corporate feel that lifting its title from Ballard’s novel The Unlimited Dream Company would give it. Slightly naive about publishing law and etiquette, and probably looking for a little approval from an idol, I decided to give Ballard a call and ask if he’d be OK with it. Having no landline, I went out and phoned directory enquiries from a phone box.

“I’m trying to get in touch with a friend, and I’ve lost their details,” I lied. “The name’s Ballard, and they live in Shepperton—if you have a look and if there’s only one that’s probably them.” I don’t think they were supposed to, but they gave me the number, which I called straight away.

“Is that J.G. Ballard?” I asked. “Yes,” came the clipped, confident accent. “The writer J.G. Ballard?” I asked, I little dumbstruck. He was very courteous and when I told him about my zine and asked for his address to send him a copy, he complied. He sent me a postcard of the Wat Buddhapadipa Temple in Wimbledon, explaining that as long as I wasn’t planning on calling a novel The Unlimited Dream Company, I was fine legally, and wished me well with the venture.

Reading the book J.G. Ballard: Quotes when it came out (one of several essential Ballard volumes from RE/Search Publications), mostly on buses and tubes around London, the extent to which he has acted as the modern world’s most canny prophet sank in deeply.

Even though he was recognized to an extent within his lifetime, his death comes during a period when the relevance of his work has become quite crucial. Celebrity culture, media morbidity, the death of affect, the pathologies of sensationalism, ecological catastrophe… Terrible things to be so right about; but it was a monumental achievement to face them with stoicism and a relentless eye for possibilities.

Everywhere is infinitely exciting, given the transforming power of the imagination.

J.G. Ballard

I was a little unsure about how my info-heavy talk would go down following the wonderful party vibe that kicked everything off (thanks to Stephen and Allison’s voodoo ceremonials). I was amazed that everyone kept a respectful quietness going throughout. Maybe everyone fell asleep! Judging by the lively and mixed feedback I got, thankfully not. Though Donal Ruane and Dave Luke’s much livelier talks got people going.

The biggest disappointment of the night was undoubtedly the question and answer section being squeezed out by time constraints. Since starting public speaking, it’s always seemed to me that actual talks are best as preludes to Q & A, something to get people sparked up enough to start thinking and questioning. I sorely missed that group interaction. Next time we’ll make a point of it.

Of course the whole night was an experiment in treading the line between spiritual celebration, intellectual melting-pot and boozy shindig. It came off for me; hope you had a great time.

If you want to link to the event, please use this URL. You can also reserve tickets there (we expect it to be busy); plus, it looks better on black.

You can call this healing, you can call it transformation—there are all sorts of names. But let’s stay with the word “love” because it is so amazing to realize that love is working toward clarification, becoming clarified like a broth, like a butter, because what happens is transparency. And when we try to “clear things up,” go over the past to see it better, or put ourselves through confessions—all that is part of love becoming clarified. We are working at transparency. Impossible dark spots of the interior person get lit up, the shadow, the ugliest man, all the shames and embarrassments regarding the concealed personal tied-up self—well, there they are. “Good morning! How are you! Nice to see you!” They’re aren’t gone away or healed or integrated. [...] There they are, but they have become transparent, for a moment at least, like rubies and emeralds. The leopard can’t change his spots, but the spots can be gems. I am trying to say that your shadow is your virtue, and that is what love is mostly about. And that’s what remains—if anything has to remain—after a person’s dead. His faults, his unbearable qualities, or hers, become clarified, and you remember them as virtues. They stand out sharp and clear, like essences. It’s amazing how the very thing you couldn’t bear in your mother or father, in your wife or husband—they die, and then the rubies show right in the shadow…

It happened back in February, but I’ve only just heard: Christopher Hyatt, occultist and psychotherapist, author of numerous books on magic and brain/body change, and prolific publisher, has died.

I always found New Falcon‘s output a slightly mixed bag, but among its catalogue there were many utterly essential works by Robert Anton Wilson, Phil Hine’s definitive chaos magic manuals, and a long list of other gems from modern Western occultism. Hyatt’s own Undoing Yourself helped give me some of the most revelatory months of my life.

