It’s a while since I published my essay and booklet on Verbeia, the Romano-Celtic goddess from Ilkley. I did a revised edition of the booklet in 2000 or so, to include new information; but now that more information has come to my attention, I decided to try and create an easily referenced consolidation of Verbeia research that I can keep up-to-date.

I’ve added some bits to the Wikipedia page, but I suspect some of the speculation there (pretty tame by my standards) may, strictly speaking, have overstepped the boundaries of Wikipedia’s style guidelines.

Well, I’d recently heard of one of Google’s latest ventures, knol. “A unit of knowledge” that say—which seems a little forced to me. It’s still in beta, but it’s got some interesting differences from the Wiki. There’s the usual Google attention to usability and neat detail. You create your own pages on anything. You can collaborate with others if you want, but that’s on a strictly voluntary basis. Obviously it has different strengths and weaknesses to the Wiki, but it seemed ideal as a place to collate my Verbeia research.

So, here’s my Verbeia knol.

It’s set to “moderated collaboration”, so anyone logged in can suggest additions or corrections that I then vet.

A small lesson from publicizing this came from posting a link on the Modern Antiquarian’s Swastika Stone page. I thought I’d found some new info about Verbeia and the Swastika Stone’s relationship. Just after I posted my new link, I noticed the venerable Kozmik Ken had posted the same info four years ago. Ah well, I’m only just getting back into this research lark…

Romano-Celtic carving now to be found in All Saints Parish Church, Ilkley, West Yorkshire.

by Gyrus

Firewoman, river of life
Firewoman, mother and eye
Firewoman, seeding below
Firewoman, help my earth glow

Psychic TV, ‘Firewoman’

At first it was just the stones.

The north side of Rombald’s Moor, steep crags and patches of forest, towers over the town of Ilkley in West Yorkshire. Scattered over its hills are literally hundreds of prehistoric rock carvings that are still baffling archaeologists and students of the history of art. They are all seemingly abstract, dominated mainly by ‘cup-and-ring’ designs. Cup-like depressions carved into the rock, alone or clustered in groups, often surrounded by one or more rings. These rings may overlap with those radiating out from nearby cups; there may also be a straight groove running from the central cup, out across the rings.

Some cup-and-ring carvings from Westhorton, Northumberland

After checking these out for a while, I was amazed to learn that nearly identical carvings exist in Northumberland, across Scotland and Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Scandinavia. Closely related ‘primitive art’ can also be found in the Canary Islands, Africa, India, Australia, the Americas, and many others places I’m sure. Across the globe, these enigmatic designs can date to anywhere from the Stone Ages to the present day (in the case of tribal cultures still making them). The ones in Ilkley are hard to date, because of their exposure to the elements, and guesses range from Neolithic times (5000-2000 BCE) to the late Iron Age (about 500 BCE).

I was initially attracted to these markings because of their enigma. The possible significance of megalithic sites like Stonehenge seemed to me to be all mapped out, exhaustively elaborated. Yet stabs at the meaning of cup-and-ring marked rocks are generally half-hearted, quelled by a lack of reference points. Ronald Morris lists 104 possible interpretations, all extremely brief, in his book on the rock art of Galloway—from the stupidly prosaic ("stone age doodles") to the wildly improbable ("carved by lasers from outer space").

Several people have grappled with interpreting the carvings in an open-minded and intelligent way, but they are few. For good reason. We will never know what these carvings were used for. This is the bottom line of most prehistoric investigations. We’ll never know, not exactly. How you proceed from this baseline of ignorance is a mark of your own psyche. Do you not even start to delve further, dismayed by the prospect of never being able to attain certainty? Do you meticulously catalogue that which you can be certain of, sites and sizes, recurrent features? Or do you, in wilful ignorance of the evidence that exists, treat prehistoric art as some sort of Rorschach for your own mind, projecting your desires onto them to suit your own needs?

Given that you’re interested in rock art, the first option is an admission of despair, because ultimately nothing in life is certain. The second path is that of the academic, and such work is essential to any attempt at interpretation; but as an end in itself it is a petty cover-up for despair, and in omitting the realm of significance it removes genuinely human interests. The third tactic is a caricature of the independent ‘mystical’ researcher, and is how most academics would probably view my own work. But I think it has to be seen that an element of this subjective projection is unavoidable. As we have little concrete evidence about the meaning of prehistoric art, what else fills the gaps but our own minds? In the interests of ‘objectivity’, the psychology of the prehistorian is left out of academic texts. Yet they are still people, and no amount of rigorous methodology can, I believe, erase the person from the writing. The fantasy of objective science is a contradictory enterprise of reality-denial: "I want to see the world as it would be if I were not here." The reality of the situation is that you’re always there. In denying their own personal presence, many writers leave themselves (and their readers) open to an unseen subjectivity, which can either be uncovered and made part of the picture, or left to grow more powerful and malignant, eventually rigidifying into dogma.

My own personal approach is… personal. I have to experience the place I’m involved in. I spend time there and immerse myself in it, meditate and do rituals, note dreams and synchronicities. I bathe in the mystery until intuitions that make contact with intellect bubble up. I study a lot, and greatly value the work of historians and archaeologists. But I am not overly concerned with ‘methodology’. My method is: go from the concrete part of reality that interests me, that draws me to it, and branch out into whatever different directions I feel are relevant. The ‘disciplines’ I delve into—archaeology, history, religion, etymology, ethnography—are subservient to the reality I’m investigating.

A general problem for me, one left out by most academics because it prods at their own basic assumptions, is deciding where I stand in relation to history. I feel I’m moving slowly (and non-linearly) towards a radical non-linear approach. I’ve tried to trace many different things through history, mainly shifting archetypal myth-figures; and I find too many cross-cultural connections, too many links across space and time to really believe, deep down, that ‘history’ (when it embraces human experience) can be accurately represented by a straight line. Historical context is important, but a wider context exists, that of the nature of time.

‘Time’ is a single word, but what it refers to is profoundly diverse and chaotic.

Linear historical time

One day, year, century after another, ad infinitum.

Linear eschatological time

One day, year, century after another… BANG!!!

Cyclical time

Each day is created anew at daybreak; each year is, in a way, the first. The growing-older-and-dying world co-exists with the Dreamtime, where all the ancestors are still active and all myths and realities recur.

Cyclical eschatological time

"Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant . . . And every instant also gives birth to a world—despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb—a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture." (Hakim Bey)

Real time

No such thing!

All forms of time are potentially accessible. Many different gradations of these simplified categories are usually experienced in the course of a day by most people, but the subtle differences usually go unnoticed.

So history is not absolute. History as we know it is our own culture’s construct of time, our largely linear map of temporality, projected back onto the material artifacts left in the fabric of the world by our ancestors. Not to mention the psychological prejudices and models we leave unquestioned, and our lack of culturally sanctioned landmarks in the realm usually called the ‘spiritual’—a realm that was arguably a prime concern for ‘map-makers’ in prehistory. ‘Objective history’ is an illusion born of a lack of true context, our ontological context.

One of the stickiest problems in tracing mythology and religious practices through history is that of tracing influence and co-mapping meaning. Should we compare similar motifs and artifacts across time and space in our search for meaning? For example, could the rock art of the !Kung San bushmen in Africa today have any bearing upon the carvings left on Rombald’s Moor by people who lived thousands of years ago?

Things become stickier (for the linear historian) when times and places are closer together, but no direct evidence of cross-cultural interchange appears to exist. The Swastika Stone near Ilkley is pretty much identical to the ‘Camunian Roses’ in Val Camonica, Italy, and they were possibly carved within 500 years of each other. Did the two cultures that produced these designs interact? Was there a parallel, but separate evolution of the same basic pan-European design, the crossed circle? Was it coincidence? If so, is the meaning of each necessarily as separate as the carvings themselves? And do we need to insult the critical judgement of readers by meticulously pointing out the subtle differences between similar symbols, and only tentatively making comparisons? It is ironic that, because of their pedantic methodologies, texts aimed at the academic community (a most discerning and critical bunch), demand the least amount of critical intervention on the part of the reader.

I do not unquestioningly believe in Jung’s theory of ‘universal archetypes’, but I do believe in the uniformity of basic human physiology, and I think the body is one of the main aspects of the world from which maps of the spirit—shamanism, alchemy, yoga, tantra, whatever—unfold. So we may expect some recurring global motifs in art and myth, notwithstanding the infinite variations that similar body-minds interacting with different environments produce.

I also believe that we each need to ask ourselves why we are interested in these things. What do I get out of this? I have no illusions (OK, a few) that I’m trying to contribute to some ever-progressing body of human knowledge. The feeling that we’re building up an increasingly accurate and ‘truthful’ picture of the world as time goes by is part of the linear history package. Look at the ridiculous ideas held by quite intelligent people in the past, and assume that your own ideas may be equally stupid in the end.

In the end? What end? The straight line is hard to shake off…

There’s one thing I’m definitely not in this for. I don’t claim to be right. I get enough out of it already, and don’t need gaps in my enjoyment to be filled with the consensus of agreement. I have to write this, and hope some people get stimulated by it. But… "I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation." (Michel Foucault) I involve myself in the conscious recognition of what I project onto the past. My theories will have a different emphasis from others’ because my transformation is different. Why shouldn’t people print for themselves a license to steal from the past, as Hakim Bey phrases it, as long as they’re conscious that they may have no ‘real’ connection to the culture they plunder, or to academic history? This is the Chaotic approach to history, the utilization of any and all human cultural artifacts for the purpose of making life now more interesting, stimulating and challenging. It can be abused by those who trivialize or entirely misappropriate other cultures, possibly affecting the general view of that culture; or by those who fail to keep a check on their ego and their connection with the here-and-now of their lives. It can also be used as the most adaptable and dogma-free map-making tool around. Flexible enough to cope with inevitable change, ontologically rigorous enough to realize it’s never right, never authoritative, always capable of laughing at itself. As a friend once said, some people would rather be right than happy.

The Badger Stone, Rombald’s Moor, looking northwest up Wharfedale

The first time I visited the Badger Stone on Rombald’s Moor, I walked alone across the moors with a map. As I crossed a small valley, clouds gathered and light rain fell. I put the map away and stumbled across the heather shrouded in mist. As I blindly approached the stone, the rain fell harder, and all I could see around me was thick white moving mist. By the time I reached it, and rounded it to see the carvings, I was too wet to care about the rain, a state which alters consciousness into a more receptive mode. Throughout my explorations of the moors, I’ve found that there has been a subtle interactivity between the land, my consciousness and the weather, as if all conspire to make me receptive to a new discovery. Standing in front of the ancient carvings on this stone, I was struck by the realization that something I considered exotic and alien, something only found in caves in remotest Australia, was actually here as well, just down the road. The rock carvings are always more impressive when they’re wet, and this, one of the most impressive set of carvings on the moor, made quite an impression on me. I did some spontaneous chanting and whirling, then walked away. As I left the stone, the mists began to clear, and the rain stopped abruptly.

Later in the year, I was writing about my idea that the Christian Satan is a demonized remnant of prehistoric chthonic snake-goddesses. Flicking through a book on folklore, I found a picture of an altar stone showing the goddess Verbeia. She holds two snakes, and now stands in the All Saints Parish Church in Ilkley. The mythic irony was too much, I had to check it out. I had only the faintest idea that she would lead me back up on to the moors, and deeper into the stones.

Verbeia

Known only through a dedication to her, carved by the Prefect of the Second Cohort of Roman troops stationed in Ilkley during 3rd century CE, and her depiction on a separate altar stone (shown at top of page). The All Saints Church stands on the remains of the Roman fort. The dedication (which can now be seen in the Manor House Museum behind the church) reads: "To Verbeia. Sacred. Clodius Fronto. Ded. Prefect of the Cohort, Second Lingones." Goddess of the River Wharfe, which flows down from the Pennines in the northwest, through Ilkley at the bottom of the valley which the moor overlooks, and east to the Humber estuary. Snakes and flowing water have intimate archaic connections. The two snakes held by Verbeia probably represent the two streams that flowed from the moor in Roman times, past either side of the fort enclosure, and into the Wharfe.

The Mavilly goddess

The Roman troops stationed here were only Roman in political allegiance. Racially, the Lingones were Celtic Gauls recruited from the upper Marne in eastern France. A goddess image similar to Verbeia—she holds two snakes and has a pleated skirt—was found in Mavilly, which is in the region where the Lingones cohort were recruited from. In this area, Gaulish Celts are known to have been greatly concerned with water cults. Mavilly is only 35 miles south of the famous healing spring at the source of the Seine. Did the troops bring a goddess-related water cult with them to blend into the matrix of the Wharfedale environment?

Scholars argue against a Celtic origin for the word ‘Verbeia’. But a female water divinity holding snakes would, in nature if not in name, happily dovetail with the way in which the native Celts of northern England (the Brigantes) probably made their environment sacred. Water cults were very frequent among the Celts: they cast offerings into wells and lakes, including human heads (Celts, like the Greeks, believed the head to be the seat of life-force, as the ‘head’ of a river is its source). Romans likewise would sanctify natural features; for them, "every grove, spring, cluster of rocks or other significant natural feature had its attendant spirit. Generally the locals gave such entities personal names, but a stranger ignorant of these would refer to each simply as genius loci, ‘the spirit of the place’. Especially awe-inspiring or beautiful spots possessed proportionately powerful genii." (Ronald Hutton) Verbeia seems likely to be a fusion of existing Brigantian and imported Gaulish and Roman influences.

Sifting through languages to find the origins of ‘Verbeia’ proved to be a dizzying task. Even a firm knowledge of linguistic influences in the area at that time wouldn’t stop your head from spinning. Two possibilities: Either language, like the universe, plays tricks, and leads you around in baffling cycles which appear connected to every other cycle; or the name ‘Verbeia’, for whatever reasons, happens to be an inexplicably polysemic (many-meaninged) cross-linguistic condensation of some of our most primal intuitions about nature. Follow me…

Spring

Verbeia is often equated with Brighid, the Irish goddess, aka Bridget, Bride, Bríd or Bríg—possibly the origin of Brigantia, the goddess of the Brigantes. Bride’s Day is Imbolc, 1st February, or when the ewes start to lactate. A goddess who heralds the coming warmth of spring. The Mavilly goddess is shown surrounded by rising vegetation. The Latin for spring is ver, from which our ‘vernal’, ‘verdigiris’ (green rust on copper) and ‘verdant’ (fresh, green) come. A botanical term, ‘vernation’, refers to the arrangement of leaves in a bud. This derives from the Latin vernatio: the flourishing renewal of plants in spring, and the snake’s sloughing of skin in spring. All these spring-associated Latin words stem from the Indogermanic root √WES, meaning "to shine".

Fire

Brighid presides over fire. Goddess of blacksmiths. Brighid, from brigh, ‘strength’. Welsh bri means ‘power’, and brig means ‘hill-top’ (‘Brighid’ and ‘Brigantia’ are often translated as ‘The High One’). Ancient belief in the sacred power of hills and mountains… the lighting of fires on hill-tops at seasonal festivals… St Bridget (the Christian edition) was honoured by nuns at a monastery in County Kildare, who kept her sacred flame burning until the Reformation. The public shrine to Vesta, Roman goddess of fire, both domestic and ritual, was a sacred fire tended by the Vestal Virgins. Brighid, too, ruled over the domestic hearth, and in Gaelic Scotland her bird was the white swan. ‘Swan Vestas’ anyone?

‘Vesta’ and close-to-home words like ‘vernacular’ both derive from the same Indogermanic root as all the shining spring-like words—√WES can also mean ‘dwell, live, be’. Home and fire, dwelling and light. From the temporary base-camp hearths of the first proto-human hunter-gatherers through to the Celts and the Roman Empire, these two are intertwined.

The most famous stones on the moor are the Cow and Calf—the ‘Cow’ is a vast part of a rocky outcrop overlooking Ilkley, the ‘Calf’ is a smaller, though still large boulder that has apparently separated from the crags. The larger rock was once known as the ‘Inglestone Cow’. When Queen Victoria was crowned in 1838, "a great fire blazed on these famous stones, and Ilkley I am told, was ‘illuminated.’" (Harry Speight)

The Cow and Calf rocks, Ilkley Moor

There is a history of beacon hills in Wharfedale. During the early 19th century, when a French invasion was feared, beacon fires were tended all along Wharfedale. The beacon signal was sent from Ingleborough, over in the northernmost reaches of Ribblesdale (close to the Wharfe’s source), down via various hills, including Beamsley Beacon just north of Ilkley, on to the Otley Chevin. Perhaps the prominent ‘Inglestone Cow’ was part of this network? The Scottish dialect word, ingle, ‘fire burning on a hearth’, may come from the Gaelic aingeal, meaning ‘fire’ or ‘light’. The Mavilly goddess holds a torch as well as snakes.

Milk

Brighid is also a cow goddess; she was reared on the milk of a white, red-eared cow. In Ireland, churn-staffs were fashioned into the likeness of a woman called Brìdeog, ‘Little Bride’. ‘Verbeia’ may derive from the Old Irish root ferb, ‘cattle’, making her ‘She of the Cattle’. Like the Irish Boand, ‘She who has White Cows’, goddess of the river Boyne. Like Marsa of Latvian mythological songs, "Mother of Milk, the Mother of Cows" (Marija Gimbutas), who may appear in animal stalls as a black snake. The night before I read Gimbutas’ book, where she relates Verbeia to Marsa, and suggests the ferb derivation, I was staying with friends who have two daughters. I dreamt I had breasts and was breast-feeding their two-year old.

There is strong evidence of an old calendar custom in the British Isles, around Beltaine or springtime in general, where the old fires are extinguished and new ones are lit. Cattle are then driven between two fires to divinely protect them from disease. ‘Imbolc’ means ‘purification’. Inglestone Cow… Fire-stone Cow.

Ronald Morris found three separate people in Scotland who remembered from their youth a ritual connected to cup-marks in rocks. They would be filled with milk each spring, lest the "wee folk" prevent the cattle from giving milk that summer.

Water

"Springs, wells and rivers are of first and enduring importance as a focal point of Celtic cult practice and ritual." (Anne Ross) Not far from the Badger Stone, at the top of Heber’s Gill, is a spring called Silver Well, "which it is not unlikely was an old Celtic tutelary spring, and bits of metal or other articles may have been thrown into it as offerings for protection from the saint or presiding genius of the well." (Speight)

The source of all life. We come from the ocean, we need water to live, we are two-thirds water. Verbeia, goddess of the river, bearing the two serpentine streams flowing down from the moor. They flow from the area where one finds the White Wells, a Victorian spa building. The healing powers of the spring waters on the moor here were reputed in the last century, and probably long, long before as well. Certainly the Romans were obsessed with spa baths, and there was one in Ilkley. "Verbeia may be a Latinised form of the Goidelic guerif, to heal." (Speight) Geurir is used in France with the same meaning.

(At the bottom of the bath in the White Wells today there is the familiar site of hundreds of coppers and ten pence pieces. You even find this in fountains in shopping malls. It is a remnant of the widespread Celtic practice, mentioned by Speight above, of casting offerings to water spirits into wells, lakes and rivers.)

In Niederbronn, Alsace, where in Celtic times Diana was worshipped as the Goddess of sacred wells, to this day women carry water from the mineral spring to nearby mountains. There, they pour it over stones with circular depressions to ensure pregnancy. . . . Holy wells are recorded by the hundreds in 19th century literature. In Ireland, they mostly became St. Brigit’s wells, all visited on the first day of spring. Devotees perform the rounds at such wells, washing their hands and feet and tearing off a small rag from their clothes, which they tie on a bush or tree overhanging the well. According to a 1918 written account from Dungiven parish, after performing the usual rounds at the well, devotees proceed to a large river stone which has footprints; they perform an oblation and walk around the stone, bowing to it and repeating prayers as at the well. If there are hollows or cupmarks in stones, the country people stoop to drink.

Marija Gimbutas

Ronald Morris’ survey of cup-and-ring marked stones in Argyll, Scotland, revealed that they "are nearly always carved where there is a fine open view. . . . more often than not it includes a view of sea or estuary." They are "nearly always made on parts of rock which are nearly horizontal. Thus, in southern Scotland seven out of eight sites have carved areas which are within 20 degrees of horizontal, and nearly half the carved areas are absolutely horizontal. . . . Where there is a ‘tail’ or radial groove from near the middle of the cup-and-ring (very often from the cup), in about seven out of eight cases, where there is any slope on the rock surface, the tail runs downhill." This all accords well with the Ilkley carvings, which are dominant on the north side of the moor overlooking the river, and are often clustered close to springs or streams. Before I had theorized about these glyphs, my intuitive ‘offerings’ to the Badger Stone consisted of pouring some of my drink (water or whiskey) into the cups and watching it stream down the grooves. There are some cups on near-vertical surfaces, but most were clearly meant to hold water, rain, or other fluids. Like wells, the water in cup-marks could be healing water. In regions where there are cup-marked rocks and peasant lore about them still survives, there are recurrent beliefs that water out of the cups is good for all manner of ailments, especially eye diseases.

The Greek Muses were water-nymphs, and poets drank from their springs on Mounts Helicon, Parnassus and Castalia for inspiration. To them, a poem was the water, honey or nectar of the Muses. Pythagoras gained prophetic insights from drinking spring water. Richard Onians, in his investigation of ancient Greek concepts about the body and soul, found that they believed ‘life-essence’ to be contained in a ‘seed liquid’ concentrated mostly in the cerebro-spinal marrow—"on tap in the genital and stored in the head", as Norman O. Brown puts it. They thought it came out of the body in the form of tears, sweat, and sexual fluids. Crying and sexual love are "repeatedly described as a process of ‘liquefying, melting’ . . . Aristotle tells us that the region around the eyes was the region of the head most fruitful of seed, pointing to . . . practices which imply that seed comes from liquid in the region of the eyes." Tears, sex, melting… I think of Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about bodily armour, rigid musculature softened by crying and sex. Experiences of weeping at orgasm. Tears, eyes, seed… the repressive myth of masturbation and blindness. There is an Egyptian myth of people coming out of a creator-god’s eyes. Cup-marks, rain, creation, life-force, healing…

The Slavic goddess Mokosh-Paraskeva Pyatnitsa "is the dispenser of the water of life. . . . The name Mokosh is connected with moisture, mok- or mokr- meaning ‘wet, moist,’ and her ritual was called mokrida. On the other hand, the root mok- appears as a name for stones. In Lithuanian, mokas is a ‘standing stone,’ always appearing in legends associated with lakes or rivers." (Gimbutas)

The significance of water and stones extends down into the rites of divine kingship. Pagan British kings usually had to symbolically wed the goddess of the land. Even as late as the 17th century, England’s King James said, "I am the husband, and all the whole island is my lawful wife." Gerald of Wales (12th century) said that in County Donegal, for his feis (inauguration), the king would bathe in water then stand barefoot in a footprint carved in rock, or sit on a stone to be handed his rod of office. The feis site of the Irish king O’Donnell in western Ulster was used until the end of the 16th century. It is a rock with the holy well Tobar an Duin at its foot, where the king probably bathed. In early Scottish history the fort of Dunadd, in the Kilmartin valley of Argyll, was one seat of the kingdom of Dalriada, "and upon the summit of the fortress the modern traveller can still find the carved footprint. Next to it in the rock surface is a bowl-shaped hollow and a splendid figure of a wild boar . . . A ruler placing his foot in the print would be gazing north straight at the ancient row of megalithic monuments." (Hutton) "In Scandinavia engravings of human footprints are common—especially near the cupped stones. On the Bunsoh stones, indeed, footprints and cups are found together." (Herbert Kühn)

The king gains his power from his union with the goddess of the land, symbolized by his immersion in her waters and his body’s shallow, but significant, penetration of her stones. Paul Devereux, in a persuasive book that links divine kingship back to shamanism, quotes a !Kung man talking of his trance experiences: "When people sing. . . I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far. . . . You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body. . .". For the San people, snakes are significant because they enter the earth, go underground, like themselves when they go on ecstatic journeys.

J.D. Lewis-Williams suggests that rocks are ‘veils’ between this world and the spirit world, and that rock art is the destruction of this veil. "In many cultures, the shaman in his trance passes through the rock into the spirit world, and to communicate what had happened in the trance, the shaman depicts what had happened on the other side on the rock. . . . The Hupa of America have a concept of spirits responsible for precipitation that live in the rock, and are known as ‘Mi.’ In addition, several contemporary shamans have acknowledged that the rock art is a marker for where a shaman could enter the rock." (Grant S. McCall)

Procreation

The belief systems of the Australian aborigines, whose rock and totem-shield art is often compared to cup-and-ring markings, may be one of the most useful tools we have to approach the meaning of European petroglyphs (rock carvings). The Australian continent is their Bible; the earth, the physical landscape, embodies their spiritual understanding of the world, contains their history and knowledge. "Preliterate peoples are at pains to identify with their land as if it were a physiological or psychological ‘echo’ of themselves." (James G. Cowan) Body and earth, psyche and landscape.

Some hunter-gatherer tribes, like archaic humans, do not see sex and birth as cause and effect. To explain birth, beliefs about the origin of children from the earth evolved. The spirits of unborn children dwell in the land, in rocks and pools, waiting to enter a receptive womb. Even after the connection between sex and birth is made, many, like the aborigines, favour the idea of earth-conception as ultimately essential to the creation of a child. Rocks or pools "bore the spirit that would vitalise the baby. It therefore seems likely that the purpose of cutting a circular cup in the surface of a rocky outcrop was to liberate a spirit and so ensure a complete and successful child-birth. . . . At some later date a ring would be circumscribed about the cup to guarantee a second child, and in this way, as the years passed, the ring systems built up." (George Terence Meaden) This idea holds that the interlinking groups of cups and rings depict inter-family bonds. The ‘spirits’ released by carving the cup may have been those of ancestors as well as unborn children, for ancestors are frequently the source of divinatory and magical knowledge in shamanic cultures. For aborigines, the two types of spirit are interchangeable, as each person is a reincarnation of an ancestor.

Two apparent survivals of these notions in modern times. The Christian doctrine of baptism: a baby’s soul is not ‘saved’ (and may as well not have one as far as hardcore Christians are concerned) until it is baptized, with holy water from a cup-shaped font. And the folklore of the stork, which carries babies from marshes to drop them down the chimneys of expectant parents.

The ‘caged spirit’ theory of cup-marked rocks does not ‘explain’ all the carvings, but no one ‘explanation’ will. The carvings were probably used by different people through time for different purposes; by different people across space for different purposes; and almost certainly by the same people for different purposes. Our culture and our psyches, outside the frames and boundaries of ‘art’, are conditioned to assign singular meanings to symbols. Before dictionaries, words were a lot more elastic. Proto-linguistic symbol systems such as hieroglyphs were even more amenable to polysemy, the existence of many meanings. Further back in the development of symbols, petroglyphs take us into a realm of signification almost alien to the industrialized west. Their meanings seem abstract and vague until they are bound to the concrete feelings and bodily, non-verbal perceptions they refer to. And many meanings happily co-exist, emanating from the same symbol without being stifled by fear of paradox.

Vertex

Middle English hwerfen, ‘turn, change’. Spelt in The Ormulum by Ormin (12th century Lincolnshire) as wharfen. The variations are endless: hweorfa, ‘whirl, what is hastily turned around’; hweorfan, ‘a turning, winding round’, cognate with Norse hvarf, ‘a sharp bend’; Old Norse hwerfi, ‘bend, crook’. Among these words is certainly the origin of, or a major influence on ‘Wharfe’, which turns and winds along the valley floor before and after Ilkley.

‘Verbeia’ has always been related to ‘Wharfe’, and a trip back to the ver- words in Latin gives us, if not a confirmation of the link, at least some fruitful and irresistibly fascinating associations. Many of our own ver- words come from the Latin vertere, ‘to turn’. ‘Vertebra’ means ‘something to turn on’, describing the backbone’s interlocking pivotal structure. ‘Vertex’ is ‘the highest point’; in anatomy it refers to the crown of the head, where hair spirals. Latin vertex literally means ‘that which turns’, but can refer to ‘top, crown, summit, pole, whirl; whirlpool, eddy’. Properly it refers to the turning point, especially the Pole Star, around which all the others turn. ‘Vertical’ stems from these associations—straight up to, or down from, the crown or summit. ‘Vortex’ is a variant of ‘vertex’. Dictionary definition: ‘a mass of whirling fluid, whirlpool or whirlwind; a system viewed as swallowing up or engrossing those who approach it’. ‘Whirl’ is related to the Old Norse hvirfill, ‘circle’; and, along with ‘twirl’, relates to the Gaelic Tuirl, ‘to descend suddenly, to come down rapidly with a gyratory motion’. ‘Vertigo’ is from Latin vertigo, ‘whirling’, again from vertere.

The closest word I’ve found to ‘Verbeia’ in any language is from Anglo-Saxon, which couldn’t have influenced the Roman altars in Ilkley—they invaded Britain after the Romans left. Nevertheless, the word wer-bære is ‘a weir where fish are caught’, which keeps the river connotations, as well as the idea of turning, as weirs (and wharves) redirect the flow of rivers.

‘Verse’ is another vertere word, because at the end of a line of poetry, one ‘turns around’ and starts a new one, unlike the linear flow of prose. Countless -verse words in English express contrary direction: converse, perverse, inverse, reverse, you get the idea.

Vertere itself comes from the Indogermanic root √WERT, ‘to turn, become’. Also root of the Old English wyrd, ‘destiny, fate, that which happens’. Sanskrit vrt means ‘to turn, turn oneself, exist, be’.

Shamanism

Brighid, patroness of poets & writers, healers & doctors, and of blacksmiths. Goddess of fire. She appears to be a late pagan distillation of the core elements of archaic shamanism.

The shaman is the original poet, the tribal myth-maker who pulls up a ‘secret language’ from the depths of ecstasy, the hidden roots of language.

The shaman is the healer par excellence, the witch-doctor.

A Yakut proverb says that smiths and shamans are from the same nest. Shamans often meets a smith during initiatory trances, who dismembers and then re-forges the shaman’s body in his furnace. Both smiths and shamans are respected and often feared in Siberian tribes, because both possess esoteric transformative knowledge.

Most importantly, both are masters of fire. "Mastery over fire . . . is a magico-mystical virtue that . . . translates into sensible terms the fact that the shaman has passed beyond the human condition and already shares in the condition of ‘spirits.’" (Mircea Éliade) Firewalking, eating hot coals, generating ‘inner heat’ for magical use, melting snow with will, drying wet sheets wrapped around the body while sat outside in freezing weather… Many tribes express magical power in terms of heat; Hindus call powerful divinities jvalit, ‘possessing fire’; Indian Mohammedans in communication with God become ‘burning’. The !Kung dance for hours around a fire to awaken num, a primal life energy that rests at the base of the spine and in the pit of the stomach. When it ‘boils’, it ascends the backbone, and when it reaches the skull, the shamanic kia trance occurs. Those experiencing kia can feel compelled to leap into the fire or handle the glowing embers.

Verbeia’s equation with Brighid is poetically supported by her forest of linguistic associations: verse is the ‘turning’ form of poetry; we have the Goidelic guerif, to heal; both these aspects are deepened by her undoubted link with spring waters, inspiring and healing. Her fiery nature should be obvious by now.

Further, Verbeia’s possible links to all the spiralling vertere words echoes one of shamanism’s most basic features. The Centre of the World, the World Tree, Mountain or Pole, the shaman’s path to the lower and upper realms of the other world. Through kundalini yoga, and the Greeks’ cerebro-spinal ‘life-force’, this may be equated with the human spine. Raise the kundalini serpent to the crown chakra, through the vertebrae, past the crown of the skull, where hair spirals round in a vertex.