More generally, his great contribution was his energetic appetite for synthesizing the therapeutic work of people like Wilhelm Reich (which he learned from Golden Dawn luminary Israel Regardie) with the full spectrum of psychedelia and sorcery that Western culture generated in the latter part of the 20th century. Without being too arsey about it (he inherited a good line in healthy cynicism from Nietzsche and others), he seemed to me to be re-synthesizing the divergent threads that sprang from the archaic craft of shamanism.

The occult and healing, because of their common ancestry, have always been connected, but modern esotericism often forgot the fact. Things have changed a lot in this regard over the past couple of decades or so; in part, this is thanks to Hyatt’s single-minded will to have more fun and pleasure by any means necessary—and to help others do likewise.

by Gyrus

Most of the writings in this book were written during a very strange, obsessive and fruitful time in my life. I was, as ever, experimenting with various ways of altering consciousness and interacting with the environment in magical ways. My own trip, the various complexes that I’d become aware of in my psyche, seemed to resonate uncannily with certain aspects of the prehistoric landscapes I was exploring—for the most part, Ilkley Moor and the Avebury monuments. As I dug deeper into their histories and associations, it sometimes felt like I was unearthing buried contents of my own mind.

There’s no certain outcome from getting into stuff like this. You can go off the rails a bit; you can publish some very dubious theories that say more about you than prehistory. My own approach was to keep my critical mind alert, but to embrace the fact that there’s a grey area between digging into your own unconscious and unearthing the realities of prehistoric life. How could it be otherwise, if we shake off the modern illusion of individual isolation, and accept that all our roots tangle together in the deep past?

There’s a long tradition of overlap between psychology and the study of the past. Carl Jung wanted to study archaeology, but his family couldn’t afford to send him to a university that taught the subject. So, he ended up doing medicine, which led him to psychiatry. The metaphor of archaeology remained with him, though. The crucial dream of 1909 that led to his theory of the collective unconscious involved him descending into the lowest level of the basement underneath a house, passing through a Roman level before encountering scattered bones. “This must be a prehistoric cave!” he exclaimed before waking up.

Oddly enough, my own plunge into the past was largely triggered by something above, in the sky. I had a nasty experience with chemicals at Glastonbury Festival—as you do—where I saw a vortex in the sky that threatened to drag me into it, to my death. The image of the vortex haunted me for years.

Looking back, with a playful eye for the movements of fate, I wonder… What led me after that experience to move to Leeds, a short bus ride from Ilkley Moor? And what led me to Ilkley Moor, where I was gobsmacked to find oodles of prehistoric rock art, the type of exotic and mysterious creations that part of me assumed were confined to caves in the Australian desert?

I had already written most of my essay The Devil & The Goddess, which takes ancient snake goddesses as a central theme, when I discovered by chance that a Romano-Celtic snake goddess—Verbeia—was worshipped as an embodiment of the River Wharfe, which runs past the moors and through Ilkley. I delved deep into etymology, and found that both “Verbeia” and “Wharfe” had potential roots in words referring to turning, swirling, and vortices. I quickly made connections with the turning, swirling Swastika Stone carving on the moor, and the vortex-like concentric circles of the common cup-and-ring marks carved onto many of the moor’s stones. Endless details, myriad connections, all gave me the vertiginous sense that I had psychically meshed with the local landscape and its history. My own association of the vortex with death and altered states permeated my reading of the rock carvings. I railed against the narrow-mindedness of academia (without having actually read much academic research, of course), and proffered my own visionary interpretations in the small press.

Before long, I was reading Richard Bradley’s book on the predominantly cup-and-ring rock art of Atlantic Europe. This was around 1997. Almost a decade before, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson had caused a storm in archaeological circles with their paper, ‘The Signs of All Times’, which proposed that much Palaeolithic art was inspired by shamanic trance states. Drawing on their ideas about geometric shapes—grids, spirals, dots, and so on—representing the hallucinations from the early stages of trance, archaeologists like Bradley started to speculate about the Neolithic and Bronze Age cup-and-rings. Could they represent these early parts of the shamanic altered state? Lab tests had shown that vortex-like imagery was common as people were drawn into the deeper levels of trance. And entry into the Otherworld was frequently associated with death by shamanic cultures. Could the occurrence of spirals and cup-and-rings at the entrances to Irish passage graves be explained by this connection?