One impulsive evening I went up to the moor and spent the night alone at the Badger Stone. While drifting off, I opened my eyes suddenly and was startled beyond belief. One star in the sky was motionless, and all the others were drifting rapidly north across the sky. This persisted, as I stammered and reeled, for about 10 seconds. Then, in a gratefully received shift of perspective back to reality, I realized that the single ‘star’ was a satellite arcing across the sky. My mind, for some reason, had played the ‘relative motion’ trick you often get on trains, where the station appears to be moving when the train sets off.

This is one of the few cards from the ‘Vertical Oracle’ divinatory deck that arrived from Antero Alli shortly after I finished this writing. Make your own connections! For more info, see Vertical Pool.

Later that week, I was playing with a toy planetarium at a friends’—a small light over which you place a clear perspex hemisphere with all the constellations marked on it. I put it in a dark cupboard, and played with it by spinning the dome around. Instantly the memory of dream (probably inspired by the shifting stars experience) from a night or two back flooded into me, and I had to stop turning the dome because of the dizzying memory rush. In the dream I was out in the open, and the entire night sky was revolving around one star above me, which was surrounded by bizarre light formations. Inspired by this, I searched out beliefs about the stars, particularly the Pole Star.

The Turko-Tatars, like a number of other peoples, imagine the sky as a tent . . . In the middle of the sky shines the Pole Star, holding the celestial tent like a stake. The Samoyed call it the ‘Sky Nail’; the Chuckchee and the Koryak the ‘Nail Star.’ The same image and terminology are found among the Lapps, the Finns, and the Estonians. The Turko-Altaians conceive the Pole Star as a pillar; it is the ‘Golden Pillar’ of the Mongols, the Kalmyk, the Buryat, the ‘Iron Pillar’ of the Kirgiz, the Bashkir, the Siberian Tatars, the ‘Solar Pillar’ of the Teleut, and so on. A complementary image is that of the stars as invisibly linked to the Pole Star. The Buryat picture the stars as a herd of horses, and the Pole Star . . . is the stake to which they are tethered.

Mircea Éliade

Macrocosm is reflected in microcosm for such peoples, who identify the Sky Pillar with the pole in the centre of their yurt or tent.

Ancient Saxons called the Pole Star Irminsul, termed ‘the universal column which sustains all’, and passed the idea of the ‘Pillar of the Sky’ or ‘Pillar of the World’ on to the Lapps of Scandinavia. Similar concepts survive in Romanian folklore. For Chuckchee and Altaian shamans, the Pole Star is a hole in the sky through which they pass into the upper levels of the spirit world.

The Swastika Stone carving, Ilkley Moor

My attention shifted from these findings to the Swastika Stone. Nine cup-marks in a cross formation, surrounded by a whirling swastika groove, with a curious appendage to one arm. The north-south line of cups is aligned to less than a degree off magnetic north—pointing straight at the Pole Star. This connection was thrown a bit by the fact that the swastika appears to rotate in a clockwise direction, whereas the stars in the northern hemisphere go anti-clockwise round the pole, rising in the east and setting in the west. But if it was meant to be some sort of connection between the earth and the sky… Try pointing your finger and making an anti-clockwise circle in the air, following the stars. Imagine you are drawing a rotating disc. Now move your hand, the disc, downwards until you are looking at the ‘other side’ of the disc, looking down your finger instead of up it, but keeping it moving in the same direction. It will now appear to be moving clockwise. If the stone describes the base of a Sky Pillar, extending down from the Pole Star to the ground, the clockwise motion of the swastika makes perfect sense—it maps the motion of the stars down onto the rock. Cup-and-ring petroglyphs may be seen to echo the same image. The groove or ‘tail’ becomes the Sky Pillar, the cup the Pole Star, and the rings the paths of the revolving stars.

(I should note here that I’m not moving towards the general idea that cup-and-ring patterns are maps of stellar constellations. Perhaps some involved rudimentary attempts at this, but no one seems to have found accurate correspondences in any existing patterns. They seem to be more to do with the sky as an access point to alternate realities.)

The swastika is a near universal symbol that should be reclaimed from the Teutonic boot-boys of the mid-20th century. It is found in Buddhism and Hinduism, on goddess-related artifacts from Bronze Age Greece, and in British Celtic metalwork from the 1st century BCE. As a petroglyph, it is found in abundance in Val Camonica, northern Italy. Here there are 16 carvings almost identical to that near Ilkley, and 68 others with differing arm orientations, all spread over 27 rocks. They date from the 7th to the 1st century BCE. The symbol is also found in Sweden, along with many other designs based on the so-called Celtic Cross, the wheel with four spokes. "Across the Romano-Celtic world, from Britain to Czechoslovakia, the wheel was the symbol for the sky, representing either the sun alone, or the whole turning heaven." (Hutton) Most interpreters, indeed most surviving religions who still use it, see the swastika as a sun or fire symbol. Its connection with fire-oriented cults is strong, but the Ilkley carving is oddly positioned if it has anything to do with sun worship—it faces squarely north into the Wharfe valley. One possible sun connection exists, though. The ‘appendage’ cup, in relation to the central cup, is roughly aligned to the summer solstice sunrise in the northeast. The groove around it forms a sort of hook shape which, if turned in the same direction as the ‘spin’ of the swastika, would haul the solstice sun across the sky.

A Norse fylfot from the Isle of Man

The Three Legs of Man

On the Isle of Man a Norse cross from around the 10th century was found standing in a groove in a large round stone in a churchyard. At its bottom is a fylfot, or swastika-like design, incorporating four spirals bound together. Of course, the national symbol of Man, the Three Legs, is a three-legged swastika.

Bridget’s Cross

February 1st in Man, until recently, was Laa’l Breeshy, ‘Bridget’s Feast Day’ (‘Wive’s Feast Day’ in northern England). A parish church, a nunnery, and no less than seven of the ancient keeils or cells on the Isle are named after the Irish saint. A favourite form of Bridget’s Cross, central to Imbolc folk-rituals in Ireland, suggests a swastika.

Oddly, the Bible gives us a link between stones and ascension into the sky. Check out Genesis 28:10. Jacob spends the night in a place where he gathers stones together for pillows. "And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it." Vastly impressed by this place, he sets his pillow-stone up as a pillar, and anoints it with oil. He names the place Beth-el, ‘sacred stone’.

"Throughout the world, certain images of ascent were used—the shaman’s spirit could rise on smoke, ride along a rainbow, travel up a sunbeam and so on. But from northwest Europe to Tibet none was more ubiquitous than the ladder. . . . It shows the remarkably universal aspects of shamanism, then, that the image of a human figure atop a ladder occurs also in southern African rock art." (Devereux) The Zulu word form -qab associates trance-states with ascension and art: ukutiqabu, ‘recovering from fainting’; ukuqabela, ‘to climb to the top of a ladder, tree or mountain’; ukuqabela, ‘to paint’.

Ladder-like carvings on the Panorama Stone, Rombald’s Moor, opposite St Mary’s Church

In some cup-and-ring designs on Rombald’s Moor, the single groove ‘tail’ becomes a ladder-like image. The interlocking cup-and-rings may be series of levels of the spirit world penetrated by a shaman’s consciousness. These varied and sometimes messy patterns evoke shamanism still evolving, humans repeatedly grappling with deep trance states, plumbing the depths behind and ascending the heights above the rocks, attempting to haul descriptions of their journeys back to the earth.

If this shamanic idea holds water, the dating of the moor’s petroglyphs poses problems for the orthodox study of their significance. Most of the comparable Italian and Scandinavian glyphs are dated to the late Bronze Age or the Iron Age, the latter half of the 1st millennium BCE. Was there a Celtic or proto-Celtic shamanism that continued the traditions of much older cultures? Cup-and-rings appear in Neolithic tombs in Ireland. Paul Bennett, a local researcher who knows the moors here better than anyone I’ve met, believes the Swastika Stone could date to 2000 BCE or earlier—and its complexity suggests that the simpler cup-and-rings are even earlier. People lived on Rombald’s Moor from as early as 7000 BCE, so this is entirely possible.

More perplexing of all is the complex of shamanic associations constellated around Verbeia’s possible etymologies. Possibly language playing tricks, but they’re compelling tricks, evoking the vertical pillar up to the Pole Star… the ascent into the sky vortex, ‘a system viewed as swallowing up or engrossing those who approach it’… the vertebrae of the spine, the vertiginous whirling motion of a fiery climb to the vertex…

Liminality

I approached the Badger Stone once to do a brief ritual. As I neared it, it started to rain. I was reminded of my first visit, but I tried to shift my attention back to the present to focus on my ritual. After I started, I was soon forced back to the present. The rain pelted harder and harder, the wind grew more fierce, and at the peak of the ritual the rain turned into savage hail. It was blowing hard from behind me, hurting my head, and coming in at an almost horizontal angle, creating a tunnel-like effect before me—and an extremely conducive state of mind! I wound down, and the hail returned to rain. I left the site, and the rain stopped.

When the sun rose after I had the ‘shifting sky’ experience, just before it cleared the clouds on the horizon, it started to rain lightly. I jumped up to run for cover, but decided to stay and see the sun up with some chanting. It was beautiful. Glowing sun bursting up, gentle rain, and behind me a magnificent rainbow. I finished chanting, left, and the rain stopped. I kid you not.

Memories of these experiences shouted for attention when I read Ruth Whitehouse’s book on cave-based cults in Neolithic central Italy, Underground Religion. The apparent sacred significance of water in ‘abnormal states’ (stalactites and stalagmites, bubbling or hot water, steam) to these people led her to recognize the importance of ‘liminal’ (marginal, borderline, cross-over) states in their beliefs. Cave mouths, between dark and light… stalagmites, hard water… steam, gaseous water… and ultimately the shaman, between this world and the other, a mediator. For numerous shamanic cultures, the rainbow is a prime liminal phenomenon, produced in the conjunction of sun and rain, fire and water, bridging the gap. Fire and water. Brighid. Verbeia. Why should they preside over such contradictory elements?

Atl-tlachinolli, Aztec hieroglyph for burning water

The Aztecs, according to Laurette Séjourné’s Burning Water, believed that liberated consciousness could only be achieved through an internal bodily battle, a "blossoming war". Victory is attained through the union of opposites; the Aztec "vision of Earth as Paradise is based on the concept of the dynamic harmony between water and fire." Their hieroglyph for the "blossoming war" is called atl-tlachinolli, from atl, ‘water’, and tlachinolli, ‘something that has been burned’. This symbol always accompanies Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, the Aztecs’ mythic originator. Bird-and-snake figures are frequent in myths across the globe, and probably represent the union of chthonic earthly realms (snake) with the skies above (bird). The Aztec symbol for the union of heaven and earth is the cross, perhaps the most basic possible representation of liminality (cross-over). The quincunx (a cross formed by five points, the four cardinal points and a centre) is "the most frequently occurring sign in the Meso-american symbolic language." The number 5 represents the centre, the point where heaven and earth meet, and the quincunx also symbolizes the heart, "the meeting-place of opposed principles". Curiously, one of their symbols for the Fifth Sun (or Era), the Sun of Movement, the Era of Quetzalcoatl, the unifying "Law of the Centre", is a swastika-like glyph.

Aztec ‘movement’ hieroglpyh from Teotihuatecan

An Aztec qincunx

How all this spiritual cartography relates to human experience is crystallized for me in the Aztec vision of the heart as the centre, where opposites unite. We are impoverished if we can only feel one emotion at a time. All pure emotion, I find, is profoundly ambiguous. Polysemic. Anger and exhilaration, joy and bittersweet sadness, sexual bliss and terror, tender love and fear, weeping at orgasm… ‘Emotions’ are the words and concepts we tack on to the chaotic flows of psycho-biological energy around the body, flows which have no anchors and no true boundaries.

Potent emotion, when cut loose from judgement and prejudice, becomes ecstasy.

References

• T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey
• Foucault edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman
• The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles by Ronald Hutton
• Upper Wharfedale by Harry Speight
• The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas
• Pagan Celtic Britain by Anne Ross
• The Origins of European Thought by Richard Broxton Onians
• Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown
• The Prehistoric Rock Art of Argyll by Ronald W.B. Morris
• The Rock Pictures of Europe by Herbert Kühn
• One Medium, One Mind by Grant S. McCall
• Shamanism and the Mystery Lines by Paul Devereux
• The Aborigine Tradition by James G. Cowan
• The Goddess of the Stones by George Terence Meaden
• Shamanism by Mircea Eliade
• Burning Water by Laurette Séjourné

Photo © 1997 Carl Abrahamsson

An Interview with Phil Hine

by Gyrus

Forces of Nature

Gyrus: What was your first experience of nature, that you can remember, that made you think "Wow!" or got you interested in it? I don’t know, did you grow up in an urban area?

Phil: I grew up in Blackpool. So I think my first "Wow!" encounter with nature was seeing the high tide. We used to have high tides in Blackpool, a couple of people killed every year, that sort of thing. So I think my first contact with wild nature was looking at the sea, just thinking… that’s a very powerful thing.

Gyrus: Is that a vivid thing from childhood, or was it something you thought of just because of that question, thinking back?

Phil: No, that’s a vivid thing from childhood. I started swimming in the sea when I was about ten. For a long time it was a very, very powerful force for me. Still is, I just don’t get to go to the sea very often. Whenever I get the chance, I always enjoy looking out at the sea. I actually quite enjoy watching the waves in the sea, I think that comes from those early experiences. I’ve nearly come a cropper a couple of times when I was a kid, swimming in the sea, and I learned to respect it the hard way. It’s one of those things that I think struck me at a fairly early age, about how we’ve got this idealized picture of nature that actually is pretty far away from the reality of nature. I think that’s an awareness that’s stayed with me ever since.

Gyrus: And that was the main aspect of it that struck you, its wildness—

Phil: Its power, its uncontrollability, and the fact that we often take nature for granted. We take the sea for granted, but we can’t, we shouldn’t; we should respect it and be wary of it.

Gyrus: Has that fed into any of your magical work?

Phil: I think so, yeah. I think it’s taken me a long time to see it. Like a lot of people starting out in magic, I went into all the very heavy symbol systems. A lot of magical systems, you have these ideas for mapping out different elements and things like that, and they’re all kind of really nice and cut-and-dried… And water isn’t like that; to me water is wild and uncontrollable and can kill you if you’re not careful. And I think a lot of magical systems actually take you away from a direct contact with nature, because you’re not dealing with nature, you’re dealing with an idealized picture of it. So I think it’s taken me a long time to recover from all that, and to start to see how my relationship with nature comes into my magic, and comes out of my magic.

Gyrus: When did you first start twigging that difference, when you were into ‘symbol systems’ and doing magic—

Phil: Well, I think the first notable experience I had was when I was about nineteen or twenty. I was into the Cthulhu Mythos, which I’d got into purely from reading Lovecraft and thinking, "Oooh, this is git ‘ard magic, it’s things with tentacles that don’t go away when you try and banish them." My awareness of the relationship between nature and the Great Old Ones is something that’s only come out since. But the key experience I had with that was that I decided to go and do an invocation of one of the Great Old Ones on top of the highest peak in the area I was living in, which was Huddersfield. I was actually living in a village on the edge of the Pennines. So I went up the top of this mountain—it wasn’t like a hard climb or anything, I could get up it in my walking boots—to do this invocation at the dead of night. I did all the business, shouting and screaming… I think I cut myself, and did symbols on the stones, like you do. And as a result of that I got totally freaked out. I remember seeing—well, ‘seeing’ in inverted commas—seeing this beam of light coming out of the sky, coming down to where I was, so the next minute I was like "Fucking hell! I’m out of here!", and running down the mountain, seeing sheep with red eyes and being really freaked out by it. And I turned up at this friend of mine’s, who knew what I was into, about an hour later, and he said, "Oh, I told you this would happen, blah blah blah, don’t mess with them things."

But that really hit me. Again, it’s the difference between what you think it’s all about, and it what it actually is all about. And I think I was scared by nature. The fact that I was on my own up a… it was a beautiful view… I think I was hit by the raw panic of nature, y’know. Confrontation with the unknown.

Gyrus: Was that something you learnt to use and integrate? Do you think there’s still… whatever level you get to there’s a point where you’ll think "Shit!" and run away screaming?

Phil: Oh yeah. And I think I actually value that experience. One thing I used to talk about with Paul Bennett was—we were both into ghosts, spooky stuff—and I said, y’know, it’s alright dealing with haunted houses, ‘cos if there’s something horrible in the basement, you come out the basement, go in the living room and have a cup of tea. What happens if you meet something in the middle of Ilkley Moor in the night? You can’t run away! There’s nowhere to go, y’know. I think in that sort of situation I would be scared. It might not stop me doing whatever I wanted to do. It might, I don’t know.

This is a recurring thing coming out, that we idealize nature, that we make it safe. People bang on about ‘natural laws’, and yes, we know that the seasons have their cycles. but we can’t actually map them on a computer. They don’t conform to logic. I know from my magical studies that a lot of powerful magic is related to wild nature—not the nature of communities and the safety nets we put around communities, but out there in the wilderness. Anything can happen, you can meet gods, demons, spirits, horrible hairy things that leap out from behind bushes and scare you silly. And I think that’s a very powerful experience. I don’t go looking for it, but when it comes I’m… "Yeah, alright."

A couple of years ago I was walking through some woods in the rain with some friends, who were ecologist musicians I guess. And this friend of mine was saying, "Look at that tree! That’s Cthulhu that tree is!" It was late autumn, all the leaves had dropped off, and this tree was like a tentacled thing, pouring up from the earth. And I thought, "Yeah, he’s right." And I’ve started to think about the Great Old Ones like Cthulhu, and the other things that are all tentacles and hooves, as being, certainly on one level, our repressions of nature. Of this wildness. You go up into the Peak District on your own, and that wildness hits you. I think these beast/animal forms are our way of repressing all that we fear and don’t like about nature: its chaotic side, its frothy, bubbly, maggots under stones side, that we don’t quite like to deal with all the time—

Gyrus: Which is something that would obviously come from being an urbanized culture. But from what you say about never getting to a point where nature wouldn’t be able to freak you out, it would be a part of tribal cultures who live—as far as humans can—as part of nature. There would still be that beyond-human, untamable aspect of nature.

Phil: I think so. The Greeks… this is where the idea of panic comes from. One thing that Pan, I think, symbolized for the Greeks, and I think still does to a large extent, is the fear of the wilderness. People nowadays say, "Oh yes, Pan, he’s got a big dick," and they don’t look past that. But Pan is god of the mountains, the wild valleys, the sea even, and represents this fear that can strike you at any time. Which is something fairly understandable when you’re one little person all alone in a vast landscape. I read some time ago that when urbanized people started going out on trips into the countryside—it became popular at the beginning of the last century—people from the great urban conurbations, these delicate middle class ladies go out to the Lake District to have a look around, and they faint. Just because of the vastness, the expanse… they can’t take it. Algernon Blackwood wrote some very good horror stories in which the whole subtext is this thing of people confronted with the vast spirit of nature, the sense of place, being terrified by it. And I think that’s a very powerful experience, a very valuable experience.

Gyrus: Do you think that losing the sense of the value of that fear and awe is part of why we’ve tried to control nature so much, tried to box it out of our lives?

Phil: Yeah, I think so. One thing Christianity did was take fear and awe away from nature and put it ‘up there’ somewhere. All those monotheistic religions directed the attention to some hidden force up there who blasted you with a lightning bolt if you didn’t do what he said, basically, rather than leaving us prey to the wild forces, who can be placated, and sacrificed to, and worshipped, and spoken about in hushed voices, but you never quite know what they’re going to do. I think that’s something that’s been progressively happening for a very long time, and still is. A lot of magicians will talk about being able to control spirits, but the idea that spirits have an independent existence away from the magician is a bit… I tend to see spirits as independent entities, apart from the ones I’ve cobbled together myself for a specific ritual. But if I meet an elf in the woods, I’m not gonna say, "Oh, that’s just a part of my Self." It’d probably pull my nose off.

Gyrus: Paul [Bennett] talked about that. There are times when you go to places in the wilds, and come up against a sense of a force pushing you back. At first, you’re trying to get past your fear of it, and you think, "No, I’ll just push forward, stay here and overcome it." But in the end you come to realize you’ve got to respect that, and there’s sites, stones, parts of nature that either you’re not meant to be there yet, at that point in your life, or whatever. You have to respect that there are things out there to work with as things other than you. Not everything out there is something you’ve got to integrate into your Self and take full ‘control’ of.

Phil: I think that’s certainly true. If you venerate nature, as a pagan, then that entails not wandering about trying to impose your will on it because you think it’s the right thing to do. If you say, "I respect all living things," everything has a soul, or everything has a spirit, then you have to act from that premise. I think for a lot of people it’s just a word game they play with themselves. For some magicians I’ve known and worked with, and I’ve been like it myself, nature is like, "Oh, let’s go outdoors and do a ritual ‘cos it’d be nice outdoors." Without actually thinking, is it appropriate to do the ritual outdoors? Might something object? What are we getting into? A friend of mine called Barry the ex-Pedant did this wonderful little book called Finding Your Way In The Woods. I really like what he recommends—if you’re going to work in a place, go and see it in all the seasons, become part of its place… We had a conversation once about ecological hyperspaces. It got very technical, but I think what he’s saying is basically sound, that you have to become part of the landscape that you’re working with. Otherwise, you’re just imposing your will on it, and that’s not very far from Christians going around saying, "We’re the caretakers of the Earth." Or, for that matter, some New Agers saying, "We are the consciousness of the Earth." Again, that’s a way of saying that we’re top dogs, we can do what we like. You say to them, "Well there’s a lot more insects than there are of us, insects have got equal spiritual rights—if not more so, ‘cos there’s more of them and they’ve been around a bit longer." We’re just like a ‘blip’, on the scale of planetary evolution.

Models of the Earth

Gyrus: When did you get into what most people call ‘earth mysteries’, and how did you find the earth mysteries community?

Phil: I think I first got into earth mysteries when I first moved to Leeds in the late eighties. Meeting Paul, and Andy Roberts, and a few other people. That’s when I started to get into earth mysteries as a ‘thing’. I’d been aware of things like The Ley Hunter for a long time before that, but I first started to get into the ideas of people like Paul Devereux at about that time. I actually did a talk at the Ley Hunter’s Moot one year in Hebden Bridge. Paul had asked me to talk about my ideas about how magical spirits relate to the whole earth mysteries thing; ghosts and UFOs and the whole thing. I’d been doing a lot of work with spirits at the time, and what I did was got up on stage and presented my thesis. And in the middle of this I was hit with the appalling thought that nobody in the audience could follow what I was talking about. Not because it was ‘brilliant’ or anything, but because I was coming from a totally different paradigm. Some people liked it, and a lot of people didn’t.

I think one thing I got out of the earth mysteries community is that it’s like any other ‘genre’ with the whole occult paradigm; there’s a lot of suspicion between earth mysteries people and yer magician types. I think a lot of earth mysteries people want to be respectable, and magicians are very rarely respectable! It’s fine for them to talk about ley lines, but not fine for me to talk about Goetic demons. What I was trying to do was draw a connection between the two. It’s still something that interests me, but I wouldn’t call myself an ‘earth mysteries’ person. "I find the Earth a mystery," is probably a very trite answer to that. I do read stuff on it occasionally.

Gyrus: When you were heavily into it, what were your working models? You wrote ‘The Physics of Evocation’ [published in The NOX Anthology, New World Publishing, 1991]—

Phil: Yeah, that was the talk I did at Hebden Bridge that sank like a lead balloon. What I was interested in, and what I’m still interested in now, is how we construct meaning out of our experience. I had been corresponding at the time with a guy who was a ‘chaos mathematician’ magician, who got into this idea of information structures being localized in certain areas, brought about by various arcane processes, and that these information structures could be interpreted by people—I think Jenny Randles calls this the "Oz" Factor—as ghosts or UFOs or balls of light. One thing that Paul did tell me was that when he was mainly into UFO research, when he saw things he saw UFO-type phenomena, or entities that conformed to UFO-type phenomena. And when he crossed over into earth mysteries, he started having things that were more cognate with earth mysteries-type phenomena. And I find that very interesting. That made me think, well there’s obviously some level of interpretation here. That your belief system helps you interpret the experience in different ways.

So what I suppose I was interested in at that time was trying to come up with a general model of how we construct meaning out of our weird experiences. . . . It’s something that interests me from time to time, how people explain things. People bang on about energies, "I felt this weird energy." I think, well, did you actually feel a weird energy? You had a sensation, was it an energy? Was it just a tingling sensation?

What else I was getting into at the time, I was getting into Spiritualism, in a very kind of ‘objective’ way. I talked to this guy who had been to a Spiritualist meeting. He said that various spirits had manifested, including this person who wasn’t dead yet! How did they explain that? Well, they couldn’t really. That’s where their belief system started to shake at the edges. Again, I found that interesting. I’ve got this idea that people’s beliefs contribute towards a situation, but their explanation for how that situation arises isn’t necessarily a valid explanation. But having that explanation in their heads helps them have the experience.

City magic

Gyrus: You were obviously doing magic where you were living in the city at the time. Did you see any relationship between what you were doing out in the wilderness and what you were doing in your basement?

Phil: Yeah, I think so, because I don’t think you can ever get away from the wilderness—it creeps in to the city. You know this yourself from living in Leeds, it’s a very green city. We went out and did stuff in Meanwood Park, stuff along the Ridge, over in Chapeltown, everywhere. What I was also interested in for a long time was forming relationships, for want of a better term, with the spirits in cities. Not merely the ghosts of haunted houses, but maybe the ghosts of old industrial buildings. The weird things that hang around electrical sockets when nobody’s looking. I think how we frame and interpret and allow spirits to be there… "Oh yeah, there’s earth spirits and water spirits and fire spirits." But are there electrical spirits? Are there nuclear energy spirits? Are there spirits of gas and petrol and plastics and things like that? I was very caught by the realisation that we have lots of metaphors for dealing with magic in the outdoors, but we didn’t have very many metaphors for magic in the cities.

Gyrus: That idea of spirits for urban things came from traditional models of there being spirits of the woods or whatever? Did you find that and think, "Hang on, I’m living in a city and this is my environment."

Phil: Well it was more the realisation that I was living in a city and this is my environment, I’m working in the inner city with people whose problems are beyond my magic. Somebody comes to you and says, "I’ve got a bit of a bad knee, can you do some healing on me?" "Yeah, alright." Somebody comes along to you, as somebody did once, and says, y’know, "I need to detox. Got any ideas?" And you think… that’s not in the books! What the fuck do I do? So I was really aware that I was in unknown territory. That again relates to the whole nature/wilderness thing, ‘cos you have to keep putting yourself in unknown territory. In some ways every new situation is unknown territory once you take the blinkers off. And even when you’re down in the basement, some basements are really scummy places… you’re in a very enclosed space, but it’s also very dark, it’s a bit gloomy down there; again it’s a way of moving yourself somewhere… If someone’s told you there’s a spook in there, you’re walking into unknown territory. For me, I always get very physical reactions. My hairs’ll go up on the back of my neck or my eyes’ll start watering, so I go by very physical cues.

Chemignosis

Gyrus: Psychedelics—did they play a part in what you were doing when you first came into magic?

Phil: No, not really. I mean I’d done psychedelics before I started doing magic. I’ve never had a good relationship… I’ve done mushrooms and acid, and all that stuff, but I’ve never been able to get with it. I find it good for passive visions. I’ve had some great encounters with various goddesses, who I haven’t been working with or interested in but turned up during acid trips, and said various things to me, but then I forget them. But I’ve never been able to get good working relationships with psychedelics for magical work. I know people who do, and that’s fine, it’s just something I’ve never particularly been into.

Gyrus: A lot of people I know and a lot of people I’ve read hold a lot of store by idea that doing mushrooms out in nature is a totally different and more valuable experience, doing them where they grow for a start.

Phil: I went up to Arbor Low a few years ago with some TOPY friends, and we did a load of shroooooms, and I remember being really freaked out by the cows. This cow was stood at the other end of the… everybody else had gone off to do something and I was sitting near the campfire, and there was this cow staring at me, and it was coming forward and I thought, "Fucking hell! Freak out!"

I think for me, psychedelics cloud things. My most intense magical experiences have not been with psychedelics, that’s all I can say. If that’s what people want to do, it’s fine, but… it doesn’t work for me. All my really intense magical experiences… I think a few years ago in Austria—I think this is maybe a stress related experience—I had to go out into the local forest to abreact all this stress with this friend of mine. And I was walking through and… "What’s THAT?!" And she goes, "I can’t see anything, Phil." "Oh, it’s… it’s a spirit, dear." And I was seeing Pan-type figures and satyrs and old women coming out of trees, hallucinating totally, wildly, more intense hallucinations than I’ve ever had with any psychedelics. And that was just a physical thing for me. I was completely out of my head, y’know… "What’s that?" "I can’t see anything." "Oh it’s a spirit, ‘s alright, ‘s alright." That was just a thing that came out of my head as a result of the stress, and I needed to have that experience. But as I say, psychedelics just don’t do it for me.

Changes of scenery

Gyrus: This was in Austria? I’ve heard you’ve travelled to many different countries. Have you had much experience of the natural landscapes in other countries, what places around the world have really struck you?

Phil: Well in Austria it was rather restricted ‘cos we were staying in this 15th century castle that had a nice landscape around, so that was just that area. I’ve been to Italy, but I spent most of the time doing museum, art gallery things. When I was in America, spent some time driving through Arizona, and that was quite interesting. The vastness of the desert. I remember something that really struck me from flying over American cities is that things are crowded in. You fly over a British city and it’s all spread out like a big cow pat, but American cities are grid-planned, more modern. In America I got a sense of how vast the whole place is. I think that really helped my understanding of the difficulties people have in America making contact with each other. Britain is probably smaller than some states, y’know. And there I was travelling thousands of miles across America just to go and do a workshop. I think that was good ‘cos again it really got me into the vastness of the landscape, and how do we cross it, and how do we form relationships to it—

Gyrus: And how insignificant humans are in comparison—

Phil: Completely, yeah. I spent some time in Israel, and that was quite interesting because I very often get what I call ‘the call of Pan’, which is just like run off and go into the wilderness, which I had a few times. It was a problem ‘cos there were a lot of minefields around the area where I was staying… had to take great care not to go into the wrong field.

It’s almost like a feeling of renewal for me, when I really go up somewhere where there’s mountains, I feel revitalized. I think that’s from living so long in the north of England, I really love mountains. When I moved down to London I found it very difficult to feel at home here. I was in Leeds four or five years, and by the time I’d been there four or five years I had a sense of some connection, some vague relationship with the soul of what Leeds is. Bits of it I knew very well, other bits we were on nodding terms. But London is too big for me. Something I’ve noticed is that in Leeds I used to get things popping in all the time, for visits, or just breezing through, and now it just doesn’t seem to happen. Possibly because I’m in a totally different space, I’m working, and maybe I don’t allow that to happen ‘cos it disrupts the many things I’ve got to do. But I do miss it sometimes.

I have to keep on saying, yeah, well I did some really good stuff in Leeds, but on the other hand it was a totally crazy space, doing really mad stuff, and my life was pretty mad. So I allow myself to be nostalgic for that period, but think, "Nah, I wouldn’t wanna fuckin’ do it again."

I think London is definitely a weird place to live for a magician. I know there’s a lot of ancient sites around, there’s a lot of power, all this stuff going on on various levels, but I find it really difficult to connect to. I’m starting to get a bit of a connection to Brixton in the sense that sometimes I’ll go out at night and think, "Go home. Not safe…" Something bad is out there or something’s gonna happen. But it’s not as strong as it was up north.

Gyrus: Have you consciously tried to relate to that? The London Psychogeographical Association springs to mind all the time. Are you interested in that, ‘urban psychogeography’?

Phil: Not really. I occasionally get ‘twitches’, but I think my real problem is that I’m pulled in loads of directions all the time. So anything that comes into my field of information has to really battle for me to stay with it for a long period.

Magic and ecology

Gyrus: You did some eco-magic workshops here in Brixton. When did you get into—

Phil: Eco-magic? Again I think this was ‘the Leeds experience’. As I recall we were sitting in… Fat Freddy’s Café?

Gyrus: Where’s that?

Phil: Obviously not there anymore. It was Call Lane, down near where—

Gyrus: Oh yeah, what was it called?

Phil: Fat Freddy’s. It was a really nice café, it was like a hut almost, with space for about thirty people in. And I was sitting in there with a bunch of the other Leeds magi, and we were talking about Starhawk and all this eco-magic stuff. I don’t know who thought it up, I know I was there when it came up. There’s an apocryphal story that during the Battle of Britain all the witches of England got together and did massive rituals involving self-sacrifice, to keep the Germans at bay. It was suggested that we do something like that again, a mass ritual with as many people as we can get involved, to raise awareness of the ecological crisis. And this became known as ‘Heal the Earth’, this was about 1987, I met Paul through this. I printed out a flyer—do you want me to see if I can find it?

(pause to rummage for flyer)

Gyrus: I think the road protest movement was in its early days then. I suppose Dragon—

Phil: Oh it was well before Dragon. 1987, summer solstice. We called it ‘Heal the Earth’ just as a name-tag, none of us liked the idea that you could actually heal the Earth. I think that’s a bit presumptuous. But the whole point of the mass energy-raising, as it became known, was to direct a pulse into the human mass-consciousness, just to raise awareness that there’s a crisis. Our reasoning was, until people are aware of ecological issues, they’re not going to do anything about it.

Gyrus: Your sense of this being a crisis, was this from intuition, feeling, or information from—

Phil: Nah, I think I was just a increasing awareness that we’re killing the planet. I think that’s something I’ve probably been aware of for quite a long time. I’d just read one of Starhawk’s books, and she’s very into political magic. Paganlink Network was getting going and there was a strong political magic thing within Paganlink Network. And I think all these things came to a point in Fat Freddy’s Café. So we ran around and designed the leaflet you’ve seen, and then we just put it out. Got people to photocopy it and take it down to festivals, I think somebody took some over to France. Me and my girlfriend at the time, and this other friend of ours, Colin, went up to the Buck Stones—

Gyrus: Backstone?

Phil: Buck Stones [on Ilkley Moor]. Not the stone circle, just a little group of rocks that’s been ritually used for a good few years by the locals; and we went and drummed for a few hours on the day, which was really nice. I got this sense of this energy going shhhhp! We chose the Ace of Cups symbol, the idea of all the energy pouring into or out of the cup.

Something I’ve noticed in recent years, because people doing these mass rituals, they’ve become really popular—I’m not saying we were the first—is that people very often say that what you have to do to raise energy is do this. This particular ritual or this particular meditation. We left it totally open, we said you can drum, sing, chant, fuck, do a ritual, whatever, but this is the ‘statement of intent’, if you like. We did that one in ’87, then we did another one in… I think we did three all in all, but I think the others were a bit later on. For me that ritual was really interesting because it was an articulation of… Again, a strange idea in magic is if personal politics and magic come together, which now I think is more accepted, but where I was at that time it was something that people . . . y’know, "magic is above politics" and all that stuff. So for me it was a great lift, and then that gave me a tremendous ego-boost, in terms of what you can do if you set your mind to it. For me one shah of the by-products of that ritual, that event, was Pagan News. I thought if we can do this, we can do lots of other things, and Pagan News took off soon after that, the next year.

Gyrus: And that was set up with the intention behind that ritual in mind, or what is just the inspiration that you could actually do this magazine?

Phil: I think the inspiration was… I was a great thing getting people from all disparate backgrounds, Wiccans, Earth Mysterians, Hippies, Thelemites, y’know, cooperating. I think what it was for me was this sense of reaching out to people. Just very simple things, like I went round to this guy’s house, Rodney Orpheus, who ended up doing Pagan News with me, and we talked to him about this Heal the Earth idea, and he went, "That a fuckin’ great idea!" And that feedback, that warmth, I think was a really powerful thing for me. Somebody coming back and saying, "Yeah, let’s go for it." That is a tremendously empowering thing. It wasn’t like, "Oh we’ll do this and that’ll lead to that and that’ll lead to that," but in hindsight that’s what happened.

Network activism

Gyrus: So that was an inspiration as to how what people would call networking nowadays would work, rather than the traditional hierarchical structure of magical orders?

Phil: As I say, I was getting involved with Paganlink Network at the time, it was starting off, in embryonic form, around that period, and it started off the next year. I remember meeting Rich Westwood around that time, and talking to him, and he was one of the… I would say he founded Paganlink Network, some people would disagree with that, but I think he was a main man—certainly he was for me.

What I did between Heal the Earth and Pagan News was this weird project called the Lincoln Order of Neuromancers.

Gyrus: Come again?

Phil: Well, I had some friends in Lincoln! What we were doing was poking fun at the whole Chaos scene at the time. We produced this free ‘chain book’. The idea was we sent out this unstitched A5 booklet, and said to people, "This is a chain book! If you like it, stick something in it and give it to a friend!" And that went really well, we had some people writing applications to join the Order, which of course didn’t exist, which was quite funny. I wrote some articles under various pseudonyms, and we created this whole mythos around this crazy magical order; stupid things, but also quite interesting things, I hope. And the idea there was to have a bit of a laugh, and to also sneak some interesting ideas in, under the counter. And that worked really well, in terms of networking and stuff, and again I think that helped me get the idea of Pagan News off the ground—let’s do something else! Let’s upset some more people, let have fun, let’s do things, y’know? With Pagan News, various ‘luminaries’, who shall remain nameless, said, "Oh you’ll never do a monthly pagan magazine, it’s impossible." So I did it.

Gyrus: Had it not been done?

Phil: Probably.

Gyrus: What’s this cynicism about doing a monthly pagan magazine, ‘cos there’s so few pagans or what?

Phil: No, ‘cos it’s so difficult, you don’t usually have to have a turnaround in three weeks. The first thing we did was a thing called Northern Paganlink News, which started out as a four-page newsletter. And after about six issues… we were doing silly things like we’d gone into that college—near Headingley? Not the university… can’t remember the place. Anyway, we’d go in there and say to the guy who ran the photocopier, "Look the other way!", and come out with about 2,000 leaflets. Again there was the networking element, and we were sending these… it got silly, like we were sending two or three thousand of these leaflets all over the north of England. Eventually we decided we were getting so much good material from people that we decided we’d mutate it into a monthly news magazine. Costing 30p, back in them days! That was a lot of fun—it’s very, very hard work. Agitpress, the Chumbas [Chumbawumba] people did the printing for us. We did a ritual to find equipment that… worked very well.

Gyrus: So doing the magazine was part of… what magic you were doing? Crowley compared doing a ritual to publishing a book—you have your intent, the printers are your ‘servitors’ or whatever…

Phil: What magic was I doing? Anything and everything. Rodney was an ardent Thelemite, so I was doing a lot of Thelemic magic with him. I was unemployed, totally busy and stressed out all the time, doing whatever magic I wanted. Things I would not do nowadays, purely ‘cos I don’t have the space and time to recover afterwards.

(tape gets turned over)

The birth of Chaos

Gyrus: … how did it begin?

Phil: Well I wasn’t around at the time. I first came across Chaos Magic in 1980, something like that. I picked up the fabled white edition of Liber Null [by Pete Carroll] at Sorceror’s Apprentice. And I thought, "Ooh, this sounds good." I didn’t actually do much about it there and then, but then I finished my course at Huddersfield at the poly and moved back to Blackpool for a bit, and, quite by synchronicity, managed to contact one of Blackpool’s witch covens. I got into doing things with them, in a modest witch coven, which was very interesting. Actually, on a side note, going back to nature again, what I always remember is that Kathy, the High Priestess of the coven, whenever she wanted to impart something that was particularly important or significant, we’d always go outside. We’d even go and sit in the garden under a bush, ‘cos she had this massive garden, and we’d play like kids in the bush or something, or we’d go for a walk on the sand dunes. Nature was creeping back into my life then, in a magical way.

Gyrus: When I went to this conference at the university in Leeds called ‘Thinking Alien’, the cutting edge of academia, or the strands of academia looking into stuff like UFO phenomena, stuff like that. You know the Rupert Beckett building? You walk up the stairs and the lecture theatres are like fucking cattle stalls or something that you go into. There was some good stuff, but it was what turned out to be one of the last really nice sunny days of the year. And I was sat in this lecture hall, listening to this guy drone on, and there were no windows at all. And I just started thinking, how much of the way learning is structured in our society is to do with total ‘boxed-offness’ from nature? And who would be bothered to follow what this guy was saying if we were sat in the park, and there’s a frisbee game over there and you go, "I’ll go and play that." I just thought it was interesting that when it was something important that she wanted to impart to you, you went outside; and my thought about what was happening here was that what this guy was saying wasn’t terrifically important at all, and the fact of having this ritualized total enclosed environment which forced you to focus on what he was saying—which was of very little consequence. Sorry, carry on!

Phil: Yeah, so I was with the Blackpool witches and I got back into Chaos Magic at that point I think, probably as a counterpoint to what I was doing with them. Kathy said, "What’s this Chaos Magic all about then? Go and find out about it and come back and tell us." So I got more interested in it. That didn’t really go anywhere for a few years, and then in the mid-eighties I went up to York to study occupational therapy. I thought, "Right, no magic, let’s go and get a degree and fuck off and get a good job." Famous last words sort of thing…

Phil: The coven I was in—I think this probably explains things a bit—the coven I was in was very, very secretive. You couldn’t wear magical jewellery, you couldn’t have your books out, you had to have them under your bed in a box, and if anyone else started talking to you about magical things you had to… [??] And some way I broke out of this and just started gabbing at people. I had a lot of friends who were kind of like whacky punks, that was the sort of scene I was moving in, and they really got grabbed, excited by the idea of Eris, goddess of chaos. So pretty soon I was stopping doing the Wiccan rituals, I was keeping up and doing rites with Eris, goddess of chaos, and having all kinds of weird experiences with that. So this was Chaos Magic coming more into my main thing I suppose. And that all culminated in… there were two Eris rites, there was one that I actually did with the Wiccans, who’d moved to Macclesfield by that time. And that ended up with the High Priestess sitting on the floor of the room going: (rhythmic whooshing noises). And the next day I had a channelled communication from Eris—on Stockport station! Place of pilgrimage… And then I did the same sort of ritual again with a woman I was working with at the time, and I just had the most incredible ecstatic experience that was like becoming part of what Grant Morrison calls ‘the supersphere’—this realisation that you are linked with the macrocosm… just seeing all these lines of connected ideas and inspirations and streams of thought all merging into a point, somewhere above the top of my head… I staggered away from that.

I think that was important for me ‘cos then I stopped going along with other people’s prescriptions, and just did whatever felt good at the time. Which I think probably defines a lot of my approach to Chaos Magic. ‘Don’t do what other people tell you to do; go with it.’ I was reading a Dion Fortune book, something I’d probably read about a dozen times, and I started crying, I was really affected by this… crappy 1930s novel! And that lead into a whole series of working with Isis, that I found tremendously powerful. I went through a five-year trip of working almost exclusively with goddesses: Isis, Eris, Babylon, Ma’at, all these goddesses that are related to different symbol systems. And that evolved into my own personal system. So my Chaos Magic was kind of like bubbling along by the time I got to Leeds. As more stuff was percolating out about Chaos Magic, and as Leeds was basically ‘Chaos central’ in the mid to late eighties, I started meeting various other ‘names’ on the scene, and getting more interested in it. I’d be round at someone’s place, rattling on about Chaos Magic, and somebody’d say, "So what’s it all about then?" And somebody said it to me once in the right mood and I wrote this little booklet, Condensed Chaos. And that was my first move towards becoming associated, as an individual, with the Chaos current.

We had a little group in Leeds called MC Medusa & The Hydra’s Teeth, that went out and did silly, chaotic, whacky rituals. Leeds was crazy, we had The Hydra’s Teeth at one point; I joined AMOOKOS, the tantric cult, clan, tribe, whatever you want to call it, around that time; I joined the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the Cthulhu fanciers; and there was the whole Paganlink thing, I was involved in so many different magical streams all together. When I moved to London, as was probably inevitable, I hooked up with (hushed voice) the Illuminates Of Thanateros. It was kinda strange for me, ‘cos I’d already placed myself, not particularly as a Chaos Magician, but I’d actually written Condensed Chaos and Chaos Servitors about a year before, but I just couldn’t afford to get them published. So after those two, and then Prime Chaos, then Condensed Chaos, and now people say, "Phil Hine, Chaos Magician"; which I don’t think is true at all.

Gyrus: Any label that you’d like to attach to yourself at the moment?

Phil: No, not really… Labelling is a funny thing, because people very much go by what you write, and when I did the shamanic trilogy back in the eighties, it was, "Phil Hine, Urban Shaman." And I never at any point said that I regarded myself as a shaman. But that’s just the label you get.

Gyrus: Have you used the labels people have associated with you?

Phil: Yeah, sometimes I think you have to. But I try and make it very plain to people that this is just a temporary structure. People say to me, "What are you into at the moment?", and for the past couple of years it’s been more Tantra than anything else, although I’ve had a dip into the Northern tradition, and been doing stuff with Thor and Freyja. I think my problem… well, probably where people find it difficult with me is I’m into so many different things all the time that they have trouble pinning me down.

I’ve always hated labels, though. When I was in the witch coven, I’d done a lot of work with Kali, and people’d come and say, "Ah, Phil’s a priest of Kali," and I’d say, "No I’m fuckin’ not!" I actually got an email the other day from a woman saying, "I’m writing to you with a problem because in the circles I move in you’re the most famous Chaos Magician in the world." And I just thought, "Urrghh!" I don’t want to be a Chaos Magician really… don’t want to be known as a Chaos Magician, just that. You get that label applied to you and then people have a fixed idea of what Chaos Magic is—

Gyrus: Which is against the idea of what Chaos Magic is in the first place, a fixed idea…

Goddesses and gender

Gyrus: The goddess period you went through, relating this back to nature… What is your view on why nature, the Earth, has been feminized so much? People bring up the Egyptian Geb, god of the earth, and Nuit, goddess of the sky. How do you relate to those sorts of polarities?

Phil: I think that’s a very complex question, and I can’t give you a pat answer. I think on one level we tend to feminize the Earth because of all the stereotypical stuff. Gordon McLellan and I were discussing this whole idea of, when people says archetype, do they really mean stereotype? I think there’s a hell of a lot of that when we talk about mythic structures and magic and symbolism. Y’know, the feminized Earth is nurturing, warm, enveloping, and all those lovely, nice, safe, controllable female qualities. I think people have problems with the Earth as like, well she’s got her period, and a volcano’s gonna erupt and kill thousands of people. Was it Jeanette Robbins who did this book on sun goddesses? [Actually it's The Sun Goddess by Sheena McGrath - Ed.] She really blew open the whole thing of lunar goddess / sun god. I forget the woman’s name but she did this marvellous book on sun goddesses which blew that whole thing wide open. It’s almost like we can accept… it’s like we put gods in little boxes. People say Pan is a sex god. But as I said, he’s related to the sea. You think of him—shaggy hooves, big prick, horns—you don’t think of that as a sea god, but he is a sea god as well.

I don’t know, I often feel that the myths that are used nowadays to describe our experiences of the world are, of course, being interpreted. So when we talk about the "Earth Goddess", we’re not actually really relating to an Earth goddess in the same way that people were two thousand years ago, obviously not. Also what gives me a slight problem about the whole Earth Goddess thing is its anthropomorphism. Y’know, why should the sacred figure of the Earth be a human? There’s an artist called Alistair Campbell who did an interpretation of the Great God Pan, which I always thought was marvellous, this things was half-insect, half-mammal, half-reptile. And I thought yeah, that strikes me as a viable picture of the soul of the planet. Humans are like that (does ‘tiny’ hand gesture) on the planet, compared to all the other bits of the biomass. So why should we have human representatives to deal with the planet itself? We’re not dealing with the planet itself, we’re dealing with an idealized picture again.

I like goddesses. I think I’ve a much stronger affinity to goddesses than I do with gods. But I’m a polytheist. People say there’s the ‘One Goddess’. That sounds too much like Christianity to me. I say, "No! There’s lot’s of different goddesses, and they’re all different." And you can’t say all the goddesses are One Goddess. You can as a limited metaphor, but only up to a point. You can’t really say that Isis is Kali. Yes, they have things in common, but they’re different. It’s like saying you and me are the same entity ‘cos we both wear boots—it’s stupid.

I don’t know—how does that sound?

Gyrus: Yeah, it’s one of those things that’s so complex it’s too easy to give—

Phil: A pat answer to. Well it’s just my immediate thoughts on the subject.

Gyrus: One thing that’s always struck me is, I think Robert Anton Wilson mentions it in Ishtar Rising, that however much you try to take a objective, relativistic view of the way humans have related to divinities, there seems to be something that brings origins, or basic religious ideas back to the feminine because of our biological position. Which is, we spend the first nine months of our lives inside a woman.

Phil: I think that’s definitely an important thing. Yeah, I think that’s something very central. I remember when I was at a coven meeting, many years ago, I saw one of Kathy’s youngest daughters go up like that to her mum, and I thought yeah, we do that all the time when we’re invoking don’t we? "Pick us up, mummy!"

Yeah, there’s definitely deep socio-cultural, psychological, biological levels to everything. It’s just so hard to sort out the different threads. And it’s so easy to minimalise them and make something less vast and full of awe by saying, "Oh, it’s the Goddess, innit?" Because some conceptualisations I’ve seen of the Goddess just strike me as… Laura Ashley. ‘Laura Ashley paganism’.

Something I found interesting in the Tantric mythological system is that the goddess is sometimes very crone-like, what we in the West would see as crone-like goddesses. Like Bhairavi, who’s the dark goddess who’s related to the dark side of Siva. She rips people’s heads off and has them for tea. And she’s most often worshipped as a young girl. Which kind of breaks down that maiden-mother-crone structure which is so prevalent in Western forms of magic. Y’know, you can have the maiden, you can have the mother, you can have the crone. But to have the ‘crone’ as a 16 year-old girl I think breaks out of that, and for me that’s interesting. Again, we’re dealing with stereotypes as much as archetypes.

Gyrus: What’s you’re working definition of the difference between them then, stereotypes and archetypes?

Phil: Well since we only talked about it two minutes ago I don’t really have one! I was very, very into Jung for some years, and then I sort of went off him in a big way. Something I’ve re-read fairly recently is June Singer’s book Androgyny: Towards a New Theory of Sexuality, where she’s talking about the divine archetype of the Androgyne. But I noticed she’s very, very selective about who she ‘gifts’ with embodying that archetype. What I don’t like about that whole ‘searching for archetypes’ thing is that you get very selective about it. I’ve read books on… I read some awful book a few years ago on homosexual archetypes, and there was ‘the sissy’ and ‘the pansy’, and then there was the ‘male’ one. And it’s obvious that this writer’s looked at homosexuals through stereotype sunglasses, and said, "Oh that’s that archetype, and that’s that archetype." What I find suspicious about anything like that is using a spiritual or mythological argument to justify not really thinking about what you’re looking at. Which I think is something we do very, very easily.

Gyrus: I’ve just borrowed that June Singer book off Paul, got about quarter of the way through it. It struck me that from the outset she seems to—as far as I’ve got—see homosexuality or bisexuality, in relation to androgyny, as ‘weak’, and not quite the ‘proper’ form of androgyny. Androgyny is this idealized female-within-male, male-within-female thing, but always within a biological male / female setting.

Phil: I was looking at this whole androgyny issue recently, ‘cos I’ve been doing some research into the androgynous form of Siva-Sakti, Ardhanarisvara. I was thinking, my big issue about this whole androgyny thing is it’s very, very limited in what we accept as androgynous. I mean, Ziggy Stardust is an acceptable androgyne. Is a woman with a beard an acceptable androgyne? A very pretty looking female-man is an acceptable androgyne, but is a butch diesel-dyke with a pasted-on moustache and shades? This whole androgyny thing is very much enmeshed in culture and what is acceptable in culture. We can accept a man who looks like a woman, but a woman who behaves too much like a man is still a problem. I was reading a book called Androgynes, Women & other Mythical Beasts by an anthropologist called, I think, Wendy O’Flaherty, something like that. And she really goes into the whole thing in India, about how it’s no problem for the men to become women, mythically and culturally, but woman behaving too much like men is a no-no. So I think this whole androgyny issue is very culture-bound.

It’s an interesting model, but I don’t think it says anything new. To propagate it, you need to unfairly establish stereotypes, like the fact that women are intuitive and men are logical. Says who? One thing the feminist critiques, like Mary Daly and other people, one thing I got from these feminist critiques is that these male and female attributes are culturally defined. So if you start projecting them onto archetypes and gods and goddesses, we’re in for a bit of a strange time of it.

Breaking a lack of taboos

Gyrus: The big thing I was going to ask about Tantra was related to the idea of being culture-bound. There’s a traditional Tantric rite—I can’t remember the specific name of it—the five—

Phil: The Five M’s.

Gyrus: Am I right in saying it’s the conscious breaking of Hindu or Indian taboos?

Phil: It does involve that, yeah.

Gyrus: As far as practising Tantra in the cultures, subcultures, we live in goes, that must be difficult.

Phil: Extremely.

Gyrus: ‘Cos there’s so many taboos that have just gone out the window.

Phil: If you’re a young Brahmin caste priest coming to me for a Tantric initiation, I’ll say, "Well, get a bottle of wine, some beef, and I’ll get a couple of girls from the port in the town, and we’ll meet down the cremation ground." It would be like ultra-horror, because for a Brahmin in the fourteenth century, wine, beef, shagging low-caste women, and just going down the cremation ground would be big taboos. Nowadays we think nothing of wining dining and fucking, it’s like eating meat and drinking wine are a prelude to the sex. It’s not a taboo anymore.

I think the big problem in… My feeling about Tantrik magic is I’m not trying to recreate what some fourteenth-century Tantrik did. I’m trying to take principles and ideas and apply them to what’s relevant to me, here, now. I see an important element of Tantra being related to confronting your own personal taboos, your own personal boundaries, realizing the things that hold you back and trying to do something about it. It’s called ‘Klesha-Smashing’. Kleshas are knots, or fetters if you like, that bind us, that stop us from experiencing the world in a more spontaneous, natural way. For me as a man in late twentieth-century Western culture, I would totally [??] Kleshas. I mean, some things I’m not bothered about; some things I am bothered about.

I was reading the magical diaries of a friend of mine the other day, and he was saying that you can never actually decondition yourself fully, because you’re always going to pick up new bits of conditioning, that are just as nonsensical and limiting as the lot you’ve just got rid of. And I think he’s right there. I’ve met people who’ve said, "I’m completely deconditioned!" And I think, "Hmm, amazing! Worship!" I don’t have a sense that I can ever reach that [??] state.

Gyrus: What, delusion?

Phil: Well I am saying that I suppose. For me deconditioning is a continual battle of, I suppose, understanding myself. And, as an extension of that, understanding how I relate to the world. I think for me the core of the Tantrik magical philosophy is to engage with the world, to relate to the world in as joyful a state as possible. Not so much ‘stress-free’ in the everyday sense, but to relax and have a nice time in the world. And I think for me that involves a lot of Klesha-Smashing.

Gyrus: In whatever tantrik work you’ve done, as far as whatever culture you see yourself as part of, are there any specific taboos that you’ve tried to work with in a tantrik way? People might not have realized our taboos ‘cos we might consider ourselves a ‘taboo-free’—

Phil: Well something I would say about Chaos Magic, which I think is related, is that I got over my total fear of talking to strangers through Chaos Magic. Again, these deconditioning techniques. How I did it was that I was very shy and retiring as a kid—I think one of the reasons I got into magic was I had very few social skills, a very low opinion of myself. "Get the bastards!" basically. I was certainly like that in my late teens. By the time I was in my mid-twenties I’d realized that I wasn’t going to have a very nice time of it if I kept this up! So when I moved to York and started at the College of Ripon & York St John, I deliberately put myself in a position where I would have to talk to large groups of people. I remember the first time I stood up in the big college student’s union meeting and said something. I had a prepared speech and my voice was like, "eh-eh-eh-eh," I was so nervous. Then I had to get up again and say something else, and of course by that time I was actually annoyed and all fired up, I found it a lot easier. By putting myself into a position of becoming student union rep for my department, I had to talk to the student’s union, the Academic Board, the lecturers and the staff and the teachers and the students and all that. In the course I was doing in occupational therapy I had to relate to various groups of people.

And in the end I moved from—I’m not saying I did it overnight, a few years I think—I moved to a position where I actually enjoyed getting up and talking to fifteen hundred people, y’know? It wasn’t a source of worry and stress and "Oh shit!" anymore, it was actually something I enjoyed doing. To me that was an extremely powerful personal transformation. That I think, for me, is something that I’ve seen as a strength both in the Chaos and in the Tantrik approach, in that you identify what for you is a Klesha, something that binds you, and you try and, not necessarily overcome it, but release yourself from it. (rustling as a cigarette pack is opened) I’m gonna try hypnotherapy, I think, to give up smoking. ‘Cos for a long time I thought, "No, I can do it!" Y’know, mighty magician, True Will, and all that sort of thing. Then I thought, well, maybe I can’t do it, maybe I need somebody to help me. Which is itself, I think, something that it’s very easy to ignore, that you need—

Gyrus: That would be a taboo within certain sections of magical currents—self-reliance leading to a taboo against… acknowledgement that you need help.

Phil: A lot of these taboos are little things but they’re important. One of my other much-used examples is getting over my fear of maths. I was a ‘maths-shy’ kid when I was at school. In fact my parents actually worked out that I was always ill on Mondays ‘cos I had a triple maths period. I studied statistics when I did psychology… I really liked the theory of statistics, but dealing with the numbers was just hell. How I eventually started to get around this was, by about—we’re talking fairly recently—by about the nineties, when I moved down to London, I got so much into computers, but I had this real ego thing—y’know, gimme a piece of software and I can do it, make it work, doesn’t matter what it is, I can get it to do something. I was given the job of writing some fairly mathematical databases that would work out things like author’s royalties and VAT returns and that sort of shit. I can remember actually dancing around the office because I’d successfully written this piece of code that would automatically work out VAT on a statement. "Yes! I’ve broken through something here…" And OK, it’s not like a really stunning example, but for me, having had that previous twenty-odd years of not wanting to do anything at all related to maths or figures or money, it was a real powerful thing for me. I think often the really powerful taboos are the ones that don’t look really big.

What I did there was use a powerful and positive ego-drive to overcome—like a strength to overcome a weakness, which I think is a good way to do it. I sometimes say to people, try and write down your strengths, write down ten strengths that you’ve got, and write down ten weaknesses. And then see if you can use the strength to deal with the weakness. Not to ‘overcome’ it or to ‘break through’, but to… to undo yourself from it. I really like this idea of Dr Christopher Hyatt’s Undoing Yourself, I think that’s a really nice phrase. It sounds better than overcoming. It’s not really about control, it’s more like shifting the goalposts, and I think shifting the goalposts is a really powerful magical technique. It’s like suddenly you open up the door and go, "Ooh, didn’t know this was here!" Go through it…

Gyrus: I think this is related to smoking, I’ve just been reading T.A.Z., Hakim Bey’s thing. And that’s a social, cultural model, but I think it can very well apply to the personal level, in that his idea is that a total all-out assault on the State will just lead to total crushing over whatever movement’s trying to oppose it.

Phil: Or that movement will itself become the next—

Gyrus: Yeah. So let’s not go for the idea of this turn-around revolution point. Even though that’s not a viable option in this situation, we can try to enjoy what we envision as what we’re going to enjoy after that point now, as a means of getting towards that state. I think I’ve tried to do that with thinking, "Shit, smoking’s holding me back so much, I’m never gonna progress until I give up," looking forward to that point of giving up. And then thinking, "Fuck no!" Just getting on with what I want to get on with, within that framework, and break it down from within.

Phil: I really enjoyed that Bill Hicks tape, what he said about smoking. We actually borrowed the video from a friend and he said, "Smokers! I’ve got a message for you: non-smokers die every day!" I like that.

I like Bey’s stuff ‘cos he’s really into the idea of partying, when he talk about potlatch and things. That whole ‘immediatism’ concept really grabbed me when I was writing Prime Chaos—"Yeah, this is a ball I can run with." The idea of play. Something kind of along the same lines that I picked up when I was in Leeds was Lionel Snell’s book… Thundersqueak: Confessions of a Right-Wing Anarchist, which I thought was brilliant. A really good piece of advice he had there for dealing with state bureaucracies, which I actually did try out practically in the Leeds DSS office—

Gyrus: Be really nice.

Phil: Yeah, to be really nice—and it works! If you go in there and scream and shout, they get that all day, so they just react in that normal way, as you do. But go in there and be really nice, and beg, and say, "Look, these forms are really difficult," and if you can do it, burst out crying. And I tried that, I went in there and was really nice and polite, and "I want you to help me." Somehow I managed to get these really burnt-out DSS workers to process my claim—in quite good time.

Another thing I find interesting about magic is the way people wall magic off: it’s something to be done outdoors, in your bedroom or in the basement… You don’t tend to do it in the DSS office or in a bus queue or when you’re standing on the tube train platform. Magic becomes an enclosure that you escape to. I can identify with that because I’ve certainly done that for quite a few years, and there is this thing in a lot of magical textbooks, the idea of your mundane life and your magical life—and the two don’t ever cross. I say, "Well, there’s just life." Magic doesn’t stop when you take your robes off or put your trousers back on.

The magical borderline

Gyrus: How does that affect your attitudes to banishing before and after rituals?

Phil: I think… That’s what you’re told isn’t it? "You have to banish before and after a ritual…" I think a lot of magical skills, and we are talking about skills here… again I think it’s interesting, thinking about learning, because if you learn to work with wood, if you learn to be a carpenter, you pick up a skill, but at some point you’ve stopped doing what your teacher has told you and you’re doing it yourself, you’ve made the skill your own. I think magical skills are exactly the same kind of process. Yeah, you follow people’s books and courses and things, but at some point you must make the skill your own.