Well, of course it could. I’m all for keeping an open mind about prehistory, this vast period that we’ll never be certain about. But the logic and coherence of the “shamanic trance” theory of rock art, while it obviously can’t be applied anywhere and everywhere, means to me that it has to be placed in the foreground of our collection of possible models for the origins of this art.

Now, I’m really interested in how I managed to come to this conclusion independently, after a few years of messing around with strange drugs and staggering about West Yorkshire’s moors, when earnest academics had taken most of their careers of diligent study to get there. Does this mean that we can throw all our books away and get to the truth of the past by wrenching the lids off our minds? Sadly not. However, I’m not entirely convinced that it was blind luck that led me to this theory that academia has now validated. There really is something to be said for getting down to the basic structures of the psyche through experimentation, and using the data gathered from this first-hand experience to speculate about that period when these basic structures were being laid down—and, for the first time, expressed in material artifacts. It’ll never be an exact science, but it can function as an extremely valuable adjunct to scientific exploration. Some common-sense participation in the ways of magic, animism and altered states could, I believe, help ground abstract theories in the realities of the human body and the many qualities of the human mind that persist through changing historical circumstances. Anthropologists often go a bit native and live their subject’s life a little; why not archaeologists too?

If personal experience can contribute to the study of the past, what can the past contribute to our experience now? For me, history was always my worst subject at school. I’m still pretty patchy on all that stuff that happened between the Romans and the 20th century. My route into the past was Terence McKenna’s theories about the role of psychedelic mushrooms in the origins of human consciousness. Suddenly, someone was drawing compelling links between the direct experiences in my life that fascinated and inspired me, and the grander, often bewildering sweep of human history.

Recently, Andy Letcher’s book Shroom has taken this type of theory to task, heavily criticizing modern psychedelic culture for projecting its own agendas back onto the past. And many pagans, lead by Ronald Hutton, who was a big inspiration for Letcher, have for a while been taking apart the historical fantasies of Wiccans and others who believe themselves to be continuing a genuine lineage of magical practice. Why should we need validation for our current activities so much that we’re prepared to delude ourselves about history?

I do value the hard information and refreshing cynicism of Letcher and Hutton’s work—it’s priceless among subcultures that often succumb to insular illusions. But I think their views can be seen as the flip-side to the fantasies of historical validation that they try to demolish. To polarize things a bit: one side is so blindly in need of validation, that they are prepared to be certain about things that are up in the air; but the other side seems to carry itself with a kind of modern intellectual machismo that believes this need for validation from the past can be disposed of entirely. Science is the watchword, and despite the archaeological cliché that “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”, if hard proof isn’t forthcoming, we have to turn away. This seems to be as modern as Wiccan revivalism, and at least as damaging as they believe any uncritical reconstruction of past beliefs is.

We can’t just believe what we want about the past. But I feel we can’t just leave it be, or accept the “hard evidence” of orthodox archaeology as all that remains. The past is alive, and constantly expresses itself through the present, into the future. This isn’t determinism, it’s just the way things are. You can take a more complex angle if you want, and say that it’s our relationship to the past that is alive. The imagination is one of the most potent forces in human life, and it loves the past. Especially ancient times. It seems wise to engage consciously with this love, to nurture it and guard against its excesses, rather than decry it and hope it goes away.

Dreams, as Jung found, are particularly enthused about the past. Nothing is simple and straightforward in dreams; their metaphoric nature and tricksterish layering of meaning always defy any rational attempt to codify and delineate them. But they respond eagerly when you feed your head with images and stories of ancient things. The outward forms of prehistory, when they permeate your waking life, can seep into your dream world and help give shape to long-neglected patterns in your personal history.

Anyone’s deeper complexes can be as uncertain and hard to pin down as the forever lost—but deeply resonant—rituals of prehistoric tribes. Just as we can’t pin down such archaic events with archaeological certainty, the precise identification of our own ancient moments of significance may forever elude us.

But likewise, just as the lingering, intangible traces of these moments can profoundly shape our lives from behind the scenes, we will never be able to fully wipe away our subtle bonds to the deep past of the species. In both personal and collective psychohistory, our unceasing curiosity should be tempered by a light touch that respects the reality and the importance of the past’s essential unknowability. The lack of hope for solid conclusions needn’t be a cause of despair; it can animate our investigations with a playful delight, and a respect for irreducible mystery.