My take on banishing is: there’s some times when you have to banish, there’s some time when you don’t. And it’s up to you to work out when, I can’t tell you. I think on the whole it’s a good idea, but there are situations when it’s not appropriate. There’ll be situation where you can’t banish. I’ve always found the idea of going out into the middle of the woods and doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram to be somewhat ridiculous. It just doesn’t feel right to me. What am I trying to banish? I’m not trying to banish, in fact I’m inviting things to come and watch and play, and have a dance and sing. Banishing, again, I think there’s this whole thing about closing off and shutting down, and putting your bowler hat on and taking up your umbrella and walking back into normal reality. For me the idea of a barrier between the magic and the normal isn’t really there anymore. It’s like the fairy stories where the fairy castle is a step away, if you can find out how to do the step, and for me the magic / mundane thing is a similar thing, and it creeps in when you’re not looking. Something that has become increasingly important for me is looking at the whole model of Chaos in terms of your everyday life. And how much one single chance encounter can colour your entire day, your week, your lifetime, y’know? Something creeps in that you’re not expecting, and it can throw you off or throw you on for the rest of the day. It can as simple as somebody smiling at you across the street, and you think, "I’m gonna have a real nice day today!"

Gyrus: If you take that idea of bringing your magic into your life in general. without these ‘bookends’, how does that affect your relationships to people, acquaintances, work colleagues, whatever, who have got no concept of magic whatsoever. It’s an easier thing to blend into your own life when the main people in your life are involved in magic, and understand those types of interaction—

Phil: People know I publish books on magic at work, one or two have even bought them which is really nice, but I don’t tend to talk about it too much. It’s a weird thing when you’re in publishing, ‘cos we’re turning out books every week, and I’ll maybe pipe up and say, "Oh look, I’ve got a new anthology out," and they all go, "Oh wow," y’know. But I tend to go on about magic at work. People who are interested, I’m quite happy to talk to them ’til I’m blue in the face and they’re completely bored with me talking about it. If they’re not interested in then yeah, that’s fine, it’s no problem for me. All I ask of them is they don’t bore me with their own little peccadillos. I don’t want to hear about cricket…

I’ve started doing a lot of sigil magic at work, which is basically, I get an idea for a sigil, put it on a post-it note, and just gaze blankly at it when I’m completely zapped from typesetting all day. Then the post-it note falls off the monitor, and that’s the sigil done. I find I can do quite a lot of magic at work, or going to work. I walk across the common every day, and it’s really nice to do a quick invocation of something, y’know, stretching your arms for a minute and imagining this lightning bolt coruscating down the sky into your body. I know people who manage to… there was one Thelemite friend of mine who managed to get a spare room in the set of offices he worked in cleared out so he could go and do his daily meditation in there. You can make people work around your strange ideas, but I think a lot of magic is about blending in the background. And if other people want to hear about it, fine; if they don’t want to hear about it, that’s also cool.

You have to realize that some people are scared of it. I lived in a communal space in York for nearly two years, and there was one guy who was freaked out by the fact that I had a book with a picture of the Horned God on it. He actually said to me in the house, "We don’t know what you do up there, we know you do strange things but we don’t know what you do. Why don’t you tell us?" And I said, "Well, you’re freaked out by a book. I’m not gonna reveal my innermost feelings about my other stuff to you." I think he had to respect that. He didn’t necessarily like it, but he had to respect it.

I’ve met a lot of people on the London magical scene who are Magicians—you can just tell by looking at them, they’ve got a leather jacket, a big chaosphere on the back, and ‘Azathoth Rules’ written on the back, and loads of talismans and long hair and pierced nipples and noses and other things. And I just think, "It’d be really amazing to see you in a three-piece suit." I used to play this game of turning up to meetings in a suit or in leather drag or something, and watch people’s conceptions of you completely change. I think for me a magician is about being a trickster, a rather amorphous character, somebody who can blend in with the background. It’s easy to be strange, and it’s really hard to be normal.

Gyrus: We were talking about personal politics coming into magic… Do you think there’s a case for being a bit more up-front about it? If you’re gonna set out to raise awareness about something in a magical way, you’re gonna have to be more up-front about it and specifically not blend in. Would that just be a tactic for a specific purpose?

Phil: Well it really depends what you want to achieve and how you decide to go about achieving that. The important thing for me in interacting with other people is: if I come out as a total weirdo, then that perception of me is going to colour whatever I say. If I come across to people as quite a nice, normal guy, y’know, then whatever I say, talking about more weird things, is gonna be more accepted, as the barriers don’t come up. If I walked into a room maybe dressed as a rabid TOPY-ite from the seventies with bolts everywhere and a big psychick cross and said, "Hail Satan!", I’m sure people would just go, "What a fucking weirdo." I’ve done that, I went through a phase in my late teens of dressing completely in black with an upside-down crucifix. I actually got banned from pubs ‘cos they didn’t want me in. I realize now that a lot of that was because I had a very poor self-image, so I was rebelling, and people’d say, "You’re not serious about that upside-down crucifix?" and I’d say, "Yes I am." So for me what’s been important as regards relating to people is being socially accepted. Once you’re socially accepted, you can say whatever you like, and people maybe can’t merge their views with yours, but it’s a lot easier.

Something I’ve played around with from time to time is how people’s perceptions of me are affected because they’ve tended to categorise me according to some behaviour which they approve or disapprove of. A magazine editor once asked a friend, "Are there two Phil Hines? There’s this one guy who writes the shamanic stuff" (which she liked) "and this other one that writes all this dark, Left-Hand path stuff" (which she obviously didn’t like). After hearing this, I sent an article on working with Satan and Lucifer in to the ‘zine that I’d been writing ‘shamanic’ stuff for, and well, they printed it but it was somewhat controversial, and I felt like I was ‘barred’ from that ‘zine until I could submit something ‘shamanic’ again. There was this other ‘zine, Pagan At The Heart I think it was, that printed a story that I had become ‘celibate’ and then followed it up with the snippet that I wasn’t any more and that they could name the ‘lady’ who broke my vow. So I said to these people, "Not only have you got the name wrong, you’ve also got the gender wrong," and like, the confusion on their faces was lovely, you know the way people edge away when it suddenly hits them that they’ve made a gaffe. This is fun to play around with, but there’s also a kind of power too. Once people think you’re okay, basically, it’s a lot easier to get your ideas across to them. Doing this sort of thing really brought home to me how much I was conditioned by these kind of assumptions. Like I used to think, "Oh, so-and-so’s into magic, they must be okay"—which isn’t always the case, is it?

Gyrus: Is the underlying thing, whether you’re trying to blend in or stand out, to change people’s preconceptions?

Phil: Well it’s to try and stop those preconceptions coming up so fast, I think. It’s all about charisma, I think, and confidence in yourself, and being used to being able to deal with other people. If you have to deal with people from all walks of life, then you become a bit of a social chameleon. I’ve met a lot of people who are fine at after-dinner conversation, but if you put them down the pub with a load of people who aren’t interested in magic, and it’s like, "What do I talk about?" I was like that, I used to gibber on about magic ‘cos it was the only thing I had to talk about, and eventually I realized that people were actually getting really rather bored. I tried to get to grips with this idea of what I call ‘people magic’, which is about learning to deal with other people. That’s a big part of my magic, and something that, again, isn’t really perceived as magical; but dealing with other people, not so much manipulating people, but learning to interact with people, as equals. Respecting other people. Being able to talk about really weird things and have people not go, "Ugh! Weirdo," and turn off.

Gyrus: There’s a friend of mine who says he’s got interest in, but no real knowledge of ‘esoteric things’, magic, anything; but to me, I always think of him as a ‘social alchemist’. His skills in bringing people together, hosting a party, dealing with people from all walks of life, is just phenomenal, it’s amazing. Whether he’s gradually learnt it or finds it fairly natural I don’t know. It’s breaking down people’s conceptions of what magic is.

Phil: I think that’s very important because it’s a ‘scary subject’. Particularly for people who have been brought up on a diet of… well in my day it was Dennis Wheatley—black magic and Aleister Crowley, y’know? You have to be able to say, "No, I’m not like that. Alright, I do things with blood and sheep’s entrails, but… I’m not a monster!"

Gyrus: "Officer." (chuckle, guffaw)

Naughty, naughty Chaos!

Gyrus: This is going back to Chaos Magic… bad reputation.

Phil: Oh, terrible reputation—

Gyrus: From the start, and even now—

Phil: From the start and even now, yes, twenty years on it’s still got a bad reputation. Why is that?

Gyrus: Why is that?

Phil: I think the thing is the word ‘chaos’ which upsets people. Because, as I said earlier, we don’t like to think of nature being chaotic, or our lives being chaotic. We like to think about order, and cycles, and "things happen because… fate, karma, the universe, God makes them happen." Not because they just happen and we can’t explain it… In the eighties there were a lot of people muttering on about Chaos Magicians have no sense of ethics, and being ‘immoral’. And you know that statement ‘Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted’—sounds a bit… dodgy, y’know? That’s never been an issue for me because what I’ve always said to people is that the whole issue of magical ethics, or ethics in general, is that you create your own. What is moral for you, rather than relying on what somebody else says.

I think Chaos Magic also upsets people because there’s certainly people who’ve been attracted to the Chaos Magic idea who see it as a sort of ‘Satanism of the nineties’, and want to go out and shock people. These are the kids who wear ‘Hail Satan’ jackets and stuff like that, and go, "Whooaa! Chaos!" Which I think puts people off. And what seems to be a strong tendency within the Chaos community is this slagging off of other people’s belief systems. "Chaos is best and Wicca is rubbish."—which is in itself, I think, a nonsensical statement. Hopefully they’ll grow out of it—maybe not.

Other than that, I don’t really know why Chaos has got such a… I think you’d have to find some people who are upset by it and ask them. Because my approach to Chaos Magic has been, "It’s weird! Let’s do some weird things and have a nice time!", y’know? Rather than, "Let’s do something really dark…" Oh, I’ve done the ‘dark’ stuff as well, but I’ve always done it with a smile. [happy voice] "Hail Satan, Beast!"

My friend did a workshop at one of these outdoor pagan camps. And apparently she had a whole field of nice pagans all going, "Hail Satan!", and really enjoying themselves. I think, yeah, cool, wish I’d done that.

Gyrus: What do you think about Chaos now, what with the last issue of Chaos International—

Phil: Well, (slightly comic voice) it’s the end of an era! Maybe something else will come forth, from chaos itself.

Gyrus: Did you think of it as that from the beginning? I mean TOPY, there’s far too many different points of view on what happened there to get a handle on it, but I assume most people involved in it from the beginning didn’t see it as something they would build to be a permanent institution. It would be a catalyzing thing. How did you see Chaos going when you were involved in it at its height?

Phil: Well some people say it’s still at its height. I’ve hoped for a long time that whatever Chaos mutates into will surprise me and inspire me and possibly even make what I’ve been doing look like nothing compared to the new generation of magicians. I’d like to see a new generation of magicians that make what I do and have done seem boring. I want to see new ideas and creativity and inspiration zapping out. I want to be surprised, y’know?

I’ve occasionally thought the Chaos thing will just become another ‘Thing’, in the way that we’ve got Wiccans and Fairy Wiccans and Hedge Wiccans and Qabalists and neo-Qabalists and Thelemites and Thelemites who don’t like other Thelemites; and it’ll just become another little sub-section within the Big Thing. Pete Carroll has this idea that—I don’t know if I read him right here—he has this idea that Chaos Magic will become a huge movement, it’ll totally displace all other magical systems. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

Gyrus: It’d be far too much of a self-contradiction before it got that far anyway.

Phil: Yeah, I think so. I think it’s always been for me the nature of Chaos to mutate it in all directions. If we take the idea that any person practising or doing Chaos Magic to varying degrees is doing it from their own perspective that’s not going to be the same as mine, your’s or anybody else’s, then it has to explode into some pretty interesting areas. Where it’ll all be in twenty years’ time, I’ve no idea. And it’s not really something I think about. I don’t really know where I’ll be in twenty years’ time, so I can’t really saying anything about Chaos Magic.

The northern tradition, magic & politics

Gyrus: Norse mythology—is that your thing that you’re most interested in at the moment?

Phil: No, I went through a phase of it. It wasn’t a paradigm I was really very attracted to. I tend to be influenced by the people around me. At one point I was moving in circles where I was meeting a lot of people who were interested in that. I got interested, did some rituals, and did a six-month magical retirement working specifically with Thor, which wasn’t chosen by me, I would never have picked Thor to work with, but I actually found it very, very interesting. It was just a phase I went through. I like the myths, I like some of the stories. I think the whole Norse mythology, the way the Norse people thought about their deities, is extremely interesting. When you look at modern paganism… I think in Western neo-pagan currents there’s a lot of repressed Christianity. You can’t imagine Christians telling jokes about God or Jesus. I’ve met pagans who start frothing at the mouth if you start telling jokes about (reverent whisper) the Goddess. But of course the Norse people have all these funny stories about Thor having to dress up as a woman to get his hammer back, and Odin shafting people—one way or another. I find the Norse system very interesting.

Gyrus: It seems contrary to its more public image, as being very—

Phil: Right wing, you mean? Nazi, Aryan stuff?

Gyrus: I suppose, yeah—being very sombre and self-indulgent, self-important.

Phil: Well, yeah, there’s certain elements of that in it, but you can find that anywhere you look. It’s just that, because of its Nazi associations, the Norse tradition has that particular attachment to it. I’ve certainly met very extremely right-wing people involved in it, but that doesn’t invalidate the paradigm. I was talking about Edred Thorssen to some acquaintance of mine in Oxford a couple of years back, he goes, "Edred Thorssen! But he’s a Nazi! Why are you working with him?" I thought, "That’s interesting, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t I work with him? Some people seem to instantly equate anyone who’s into the Northern Tradition or the runes with being a Nazi. Do his alleged politics invalidate what he’s writing about?" It’s interesting to see, again, taboo areas in localized magical subcultures. Again it’s how people blinker things out. So it’s like the Northern tradition is a no-no ‘cos there’s a lot of people who have problems with their right arms involved in it. Tantra’s alright. But if you look at what’s happening with Tantriks in India now, ritually slaughtering children—

Gyrus: As part of what?

Phil: Well, I read a big report… (Phil flicks through a magazine) Yep—’Children of a Lesser God’: "The age-old practice of ritual child-sacrifice is once again taking place in India… Children snatched from their homes and ritually sacrificed." Tantriks are involved in that. And some of these Tantrik gurus are actually members of the BJP, which is a large Indian nationalist party. Of which in the report it says that there was this really famous Indian artist, whose name escapes me, had an exhibition of his paintings in one of the big cities, and hundreds of these BJP stormtrooper kids turned up and set fire to the gallery. Their reasoning? Because he dared to show one of the goddesses naked.

Gyrus: Is that typical of current Tantra in India, or is it just a branch of it that’s become very—

Phil: Politicized. Well, Tantra is a dodgy thing. There’s all the New Age stuff and it’s all nicey-nice, and yeah it’s about sex and nice things, but there’s the dodgy side of it as well. It’s like Voodoo, which went through a heavily popular phase a few years ago in England. And then you look at Voodoo and the Ton-ton Macout. The really horrible things that Voodoo sorcerors have done, and do. That gets hidden away in the background. Something I was talking about with Gordon, we actually a bit slagging off Michael Harner and his shamanic teachings, ‘cos the first thing that Michael Harner did to get himself a name was do an anthropological study of the Jivaro [in South America], who are one of the most horrible blood-thirsty tribes on the planet. They’re head-hunters, their power animals are tarantulas and anacondas, and part of their magical system is that you’re not really a shaman until you’ve killed another shaman. And that all gets ‘edge out’ of modern Western shamanism. I think the whole thing about the Norse tradition and its right-wing antecedents is the same sort of thing. It’s just that it’s easier for people to see, to make that connection…

I think it also ties into people’s liberal fears about nationalism, a sense of cultural identity. What I find really strange in America is that a lot of my magician friends are very patriotic. They hated all the American stuff, but they had no qualms about being proud to be Americans. They hated the government, they were anarchists, but they were Americans. And I was thinking, if I went to a magical meeting and stood up and said, "I’m proud to be a British person!", I’m sure the daggers would be flying across the room, astrally.

Gyrus: There’s a lot of people I know who, I think it’s part of being part of road protests or ecological movements, who are proud, not in the common sense, of the land we live on. As opposed to being proud of the state apparatus and the culture we’re part of. Do you think there’s a distinction there in patriotism or connection to your country? It’s a different thing I think for Britain because we’re an island. Do you feel any of that, patriotism in terms of love for the country—

Phil: Yeah, I think I do, I think I’d find it really difficult to live abroad. I feel I have a strong connection to the land. I’m not, I would hasten to say, particularly interested in state-patriotism, I just find it a really interesting idea to play about with. One of my friends at work really doesn’t like French, and I don’t like French either, having had bad experiences… It’s a barrier I’ve agreed to live with ‘cos I enjoy it. I think… Agincourt! We’ve always hated the French, and the French hate us, y’know? I like to play with that. But I don’t think I’m quite ready for a Union Jack T-shirt yet! It’s another taboo thing—saying "I’m proud to be British" is a taboo. Maybe standing up and saying so in the right public arena would be a real klesha-smash.

Gyrus: People like Morrissey got shit-loads of flak for that.

Phil: Freyja Asswyn, a few years ago, I think at a Leeds Occult Society talk, when asked, as was inevitable, did she think that black people could study the runes, said no. And a whole section of the audience got up and walked out. And I thought that’s a knee-jerk response. They didn’t pull her up on this, they just walked out. Why is she saying that? I don’t think she was right, and I don’t think she does anymore, she might not even have meant it at the time. But I remember someone saying to me, "Do you think white people can study Voodoo?" Well I dunno really—Voodoo is so much a pan-African tradition. I think you have to be in a culture where it’s accepted. Yeah, you can study Voodoo in your basement flat in Basingstoke, but things like Voodoo I think very much require some kind of cultural environment to relate to it—after all it’s a very community-based thing.

Gordon once told me that a Lakota shaman had asked him if whites had any spiritual traditions of their own, as all he could see was white folks ripping off his people’s beliefs. I think we have to be very careful when we appropriate chunks of living magical traditions, otherwise it’s Western imperialism all over again. The West has take their land, their culture, their dignity, and now we’re coming back for their spiritual beliefs. On reflection, Freyja was making a good point about the relevance for different people taking on ‘foreign’ belief-systems—of course it was taken as being un-PC, but again, this is us white folks making sweeping assumptions without looking more closely into the matter. One ‘black’ magician told me he preferred Western magic to his own indigenous traditions as he considered it to be ‘more powerful’ than them, which would horrify the PC-brigade, who I think like ‘natives’ to be ‘natives’—it’s unconscious prejudice in another form. Just recently I was talking to a woman about Seidr, and she was saying, "Well of course, you wouldn’t understand it—you have to be a woman or a gay man to understand it." And I’m thinking, "So just because I’ve got a girlfriend she assumes I’m straight and therefore can’t do seidr. If I’d been sitting there with a male lover she’d have behaved completely differently."

Tradition and Chaos

I think the Norse tradition, for a lot of people I know who’ve worked in the Norse tradition, to the exclusion of everything else, see where they’re living in Britain as relating to that tradition. ‘Cos there’s certain elements of the Norse tradition all over the country, in our language, in places…

Gyrus: That seems to be a very ‘un-Chaos’ approach to it—that you need that cultural framework within which to work with something… I thought Chaos was a sort of unrespectful thing, to read a book about an African culture, or Australian Aborigines, and use elements of the way they see the world in the way you go about your magical work or whatever, wherever you are. I ‘clicked that in’ as the Chaos approach. But what you’re saying is that you have some sort of respect for the cultural frameworks…

Phil: Again it’s different Chaos approaches… When I was doing my Northern tradition stuff, I was reading the myths, great stories, enjoying them, and I was working with Thor. I was trying to think, how will I behave in a way that Thor likes? I was doing Northern tradition magic, I was researching into the culture as it was then, and trying to understand what historical effect that culture has had on Britain. The good thing about Britain is it’s such a melting-pot place, Britain is such a pot-pourri of cultures. A great deal depends on your magical approach. Yes, you can have a bit from here and a bit from there and a bit from elsewhere; that’s not really how I do things. If I’m going to do a Tantrik ritual, then it will be an entirely Indian-based working.

Gyrus: Although you’re not Indian…

Phil: Although I’m not Indian, no. But I would make the working Indian-based in the sense that I would only use Indian ritual structures and symbolism—trying to recreate the ‘spirit’ of the ritual, and I think using Western ritual structures and formulations detracts from that. What I’ve come to realize recently is that when I’m doing Tantrik work, or when I’m trying to think Tantrik, if you like, it’s important that I understand the history of that culture. I try and get some understanding of what’s happening in it now; understand how Tantra contributes to the psyche of that culture. For me, it’s problematic just to take something from a culture without understanding how what you’re taking relates to that culture. It’s like what we were talking about earlier in terms of taboos. Yeah, you can do the rite of Five M’s, but it wouldn’t be powerful, because those Indian taboos are not taboos in Britain. So that rite is almost invalidated, you have to find some new taboos. For me a problem in modern magic is we tend to project things onto what we take from other cultures. I sometimes wonder if we’re so interested in taking stuff from other cultures because we don’t know anything about our own. The Norse tradition is helpful there because it is a magical culture related to Britain and northern Europe. It’s an interesting thing to get more awareness of. Because I’m tapping into our own history, it’s part of our own ‘dreaming’. The Aborigines’ Dreaming idea is interesting in itself, but it’s also useful to take things from our own history. For me an issue is respecting those traditions.

When I was doing the Thor work—I was doing it as part of my IOT work—one very popular approach to magic in the IOT, when I was in it at least, was invocation to possession. To be possessed by an entity. If I’d been just using IOT-accepted procedures, I would have done possession work with Thor. But because I’d done research into how Thor fitted into the culture, I decided, rightly or wrongly, that possession work with Thor wasn’t appropriate to how Thor was viewed. ‘Cos I would say that—again this is only my opinion—that possession work, in the Norse culture, would have been associated with Seidr magic. Which is getting very popular at the moment… No one quite knows what it is, which I suspect is one reason why it’s getting popular—’cos you can say, "Oh, this is Seidr! This is Seidr, this isn’t Seidr, this is Seidr, and this is a Seidr workshop—£75." As I see it, Seidr was something the wandering loonies did—the sorceresses, the shamanesses, the gay shamans, however you want to define them. Not yer normal, everyday folk—which is what Thor was the god of, he was the god of the Thralls, of the common people. Because personally I didn’t find possession work, which is (frantic gibbering sounds) with Seidr—which is not the way of the common folk, it’s for special people—I didn’t feel that possession was appropriate. Y’see how I’m trying to fit the argument in?

I think that when we borrow things from this culture and that culture, we have some responsibility to find out: Is it appropriate to do that in the first place? Why is it done like that in that culture?

Gyrus: This respect for and responsibility towards another culture is emerging out of the Chaos view, in that—

Phil: Emerging out of my view.

Gyrus: Right—

Phil: Out of my Chaos Magic approach. Just to clarify it a bit more, I realized fairly recently that, although I’ve been interested in Tantra for some years… I didn’t know anything about India. I’d been reading about this Tantric cult who lived in Assam in the fifteenth century… I didn’t know where Assam was! It was a shock, and I thought I should know.

Gyrus: Because the relativist Chaos approach is that every culture, magical order, whatever, is part of a culture ‘cos it’s culturally conditioned… That relativistic approach actually leads towards wanting to find out about that culture, and respecting it…

Phil: Well, hopefully. That’s certainly how I would view it. Because for me a strong element of Chaos Magic is: if you’re gonna do something, why not pull out all the stops? I’ve seen a lot of people do rituals to gods and goddesses from other cultures, that have been like a very minimalist ritual, and for me they’ve had no power. If somebody’s gonna do a ritual with… I don’t know… Isis, I wouldn’t just put a black robe on and stand in the middle of the room and do something that goes on for twenty minutes. I’d probably make the room completely Egyptian, make myself up like Isis, the full lot. And take weeks over it if necessary. I would really pull out all the stops… make it powerful. For me the problem with taking a bit here and a bit there is that you actually lessen the power you can give to an experience. If you’re gonna do something that demands that you fast for twelve hours, that you actually put yourself out, that you maybe stop smoking for a week so you can afford this particular bit of magical apparel that you need for a ritual… y’know you have to sacrifice to get anything together… and that you really make it a powerful thing, personally for you. Rather than just going, "Oh I’ll do that"—and in five minutes it’s over and you do another ritual. I’ve never found that approach worked for me. This background reading, this research that I’ve been talking about, is part of making the process powerful for me.

You get things like… I’d been doing a mantra—and I didn’t understand what the mantra was about. Which for Indian magic would be nonsensical, because you have to understand what the mantra’s about before you can click with it. But people do it all the time. "Oh, that’s a really nice mantra." "What does it mean?" " I don’t know." "Well go and find out."

Gyrus: It just struck me as interesting that the approach of ‘doing what works’, which is usually seen as…

Phil: Doing what’s most convenient.

Gyrus: Yeah. And that’s part of the ‘bad reputation’ that Chaos has got. If you actually seriously consider it, doing what works involves a lot deeper consideration of what you’re doing than most traditional approaches.

Phil: This is certainly where my thinking has gone for the last few years. That what works is what becomes powerful. For something to work is has to be powerful and you have to make it personally powerful, and that involves a lot of time and hard work and personal research and heart-searching. Only today I was keying in this essay from about 20 years ago on Huna magic. And in Huna magic there’s this idea that you formulate your statement of intent, but before you can do it you have to ask your unconscious whether it will—in this Huna system it’s the unconscious self that actually does the magic, you just ‘decide’ it—and you have to ask your unconsciousness if it will carry out this request for you. And I find that a really interesting point. ‘Cos so often somebody goes, "Right, it’s my statement of intent to do this," and it’s not questioned. You never say, "Should I do that? Is it appropriate for me to do this? Why do I want to do this? Do I want to do it because it’s the right thing to do or because I’m just boosting my ego?" Again that’s something that’s become increasingly important for me over the years, this ‘think before you enchant’ kind of thing. Which I think is particularly important if you’re intervening in another person’s situation. Why am I getting involved in this… road protest? Am I doing it because I’m genuinely against what’s happening? Or am I doing it ‘cos I know that if I go there I’ll get spotted by the media’s cameras and I’ll look good? Surely there must be elements of this happening now as the road protests become more and more high profile. That people are turning up not because they have a firm belief in protesting against the road, but because it’s the in thing to do, or it’s become trendy.

Gyrus: I heard about harnesses becoming accessories in London clubs. Whether they’re protesters who’ve grown attached to their harnesses or non-protestors who’ve seen it in I-D magazine, you can never tell—but I’m sure that element’s there.

Phil: I use that as an example, but I think a lot of this happens with people in the magical scene. It can lead to a lot of quite intense discussions in groups. Like, I’ve been at a group meeting where a member of the group turned up and said, "I’ve got to do this ritual to heal somebody, I’d like you to all join in." But you go, "I don’t like that person, I don’t want to heal them." Or, "Why should we heal them. That’s your thing, you deal with it." It becomes a big ‘monster’, almost. People turn up expecting that everybody else will fall in with them. And of course it doesn’t happen. What often happens is that people go along with the ritual ‘cos they’re too scared to actually make waves. But something that I’ve decided for myself is, if I really don’t agree with something, I’m not gonna do it. I don’t care how much bad blood it causes before afterwards and during, I’m not gonna do it. ‘Cos it’s about taking my own responsibility for what I do and don’t want to get involved in. This has lead to some quite strong arguments with people, and loss of friendship, ‘cos I wouldn’t support their ritual, I wouldn’t support their intent. I said, "I don’t care. Can’t you respect that I have a different view on this subject?"

Ask me another question, I’m just rambling on now.

Hyper-events

Gyrus: Loads of the stuff that I’ve written down we’ve actually got to along the way. I’ve got ‘apocalypse’ as the last thing. We talked a lot about this last time, but… What do you plan to do on New Year’s Eve, 1999?

Phil: Haven’t planned anything.

Gyrus: I was really struck by Stewart Home’s thing about ‘Say No To The Millennium’ [London Psychogeographical Association Newsletter, Beltaine 398 (1997)].

Phil: I thought that was funny, yeah. He’s become really popular—I went into Books Etc. and his book was on the bestseller shelf! Mr Home is gonna become a ‘media figure’ I think, like Irvine Welsh.

Gyrus: I thought he’d gone in the other direction, that he was just becoming more and more obscure, studying Hegelian philosophy…

Phil: Well there’s that side to him as well, but he seems to be making it into the mainstream.

Gyrus: What I was interested in about that was: is it possible to be indifferent to the year 2000? And his article, saying ‘no’ to the millennium, and ranting against the Millennium Dome or whatever… I just started thinking, well, it’s been a thing for a while, just ‘cos it’s the year 2000. Friends over the past have said that we should arrange to do something on New Year’s Eve, so wherever we go, we’ll meet up for this point—just ‘cos it’s there, and it’s this round number in our calendar. I read that and it touched a lot of things that have been coming up over the past, I thought, "Yeah, I don’t want to participate in it." But my decision to not participate in it wouldn’t have come about if there wasn’t some sort of—

Phil: Brouhaha about it all…

Gyrus: Yeah.

Phil: Well I don’t think you can ignore it totally. I mean millennialism is such a strong force, in Christian culture particularly. There was a lot of stuff in the Middle Ages when the end of the world was declared virtually every year. I suppose the best way for me to think about it now would be to relate it to the Princess Diana thing. Because I tried as hard as I could to ignore that, and I couldn’t. And in the end I sat down and talked about it to one of my friends, Jo, and we actually had a very interesting conversation about how Diana was a popular cultural symbol of the Goddess.

Gyrus: She was called ‘Queen of Heaven’ by so many people…

Phil: Diana, of course, Diana of Theseus…

Gyrus: I think her brother referred to that in the speech he gave at the funeral…

Phil: It’s almost like a popular symbol of the Goddess… (squelching noise) The Goddess is dead.

Gyrus: She’s being buried on an island in the middle of a lake…

Phil: It just screams Arthurian myths at you. As a cultural event, her death, the whole death/mourning thing was one of the greatest things to have happened, probably for a few centuries. A tremendously powerful magical event. I mean nobody, I think, could have predicted what happened. In the end I had to, I think, realize that it was a magical event.

I remember on the funeral signing on to my internet service provider, and they had this thing saying, "We hope all will join in the ten minute’s silence by staying off the net during the funeral." And I thought, "Fuck that! It’s gonna be the fastest download time possible, ‘cos thousands of people won’t be on the net."

Even at work, we still had to discuss fairly early on, "Well it sounds too neat that she died in an accident… C’mon, let’s talk conspiracy theory." That became quite enjoyable. And then we’d be commenting on the thousands of tons of flowers… It’s just impossible to get away from it. And then I started thinking, "I’m missing something here." I don’t feel grief for her. I’ve always been pretty much anti-Royalist. I’m not engaged on an emotional level, but on the other hand, it’s an intensely magical thing that’s happening—I should be at least taking note of it. I suspect I’ll probably start feeling like that about the millennium at some point, but when I do I don’t know…

I’ve noticed recently, I used to rigorously… I used to be so in tune with the moon that I could tell you what phase the moon was in without actually looking at it. I used to rigorously observe all the… Samhain, Beltaine, all that stuff. Nowadays people go… Paul said to me, he said, "William [Burroughs] died at Lammas, didn’t he?" And it never even occurred to me that it was Lammas. I’m kind of like out of tune with the seasons, in a way I’m starting to find a bit worrying. Again it comes back to the nature thing—I’m trying to be more observant. I think it’s a ‘London effect’, that I’ve been kind of like losing my touch to the rhythms…

The year 2000… Yeah, we can be cynical about it, like Stewart Home’s being, or we can get totally onto the bandwagon. In some ways… I’ve got very odd feelings about the Millennium dome, ‘cos it’s such an outrageous thing—everybody hates it, Tony Blair’s going for it… There’s something very weird and magical about this government. It’s almost kind of like… (big pause) There’s something odd going on.

In some ways I think I probably won’t get all happy-go-lucky about the millennium, but I might think, maybe the millennium will mark a shift. The eighties was all Thatcherite stuff wasn’t it? Not a good decade for those of us near the bottom of the heap. The nineties is a bit culturally dead and postmodernism rules the landscape. Once you get behind the gloss of postmodernism, there’s a lot of cultural decay and emptiness, the whole existential void thing. When I was very into writing about postmodernism and Chaos Magic, it was, "Oh yeah, Chaos Magicians are people who enjoy the postmodern emptiness." And I’m not sure I’m into that idea anymore. That whole idea about ‘the end of history’, what’s the next stage gonna be? Nobody can say what it is… Maybe the whole millennium thing will bring something forward… I’m trying to be positive about it here.

About 10 years ago I heard a rumour that the Grateful Dead were going to play at the Great Pyramid of Cheops on New Year’s Eve 1999. And I thought, "I’d like to go and the Grateful Dead at Cheops!" But I strongly suspect that I won’t. I don’t know what I’ll do.

Gyrus: I thought I’d like to be travelling around somewhere other than Britain, and by Christmas be somewhere where I’d lose track of the days and I wouldn’t know what point at which it changed over. And even that would be a reaction to the event. You can’t be indifferent to it, unless you’re already living in a culture that is cut off from the Gregorian calendar and indifference or reaction to it isn’t even an issue. If it’s an issue then you can’t be indifferent to it.

Phil: It’s like Christmas, in a slightly different way, but Christmas you can’t get away from. You can ignore it, you can… For me Christmas is something that doesn’t really start to happen until about the week before Christmas, when you madly rush around and get into that horrible Christmas mood. It’s never been a particularly good time of the year for me anyway. But you can’t ignore it, and it’s not gonna go away. I think the millennium is a similar sort of thing…

Gyrus: I’m just gonna go for a slash, sorry… (pause)

Phil: It’ll be interesting to see how the loony Christian cults respond to it. Because you know all that stuff about the Rapture? And the eighties Reaganite Christians in the States who believed there was gonna be a nuclear war, and the Rapture would come and they’d all be taken up into heaven. We’re not living in that kind of doom-laden environment anymore, culturally—The Bomb has gone. It’s still around, but it’s no longer an overwhelming presence. It’s no longer something that gives me nightmares about what I’d do if there was a nuclear war. So I don’t think we’re heading for an apocalyptic 2000. I don’t think there’s gonna be a major spiritual revelation across the world that’s gonna sweep us all up into the New Age—at least I hope not. I wouldn’t be allowed to stay on the planet… One of the books we’ve just released is this book that drivels on about the New Age that’s gonna ‘awaken’ everybody, and people who are not ‘in tune’ with it will be ‘removed from the planet’. I’ll probably be one of the people who’ll be removed from the planet then!

Again it’s not something I’ve really thought seriously about.

Gyrus: It is odd how… it’s not really odd, it’s—

Phil: I’ll be 40, that’s probably why I haven’t seriously thought about it.

Gyrus: I’ll be 40 in 2012! Maybe fed into my thing about that—

Phil: Oh! Have you seen that web site on the web, ’2013′?

Gyrus: Is it part of the people who do Desert Moon distribution in America? Some people over there said about, "Oh, we’ve been trying to get this ’2013′ together, and we’re really interested in your magazine blah blah blah…"

Phil: I don’t know it’s some kind of… I found a link to it from one of the Chaos sites. It just had the most brilliant graphics stuff on there. They seemed to be forming some kind of cult thing, but I’m not sure whether they’re serious or not, it’s just a really nice site, real nicely engineered…

Gyrus: Have you seen—I may have emailed the address to you—a site called ‘Bert is Evil’? About Bert from Sesame Street…

Phil: Yeah, I got that today.

Gyrus: Absolutely brilliant. Some guy’s got loads of images of Bert from Sesame Street and all these conspiracy theories about him. One of the bits I looked at was Bert as the member of the SS who orchestrated the Reichstag, with a picture of him stood next to Hitler… It was really well done. And Bert sexually assaulting people…

Phil: Brilliant.

Gyrus: Yeah… I thought about 2012 as a ‘countercultural millennium’. (Tape gets changed.) It might be mainstream by the year 2010… And then it’s the same argument all over again, about being indifferent to it, and what you’re gonna do on December 21st 2012. McKenna’s said that he’s gonna be camped out in Columbia, or wherever he was when he did his mushrooms…

Phil: Probably with a few thousand people lurking behind the bushes…

Gyrus: Well it just seemed strange that most of the people I know who’ve grown up outside the framework of school-work-marriage have your attitude: no idea where they’re gonna be in five years’ time, y’know? It seems odd that somebody who’s done so many psychedelics like McKenna, and obviously appreciates the chaotic nature of everything, can say, "I’m gonna be doing this in 15 years’ time." It strikes me as very odd. [And then he goes and dies in 1999 - Ed.] It’s a totally paradoxical thing. The only way that what McKenna thinks is gonna happen at 2012 is gonna happen, is if people totally grow out of the idea of… going towards that date…

Phil: If we’ve all forgot about it, it’s gonna happen.

Gyrus: Yeah.

Phil: "Oh it’s 2012! Where’s McKenna?" In magical theory we have this whole spectre of the new aeon, which I think is probably a similar thing. This weird idea that there’s gonna be a new aeon. And Chaos Magicians have evolved this concept called the PandaemonAeon—Pete Carroll’s Fifth Aeon. For me we’re all actually already in the PandaemonAeon, it just that we haven’t woken up to the fact that we’re in the PandaemonAeon yet—it’s something that’s already happening, around us. I often think the idea of a new aeon is a bit like the Marxist conception of the Revolution: it always just around the corner, and I’m always working towards it; but I really hope it’s not gonna happen…

Gyrus: Carrot on a stick.

Phil: Yeah.

Gyrus: I’ve been at parties where, when I was really into the 2012 thing, where I thought, "This is pretty close to what we’re edging towards." Looking really closely at Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z. stuff, I started to think, "That was IT!" It was happening, it was there, y’know? The idea—my linear map in my head—of reaching out towards this date is distancing me from what I’m experiencing now. Thinking, "This is really close to what’s down the road…" Whereas if I’d totally trashed that carrot on a stick, I wouldn’t even have been thinking that, I would have been there. Which I have been at times—obviously the times when I haven’t thought about it.

I’m well glad this is gonna be the last issue [of Towards 2012]. It’s a useful phase. I mean, McKenna always uses this phrase, "using the calendar as a club". Which I took as the key point of it, of going, "OK, we’ve got this calendar, let’s utilize it to bash ourselves round the head and wake ourselves up." I think doing that has done it for me…

Phil: Well what’s interesting of course is that the concept of the future is a fairly modernistic concept. Again, something that Edred Thorssen bangs on about in his expositions of the Northern tradition: there’s a past and there’s present. Those people had no concept of the future, in the same way that we do nowadays. The whole thing about Futurism—early 20th century?—this whole idea that we’re going into this ‘future’…

Gyrus: Science fiction is late nineteenth century at the earliest…

Phil: It’s a very late stage way of thinking about time. Which is why I like Hakim Bey and his idea of Immediatism, ‘cos it scrubs the future… I got into a good conversation with a friend of mine about the future that we were promised in the late sixties and early seventies that hasn’t come about. The lost future, where’d we’d have nuclear-powered toothbrushes and things and big gleaming white cities… I think William Gibson wrote a story about that, about that kind of ‘missing future’. It’s interesting the way the future is, it’s a carrot on a stick thing like you said, it’s a thing to keep going—the cheque’s in the post, basically.

This comes back for me to magical ideas about time. Something I really find joyful about Indian attitudes to time is that they’re so amorphous. There’s an Indian word for time, the kalpa. It’s a unit of metaphysical time. I actually looked it up in a dictionary the other day, and found out that ‘kalpa’ is the time that it takes a bird’s wing to wear away a mountain. It’s a lovely, lyrical metaphor, but it’s not a strict count in terms of years. One thing I do enjoy about Tantra is that a lot of its concepts are completely metaphorical. When they talk about a thousand, they don’t mean a thousand in terms of counting, they mean a lot… They don’t mean ten thousand in the way we understand it… Because our culture is so hooked into the literal interpretation of the word, we miss out the metaphorical, or the magical, if you like. My problem with the whole idea of the 2012 thing is, it’s a nice metaphor, but it can only ever be a metaphor. Because 2012 might be something totally different from what any of us can think about. We can’t predict the future in that way. The new aeon that I began believing in as a literal thing—"The New Aeon will dawn when every man and every woman realizes their True Will"—it ain’t gonna happen, y’know? And what is True Will anyway?

Magicians use a lot of very amorphous concepts, and this is something I’m increasingly interested in. On all levels, not only—it relates particularly to my relationship with nature—but everything, how we construct meaning out of magical experience, how we interpret something in a way that can be meaningful for us. Again, I was reading this friend of mine’s magical diary, and he said, "I bought Austin Osman Spare’s Complete Works, and it was £14.95. 1495 is the complete numerical value of the alphabet!" And I thought he’s making a structured link, to interpret an event that’s happened to him that’s completely… chance. He’s bringing it into his magical interpretive system. I think one of the great interesting, and probably dangerous things about magic is the way that you can connect events together to make them personally meaningful. You can have an experience of God, and then go off and become a High Priest of Jehovah or something, and decide to go out and save the world. Or you can just say, "That was interesting."

Creating the ancestors

Gyrus: I’m writing, trying to write a huge thing about time for the ‘Apocalypse’ issue. Loads of it’s to do with archaeology, and how we project our ideas of time back onto past cultures. The thing I was thinking about when you said about the future being a new part of our consciousness or whatever, what would be called ‘traditional’ societies are very, very deeply concerned with the past, and ancestors, burials…

Phil: This is why I’ve always been very wary of the whole ‘tribal’ thing in modern culture, ‘cos tribes are very rooted in the past, and modern culture is not at all rooted in the past.

Gyrus: I thought a lot about this recently ‘cos of the people who’ve died recently—Burroughs, Simon Dwyer [editor of Rapid Eye]… I think this is the first Samhain where I’ve started to consider the traditional, or supposedly traditional idea of ancestors being associated with that time. And thinking in terms of cultural ancestors rather than biological ancestors. We have a ‘past’ of the counterculture now. Which is a new thing, there wasn’t in… well I suppose slightly, in the sixties—there’s always been people throughout history who you can draw from. But now there’s people within this Western counterculture who’ve gone through the whole thing and died and passed on. How’s that gonna affect how people… Is it gonna bring back this idea of the past, or… I don’t know, I’m just waffling. These are just undefined thoughts floating around at the moment. Do you have any feelings for that, of cultural ancestors?

Phil: Yeah, I think I do. Something I got interested in quite a while back, coming back to magic, was magical role models. I started thinking there’s not really a great deal out there. There’s Crowley as a magical role model, and loads of people still wanna be Crowley. I’ve met people who were doing everything that Crowley did, in chronological order, to be more like him, and so on and so forth. Which I found most amusing. I got very interested in—I suppose it stems from my sociology studies—I got very interested in how we think of ourselves as magicians. And I started thinking, "What role models are there out there?" There seem to be very few. Crowley’s a good one, but Crowley puts a lot of people off. Alex Sanders is a very good ‘ancestor’, ‘cos he’s a wily old trickster, who started the modern witch scene. He was one of the awful people who did weird things and put a lot of people off, and definitely had a sense of the ridiculous. Dion Fortune’s a case in point, ‘cos again, a very, very powerful figure as a magical ancestor. But her society, the Society of Inner Light, which is still going nowadays, I heard that they were trying to ‘edit bits of her out’. They thought she was too pagan, they’ve gone very Christian, white light… They can’t really take her very pagan approach, and they’re trying to ‘rewrite’ her.

Gyrus: Sounds familiar…

Phil: Yeah. I do feel a very close spiritual link to William [Burroughs], in the sense that he’s been a great influence on my life, so I was very sad when he died. I did think about doing a whole formal ritual goodbye, but then I realized that having Paul and Caroline around and playing tapes and getting stoned, and just jibbering about him, that was my letting him go. I know people who were really, really, just totally… thrown by it. He’s an ancestor, I suppose.

I think there will be other people who are perhaps not very well known now, but it will be realized that they’ve left their mark. I think there’ll be fictional characters as well that’ll come into that, media stars. We’ve got the electronic extensions of the media, which will boost it. And our past is much more complicated now because there’s so much more of it. The past is being rewritten every day. I keep hearing about some latest controversy about them finding new evidence of humans starting not in Africa but in Asia or in America. I haven’t kept up with it, it’s just that what we take as fixed in the past isn’t actually that fixed. Bits of it are being recovered and rewritten every day. And it’s almost like the past is becoming quite amorphous in many ways. Which again is interesting because we have this fixed idea that ‘the past has happened’. It’s almost like the more viewpoints you get on the past, the less fixed it becomes. You get the thing nowadays where you think, "The things the government has done, will we ever find out about it? Are they still lying to us about UFOs?" That latest series of excuses by the American military about why Project Blue Book was initiated. It sounds like they’re still lying… The chaotic-ness of the past that we’ve got nowadays, that we probably didn’t have a hundred years ago. It makes for a very interesting situation…

Again, my problem with the idealized pagan and magical cultures is, there’s the idea of the tribes, which I don’t think… The problem for me is that paganism is very new. The whole neo-pagan magical movement in the West is what? Probably less than a hundred years old. So we really haven’t had time to evolve, I mean naturally evolve, ancestors, tribal patterns… We talk about tribal patterns, but we know from anthropology that tribes goes on for hundreds of years—until we arrive with the common cold and syphilis, and destroy them. We know that these systems build themselves up over generations. We haven’t had that many generations, in our modern spiritual pagan culture. We haven’t had enough time really to build up ancestors. In the eighties there were these various movements to create pagan councils of elders. I discussed that recently with some friends, and we said that the only way that we’re gonna get elders is how elders would evolve in any natural community, it’s gonna be a pattern over time. And we haven’t given ourselves enough time to do that.

Gyrus: Do you think that’s a positive thing, progressing through time and developing a sort of ‘pantheon’ of elders or ancestors or whatever, in a modern context. Obviously we’ve got to treat it differently to how aborigines would treat it ‘cos we’re in a different culture, but within our culture, is it… a fear of moving forwards? Do you think it’s an innate human thing, that whatever culture develops, there has to be, for any progress to happen, some sort of lineage, or connection to the past?

Phil: I don’t know if it’s inevitable or innate, but because a lot of modern paganism is about making connections to the past, then I think we haven’t given ourselves, as a culture now, enough of a past. You start to see it in little ways, like I’ve got a friend who’s an hereditary witch. Which isn’t to say, as a lot of people are trying to say, "Oh, he’s part of a tradition going back to the witch trials…" His mum’s a witch. I’ve met her, she’s really nice. He’s a Chaos Magician, she’s a witch. He can say, "I’m a hereditary witch," and people say, "Ooooh!" And he says, "Yeah, my mum’s a witch!"

Gyrus: Well it’s the same idea as saying that someone from India, whose parents moved over to Britain, and they were born in Britain, they’re British. It’s the same idea.

Phil: I think it’s great to start trying to assimilate these ancient concepts of ways of living, like tribes and clans, what have you, a lot of American Indian stuff. But we just need another few hundred years to do it, before it sinks in. Because a lot of the time we are borrowing from other cultures, and I feel for me there’s times when I have to drop it and say, "Yes, this is a borrowing." The AMOOKOS thing is particularly interesting because AMOOKOS is part of the Tantric heritage that stretched back quite a long way. For me that is magically powerful, the fact that I can… Alright, I can’t trace my… I know my guru, and I know the guy who initiated him, and I know the guy who initiated him, and that probably goes back to about the 1950s. Before that, we don’t know, it’s a void, but we know that the tradition stretched back several centuries.

Now for me that is magically powerful, but it’s not… even though I find it personally powerful, it’s not the same as being part of that history directly. It’s kind of like passed on. It’s like a second-hand history. I feel that—perhaps I’m being unfair—but a lot of people who become involved in spiritual, esoteric, pagan things are looking for a connection with a solid past… that just isn’t there. It’s like all this stuff about ‘magical traditions’. You think, these traditions have written themselves into existence, and are now trying to say, "This traditions comes from ancient Lemuria!" Which probably never existed in the first place, and if it didn’t it probably wouldn’t have spawned people who run around doing what these people do. We try and give ourselves a connection to the past that isn’t there, why do we need to do that? You can say, well it’s ‘cos of modern rootlessness and ennui and all that stuff. We need to feel that connection with the past. So perhaps throwing out an anchor into the backwash of history is an important thing to us. Perhaps that isn’t innate, I don’t know. But nowadays I find it very difficult to do that without actually considering that I am doing it.

Gyrus: But you think that’s a useful and powerful thing to do as long as you recognize what level you’re doing it on…

Phil: Yeah, I think so. Again this is probably a reason why Chaos Magic upset people, because in the early days it said, "Chaos Magic is not a tradition. We’re not claiming that this comes from Atlantis, or ‘ancient Druids’. We’re making it up as we go along."

Gyrus: And now it’s become some sort of tradition…

Phil: Yeah… I mean on the internet I’ve seen people talking about ‘Carrollian’ Chaos Magic, so Pete Carroll’s become a label for his own brand of Chaos Magic, which I’m sure he would not like. Or maybe he would like it, I don’t know… He himself talked about ‘techno-rational’ Chaos Magicians versus ‘artistic-romantic’ Chaos Magicians. He said that where he was concerned that the ‘techno-rationalistic’ Chaos Magicians were the people that he was going forward with, and the anarcho-romantics would be all dropping like flies. I suppose I’m an anarcho-romantic Chaos Magician, rather than a rational, technocratic one. I’m interested in models, and explaining things. But I see the explanations and models as models, and I’m not interested in the ‘equations of magic’, whatsoever. It’s nice to play about with explanations, but when it comes down to it, it’s just weird stuff that happens to us. And I prefer not to explain it. But I’d quite like it to keep on happening, thankyou.

Gyrus: I think I’m out of questions.

Phil: Super!

by Gyrus

That which an age feels to be evil is usually an untimely after-echo of that which was formerly felt to be good—the atavism of an older ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The following writings began as a short article written in reaction to numerous interviews I had read with ‘Satanic’ or ‘black metal’ bands (in Esoterra magazine). I got very tired of their knee-jerk social Darwinism, their philosophy of “the strong over the weak”. Metal bands will never be the best exponents of any philosophy, and Satanism shouldn’t be judged according to their interviews. Nevertheless, their simplistic view of nature’s laws (which in any case should be seen as nature’s habits) encapsulate many quibbles I have with the social Darwinist shades of Satanism, and occultism in general. There are a lot of much more enlightened strains of the ‘left-hand path’, as these writings will hint at. These strains usually attempt to transcend the left/right dualism of occult morality, a false dichotomy where self-interest and concern for others are seen to be mutually exclusive.

While I’m not a Satanist, not even strictly a practising occultist, occultural philosophies have a deep influence on my world-view and life. I read widely on these subjects, and though I love toying with ideas, maps and models for intellectual amusement, I find that I’m with Nietzsche when he says, "I do not know what purely intellectual problems are." So what began as a somewhat playful little jab at the shaky foundations of social Darwinism gradually evolved into an outpouring of the visions and intuitions that my recent experiences, research and reflection have led me to. It’s an exorcism of sorts, an attempt to externalize the insights, feelings and perceptions that I often find flooding into me, seemingly unbidden, but later seen to be exactly what I needed to shift my world-view out of a stale or narrow perspective. I find it’s only through externalizing these cascades of insight that I can make room for more to arrive.

My research is not strictly ‘scholarly’. Dreams, drugs, sex, conversations with truckers who give me lifts, synchronicity-laden trails that lead me to books I wouldn’t usually notice, trashy movies, walks in the countryside, emotional breakdowns, lazy days, playing with kids… all these play a more significant role in the evolution of my ideas than the traditional academic activities of ‘thinking’ and ‘reading’. And, when I really look at it, I can’t imagine that this is anything new. Life isn’t cut into categories in the way that the division of academia into different disciplines pretends it is. Everything influences everything else, and I think what I’m doing is just consciously recognizing this… and then writing.

That said, some of the material here is quite ‘dense’, laden with associations which might come to me, immersed as I am in it all, without much effort, but which may ask a lot more of the reader than passive word-by-word consumption. As far as this sort of writing goes, I try to tread a precarious path between making myself clear and passionately wanting to be a ‘sounding board’. I want to leave gaps, be oblique, allow space for the reader to enter into my thoughts, fuse with them to an extent, and come away with more than ‘information’. I’m not in the business of handing people complete, air-tight systems of ideas on a plate. I don’t think you can show something to someone that they haven’t already seen; but I know from my own experience that we’ve all seen a lot more than we often pretend. I want to try to help people remember this. Also, the nature of the areas dealt with here means that words can never present a view of them that is even close to being ‘complete’. All they can do is suggest, trigger, and point. Exactly what they will suggest, trigger off or point to will depend on who you are and where you are. Ideally, you’ll take more of yourself away from this than you will of me.

Many of the ideas here utterly contradict beliefs I held two years ago. I don’t doubt that two years from now I’ll be off somewhere else. As Alan Watts said, "I am not one who believes that it is any necessary virtue in the philosopher to spend his life defending a consistent position. It is surely a kind of spiritual pride to refrain from ‘thinking out loud’, and to be unwilling to let a thesis appear in print until you are prepared to champion it to the death." This doesn’t mean I don’t want people to criticize this writing. Yes, these are my present opinions, but they will change—and I only got here by having my opinions challenged, as well as ‘confirmed’ by experiences and other people. I never want this process to stop.

There are several different, but subtly related parts to these writings. I call them "meditations" because although there are clear conceptual threads weaving throughout the different sections, there is no attempt at a coherent ‘argument’. Parts of it relate to and reflect off others parts in ways I never anticipated; no doubt many of the intended resonances will fall flat. As I said before, language, being linear, just can’t accurately describe the ideas and modes of experience I’m dealing with. All I can do is spin words, my own and the sampled words of others, around these things, revealing a fragment here, a fragment there, but still leaving mere fragments. Each trying to describe the same underlying thing, each reflecting a different part of it, in the hope that a multitude of linear perspectives can come closer to representing this non-linear vision.

Firstly, there are some arguments about the philosophical underpinnings of what has come to be known as Satanism in modern occulture. This section, being the original seed-article, could stand on its own, but hopefully the reader will soon see its intimate relevance to the other meditations as they’re unravelled. Then, taking its cue from the ubiquitous urge to uncover spiritual fertility buried beneath centuries of Christian domination, there is a speculative look at the genesis of the Devil—and what lies beyond.

The Devil & The Tao

As far as the philosophical underpinnings of Satanism go, one of the best places to start is with Friedrich Nietzsche. While he had nothing (consciously) to do with Satanism, his work is frequently cited by Satanists and modern occultists, and I think more than a few Satanists see themselves as ‘Nietzschean’.

It has to be said before setting off that Nietzsche was acutely, probably painfully aware of how his ideas may be misinterpreted. He loathed the idea that people, "like plundering troops", may pick and choose titbits from his books to use for their own purposes, disregarding material contrary to their own agendas. The racist misinterpretations (far too weak a word!) of the German Nazi party are the most blatant case in point. That said, I disagree with some of his work. In the end Nietzsche was no ‘system-builder’—he erected no edifice that must be accepted entirely or fall to the ground. He was an experimentalist, and perpetually played with and revised ideas. It is in this spirit that I read Nietzsche; and here I’m looking at him with an eye to reveal a few misinterpretations less obvious than those of the half-witted anti-Semites. No doubt I’ll end up guilty of a bit of plundering myself, but I prefer judicious plunder to wilful misunderstanding.

Darwinism is the central concept to deal with. It amuses me to see ‘black metal’ bands asked in interviews if they believe in the (supposedly ‘Nietzschean’) philosophy of "the strong over the weak", "survival of the fittest"—as if this would provoke some new and interesting response! We’re talking social Darwinism here of course, but let’s look first at the biological argument.

Darwinian evolutionary theory often seems too obvious to bother arguing with, but this is precisely my problem with it. It’s too bloody obvious. The nail was whacked on the head for me when I read Arthur Koestler’s Janus: A Summing Up. Here he quotes C.H. Waddington, a critical neo-Darwinian:

Survival does not, of course, mean the bodily endurance of a single individual, outliving Methuselah. It implies, in its present-day interpretation [1957], perpetuation as a source for future generations. That individual ‘survives’ best which leaves most offspring. Again, to speak of an animal as ‘fittest’ does not necessarily imply that it is strongest or most healthy or would win a beauty competition. Essentially it denotes nothing more than leaving most offspring. The general principle of natural selection, in fact, merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a tautology.

Further, Ludwig von Bertalanffy acutely observes that "It is hard to see why evolution has ever progressed beyond the rabbit, the herring, or even the bacterium which are unsurpassed in their reproductive capacities."

The so-called rationalism of modern—usually ‘socially Darwinian’—Satanism rests on very dodgy philosophical ground, simply because when you bother to try and define the terms used in the idea of "the strong over the weak", you’re invariably left with a sense of, "Yeah, and…?" It’s like saying you believe in the philosophy of "winners beating the losers". Jello Biafra nicely undermined knee-jerk social Darwinism with his quip that "the strong prey on the weak, and the clever prey on the strong"; but in the end this just begs the question. Also, orthodox Darwinism inevitably holds that humanity is the latest in life’s progressively ‘better’ attempts at creating organisms. Surely social Darwinism would hold a similar view about contemporary culture? This doesn’t sit too well with the misanthropy, and contempt for the ‘lowering of standards’ in modern society, that is prevalent among many supposed social Darwinists. If the strong really do overpower the weak, why have we been dominated for so long by such a half-assed religion as Christianity? I think many Satanists, in claiming "strong over the weak" to be a universal principle of nature, are actually trying to say, "I’m harder than you and I could have you easily." Or at least, "I could out-stare you, mate." That’s another argument. But as for universal principles—forget it. Evolution and history are far too complex and multi-dimensional to limit themselves to the strategies of a fight in a pub.

Nietzsche was definitely not a Darwinist, and had no faith in "survival of the fittest" as an ‘explanation’. For him, his conception of the "will to power" was the driving force behind all life. It is essentially a conception of creativity, and has far more to do with creative self-mastery than power over others. Nietzsche’s notion that creation must be destructive ("Who wishes to be creative, must first destroy and smash accepted values.") is often seen in limited terms. This is only the first step. The second step, often left out, is that the new creation itself must again be destroyed. And the steps go on… Zarathustra is quite explicit on this: "And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again…’" The famous ‘Superman’ isn’t a concept of some inevitable evolutionary goal toward which humanity is inexorably moving (i.e. it’s not Darwinian). It’s a vision of an ideal state of being, of perfect self-mastery and perpetual re-creation, which Nietzsche believed some humans—Socrates and Goethe for example—had already, to an extent, achieved. Together with his doctrine of eternal recurrence, it’s a glorification of the moment, of total involvement in the turbulent flow of immediate experience. "Not to wish to see too soon.— As long as one lives through an experience, one must surrender to the experience and shut one’s eyes instead of becoming an observer immediately. For that would disturb the good digestion of the experience: instead of wisdom one would acquire indigestion." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)

Comparison with Taoism is illuminating. While our cultural filters place Taoism in some ‘soft’ category, and see Nietzschean values as being essentially ‘hard’, the distinction blurs when you consider the supra-cultural state to which both aspire. Nietzsche used the word ‘hard’ many times in describing ideals, as in "all creators are hard." (Twilight of the Idols) But I don’t think we can just accept this word unquestioningly. Its modern connotations evoke more of a mindless thug than a vibrant Superman. Words are subject to mutation; but even if the words themselves remain the same, their meaning is always mutating, for words are "pockets into which now this and now that has been put, and now many things at once." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)

Before considering Taoism, I’d like to follow a little tangent about Nietzsche’s ‘hardness’. I always thought of Nietzsche (before actually reading him) as some grim Teutonic beast. He was actually vehemently opposed to the Germanic temperament, which he considered mediocre (when in a good mood). He repeatedly praised the southern European disposition, that of light-heartedness, exuberance and cheerfulness. A far cry from the fashionably serious and dreary poses of many modern ‘Nietzscheans’. A key influence on this popular misconception of Nietzsche is probably that famous portrait—the furrowed brow, the dark gaze, the amazingly bushy moustache. It doesn’t do much for his philosophy of light-heartedness. I was tempted to just put this image, of a very stern and worried-looking guy, down to his frequent bouts of illness. I recently found out that I was more justified in this temptation than I guessed. Nietzsche never grew such a moustache. These amounts of hair appeared on his upper lip only during his last ten years of life, during which he was helplessly insane. He was unable to care for himself, and this responsibility fell to his sister, who allowed the ‘tache to flourish and brought people in to do portraits. Poor Freddy had no choice. This picture of an intense mad-eyed walrus is probably not how Nietzsche would have liked to have been remembered! His sister, who managed to distort his work as well as his image, has a lot to answer for.

To return to Taoism… The Tao, usually translated as "way", is seen as that force which underpins, interpenetrates, and flows through the universe. Actually, "flows through" is misleading, as it conjures up images of ‘things’ as vessels through which the Tao passes. Taoism admits of no such duality. And the Tao’s primary characteristic is that it cannot be defined. A definition of it, such as "the process of the universe", may loosen our categories a bit in order to contemplate it, but categories ultimately have to be destroyed if that process is to be fully apprehended. I think Nietzsche was too suspicious or ignorant of ‘mysticism’ to fully admit it, but I suspect any Superhuman state would involve a similar destruction—or transcendence—of categories.

So what is this process, or Tao, that we’re trying to apprehend? In Nietzsche’s words, it is "that which must overcome itself again and again". Nietzsche’s conception of embracing this, of fully participating in the process of life, is shot through with an distinct emphasis on struggle—assertion, strife and conflict. Regarding modern occultural misinterpretations again, it is primarily in this sense that he intended his many references to war. Being anti-state and anti-political, Nietzsche in no way ‘advocated’ bloody economic and territorial battles between nations. He didn’t ‘condemn’ them either. Nietzsche was neither liberal nor fascist. He largely used the word "war" in the sense of resolutely striving for self-mastery without shrinking from—rather, embracing—the inevitable conflicts this quest entails. "I will not cease from Mental fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand…" (William Blake, Milton)

Reconciling this relentless struggle, which is obviously part of the path to self-perfection, with the supposed passive quiescence of Taoism, is itself an ongoing process. Of course, it’s ultimately a false dichotomy, and Christopher S. Hyatt seems to have summed it up best in his book The Tree of Lies:

The concept of surrender has become so distorted that many believe that "surrendering" is in opposition to power, sex and self mastery. This is one of the greatest lies. . . . self mastery is not possible without surrender. This issue cannot be overemphasized. Magic and Mysticism—The Will To Self Mastery and The Will To Surrender—are two sides of the same coin. . . . when power or love are taken to their extreme they become one.

The Tao is a struggle of perpetual self-overcoming—again and again. But as Alan Watts ceaselessly points out, it is a struggle devoid of ‘anxiety loops’. In fully surrendering to the flow of life, one surrenders one’s resistance to the rolling process of destruction and creation, ‘war’ and ‘peace’, that true life constitutes. Passivity is often part of this resistance, as much as frenetic anxiety can be.

Satanism and Taoism are alike in that they are both deeply concerned with the hard/soft, strong/weak distinctions. Satanism seems to emphasize and value ‘strength’, while Taoism seems to emphasize and value ‘weakness’. I feel that both may learn from each other. Taoists who have made the clichéd image of the quiescent oriental sage their behavioural ideal would do well to meditate on the Tao at work in an ocean whipped up by a tumultuous thunderstorm, and see how close to ‘nature’ they really are. Hardened Satanists, intent on fortifying their unbending will, would do equally well to take a sword to a piece of solid wood, and then to a pond. The wood will splinter and be destroyed. The pond will passively accept the blade, and effortlessly flow back to perfection once it is withdrawn.

I was made with a heart of stone / To be broken with one hard blow / I’ve seen the ocean break on the shore / Come together with no harm done

Perry Farrell, ‘Oceansize’

Satan’s Ancestry

Those who point the finger at Satan, reveal Satan. Those who fight Satan, give him power. Those who blame Satan, give him influence. Those who talk much of Satan, create him.

But those who worship Satan, tame Satan. Those who passively resist him, earn his respect. Those who accept him, diminish his influence.

And those who analyse him, learn his wisdom.

Lionel B. Snell, ‘The Satan Game’

The Christian devil, Satan, is an archetype. Whether one sees archetypes as creations of the human mind, genetically-rooted universal ‘templates’ of conscious experience, or fully independent spiritual entities, is irrelevant here. Even if archetypes are seen to be autonomous ‘beings’—gods, goddesses, demons or spirits—they are inevitably experienced by means of our own bodies and minds. Our experience of them is filtered through whatever biological, cultural and psychological structures we happen to find ourselves equipped with to make sense of the world. Thus, if we’re talking about the realms of human experience (and what else can we talk about in a useful way?), Satan may be seen to have a history, a mythical family line of descent. Certain universal facts of life, such as the processes of sex, birth & death, will be ever-present in most mythical figures; but the specific figures themselves evolve throughout human history to mirror the complex cultural interactions and upheavals that have ceaselessly manifested since the first time apes developed language, culture and myth—and became human.

In this speculative Satanic genealogy we shall obviously work backwards, climbing down from contemporary branches, down the trunk, and under the ground where the roots lay hidden. So to begin with, how is Satan conceived in contemporary culture?

Modern Christianity has lost much of the medieval iconographic vividness in its conception of Satan, as it is supposedly more ‘sophisticated’, and not given to simplistic anthropomorphisms (i.e. Satan as a reptilian, horned, cunning and wily beast-man dwelling ‘down there’ in his burning lair). The most significant manifestation of modern Christians’ concern with their Devil is in the phenomenon known as the ‘Satanic Abuse Myth’. ‘Satanic Abuse’, because the phenomenon centres around the conviction that the Western world is infested with invisible networks of evil Satanists, who ritually abuse and bloodily sacrifice people—usually children—in the service of their Dark Lord. ‘Myth’, because this conviction has uniformly been found, by government-commissioned investigations and independent researchers alike, to be false. Certain cases of abuse have been found where the perpetrators used the paraphernalia of occultism to terrify their victims into submission and silence. But not one case of genuine Satanists, occultists, or pagans harming children for the purposes of magickal ritual has ever been found. So we can see that these obscene Christian fantasies of blood-soaked orgies and child sacrifice are merely the modern version of the medieval equivalents, the witch-hunts (or of the Roman equivalent, where early Christians were accused of similar crimes…). The vividness of these modern scapegoating fantasies seems to have made the mythical figure of Satan himself less necessary. Who needs an image of a subterranean Devil on which to project your repressed fears and desires when you can conjure up such horrifying scenes of ‘actual’ human activity?

Often at the forefront of the cultural panic around Satanism was the self-styled leader of California’s Church of Satan, Anton Szandor LaVey. He seemed amused as well as indignant about the latest bouts of witch-hunt scaremongering. He knew as well as any open-minded observer that more children have suffered abuse and molestation at the hands of trusted Christian priests than have even heard of the Church of Satan. And his codes of Satanic practice are there for all to read: "Do not harm little children. Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food." (from ‘The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth’)

But for Satanists as well as Christians the actual mythical image of the Devil has become less central. LaVey states that Satan is "a representational concept, accepted by each according to his or her needs." This seems mightily hazy without LaVey’s repeated reminders that ‘Satan’ roughly translates from Hebrew as ‘adversary’ or ‘opponent’. Satanism is based on the principle of opposition. This is usually seen as opposition to the status quo, specifically Christian morality. Satan is an emblematic concept presiding over the practice of all those wonderful un-Christian things: free sexuality, autonomy, indulgence, harmony with (instead of dominion over) nature, and anti-authoritarianism. Many Satanists seem to slip up on this last one, and it’s here that most Satanism as it stands loses my sympathies. Just as many people forget that Nietzsche’s ‘destructive-creativity’ is meant as a perpetual process, not just a one-off revolution, Satanism can often slip from being an expedient release from Christian programming into being a dogma in itself. It seems to find it hard to challenge itself as an institution. There are many parallels here with the ‘left hand path’ of politics, Marxism. Many unsophisticated Marxists still think that their beliefs could function wonderfully as they stand once capitalism is cast to the ground once and for all, not seeing that their present beliefs are conditioned by their capitalist context. If Western capitalism is ever ‘overthrown’, I think many Marxists will follow their historical predecessors and become the new despots, or just be at a loss as to what to do without ‘the opposition’. Substitute ‘Satanists’ for ‘Marxists’, and ‘Christianity’ for ‘capitalism’, and you have a wildly simplistic, but very revealing analogy.

The influence of Chaos Magick and all its kindred philosophies on modern occulture seems to be a useful counter to this tunnel vision of simple opposition. The heart of Chaos Magick is the practical implementation of Nietzsche’s vision of life overcoming itself again and again, and provides a good antidote to any sliding towards dogma, or dependence on a static adversarial figure.

To return to Satan, we can see that despite his modern transformations, the popular conception of the Devil still bears the unmistakable hallmarks of pre-industrial Christianity’s vivid image of him. He is almost always bestial. The horns and the cloven hooves are synonymous with the Devil, and a reptilian tail is often attributed to him. Related to this is his unmistakably sexual nature, often seen as a threatening or perverse sexuality, but definitely sexual. The conception of Satan as the rebel angel Lucifer is a bit of an anomaly here, and this figure seems like a more refined, sublimated and ‘humanized’ Devil, all ferality turned into stubborn pride, and sinister sexuality emerging as cunning seductiveness.

Pre-twentieth century Satanism, exemplified by people like Phillipe the Duc D’Orleans and Sir Francis Dashwood, was the domain of rebellious and hedonic aristocrats. Their repudiation of the asceticism of Christianity often involved the kind of debauchery modern Christians are eager to pin on modern Satanists. There is evidence of child murder and ritual sacrifice. Many, however, penetrated beyond frenzied opposition to the Church and discovered the intimately related, but deeper roots of Satan in pre-Christian pagan gods. Bloody sacrifice was usually part of such old paganism, and we’ll return to this later. For now it is sufficient to see that the figure of Satan cannot be separated from the nature gods of the older religions.

Modern Satanists are often quick to deny this connection as being necessary or significant, probably eager to hang on to Satan’s supposed status as a god in his own right, independent of both Christianity and nature worship. I suppose they fear the potency of their god being quelled by his being subtly appropriated into the realm of ‘neo-paganism’, derided (in some cases accurately) by Satanists as wishy-washy. But the connections are there.

For a start, it’s plain that the Christian Satan was evolved as part of the church’s expansion into pagan or ‘heathen’ lands. This process was often complicated by unforeseen overlaps between Christianity and indigenous pagan practices, to a certain extent betraying Christianity’s pagan origins. We see this clearly in Catholicized Central and South American countries, where many natives have blended the invading cosmology into their own. A vivid example of this is the fact that indigenous Mexican mushroom cults call their fungal sacrament teonanácatl, meaning ‘flesh of the gods’. Those cults which survived the Spanish conquest could easily accept the god Jesus, who offers us his flesh to eat, and his mother Mary, who became the new bottle for the old wine of Earth-Mother goddess figures. Invading Christians spreading north over Europe consciously appropriated existing pagan festivals, and built their places of worship on ancient sacred sites to win over the populace. But they still needed to weed out the more overt paganisms. So the widespread Horned God or Goddess, who presided over pagan nature worship and fertility rites, was demonised. Through the installation of dualistic categories of good and evil, and the identification of pagan gods as evil, they gave themselves permission to trample paganism into the ground, and a lot of spiritual clout with which to terrorize natives into obedience.

The greatest insights into Christianity and Satan can be gleaned from exploring the Greek god Dionysus. He is very typical of pagan nature gods: he is horned, signifying kinship with animals (like the closely related goat-god of the Arcadian pastures, Pan, another source of Satanic iconography); he is a ‘dying-and-rising’ god, reflecting the cyclic process of the seasons in nature; and he has a strong wild and untamed aspect, again like Pan, forming a bond with pre-civilised humanity. It’s obvious how Satan, Christianity’s repressed shadow, has derived from such an archetype. In its irrational suppression of sexuality, nature, cyclicity and the body, Christianity latched on to this archetype and pushed it so far away from human experience that it became alien, and we became alienated. The already feral, ego-shattering Dionysian godform became utterly evil and terrifying, a force to be held at bay at all costs.

Now things get confusing. Did not Jesus, like Dionysus, die and rise again? Both are intimately associated with vines and wine; both have been connected to the use of psychedelic mushrooms; the flesh of both is in some way eaten as part of their worshippers’ rites; and both names, according to John M. Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, stem etymologically from the same Sumerian root. There’s almost as much evidence connecting Dionysus with Jesus as there is with Satan.

It’s my feeling that we have here a crucial fork in the history of archetypes. Christianity appropriated the more abstract spiritual motifs of dying-and-rising nature gods (mainly supposed ‘life after death’) and up popped the mythical Jesus. The chthonic associations with the Earth, with sexuality and the body, were all repressed, compressed and demonised into Satan. In this division was lost all cyclicity, all the transformative and change-affirming power of nature’s process. We descended into truly profane time; linear time instead of rhythmic, spiralling, sacred time. Norman O. Brown has noted that "the divorce between soul and body [analogous to the Jesus/Satan split] takes the life out of the body, reducing the organism to a mechanism". Likewise, the conception of an extra-terrestrial, eternal time (Heaven) as sacred renders the Earth profane, and binds us to the linear track of uni-directional historical ‘progress’. We may see ourselves as moving towards this sacred time—but it is an ever-receding carrot-on-a-stick, and tears us away from omni-directional immersion in the moment. "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn." (Jim Morrison)

In Satanism, Satan is seen as embodying the principle of division and duality, that principle without which manifestation—matter, flesh, bodies & sex—cannot occur. This is symbolized in the ‘inverted’ pentagram, where two points are directed upwards and one down. The dual realm of manifestation rules over the singular, united realm of spirit. In the ‘normal’ pentagram the spirit rules the flesh. Jesus is seen as opposing Satan, and embodies the spiritual principle of unity. So what are we to make of the actual historical beliefs and practices of the followers of these two figures? Christianity has turned out to be militantly dualistic, denying the body and ravaging the Earth, glorifying the ‘spirit’ and longing for some united heavenly kingdom. And Satanists, while obviously prioritising flesh over spirit, ego over collectivity, are inevitably involved in many practices which approach Dionysian revelry, serving to abolish individual distinction. Also, their emphasis on living for the moment instead of "spiritual pipe-dreams" could be seen to destroy the future-fixation of profane time, following Nietzsche into a whole-hearted immersion in the eternal present.

Our problems in analysing these contradictions betray our present evolutionary and cultural problems. In looking at the splitting of Dionysus, we’re seeing the mythical reflections of a phase in the development of the human species where the increase of city-dwelling and changes in agriculture & economics began to erode our bond with the rest of the biosphere. City walls are the rigidification of human ego-barriers writ large. "When Christians first distinguished themselves from pagans, the word ‘pagan’ meant ‘country-dweller’. For the first centres of Christianity in the Roman Empire were the great cities—Antioch, Corinth, Alexandria, and Rome itself." (Alan Watts, Nature, Man & Woman) In our quest to urbanize our existence, to become as independent as possible from the less comfortable and benign aspects of nature, we have become lost in a mire of confusion. Witness Blake’s disgust at the industrial revolution in his phrase "dark Satanic Mills", and the fact that most of the mill owners were probably devout Christians. Protestantism has been intimately linked to the rise of capitalism by psychoanalytical historians; Satanists advocate material power. A church in Coventry recently held a service in thanks for the car industry; and Jesus advocated shunning possessions and said rich people would have a bloody hard time getting into heaven. Such confusion seems to be the price for living under the sway of false dichotomies like Jesus/Satan, spirit/matter, collective/individual, intellect/instinct.

Culture and civilization are inseparable from material technologies, and things are no less confused in the technophile/Luddite debate. The real dichotomy to be tackled here is that of harmonious/unharmonious technology. Do our tools help us achieve our desires, or do they become our desires? Do you browse the web to kill time and boredom, like TV, or use it to help you do what you want to do in the real world? Is our technology harmonious with nature? In most cases today, the answer is a painful no. We have lost the vision of the first grand tool-using age of humanity, the Neolithic, where culture, agriculture and technology were used to work with and intensify the natural environment.

Reclamation

Our Satanic genealogy has so far reached the figure of Dionysus, and if we delve further back, we find his roots in the pan-European Neolithic worship of the Great Goddess. In Greek myth, Dionysus’ mother is identified as Semele, a mortal. She was, however, sometimes equated with Ge, the Thracian form of the Earth Goddess Gaia.

The male god, the primeval Dionysus, is saturated with a meaning closely related to that of the Great Goddess in her aspect of the Virgin Nature Goddess and Vegetation Goddess. All are gods of nature’s life cycle, concerned with the problem of death and regeneration, and all were worshipped as symbols of exuberant life.

Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe

Now I shall lose the interest of yet more die-hard Satanists. I think it’s possible to trace most of Satan’s aspects and characteristics back to the Neolithic (and perhaps Palaeolithic) Great Goddess. It’s true that if you gathered all available books on Goddess worship together, the vast majority of them—in their style, typography, illustrations and attitude—would probably be… well, twee. It’s obvious why the figure of the Goddess is largely consigned to the realm of New Age Pap; but I think a serious, unromantic investigation of the religious and mythical complex termed ‘the Goddess’ will uncover something a lot more challenging, vital and useful than the trite New Age-isms we’re usually presented with.

The Neolithic Goddess, like Satan, was invariably horned; the ox was one of her most revered forms. Being associated with the Earth itself she was often a chthonic (underworld) Goddess, this aspect entering Greek mythology in the story of Demeter and Persephone. It’s worth noting that Heraclitus once said that Dionysus was another name for Hades, lord of the underworld. The whole chthonic goddess & son complex is the basis for our image of Satan ruling over a subterranean Hell.

Another strong link between the Goddess and Satan is the serpent. The serpent in Genesis’ Garden of Eden is often associated with Satan, and Christianity usually extends this association to all snakes. The snake was, along with the ox, the animal most frequently associated with the Neolithic Goddess. The spiral, often symbolizing a coiled serpent, is one of the most common Goddess symbols. Archaic serpent myths from around the world are far too numerous to detail here. However, one extremely early myth (perhaps the earliest), which detours us to an extremely bizarre connection with Christianity, is well worth going into.

In his book Blood Relations, anthropologist Chris Knight proposes that human culture was the result of early female Homo sapiens synchronizing their menstrual cycles. This collectivity, he argues, empowered them to periodically ‘sex strike’ during menstruation—females basically refused sex with their partners (but possibly had menstrual sex with male kin) until the men went hunting and brought back enough meat to feed them and their children.

The full thesis is persuasive but very complex. It is enough for now to note that the hypothesized collective act of female synchrony was achieved through tidal and lunar observances, utilizing these natural, universal cycles with which widespread groups of women could ‘phase-lock’ and harmonize their own blood cycles. In the Australian Aboriginal myths of the Rainbow Snake, and its associations with menstruation, water, the moon and women, there is widespread acknowledgement that this ‘cosmic serpent’ (often androgynous) originally gave women power. Knight’s key argument is that this power is the power to periodically unite in saying ‘no’ to sex, to initiate sexual-political change (the Snake symbolizes the united body of ‘flowing’ women). At the same time, it is the powers of shamanism and magic, which Knight sees as evolving as a result of the first ‘proto-cultural’ groups of humans in Africa dispersing inland, away from their coastal origins. The females, robbed of the tide as one of their main cyclic guides, evolved moon-scheduled ritual activities—and thus symbolic culture—to synchronize social, psychic and bodily rhythms.

Somewhere along the line, as the myths and practices of many surviving hunter-gatherer tribes testify, this power was appropriated by men. Knight sees male initiation ceremonies involving cutting the penis or arm (found among Australian Aborigines and other indigenous cultures), together with the existence of extreme menstrual taboos, as evidence for a male take-over of female ritual power. One male Aborigine, speaking of their all-male rituals, told C.H. Berndt that "all the Dreaming business came out of women—everything; only men take ‘picture’ for that Julunggul [i.e. men make an artificial reproduction of the Snake]. In the beginning we had nothing; because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women." The surviving Snake myths, propagated by all-male initiation societies, portray the Snake as threatening to women. Part of this threat is derived from myths that describe the Snake swallowing women; Knight feels that this once symbolized the power of synchronized menstruation to unite women, together ‘in the belly of the Snake’. Male initiation societies utilizing the Snake mythology may see this devouring serpent as somewhat threatening, but still desire the womb-return, unity and rebirth of being swallowed. Much as Jonah is willingly cast into the sea to be swallowed, then vomited out by the "great fish" prepared for him by the Lord God.

Knight finds hard evidence of similar ‘Rainbow Snake’ myths across Africa and South America, all related closely to tides, rain, floods, menstruation and lunar cycles. The myths perpetuate these associations, but are often configured to make women see the Snake as a threat. There are some tribes, however, whose women still draw power from the Snake, and celebrate it in menstrual rites. Knight also interprets the myriad ‘dragon’ (i.e. mythical serpent-beast) legends as remnants of this archaic mythical conception of women’s culture-forming menstrual synchrony, and of the male take-over. Many dragon myths speak of many-headed beasts (the Hydra for instance), and this is possibly an echo of the menstrual Snake which comprised many women in unison. Of course the classic dragon tale, across the world, says that valiant men rescue maidens from its clutches, destroy it, and gain power. Given Knight’s theories, there could be no clearer mythical equivalent of a male usurpation of female power: overcoming a reptilian representation of their blood-unity and menstrual ritual potency.

Now, let’s have a look at the Holy Bible. Turn to Revelations 12:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:

And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

And there appeared another great wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. . . . [She gives birth to a sort of second Christ, and flees into the wilderness. Michael casts the dragon out of heaven. The dragon persecutes the woman, who is given eagle wings to escape.]

And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. [Aboriginal Rainbow Snake myths are connected with great floods in Australia's past.]

Very strange to find such a twisted distortion of what may be a primal human myth of the beginning (of culture) in the ravings of a religious visionary supposedly being granted a glimpse of the end. This vision corresponds in some way to the frequent ‘male-appropriation’ myths of modern hunter-gatherers: in depicting the dragon/serpent as threatening to a woman; and in the statement that the denizens of heaven "overcame him by the blood of the Lamb" (12:11). The Lamb is Christ, and Christ is a man who bled from his arms (and, like all Jewish men, he presumably bled from his genitals, when he was circumcised as a child). Interestingly, one New Age commentator on Revelations believes that because the many-headed dragon "has several autonomous decision-making centers, [it] is therefore the very epitome of disorganization, of centrifugal or dispersive forces." (F. Aster Barnwell, Meditations on the Apocalypse) Think back to what Knight believes the original Rainbow Serpent represents, and compare.

And who was this blood-red, water-spewing, many-headed dragon? Saint John the Divine tells us that he was "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan…". A day or so after making this Rainbow Snake-Dragon-Satan link, I started reading The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove. They take a Jungian approach to the few systematic instances of menstruating women’s dreams being recorded. Apparently, some women’s dreams at this time contain strong male figures, often threatening or sinister. Shuttle & Redgrove’s idea is that menstruation can be a time of heightened sexuality and departure from conventions for women, hence its widespread repression and extreme taboo status. They see the appearance of a compelling male figure in menstrual dreams as the appearance of the animus, a Jungian word for the masculine principle in women. Talking about the repression of menstruation leading to a "negative animus", they say: "If the woman’s menstruation is despised, that is, a deep instinctual process in her is ignored or hated, then its spirit will return with all the evolutionary power of those instinctual processes that grew us and continue to energize our physical being. You could say in this way that the Christian Devil was a representation of the animus of the menstruating woman, in so far as the Christian ethic has Satanized woman and her natural powers."

Avebury henge and surrounding monuments

I want to follow these Goddess/Serpent/Devil associations now by focusing on one specific place (which will also lead us to other areas I’m interested in): Avebury in Wiltshire, with its rich psychogeography and densely inter-related complex of Neolithic monuments.

Michael Dames has analysed the Avebury monuments, synthesizing archaeology, folklore & ethnography, to build a vision of a harmonious cycle of structures embedded in the local geography. They form a ritual landscape which reflects the cyclic narrative of the seasons and of human life. The monuments are seen to celebrate and embody the Great Goddess, conceived in the pervasive form of the Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother & Crone. (Being three multiplied by itself, the number nine is frequently given a high status in Goddess-based religions. It seems no coincidence that modern Satanism has adopted this as its central number.)

The massive Avebury henge is approached from the south and west by two long, slightly winding stone avenues. Dames’ contention is that these two avenues are processional serpentine pathways by which young men and women approached the henge for marriage and consummation ceremonies. The men’s Beckhampton avenue, to the west, is largely destroyed. It seems significant, though, that the name Beckhampton derives from the Old English word meaning ‘back’. Dames relates this to the spine, and to Tantric beliefs in the raising of the Kundalini serpent energy from the base of the spine.

Much more evidence survives in relation to the partly intact West Kennet avenue, beginning at the Sanctuary (the name for the remains of a circular wooden temple at the southern foot of Waden Hill). Comparisons with contemporary Neolithic symbolism and ethnographic studies show that the Sanctuary (corresponding to the springtime Maiden) was probably a site for the initiation of young girls reaching puberty. This conjecture, along with the proposed serpentine nature of the processional avenue leading to consummation in the henge, is supported by Chris Knight’s research. Aboriginal mythology equates the Rainbow Snake with the ritual dance through which women collectively synchronize their menstrual periods (or with which men are united in blood-letting initiatory rituals). As the onset of a girl’s puberty is signalled by their first menstruation, Dames’ theories about the function of the Sanctuary and the symbolic serpentine nature of the West Kennet avenue stand on quite firm mythical ground.

At the henge, the male and female snake-avenues conjoin. Dames argues that the so-called ‘D’ feature within the southernmost of the two stone circles inside the henge is a representation of the tip of the phallic Beckhampton avenue snake entering the henge. This is ‘swallowed’ by the females’ West Kennet snake, whose gaping jaws may be seen to be symbolized by the southeast and southwest quadrants of the henge, the actual stones representing its teeth. The dual sexual symbolism of the serpent—penetrator and devourer—is not lost on Dames. He speaks of the Beckhampton avenue’s "commitment to bisexuality" as it approaches ritual sexual union in the henge; we’ll return to his androgynous Avebury Goddess later.

The vast stone standing at the point where the West Kennet avenue joins the henge is commonly known as the Devil’s Chair. Also in the Avebury area we have the Devil’s Den long barrow; and there are too many caverns and Neolithic standing stones in the British Isles named after the Devil to catalogue here. The demonisation of indigenous paganism that was such an integral part of Christianity’s conquest of these islands is prolifically demonstrated in such folkloric names.

In 634 CE a Christian church was built up against the west bank of the Avebury henge. On its twelfth-century font is depicted a bishop, armed with a spiked crozier and a Bible, fending off two serpentine dragons. However, the battle waged against the powerful chthonic forces of nature glorified in the Avebury monuments wasn’t some abstract war of symbols. In the fourteenth century most of the stones in the southwest quadrant of the henge were destroyed by Christian authorities trying to eradicate the many "superstitions and questionable practices" still connected with the stones. These bastards destroyed part of our heritage, in the name of Jesus.

Christianity, especially in rural areas with a deep pagan tradition, can never entirely purge itself of the past. In the parish church of Ilkley, West Yorkshire, there is a stone carving which is usually identified as the Romano-British goddess Verbeia (above). In her hands she holds two writhing snakes, resembling the famous Minoan snake goddess statuette found in Knossos, Crete. Verbeia is said to be goddess of the River Wharfe, which flows through Ilkley, forming the familiar goddess-serpent-water associations. However, one historian of Ilkley believes the goddess is only superficially associated with the river itself, and was once associated with the brooks flowing down from springs on the famous neighbouring moorlands. On these moors are numerous prehistoric rock carvings, stone circles, and traces of human settlement dating back to 7000 BCE; Verbeia is probably a survival of more ancient myths in the area. The historian notes the double snake symbol’s connection with healing (look at the British Medical Association’s symbol), and the long-standing reputation of the moor’s waters for healing properties, which survived into Victorian times, when a renowned healing spa was set up near the edge of the moor.

In Dames’ ritual landscape cycle we move from the henge southwards to the awe-inspiring Silbury Hill, a flat-topped conical mound of earth which stands as the largest man-made Neolithic structure in Europe. Known to have been built progressively over many years, added to each August (harvest time), it seems likely that this was the Neolithics’ vision of the pregnant Earth Goddess made flesh. Natural breast- and belly-like hills and mounds were commonly worshipped in many archaic cultures, but the emergence of agriculture signified the rising importance in human participation in nature. Silbury Hill—the Mother Goddess labouring to give birth to the year’s crops—is a monumental testament to a culture whose technology still harmonized with nature, working mythically and practically at precisely the same time.

Excavations have revealed that at the core of Silbury lies a circular wattle fence and stacked layers of turf forming an inner mound. The wattle fence has exactly the same diameter as the Sanctuary, and most projected reconstructions of the wooden temple at the Sanctuary reveal it to be identical in size and form to the inner Silbury mound. Silbury, then, is a fractal reflection of the Sanctuary, which is replicated within and then magnified eight times in the total mass of the Silbury mound. The springtime Maiden has matured into the life-giving Mother of the harvest. A careful study of Dames’ investigations into the harmonic fractal resonances within the Avebury complex (all monuments being based around natural units of measurement taken from the springs feeding into the revered River Kennet) is capable of pushing the rational mind beyond itself into a deep, awe-full respect for the powerful visionary precision of this ‘primitive’ culture.

Of course, being the most provocatively sensuous and voluptuous of all the Avebury monuments (go there!), Silbury failed to escape the demonisation of Christian folklore. There is a legend that the Devil was once on his way to attack Marlborough (just east of Avebury) by dumping an apron, or spade full of dirt on the town. The bishop of Marlborough apparently stopped him at the last minute; the Devil dropped his load, and Silbury Hill was formed.

The last monument in the cycle, before it completes a total gyration and feeds back into itself at the Sanctuary, is the West Kennet long barrow. It is located just southeast from Silbury and almost due east from the Sanctuary. This multiple burial chamber is the Goddess in winter: the Crone, the death-dealing Dark Goddess found (and so often repressed) in many religions. The barrow is constructed—like other European Neolithic burial chambers—to render yet another form of the Goddess’ body. You go in through her stone vulva, and enter a small corridor with five small adjoining womb-tomb chambers.

Despite its belief that faith in the Lord Jesus Christ will automatically transport his followers to an eternal realm of happiness, love & old friends on dying, Christianity is terrified of death. Most systems of belief promoting a simplistic, personal and linear form of immortality are—they deny death. "Hell, Luther said, is not a place, but is the experience of death, and Luther’s devil is ultimately personified death." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death) Again we see that Christianity has ruptured, repressed & demonised the cyclic processes of nature. To cultures harmonized with the seasonal rounds, death precedes life just as death follows life. The Avebury cycle, where each distinct monument participates in the unified ritual landscape, suggests a culture where the principle of division has not yet been separated from the principle of unity; death is part of life.

The barrow was built around 3250 BCE, and remained open until around 2600 BCE, when a huge stone forecourt was erected, and the chambers were packed with a mass of chalk rubble, organic material, and bits of bone and pottery (resembling the chalk, soil and vegetable layering found in the core of Silbury, whose foundations are contemporary to the sealing of the barrow). During its ‘active’ time, the barrow was almost certainly used for ritual as well as burial purposes. Dames points out that "the belief that the living can find meaning and reality within putrefying chaos was once widespread", and rightly notes the possible parallels with Tantric practices.

The loving Goddess of Creation has another face. As she brings man into time and his world, she also removes him from it. So she is his destroyer as well. No-one can be a successful Tantrika unless he has faced up to this reality, and assimilated it into his image of the nature of the Goddess. There are many rituals, some of them sexual, carried out among the corpses in real (or symbolic) cremation-grounds, which bring this necessity forcibly home to the practising Tantrika. There, in the red light of funeral pyres, as jackals and crows scatter and crunch the bones, he confronts the dissolution of all he holds dear in life.

Philip Rawson, Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy

We can never know the exact nature of the rites enacted in the West Kennet long barrow, but many of skulls and thigh bones from the dead buried there were found to be absent. The obvious explanation for this is that they were used in Neolithic rituals, probably at the nearby causewayed camp on Windmill Hill, northwest from the henge, where many individual skulls were found. Dames notes that "the widespread use of skull and femur in fertility rites was maintained down to classical times, when the rotting flesh fell off to reveal the clean tools of a new sexuality, with skull acting as female container, encompassing the thigh bone-phallus." I’m also reminded of the use of skulls and thigh bones in various ‘left-hand path’ (i.e. frowned upon) cultic practices in Tibet. It’s clear that any study of Neolithic Goddess-orientated cultures will fruitfully profit from comparisons with non-mainstream Asian religious beliefs.

The Snake Goddess

A few years ago, shortly after I had become interested in paganism, but well before I began any of the above research, I had a very bizarre dream. I dreamt I was an actor in the process of making a film whose director was a very sinister and shadowy figure. There was an unnerving atmosphere on the set, and I kept finding small, partially hidden pentagrams and other similar symbols—sewn into the undersides of cushions and so on. I became convinced that the script and set were devised so that the specific motions and gestures the unwitting cast made during filming would have the equivalent effect of a ritual to evoke the Devil. In the half-dream hypnopompic state before fully waking up, I had the distinct sensation of physical pressure around my anus. Dream logic convinced me that this was in fact Satan. I was vaguely disturbed during the following day, but the dream quickly faded into the past.

Earlier this year, I was writing something about the idea that dreams and vision states are in fact the perceptual flip-side to interior bodily sensations. The two realms can be seen as two different ‘channels of perception’ conveying information about the interior processes of the human organism, from visceral energy streams to the sub-molecular goings-on in the brain. Going to sleep one night, having just finished the section on this particular subject, I had a hypnagogic experience that seemed to confirm my theory, and shed revealing light on the dream of the Devil a couple of years before.

I was in a pretty low state, and half-heartedly (pathetically actually) called on the Earth Goddess to visit me in my dreams that night. Soon after, I found myself getting up from the bed and walking across my room. I was suddenly overpowered by incredibly intense body sensations, and felt my mind ‘blacking out’ as if I was fainting. I instinctively ‘knew’ that this was the power of the Goddess overtaking me, and tried hard to surrender to it as I fell down (‘trying hard’ in these situations is a classic mistake!). I found myself lying on the floor, a huge lump obscuring my vision in my right eye. I heard the woman who lives across the hall from me trying to get in. My fall must have been loud, I thought. I took the lump on the right side of my face to be a result of the fall, and desperately tried to work out how I could get up to open the door and let the woman in. I couldn’t move, and feared that I’d really injured myself. At the same time I became aware of rattling noises in my kitchen. There was a distinctly female presence in there. Then I snapped out of it—I had been half-dreaming. I was still in my bed, and the ‘lump’ was a bit of the duvet against my face. I instantly connected the two instances of female presence, one seemingly trying to help me, with my vague plea to the Goddess.

Suddenly, immense surges of energy began to flow around my body, intense and strangely familiar streamings that pushed me into a delicious and frighteningly precarious balance between waking and dreaming. Then I felt pressure around my anus… and what followed can only really be described as being fucked by the, or at least a Goddess. A stupendous thrust of energy rushed up me, and I was immediately propelled into a highly vivid and intense lucid dream. I was flying high above a scintillatingly real landscape, a deep blue summer sky above me, a daytime sky yet dotted with stars. Part of the subsequent dream involved fishing a demonic-looking pike out of a lake—this seemed to be the culmination of a series of intense dreams I had recently had about seeing fish swimming underwater. The pike, once on land, turned into a cute brown seal.

I awoke from the dream after escaping from a very nasty situation by flying straight up through the building I was in, bursting through each floor successively and waking with a jolt on blasting out the top. It didn’t take much meditating on all the sensations and symbols to realize I had almost certainly just experienced a bizarre manifestation of the Kundalini serpent energy.

The Kundalini serpent is envisioned in traditional Tantric yoga as being a coiled-up (spiral) reservoir of normally untapped psychosomatic energy, stored in the Muladhara, or base chakra. The base chakra is located in the perineum, just in front of the anus. Kundalini is a goddess at the same time as being a spiral snake energy. Kundalini Shakti is the female principle to Shiva’s male principle in Tantra’s erotic cosmology. The goal of Tantric practice is to awaken the dormant snake Goddess through various yogic methods, causing her to surge up the body and ecstatically unite with Shiva at the highest chakra. This rising can be seen clearly at either end of my dream (and body)—both in the energy thrust up me from my perineum just before sleeping, and in the climactic flight through the floors of a building, eventually out of the top, into waking consciousness.

Many insights (and a tremendous feeling of well-being) flooded through as a result of my Kundalini dream. Firstly, there was the gnostic confirmation of my theories about Satan being (for me at least) a demonised remnant of a primal serpentine Goddess. My dream of a few years ago was undoubtedly the same Kundalini phenomenon, distorted by the Christian cosmology virus, and undeveloped. It seemed to be a ‘confirmation’, rather than being an experience induced by my research, because the Kundalini dream reflected so precisely back onto a dream I had long before any of my research began. And at the time of the second dream, although I had been looking into Goddess myths, I had not really looked at Kundalini. The fish symbolism seemed to flesh out my feeling that the Kundalini phenomenon is the prime model for looking at this experience. In Indian mythology, the fish symbolizes Kundalini’s most primitive form. Interestingly, early Christians represented Jesus (eternal opponent of the serpent Satan) with a fish symbol. Jesus opposes fish to serpents in Matthew 7:10—perhaps yet another example of divisive Christian mythologizing.

Kundalini has been connected by Gene Kieffer (a president of the Kundalini Research Institute in New York) to the UFO contact experience, after personal psychic activity that involved both phenomena. This connection and the sensations I experienced of pressure around the anus (or nearby perineum) inevitably brought to mind the infamous reports from supposed UFO ‘abductees’, who believe themselves to have been improperly probed up the arse by bug-eyed scientists from other planets. Are we looking here at spontaneous Kundalini vision states, either distorted through confusion or overlaid with a space-age clinical myth-structure?

My current belief that visions and the body’s energy processes are complementary has given me a rough rule of thumb in understanding mythology: all the most resonant and meaningful myths will reflect some aspect of biology and evolution. As Shuttle and Redgrove say in The Wise Wound, "mythology and physiology are only two sides of the same thing, which is alive." Of course, evolutionary theory and the physical sciences can be seen as yet another myth-structure; and seen in this way they should, if they are to relate to the general human experience of life, somehow echo the more primeval and recurrent mythologies and archetypes of our cultural ancestry. The idea that the Kundalini serpent, which ascends the spinal column, is the psychosomatic evolutionary force in the human body, can be seen to relate to the fact that we are vertebrates. Our common evolutionary inheritance, along with all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes, is that we have a backbone. We have all physically relived the evolutionary journey of bodily mutation as we gestated in our mother’s wombs. Human embryos, in their earliest stages of development, are successively indistinguishable from fish, reptile, bird and other mammal embryos—at one stage, recognizable gills emerge, and then atrophy.

Our individual lives begin in the amniotic ocean of the womb. Organic life on Earth began in the oceans. And humanity itself may have emerged from a partial return to the ocean. Many anthropologists believe that humans evolved on the shores of east Africa, as hominid apes returned to a semi-aquatic lifestyle. This is seen to account for our hairless bodies, the layer of buoyant fat beneath our skin, and possibly our upright posture (a distinct advantage if you’re trying to keep breathing whilst wading through deep waters).

It seems quite fitting that Indian mythology should symbolize evolutionary power through the snake, the skeleton of which is basically a backbone, and the fish, the original spine, which still inhabits life’s womb.

Any form of anal stimulation contains the possibility of ecstatic spiritual experience. Phil Hine has pointed out that Ramakrishna experienced Samadhi whilst having a dump on more than one occasion, and this is interesting in relation to Martin Luther’s so-called Thurmerlebnis ("experience in the tower"), a revelation about faith that was to inaugurate Protestant theology. The ‘tower’ was where the toilet was located in Luther’s Wittenburg monastery. "This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower." (Luther) In his analysis of Protestantism in Life Against Death, Norman Brown hones in on the centrality of the Devil to Luther’s theology, and on the ‘anality’ (a Freudian term needing no explanation, for once) of the Devil. He documents Luther’s numerous associations of the Devil with ‘filth’, ‘blackness’ and foul odours, and notes his methods of counter-attack to the Devil’s assaults—at one revealing point he threatens to "throw him into my anus, where he belongs." These scraps of information, the traditional location of the base chakra, and my intuition that Satan may be related back through history to a primeval serpent goddess, seem to be no coincidence.

Many traditions, from male Aboriginal initiation ceremonies to Aleister Crowley’s magick, recognize the power of sodomy to elicit altered states of consciousness, but this is mostly ignored in our own culture due to the extreme taboo associated with anal eroticism (and with altered states themselves). This taboo is clear in homophobia, but is equally present in heterosexuality. Often, sodomy is not merely tabooed, but actually illegal—such is the continuing power of old Judeo-Christian restrictions over modern secular prohibitions. Perhaps (as far as our own culture is concerned) the strength of the taboo against sodomy, and not necessarily the physical act in itself, accounts for its potential to induce powerful spiritual experiences. Spirituality is, at heart, a breakthrough into a wider realm of consciousness, and is thus frequently associated (as in Tantra, Chaos Magick and Satanism) with breaking the conventions and laws that inevitably shape consciousness. The danger here, as ever, is that of becoming obsessed with the breaking of a single restriction. Once a restriction is overcome, new and different restrictions may fall into place. For instance, a Satanist who has endeavoured to break the traditional Christian taboo against rational self-interest and ego-gratification may find him or herself liberated in many ways. Eventually, though, this process of liberation may restrict that person from expressing spontaneous selflessness. The path of liberation has no end.

Sodomy, then, may well be a powerful step on the path of spiritual and sexual liberation, but rigid correlations and associations may eventually become obstacles. Regarding the association of the base chakra with the anus, Phil Hine has cautioned against the idea that chakras, or energy centres, have literal physical locations: "I’m working on a body-alchemy centred approach to the chakras at the moment, and the muladhra, for me, relates to one’s physical sensation of the here & now. A great deal is made of the muladhra being the ‘seat’ of Kundalini-shakti—but again, too many people have interpreted Kundalini stuff in terms of getting away from the body, towards some kind of rarified ‘spiritual’ state. My own feeling is that the Tantric perspective is less about ‘awakening kundalini’ as though it were something static, and more about ‘becoming aware’ of kundalini’s living presence in, and around us. This necessitates, of course, a change in how we perceive ourselves, and the world we are enmeshed in." (personal correspondence) Hine’s first ‘Kundalini’ experience involved an influx of energy coming down his body. This ‘contradiction’ of the traditional experience can also be seen in Reichian therapy. Wilhelm Reich’s theory of bodily ‘armour’ (rigidified musculature, seen to be arranged in sections like the head, throat, chest, etc.) corresponds well with the chakra system. But in opposition to the yogic assertion that one must work from the bottom up when opening the chakras, Reich advised therapists to work from the top down in undoing armour.

So, anal eroticism is merely one of many gateways to sexual and spiritual ecstasy. And while individual proclivities and specific cultural circumstances channel erotic bodily energy through particular pathways, any broad overview must take into account a holistic view of the body. The many ‘maps’ of the body, from the chakra system to Freud’s anal, oral and genital organizations of sexual energy, are all ultimately limited. The least limited map of bodily energy, the map under which all others may be subsumed, is that described by Freud as ‘polymorphous perversity’ and by mystics as ‘oceanic consciousness’. It is the chaotic, spontaneously self-organizing state a baby experiences before the narrower maps of its culture impose themselves on its body—and which anyone may experience in ecstatic release from cultural boundaries.

In Love’s Body, Norman Brown has pointed out that the human body, in its deepest levels, is not as linear and static as our culture’s vision of it suggests. There is a profound interconnectedness and interpenetration at work. The main component of our linear vision of the body is the divided polarity of the head and the groin, the brain and the genitals. But… "The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. [Richard] Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which the head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow, and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head." An aspect of this ancient model can be seen to derive from agricultural fertility symbolism. In corn, the seed is literally in the head of the plant.

Further, echoing our discussion of Kundalini, Brown remarks: "The classic psychoanalytical equation, head = genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The way up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital. The shape of the physical body is a mystery, the inner dynamical shape, the real centers of energy and their interrelation…" The ‘genital organization’ of sexuality, where the genitals are the prime channel for sexual energy, is seen by both Freud and Reich as the ‘healthy’, ‘normal’ mode of eroticism in humans. Neither could conceive of a culture that could withstand the dissolution of this pattern and support groups of polymorphous humans, people for whom sexuality pervades their entire body, and thus their whole lives. Evidently we’re still a long way off from such a culture, but it seems important to recognize that anything less is a limitation of our potential for generating, using and exchanging energies. Brown’s refutation of purely genital sexuality applies equally to all forms of restricted eroticism or spirituality:

Erect is the shape of the genitally organized body; the body crucified, the body dead or asleep; the stiff. The shape of the body awake, the shape of the resurrected body, is not vertical but perverse and polymorphous; not a straight line but a circle; in which the Sanctuary is in the Circumference, and every Minute Particular is Holy…

The Androgyne

Most striking, perhaps, is the sexual ambiguity of the goddess in my dream. She was definitely a feminine presence, yet the rising snake-energy nature of her conjunction with my body put her in the cock-bearing masculine role. This perception was given a bit of consensus validation when I visited a friend in Brighton, who I hadn’t related my dream experience to. He was skimming through another piece I wrote relating to the World Tree being seen as the spine up which the Kundalini serpent rises. Out of the blue, he said, "Oh yeah! I had a Kundalini thing once when I was tripping, lying on the ground at a festival. It was like being fucked by Mother Earth." (I had related the Kundalini goddess to the Earth goddess myself—I had an strange experience of energy rushing up into me from the ground at a Dreadzone gig months before my dream. Also, the base chakra, where the Kundalini serpent is traditionally seen to be coiled and dormant, is connected in the chakra system to the earth element.) On the same journey, I visited a friend who I did tell my dream to. He quickly related it to an experience he had had while on mushrooms next to a vast boulder in the place where the sarsens (local sandstones) used to build the Avebury henge were taken from. He experienced it as a bolt of energy penetrating him from below, and nicely called it "an amphetamine pessary up the psychic jaxxee."

The Goddess is an hermaphrodite.

In Neolithic thought, maleness was an aspect of the universal being, or vessel, which was regarded as female. How could it be otherwise, if she truly encompassed everything? An architectural expression of this view is often found in Indian temples, where the overall form displays the feminine creative shape, based on the womb cell which contains the Lingam or male element.

Michael Dames, The Avebury Cycle

On Windmill Hill near Avebury, the oldest structure to be found is a cluster of 32 pits dug around 3700 BCE. Dames points out that this pit grouping can be seen to form the outline of a goddess figure, squatting with upturned arms in the traditional stylization of a woman in labour. The pit corresponding to the vulva is "the largest and most fully furnished of all the pits", containing pottery, worked flint flakes, hammerstones, and sarsen balls similar to others found beneath Silbury. However, if one does take the formation to be a squatting goddess, two of the central pits clearly form a penis shape. A small chalk slab, known as the Windmill Hill amulet, found in an adjacent ditch, bears a design similar to the pit goddess, and also displays lines apparently describing a phallus. Hermaphroditic motifs can be seen in two other carved chalk figurines found on the hill, and Dames also notes an androgynous Neolithic figurine found in Somerset and a Bronze Age goddess figure with a beard which was found in Denmark.

The heretical Knights Templar reputedly worshipped a ‘demon’ named Baphomet, most famously depicted by Eliphas Lévi as a goat-headed half-human deity, clearly male and yet breasted—with two intertwining snakes rising from his lap (an important image in Tantra). Baphomet was naturally taken by the Church to be Satan. The Templars were accused of Devil worship and sodomy, and in the early fourteenth century King Philip IV of France had 54 of them arrested, tortured and killed on heresy charges. Satan himself sometimes has shades of androgyny. Phil Hine has informed me that Robertson Davies, in his collection of short stories High Spirits, holds Satan to be an hermaphrodite. And the figure of the Devil in a seventeenth century drawing called Witchcraft (left), by Claude-Françoise Menestrier, clearly has big dangling breasts.

Dionysus, familiar to us here as precursor of the Jesus/Satan split and son of the Earth, was raised by women, often jeered at for his effeminate appearance, and referred to by a king in a text by Aeschylus as "man-woman". Alain Daniélou presents copious documentation, in his book Gods of Love and Ecstasy, that Dionysus is almost precisely equivalent to the Indian god Shiva—from whom we may also derive another traditional aspect of Satan, the trident, which is closely associated with Shiva. One of Shiva’s principal aspects is the Ardhanarâshvara, the hermaphrodite. "The Prime Cause may be conceived as masculine or feminine, as a god or a goddess, but in both cases it is an androgynous or transexual being."

In Siberian shamanism, as in many shamanic traditions, ritual bisexuality is held to be a sign of sacred power, of dealings with other worlds. Daniélou also notes that the Etruscan prophetess wore a phallus attached to her girdle. Kucumatz (inset), the supreme god of the Quiché Indians, is androgynous, both father and mother of all creation. Jewish mysticism elaborates on the creation myth of Genesis in the idea of the primordial androgynous being, Adam Kadmon, a perfect reflection of the divine (see Genesis 1:27—"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."). S/He is split into Adam and Eve to form humans.

Androgynous figures in mythology represent a state of diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity that transcends the apparent opposition of sexes and genders. They are vivid, bodily images of a recurrent spiritual impulse to unite, but not leave behind the ecstatic interplay of opposites—without which unity would be a bland mess, with no contrasts, dynamism or fun. This impulse can be seen more abstractly in the Taoist yin-yang symbol, and the coincidentia oppositorum, or union of opposites, in medieval alchemy. Referring to androgynous motifs in mythology, Mircea Éliade says that this "nostalgia for primordial completeness . . . is found almost everywhere in the archaic world."

So what does this mean for us? A recognition that, potentially at least, gender is less a barrier than a permeable membrane (to paraphrase Carol J. Clover in Men, Women & Chainsaws), and that this membrane may be a gateway to magickal consciousness. Whatever the sexual orientation involved, truly ecstatic sex (ritualized or not) can lead to a psychic intertwining and transmutation of sexual identities. Even in (or maybe especially in) the exploration of the extremities of sexual difference, this potential may emerge. As Chris Hyatt says, opposites taken to their extremes become one. Or—as in the yin-yang symbol, where at the extreme of dark yin we find light yang emerging, and vice versa—the opposites become each other.

I once went to a talk by two practising process-oriented psychotherapists (therapy based on the work of Arnold Mindell), and the woman there responded to a question about Freud by deriding his ‘oppressive’ theory of ‘penis-envy’, the idea that women are all screwed up because they haven’t got that all-important cock. Later in the talk she got round to talking about sexual experimentation, and expressed tingling excitement about the possibilities raised by strap-on dildos. Now, I think Freud was pretty ridiculous in a lot of his thinking—but not always because he was necessarily wrong, just distorted and one-sided. The pendulum’s swung right across to the other side in many feminist circles, where ‘penis-envy’ is refuted because it’s ‘oppressive’, and then men’s ‘womb-envy’ or ‘menstrual-envy’ is given as an explanation for why men are all screwed up. Hang on! Learn from the androgyne. Maybe both these ‘envies’ exist. And maybe we can ditch that word ‘envy’, and all its associations with eternal frustration. Both Freud and the fundamentalist feminists base their theories on the supposedly unchangeable biological foundation of our sex. But these immutable biological ‘envy’ theories just seem to me to be signs of a lack of imagination. Change ‘envy’ to ‘desire’ and cross-dressing or role-playing may be sufficient to transcend biology, for a time, with enough imaginative energy. Strap-on dildos for women and arses in men need a little less imagination. Still further, there are the presently available surgical techniques of transexualism. And if the permanence of this step scares you off, perhaps soon the intelligent and creative application of new technologies, such as virtual reality or nanotech biomechanics, could offer us unlimited exploration of our inherent sexual plasticity and mutability.

Flesh

It is evident that certain rites and practices of ancient Shivaism or Dionysism, such as human sacrifices, could not be contemplated nowadays. Perhaps I should have avoided mentioning them, as they could easily be used as a pretext for rejecting the whole of Shivaite concepts, but, in my opinion, it was necessary to do so because they reflect tendencies of the human being and aspects of the nature of the world, which it would be imprudent to ignore. They form part of our collective unconscious and risk being manifested in perverse ways if we are afraid to face up to them.

Alain Daniélou, The Gods of Love and Ecstasy

Going right back to where we started, let’s recall that the primary manifestation of the modern Church’s concern with the Devil is its fantasy of rampaging Satanists or pagans sacrificing animals and children to the Dark Lord. Modern human sacrifice is largely a myth; however, I see no reason for doubting that animal sacrifices occur, though not necessarily just by ‘Satanists’ (note Anton LaVey’s 10th Satanic Rule: "Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food."). Almost all religions have a deep, intrinsic history of animal sacrifice, and some still practice it. The Massai of Kenya and Tanzania, though nominally Christian, continue to practice blood sacrifice. So do followers of Santeria, a combination of African religion and Christian symbolism, in the States. They regularly ignore U.S. laws (which prohibit the killing of animals except in licensed butcheries and for animal experimentation) in order to practice their religion. The chief contemporary practitioners of ritual sacrifice seem to be Christians themselves, who slaughter and eat tens of millions of turkeys every year as part of their celebrations of the birth of their god.

Human sacrifice also has a long history. It seems to be the main element of Neolithic Goddess cultures that most modern popularisers of Goddess religions have neglected to deal with. Joseph Campbell has said that "human sacrifice is everywhere characteristic of the worship of the Goddess in the Neolithic sphere"; Avebury is no exception. Dames details many instances of human sacrifice in Neolithic Avebury: a prehistoric urn full of human bones was found in the southern inner stone circle of the henge; an adolescent male was found in the foetal position, with all bones broken, within the Sanctuary; other young men have been found buried along the West Kennet avenue. One was found with a thigh-bone jammed into his jaw—sexual/fertility symbolism which involves these sacrifices in one of the primary concerns of the Avebury monuments, the success of the crops. Dames speculates that the sacrificial victims could have actually been honoured to play this part: "For the victims, the opportunity to end their lives in physical incorporation with the Great Serpent [the West Kennet avenue] may have been regarded as an awesome privilege, an ultimate union with the godhead—son and parent united in divinity." The overwhelming holism of the surviving monuments seems to suggest that life for these people may well have been so unified, and death so deeply intertwined with life in their psyches, that young men could have felt their death to be a privilege, an opportunity to spill their life-blood into the ground and magically give life to the crops and the community—as well as return to the womb of the Earth-Mother.1

The idea of sacrifice, bloody or not, is at the heart of human religious life. Its basis is surely the food chain—the interdependence of all life on all other life, the fact that nothing lives save by another’s death. Alain Daniélou has called blood sacrifice "the sacralization of the alimentary function", that is, the ritualisation of killing and eating. "The whole universe is really only food and eater." (Brihat Aranyaka Upanishad) "The world as sacrifice; this world as food; to be is to be eaten." (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body) If the world is conceived of as one divine body, the process of life is divine autophagy—self-eating. It seems that all religious sacrifices may be derived from the recognition of this fact. Most practices are distorted to a greater or lesser degree, but the original function of sacrifice was probably part of the human urge to intensify the processes of nature. Vegetarianism and veganism do not negate the fact that life thrives on death—only an unmagickal, unholistic view of life would hold that plants are not living creatures like the rest of us. And while modern technology makes vegetarianism viable for us all (and meat-eating cruel, relying as it does on modern techniques of slaughter), the symbolism of sacrifice and blood are rooted in the consumption of animal flesh.

What do we actually mean by ‘sacrifice’? The dictionary definition is "the act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else more important or worthy." Alan Watts says that it is an act which makes something holy (sacer-facere), arguing that "sacrifice is only accidentally associated with the cessation, death or mutilation of the offering because it was once supposed that, say, burning bulls on an altar was the only way of transporting them to heaven." (Nature, Man & Woman) This idea is used to stress that ‘sacrificing’ one’s sexuality to God does not mean chastity, because if you’re not fucking, there’s nothing there to ‘sacrifice’, or ‘make holy’.

These two definitions, ‘giving up’ and ‘making holy’, seem to be at odds—you can’t make your cake holy and eat it—until we look at Shivaite (Shiva-worshipping) practices that forbid anyone to eat any flesh that is not the result of a ritual sacrifice. "One should not eat the flesh of living beings without killing them oneself, i.e., taking a conscious part in their slaughter and making the gods a party to it, since the world which they have created and uphold is itself a perpetual sacrifice." (Daniélou) In a system where "the gods must be offered the first-fruits of the harvest, the first mouthful of all nourishment", this practice makes an offering—gives something up—as well as making the act ‘holy’. In killing for food in the name of Shiva, the sacrifice forms a ritual intensification of nature, of divine autophagy. As in Dionysian rites, the animal is seen as a manifestation of the god, with whom the worshipper communes through the act of eating. You are what you eat. The pagan origins of the Christian communion should be plain. "Eating is the form of redemption. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." (Brown)

The practice of Shivaites, of only eating what you yourself ritually kill, seems diametrically opposed to the systems of hunting and eating taboos anthropologists have discovered among hunter-gatherers. Chris Knight postulates a primitive ‘own-kill’ rule: "Culture starts not only with the incest taboo, but also with its economic counterpart in the form of a rule prohibiting hunters from eating their own kills." One’s ‘own blood’, in both senses of blood lineage and totem animal blood, is forbidden. This ‘rule’, he argues, is demonstrated by the fact that their exist so many methods of getting around it. Rules are there to be broken; their boundaries, and thus the rules themselves, are defined by how they are circumscribed. The ways of getting around this rule can be seen in its application only to a man’s ‘first kill’; in tribes where you can eat your own kill provided you apologize to the animal’s spirit; and in customs where you symbolically offer your kill to someone else first, whether it’s another person or a god. Knight sees the latter as the basis of most ‘sacrifice’.

His reason for postulating this ‘rule’ is that his model of the origins of human culture sees the first proto-human apes involved in an evolving system of menstrual, sexual, hunting and economic taboos. We looked earlier at how Knight envisions culture as emerging from women synchronizing their menstrual periods. Tied up to this is the idea that the time of menstruation, the dark moon, would be immediately followed by hunting trips, as the moon waxed. Because proto-human females were more burdened by their offspring (human infants take a lot longer to mature), they needed to secure a sure supply of food for themselves and their young. In short, they needed to make damn sure the males didn’t go off hunting, scoff the lot while they’re away, and only come back with scraps (as often happens in groups of apes). Knight believes that part of the women’s menstrual ‘sex-strike’ (against procreative, ‘domestic’ sex at least) involved a growing system of associations between menstrual blood and the blood of game animals. The taboo against ‘domestic’ sex during menstruation would be psychically linked to a taboo against eating raw, bloody flesh. In Knight’s model, the women control the fire hearth, and thus it is only through presenting their kills to the women that the men can have cooked flesh, free of the tabooed blood. This way, food for the women and children is assured. Survivals of this taboo system are found in most contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes. To take one example, hunters of the Urubu tribe in the Amazonian basin may not bring deer into the village. The hunter deposits his kill at the edge of the clearing, and sends a woman to get it. The Urubu believe that "a hunter who brought his own game into the village would be punished with a terrible fever and become kaù, crazy." Californian Indians even have a special verb, pi’xwaq, which means "to get sick from eating one’s own killing".

Knight’s model is interesting in that so many ecstatic nature-based religious cults directly contravene these postulated ‘primeval taboos’. "Ancient Shivaite or Dionysiac ritual does not allow the cooking of the flesh of the animal victim, which had to be captured after a chase, torn apart and eaten raw." (Daniélou) If prohibitions against eating raw meat form part of the basis of human culture, these later ritual practices may be seen as counter-cultural forces. They evolved during times when human life was beginning to be urbanized, and ‘culture’ was becoming something very alienated from nature. Shivaism and Dionysism all stand against conventional civilization, and aim to ecstatically commune with the natural forces and spirits of the land.

Humans irrevocably evolved into cultural beings in eastern Africa long ago. Some development beyond animal existence was obviously necessary for ‘culture’ to exist at all; thus the raw/cooked, nature/culture, animal/human oppositions. But when the rural/urban opposition arose, as the great cities of Europe, the Middle East and Asia formed, something was slowly lost. Evolution was turned back on itself as human culture, a profound outgrowth of nature, began to isolate and alienate itself from its source. "The Dionysiac rite takes its followers back to a primitive stage, which is the antithesis of the city cults in which the victim is eaten cooked. Here we find a very ancient contrast between the two concepts of food and its associated rites. When Dionysus is himself the victim of the Titans who put him to death and boil and roast him, his being cooked implies that Dionysus, as the god of Nature, is the victim of the gods of the city." (Daniélou)

The menstrual blood and animal blood connection also reveals the second source of sacrificial blood symbolism: menses, the blood which women shed every month as part of their bodily fertility cycles. This may be the original ‘human sacrifice’, in that menstruating women ‘give up’ their womb-lining and their unfertilised egg.

It is possible that shamanistic practises of possession by articulate and helpful spirits originally came from the upsurge of energies at the period. There are indications that these spirits were sometimes seen not only as animals, but as the spirits of unborn children. That is, the blood of the period would come instead of the pregnancy, and the blood spoke with the spirit of the unconceived child. A distressing development of this would be in the rumoured cults where children were aborted for magical purposes: there would be no need for this in a menstrual cult where the natural energies were listened to by women aware of their existence.

Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound

Throughout history, many diverse groups have been accused of child murder or ritual abortion: Dionysian cults, medieval witches, early Christians, Jews in Nazi Germany, Satanists (and non-Satanic pagans) in the modern West. The widespread repression of menstrual power seems to be a good explanation for the projected fantasies that such accusations usually are.

Throughout Aboriginal Australia, there is no other way to arouse the Rainbow Snake than by bleeding, whether this is menstrual blood or the blood of men who cut themselves. The Snake is summoned by and attracted to blood. Perhaps this archaic myth-logic is the origin of the reasoning behind the modern occult theory of blood. Talking of larvæ, or elemental spirits, Eliphas Lévi, a nineteenth century French occultist, says that "such larvæ have an aërial body formed from the vapour of blood, for which reason they are attracted towards spilt blood ["hence come the histories of vampires", he says later] and in the older days drew nourishment from the smoke of sacrifices." In connection with this, he notes that "according to Paracelsus, the blood lost at certain regular periods by the female sex and the nocturnal emissions to which male celibates are subject in dream people the air with phantoms." (Note that Paracelsus includes semen along with menses—both are in some sense ‘unborn children’, and both are highly valued in most sex-magickal traditions.) Blood is seen in such occult theory to contain the ‘life-force’ of the organism, and spilling the blood is thought to release this energy—usually to ‘feed’ a god or spirit, so that it can be manifested, or empowered to do the sorceror’s bidding. Such sacrifice is part of many voodoo traditions.

Christopher Hyatt and Jason Black, in Pacts with the Devil, concisely reveal the modern double standards surrounding the issue of animal sacrifice.

Recently, on a national new broadcast, there was a segment taped in New York. The video showed ranks of cages containing sheep and chickens, with NYPD officers standing with military solemnity in front of them. The police, the commentator informed us, had just "rescued" these animals. Not from torture or some other form of lingering abuse, but from a place where a major Santeria festival was about to be celebrated. What was to be the fate of these livestock animals? They would be killed expertly and quickly by a Santero, the blood given to the Orishas as a gift, and most likely (depending on the ritual) the animals would be cooked and eaten that same evening by the men women and children at the celebration.

They point out that we live in a society where someone could be sat at home eating a steak (from an animal cruelly, sometimes slowly killed in a slaughterhouse), spy someone living next door swiftly killing a chicken as part of a ritual, and run terrified to the phone to inform the police about this ‘Satanist’, even if the ritualist ate the chicken later for dinner. Who is more humane? Hyatt & Black also note that all ‘kosher’ meat, drained of blood while a rabbi says a blessing, is by definition ritual sacrifice; yet this is legal. Now, I’m wholly and unreservedly against any animal being killed if it isn’t eaten (unless in self-defence). When it is eaten, I think this falls into the category of personal choice. It’s not my business if people want to eat animals without cruelty. Likewise, it’s not my business if they want to use the animal’s death for spiritual purposes before they eat it. Or if they want to kill it cleanly, then rip it to shreds and eat it raw with their bare hands.

What Hyatt & Black show is the hypocrisy surrounding blood sacrifice in modern culture. I wonder how many fundamentalist Christians involved in spreading the anti-pagan ‘ritual sacrifice’ scam sit down at Christmas and happily chew the cooked flesh of poultry kept in appalling conditions and slaughtered profanely. Given the choice, I would rather the turkey’s death formed part of a Santerian ritual, and its flesh eaten afterwards by people fully conscious of its demise—and of the sacredness of life and death.

Blood

When I first read the evidence for the ‘own-kill’ taboo in hunter-gatherer tribes—which in some extreme cases extends to hunters believing that even having seen their food alive would lead to bad hunting luck—I thought immediately of the modern meat industry. Now we haven’t the slightest chance of seeing the creature we’re eating in its living state. But this modern taboo merely serves to isolate meat-eaters from the reality of death (as one would expect in a Christian-based culture). For hunter-gatherers, who still kill, even though they may not eat their own kills, the reasons are a bit more complicated, and a little less alienating.

As a general example of how the own-kill rule functions in hunter-gatherer societies, let’s look at what is commonly known as ‘totemism’. Say there are several clans of hunter-gatherers living in the same area. Each clan has a ‘totem animal’. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that there’s the bear clan and the deer clan. Now, the own-kill taboo would work here by preventing the bear clan from eating bear flesh and the deer clan from eating deer flesh. Each clan would be responsible for the hunting and killing of their own totem animal, and for supplying the meat to the other clan. The own-kill rule therefore functions as part of a reciprocal gift-giving system of exchange. Such exchange systems form part of the basis for human culture and language. Sharing and swapping necessitates communication and agreed-upon behavioural guidelines; and the evolution of such guidelines and communication likewise facilitate more intricate systems of exchange. There is strong evidence that most hunter-gatherers link (or rather identify) this food taboo/exchange system—of which there are countless variations—with incest taboos. Thus, the Arapesh of Papua New Guinea equate the taboo against eating one’s own kill with the taboo against incest. When asked about incest by an anthropologist, a man from the Arapesh tribe said, "No, we don’t sleep with our sisters. We give our sisters to other men and other men give us their sisters."

Not all hunter-gatherer exchange systems are based on inter-tribal marrying that is so male-dominated, as many early anthropologists tried to claim (to vindicate current patriarchy). But whoever controls inter-marrying between tribes, matrilineal kin and totem animals are equated as being tabooed for a very simple reason: they are one’s own blood. "To speak of someone as ‘my own flesh’ means, in many languages of the world, that the person is a close relative, usually by ‘blood’." (Knight) To many tribes, whose word for ‘flesh’ is often the same or similar to their word for ‘kin’, this is more than a figure of speech. Malinowski, speaking of the Trobriand islanders, observed that when men learn that a sister has given birth, they rejoice, "for their bodies become stronger when one of their sisters or nieces has plenty of children." Likewise, a similarly concrete feeling of bodily connectedness is expressed by the Buandik of Australia when talking of totemic animals. When forced by hunger to eat such an animal, "he expresses sorrow for having to eat his Wingong (friend), or Tumung (flesh). When using the latter word, the Buandik touch their breasts to indicate close relationship, meaning almost part of themselves."

In fact, the evidence suggests a cross-cultural pattern in which totemic food avoidances [and incest taboos] are in some sense avoidances of the self. If one’s ‘taboo’ or ‘totem’ is not one’s ‘meat’ or ‘blood’ or ‘flesh’ in the most literal sense, it is at least one’s ‘spirit’, ‘substance’ or ‘essence’. And the crucial point is that the ‘self’, however conceived, is not to be appropriated by the self. It is for others to enjoy.

Chris Knight, Blood Relations

‘Avoidance of the self’ shouldn’t be taken in the modern sense, like ‘running away from yourself’. Implied here is an avoidance of the isolated ego. The hunter-gatherers’ gift-giving and exchange systems imply a commitment to extending the unity an individual feels between hirself and hir clan or totem animal. This unity is felt so strongly that it need not ‘feed on itself’ to bind itself together—it can (and must) be shared with others. It spills over, forming reciprocal inter-tribal bonds of interchange.

Looking back to Shivaite ritual sacrifice, the eating of one’s own kill could be seen as an attempt to regain some personal identity in societies where individuality is suppressed and compromised not to maintain kinship and transcendent blood-unity, but to support an oppressive and unhealthy social structure. However, since the whole point of Shivaism is to transcend the individual, and commune with nature, perhaps new psychic structures are involved. As I said before, Shivaism is counter-cultural. Maybe as the original cultural systems became corrupted in crowded cities, the only tack available to oppose this corruption was to oppose the principles it was based on—however socially useful and healthy they may have been in the past.

I haven’t come across any information about sacrificial practices among hunter-gatherer tribes who practice the own-kill rule, and see common blood as the great unifier. But the whole idea of feeling yourself to be one with animals and other people—in a very tangible way—seems to me to have a strong bearing on blood sacrifice. Sacrifice, in the sense of "giving up something valued", would be truest if one lived with this feeling. Offering the blood (as life-force) of an animal to a spirit would mean much less if the animal involved wasn’t felt to be part of one’s own body. If this feeling was present and real, the sacrifice would truly be a sacrifice.

Following this logic, why bother with animals or other humans at all?

And as Deities demand sacrifice, one of men, another of cattle, a third of doves, let these sacrifices be replaced by the true sacrifices in thine own heart. Yet if thou must symbolize them outwardly for the hardness of thine heart, let thine own blood and no other’s, be spilt before that altar.

Aleister Crowley, Liber Astarte vel Berylli

Crowley made exceptions to this ‘rule’ (as he had only one real rule, the often misunderstood "Do What Thou Wilt"); but the concept presented here—spilling one’s own blood as a sacrifice—has interesting resonances. It echoes the idea expressed earlier that menstruation may be the original ‘human sacrifice’. Chris Knight sees the emergence of all-male initiatory societies, involving self-mutilation and the spilling of blood, as a usurpation of female menstrual ritual power and solidarity. While we should obviously endeavour to release menstruation from the repression it has suffered—and all the evidence points to it being the most repressed and stigmatized human bodily function in history—the practice of ritual blood-letting in men today need not carry any of the associations with stealing women’s power that it may have had in the past. I can imagine many a strident feminist deriding men cutting themselves as suffering from ‘menstrual envy’. Well, we’ve already looked at this—I wouldn’t consider it ‘envy’ so much as a desire to partake of the other sex. It is some sort to equivalent of women gaining erotic pleasure and insight through using strap-ons.

It seems that the aboriginal populations who travelled across the Bering Straits from Siberia—those who were to become the native peoples of the Americas—developed the sacrifice of ritual blood-letting further. In his essay, ‘A Fashion for Ecstasy: Ancient Maya Body Modifications’, Wes Christensen details Mayan practices of tattooing, piercing, and blood self-sacrifice. As well as men mutilating their genitals, the piercing of the tongue was common, in men and in women. As Christensen says, "The psychological equation of the penis and the tongue needs little reiteration." His view is that the practice of "pulling spiny cords through holes in the tongue" may have been important for female Mayan ritualists: "If the wounding of the Male expresses the desire to own the magically fertile menstrual flow by mimicking it, the symbol seems less important than its function of linking the opposing forces of mother/father, sky/earth in one ritual practitioner. This way of looking at the rite is less male dominated, as well, as it allows for the pervasive influence of women in the ritual life of shamanistic village life. The tongue sacrifice, then, is the woman sorceror’s rite—a rite in which she symbolically imitates the male to achieve the same equilibrium."

Genesis P-Orridge, who was involved in quite extreme spontaneous self-mutilation as part of his performance art activities in the seventies, has been performing rituals for nearly twenty years, and claims that he never does one without cutting his skin. "I have to make at least one cut on myself, and it has to be a cut that will scar, no matter how small." (Re/Search: Modern Primitives) Obviously, scarification requires care, precision, and knowledge of how different parts of the body will react to incisions. But it could form part of the prime effort underlying all mysticism: overcoming subject/object dualism. Alan Watts has described this in terms of the idea, or feeling, that one is an individual ego contained in a "bag of skin". ‘I’ (the subject) am inside, and you and everything else (‘not-I’, the object) are outside. The skin is seen as the limit-point between these realms. Most people would see this as ‘common sense’. However, as Watts stresses, the skin is as much a bridge as a barrier. Many different forms of energy and matter—sweat, heat, sound vibrations—constantly cross this bridge, though we are usually unaware of it. We are inextricably bound up with the ‘outside’ world, to such an extent that we cannot exist without it. ‘Out there’ thus forms part of our identity, and our true body is the entire universe. "Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world." (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents)

And yet the illusion of the skin as an impassable physical and psychic barrier persists. Thus, cutting the skin could be a very powerful way of shattering this illusion. Scarification can be a form of ego-dissolution. For a start, pain is an intense physical stimulus, and can serve to heighten consciousness. Spiritual practices such as flagellation, bodily restriction, ritual scarification and piercing amply testify to the potency of pain as an intoxicant. In the practice of self-scarification, this alteration of consciousness could shift one’s perception of the wound from being some ‘symbolic’ link between the inner and outer realms to being the concrete link which both physics and primitive tribes insist that it is.

Further, this theory opens up an understanding of many bizarre and perverse phenomena in human behaviour. Schizophrenics frequently lacerate their skin, something usually associated with mere self-destructive tendencies. But if we see this as self-destructive in terms of an attempt to overcome the illusion of separate individual existence (the isolated self, or ego), the practice of spontaneous self-mutilation can be seen as part of the healing process that many radical psychiatrists claim schizophrenia actually is. The ‘split’ in schizophrenia isn’t the popular caricature of ‘split personality’ (which is found in multiple personality disorders), but the split between inner and outer, the retreat of the individual from the outside world. My own view is that this split is not an aberration found only in the ‘mentally ill’, but the standard psychic stance of ‘normal’ modern humans. Ego-dissolving catalysts like intense sex and psychedelic drugs wouldn’t be subject to the repression that they are in our culture if this wasn’t the case. Schizophrenia is thus the shock and confusion of spontaneous liberation from our aberrant ‘normality’, a descent into the depths of the psyche, an intensification of the inner/outer split through which one discovers the illusory nature of this division.

It is not schizophrenia but normality that is split-minded; in schizophrenia the false boundaries are disintegrating. . . . Schizophrenics are suffering from the truth. . . . Schizophrenic thought is "adualistic"; lack of ego-boundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment. The schizophrenic world is one of mystical participation; an "indescribable extension of inner sense"; "uncanny feelings of reference"; occult psychosomatic influences and powers; currents of electricity, or sexual attraction—action at a distance. . . .

Dionysus, the mad god, breaks down the boundaries; releases the prisoners; abolishes repression; and abolishes the principium individuationis, substituting for it the unity of man and the unity of man with nature. In this age of schizophrenia, with the atom, the individual self, the boundaries disintegrating, there is, for those who would save our souls, the ego-psychologists, "the Problem of Identity." But the breakdown is to be made into a breakthrough; as Conrad said, in the destructive element immerse. The soul that we can call our own is not a real one. The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost. Or, as it says in the New Testament: "He that findeth his own psyche shall lose it, and he that loseth his psyche for my sake shall find it."

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

The Divine Body

‘The Goddess’, like all forms of deity, seems to me to be much more than the ‘personification’ of natural forces, or aspects of ourselves. As the previous discussion of personality and ego-consciousness shows, this is because my conception of a ‘person’ or ‘individual’ is, at root, gradually evolving beyond the atomistic and divisive conceptions I have been indoctrinated with. Our conception of divine personifications will (or should) change along with changes in our conception of personality. Since we can’t safely shift overnight to a chaotic, flux-based state of being, the traditional view of deities will still persist to an extent, as useful focuses for attention and energy; but just as any sexual channels must be subsumed under a broader polymorphic map, lest we become obsessed with any one channel, our relationship to ‘deities’ should be encompassed by a much wider conception of divinity. My brief teenage flirtation with Christianity collapsed mostly because I found the mental idea of God as an old bloke with a beard in the sky hard to get round—and very, very silly. I don’t intend to let my present relationship with the Goddess fall prey to similar abstractions. Indeed, the foundation of my interest in this area is the shattering of abstract, monolithic, other-worldly conceptions of divinity.

Much as my ideas are preoccupied with balance, my present conviction that our ‘physical’ experience is the basis of all ‘mythology’ automatically places a distinct difference, an imbalance in emphasis, between those first two all-powerful beings we encounter—our parents. The physical root of my being is the fusion of a part of my mother with a part of my father, but this explosive cellular union is followed by nine months of incredibly rapid growth and development as part of my mother’s body. Even after physical separation occurred at birth, my mother was probably more or less my ‘world’ for the first months of life, depending on circumstances. Freudianism seems to be right in saying that the primal shock of existence is separation from the mother, first physically and then psychically. I’ve no idea why this is the way things are, but such is the case, and I usually point this out to anyone whose knee jerks in dismissal as a reaction against the idea that the first human conceptions of divinity were female. Now, I think this view is overly simplistic, and should be tempered by the above discussions about androgyny and ego-consciousness, but let’s explore it a bit and see what comes up.

Our earliest level of experience of this world is the experience of being unified with our mother in the ocean of the womb. Our nutrition and blood circulation in foetal existence depends utterly on our connection with our mother’s body via the umbilical cord. We are separated at birth, the umbilical severed, but the new world we are delivered into, the ‘external’ world, is in a sense another womb. "Birth is to come out of a womb; and to go into a womb." (Brown) The idea that the material world is our mother is found in archaic Earth-Mother beliefs; in psychoanalysis, where exploration of the external world is seen as a symbolic exploration of the insides of the mother, where "Geography is geography of the mother’s body" (Brown); and in language, where the word ‘matter’ derives from the Latin mater, mother.

Tantric cosmology sees the ground of existence as the union of the male and female principles, Shiva and Shakti. The manifest world is the product of their interplay, where Shiva is the static principle of consciousness and awareness, and the female Shakti is the dynamic principle of energy and manifestation. This is very similar to the Vedic idea of maya, or illusion. The ‘material’ world is seen as an illusion weaved by the goddess Maya (incidentally, this was also the name of the Buddha’s mother), behind which lies the non-manifest reality of cosmic consciousness. We can also relate this back to the idea that Satan rules the world of manifestation—"The Devil is the lord of the world" (Luther)—and God rules the ‘non-material’ realm of the ‘spirit’. Tantra’s Shiva-Shakti cosmology is much more holistic, and does not treat the web of matter weaved by Shakti as ‘illusory’ in the sense of something to be overcome, some cosmic deception that inhibits us. It is seen as the basis of our spiritual quest, the ‘raw material’ with which we should work to transmute ourselves and the world.

We are, at present, part of the Earth. This planet doesn’t ‘stop’ at the ground we stand on—its true boundary is the outer edge of the atmosphere, and we are thus inside the Earth. And, like the human body, the Earth’s body doesn’t really ‘end’ in an absolute way at its boundary, or skin. The atmosphere, like the skin, is a bridge as well as a barrier, mediating the transmission of many forms of energy and matter—most notably light and heat—between the planet and the solar system, and the rest of the universe.

The transition from seeing our human mother as our Mother to seeing the world, or the Earth, as our Mother, is central to initiatory rites. In many tribal societies, pubescent initiates are isolated from their biological families. Mothers often grieve, seeing the initiation as a literal death of their child—and the birth of an independent adult. Many initiations take place in subterranean environments—caves or holes in the ground—from which the initiate emerges as a child of the Earth. It is from such underground wombs that mythologies involving the labyrinth as an initiatory complex emerge. In cultures where male-only initiatory societies emerged, the process often became a way of appropriating the power of the mother, and reveals another example of ritual androgyny:

"The young man is put into a hole and reborn—this time under the auspices of his male mothers." Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys "we two are friends," they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or "penis womb." The fathers are telling the sons, "leave your mother and love us, because we, too, have a vagina." Dionysus, the god of eternal youth, of initiation, and of secret societies was twice-born: Zeus destroyed his earthly mother by fire, and caught the baby in his thigh, saying: "Come enter this my male womb."

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

To a certain extent, though, all this is still abstraction. The transition from a ‘biological’ to a ‘spiritual’ mother is as useless and alienating as the Christian spiritual Father concept if our cosmic parent is envisaged in terms of an abstract deity. The importance of ‘rebirth’ is in the rebirth of awareness, the emergence of a feeling that we are fused with, and part of our environment. For the foetus, the fusion with the mother is an obvious fact that is not recognized with conscious clarity, because of an undeveloped sense of awareness and the fact that no other state has been experienced. Our fall from union seems to facilitate—via contrast and separation—a heightened awareness of reality, through which subsequent re-union with the environment may be experienced with greater intensity, "For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union." (Crowley, The Book of the Law)

Since we are dealing with the relationship between human consciousness and the environment, one of the most important areas of interest here is what is commonly known as earth mysteries. This is the investigation of human interaction with the natural landscape in terms of spirituality, especially regarding sacred sites, whether these sites occur naturally or are constructed. There is usually a dualism at work in the investigation of sacred sites, with the scientific disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and ethnography on one side, and paganism, psychology and spirituality on the other. The ‘subjective’ side (pagan investigators interested in the past and present use of such sites) is necessarily full of speculation and assumptions—my own writings included—but it does hold the key to approaching an understanding of stone circles, burial complexes, standing stones and all other such sites. That is, the function of sacred sites cannot be understood without an understanding of (which must include an experience that approaches) the mind-set of the people who built them. This task is probably impossible if taken to be a ‘perfectible’ scientific project, but we have much greater access to archaic states of consciousness than we are led to believe.

In trying to convey the idea that the LSD experience can access different modes of consciousness from along the evolutionary line, Timothy Leary quotes the German anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, offering it for comparison with documented accounts of LSD sessions. Von Eickstedt is trying to describe his idea of the spiritual attitude of australopithecines, our early ancestors:

In the way of experience there is dominant, throughout, a kaleidoscopic interrelated world. Feeling and perception are hardly separated in the world of visions; space and time are just floating environmental qualities . . . Thus the border between I and not-I is only at the border of one’s own and actually experienced, perceptible world.

In other words, for pre-hominid apes, and for the earliest humans, the definition of personal identity could be expressed as: I am my experience. This obviously includes the perceptible landscape, so any sacred sites and constructions that predate the evolution of ego-psychology in human cultures should be considered in these terms. This intertwining of human identity and nature is given a more roundabout, but somewhat fuller expression by Chris Knight in Blood Relations:

In this scheme of things [that of Australian Aborigines], human and natural cycles of renewal are mutually supportive and sustainable through the same rites. The skies and the landscape are felt to beat to human rhythms. Everything natural, in other words, is conceptualised in human terms, just as everything human is thought to be governed by natural rhythms.

. . . There seems no reason to discount the Aborigines’ own belief that in their rituals they were drawing upon natural rhythms and harmonising with them to the advantage of their relationship with the world around them. It was not that man was dominating nature; but neither was it that human society stood helpless in the face of nature’s powers. Rather, human society was flexible enough and sensitive enough to attune itself finely to the rhythms of surrounding life, avoiding helplessness by replicating internally nature’s own ‘dance’. Nature was thereby humanized, while humanity yielded to this nature. If the hills felt like women’s breasts, if rocks felt like testicles, if the sunlight seemed like sexual fire and the rains felt like menstrual floods, then this was not mere ‘projection’ of a belief system onto the external world. This was how things felt—because given synchrony and therefore a shared life-pulse, this was at a deep level how they were.

Naturally, the experience of a psychedelic trip does not reproduce the actual mind-set of archaic humans. For us, a trip stands only in relation to our everyday, ‘normal’, experience of the world, and is quite different from the continuous, everyday experience of, say, a Neolithic Avebury resident, for whom such a world-view would be ‘normal’. Nevertheless, such experiences, induced by chemicals or otherwise, should stand as the cornerstone of our understanding of sacred sites—and pre-civilised culture in general. And in any case, we shouldn’t be interested in trying to replicate the mind-set of archaic humanity. Individual initiation isn’t a simple one-way ‘return to the womb’, but a more highly evolved sense of omni-directional unity that follows the experience of division. Similarly, any attempt to re-engineer our culture’s experience of the environment, inspired by prehistoric and existing ‘primitive’ cultures, should be a return to a similar point, but higher up on the evolutionary spiral. "We are not interested in a return to the primitive, but a return of the primitive, inasmuch as the primitive is the repressed." (Hakim Bey)

My conception of the Goddess, then, has less to do with a visualized representation of a vast cosmic woman, ox, or serpent than it has to do with my immediate, moment-to-moment experience of the world I am part of. Even in my Kundalini dream, the ‘presence’ of the Goddess was an intuited fact, not a confrontation with a manifest form. The two instances of feeling Her presence were both experiences of intense body sensations and energy rushes, accompanied by the self-evident dream-conviction that this was the Goddess. In waking life, this perception arises very much along the lines of Phil Hine’s idea that Kundalini is associated with "one’s physical sensation of the here & now". This sensation is not a narrow feeling of mundanity, not the dissipation of mystery and numinosity that is usually associated with the apt phrase "down to earth". It is exactly the opposite: a sense of the intense completeness and fullness of each moment; a paradoxical but perfectly natural feeling of being totally grounded, yet adrift in a vertiginous whirlpool of possibilities.

A related point that interests me is that investigations into the function and purpose of archaeological artifacts are nearly always governed by the sacred/profane dualism. Is this antler-pick just a common tool, or did it have ritual significance? Are these cave paintings just ‘art’ (in the modern, profane, sense of ‘representation’), or were they part of a system of hunting ‘magic’? It’s clear that somewhere the rigid distinction between the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ arose. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in the present situation where for most people the ‘sacred’ only exists in church on Sundays (if sacredness exists at all). According to Alan Watts, ‘profane’ didn’t always mean irreligious or blasphemous. It merely signified "an area or court before (pro) the entrance to a temple (fanum). It was thus the proper place of worship for the common people as distinct from the initiates, though here again the ‘common’ is not the crude but the communal—the people living in society. By contrast, the sacred was not the merely religious but what lay outside or beyond the community, what was—again in an ancient sense—extraordinary or outside the social order." (Nature, Man & Woman)

Judging from this, the sacred/profane duality arose as a result of the increase in human populations. Beyond a certain point, it seems that the full power and mystery of existence, as felt by the earliest humans, could not be a constant fact of everyone’s experience if "social order" was to evolve. Even beyond this point, it can be seen from Watts’ argument that the sacred/profane distinction didn’t necessarily mean that everyday experience was utterly bereft of spiritual significance. This spiritual poverty, this rigid division of life into the sacred and profane (in their modern senses), has only been the norm of human experience for several hundred years, if that. And in their historical accounts, modern scientists have been projecting this division back in time for far too long. A re-vision of anthropology and archaeology is overdue, necessary and, I feel, imminent.

It seems ridiculous that anyone could assume that prehistoric humans sectioned life into neat compartments, mundane and extraordinary, profane and sacred, with anything like the rigour and inflexibility that the modern West does. Only affluent cultures, where day-to-day survival is not really a pressing issue, can even afford such a distinction. For pre-civilised (i.e. before cities) societies, where existence was dynamic and unstable, life depended on crops and crops depended on weather, among other things. For pre-agricultural societies, life depended on the gathering of food and the hunting of animals, which are subject to even more unstable factors. And these things, agriculture and hunting, were the prime focus for ‘religious’ activity. Gods and goddesses of the hunt, gods and goddesses of the Earth and crops dominated their relationship with the divine. What we consider the ‘mundane’ bits about life, like fuelling our bodies and keeping warm, were for these people projects loaded with importance and significance. In such a society, there’s nothing more significant than staying alive. Thus food, shelter, hunting, farming, communication, the sharing of knowledge and skills, all were imbued with what we would consider ‘spiritual’ significance.

The figure of the shaman, "technician of the sacred", stands as the first step in the progressive division of life into the sacred and the profane, but the first shamans could only have stood "outside the social order" in a shallow sense. Early shamans would have depended on the social order for basic support and a purpose for their path’s numerous trials, and the society would have depended on them for communication with deities and spirits, or forces of nature—more often than not for the governing and aiding ‘mundane’ projects like hunting and farming.

In short, life was a unity. Everything depended on everything else. The body was divine, and experience of the body included the environment. For ourselves, living in a culture where the dominant spiritual institutions have insisted not only on separating themselves from everyday life, but directing their spiritual aspirations outside this world, it’s evident that a new vision of spirituality more directly concerned with life, the Earth, our bodies and survival is needed. We cannot live on bread alone, but I don’t want to try to live without it. It’s no coincidence that it took an affluent society like our own, where day-to-day existence is taken for granted, to produce a device capable of utterly destroying the biosphere.

Footnotes

1. [2008] After reading Timothy Taylor’s The Buried Soul, I’m glad I couched this part in suggestive rather than definitive language. Taylor deftly exposes the naivety of many recent theorists who try to whitewash suffering in the ancient world with arguments similar to Dames’. While Taylor’s arguments are important, I still think it’s important to imagine that attitudes may be radically different in ancient societies, and to not settle on a definitive judgement either way unless evidence is blatant. [back to text]

Books Used/Sampled

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann
• Janus: A Summing Up by Arthur Koestler
• William Blake: Selected Poems edited by P.H. Butter
• The Tree of Lies by Christopher S. Hyatt
• Pacts with the Devil by S. Jason Black & Christopher S. Hyatt**
• The Devil’s Notebook by Anton Szandor LaVey
• The Secret Life of a Satanist by Blanche Barton
• The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt*
• Towards 2012 part II: Psychedelica edited by Gyrus
• Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown*
• Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown**
• Nature, Man & Woman by Alan Watts*
• The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas*
• The Avebury Cycle by Michael Dames**
• Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture by Chris Knight**
• The White Goddess by Robert Graves
• Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy by Philip Rawson*
• The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee & Madhu Khanna*
• Kundalini, Evolution & Enlightenment edited by John White
• Magick by Aleister Crowley
• The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley
• Re/Search: Modern Primitives edited by V. Vale & A. Juno**
• The Holy Bible edited by the Christian Church
• Meditations on the Apocalypse by F. Aster Barnwell
• The Supernatural by Colin Wilson
• The Wise Wound: Menstruation & Everywoman by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove**
• Men, Women & Chainsaws by Carol. J. Clover
• Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes
• Yoga: Immortality and Freedom by Mircea Éliade
• Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus by Alain Daniélou*
• Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons by Manfred Lurker
• Secrets of Mayan Science/Religion by Hunbatz Men
• The History of Magic by Eliphas Lévi
• The Psychedelic Reader edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunter M. Weil
• Dead City Radio by William S. Burroughs (spoken word album)
• T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey (spoken word album)

* recommended in relation to the ideas discussed in this essay
** bloody essential

Related Films

• The Wicker Man directed by Robin Hardy
• The Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren
• Videodrome by David Cronenberg
• Crash by David Cronenberg
• Santa Sangre by Alejandro Jodorowsky
• Carrie by Brian de Palma
• Alien3 by David Fincher
• The Exorcist by William Friedkin
• The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorcese
• Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola
• The Hunger by Tony Scott
• Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Henry Levin

by Gyrus

The Voice of the Devil

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles, Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of the Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I. Divided

A split exists in us all, and we nurse it.

We have inexplicably driven a cruel wedge between the complimentary principles of creation, and pitted them against each other in a looped war of self-defeatism. Where once existed dancing opposites, constantly interweaving, combining, parting, and mutating into each other, there arose a rigid divisiveness, and a blindness to the unity which lies below. Only this shared bedrock of unity can prevent the ecstasy of perpetually parting and entwining opposites from degenerating into an ugly conflict with existence.

We may wander around the dreary, smog-choked streets of our cities, longing in the depths of our dejection for a miracle, but we are blind to the fact that our alienation and apparent corruption is itself due to the most astounding miracle of all. A miraculous mistake. How can a creature such as ourselves have evolved, where the most acute and complex apprehensions of the world become so drastically distanced from, often opposed to, the matrix of creation out of which they grew? Why have we become such a paradox, alienated from that which it should be impossible to be alienated from, our very being? How can it be that out of the rhythmic flowing dialectics of nature an animal arises bearing a vision of reality as a jagged, struggling conflict between two opposing principles, ending with the ultimate victory of one over the other?

II. The Big Lie

While our alienations and separations reach deeper than any specific set of cultural conditions, we can have a more concrete look at our situation by seeing it in terms of the prevailing myth-structure of the West—Christianity.

Any thorough investigation of this tentatively homogeneous religious structure reveals much more complexity around the issue of duality than we find in everyday ‘common’ Christianity (i.e. the beliefs and assumptions buried deep by the length of Christianity’s dominance). The popular Christian cosmology sees God, the Old Bloke With A Beard In The Sky, supreme deity and benevolent / punishing Father Figure, forever fending off the wily evils of The Devil, Satan, the red-skinned, feral monster lurking Down Below. Humans get bashed about severely between these two, but are still expected to realize that they are vile sinners, whose only hope for ‘salvation’ (i.e. being safe) is to confess this fact in as pitiful manner as possible and pledge allegiance to Jesus, God’s son and earthly manifestation, who suffered horribly a long time ago for your sake.

This may be seen as ‘everyday’ Christianity—although, if we take a look around, we can see that it isn’t everyday at all. The Christian cosmos’ hold over the collective consciousness has gradually fragmented over the twentieth century; but it still lies buried, just below the surface, invisibly influencing social relations and supposedly secular morality. For most, this cosmos only arises in consciousness with clarity when there’s not much hope left—in extreme situations like facing certain death (witness how big a hit Christ is on death row in the USA). Real everyday Christianity is no religion at all; it is a turgid lack of awareness and self-direction. It is the odd turn of phrase, unexamined moral assumptions, guilt-relieving ‘charity’ and occasional church on Sunday.

At the moment we seem far from anything like a ‘concrete’ view of our situation—all we have is an abstract, simplistic cosmology. And it is precisely this lack of concrete reality which exposes the split, and reveals the wound. All but isolated pockets of Christianity demonstrate a profound lack of connection to the physical world; to the body, to the Earth. We are conditioned into feeling ourselves as alien to the Earth, as outsiders to life. Most forms of relating to biological reality are demonized by Christianity in the most devastating way: all demons are coagulated into the Devil, and all matter is placed under his dominion. The fact that it is standard Church dogma that God made the world and it is good seems to be irrelevant. It’s all mouth and no trousers: for all the promising talk of eating Jesus’ flesh and blood, Christianity does not feel at home with the body.

It is at about this point in investigations that any frail homogeneity Christianity possesses begins to shatter, splintering into confused fragments and contradictory doctrines. It is beyond my theology to pick apart the various strands of Christian doctrine and expose the exact locations of these contradictions; all I can hope to do in the face of this deluge is detail my confusion. Even so, I suspect that no amount of theology could delineate all dimensions of this mess: the confusion itself, like all seemingly interminable messes, is probably due to the constant process of self-deception used to avoid facing a Big Lie. The Lie in this case: We are not of this world.

In the popular, generalized and barely unconscious Christianity described above, we have a fundamentalist dualism: the absolute opposition of two mutually exclusive principles. "Ladies and gentleman! In the blue corner, on the side of righteous truth, we have: God & Son, light, the spirit, men, asceticism and life! [polite applause] And over there in the red corner, on the side of evil, deceit and nastiness, we have: Satan and all his little wizards, darkness, the flesh, women, beasts, indulgence, sensuality and death! [boo! hiss! etcetera!] The fight will be ugly, and Satan will use all the underhand tricks in the book to have his evil way. But for those who can be bothered to stick around until the Last Days, we will surely see an eternal victory… May the good side win!"

Ridiculous and cartoonish, yes; but such dualistic metaphysical assumptions infest our culture. We may be tempted, with a sigh of relief, to lay the blame for dualism at the door labelled ‘Christianity’ and forget about the whole business.

Until, that is, we encounter Gnosticism, an early form of Christianity hounded and persecuted in the Church’s infancy for the heresy of dualism. Gnostics did not view this world as good, as the creation of a good God. They view it as evil and corrupt, and therefore the creation of an evil God, a false God. Spirit is seen as encased in matter like an angel in an iron cage. It seems strange at first that such an alienated vision could flourish in a system of belief also found guilty of the utterly admirable heresy of refusing outside authority (i.e. the church’s hierarchy). Then one quickly remembers that alienation is an obvious side-effect of challenging your society’s status quo. The Gnostics saw all worldly authority as being inherently corrupt, and found in this their grounds for refusing it, turning inwards to the authority of personal experience, gnosis—thus actually becoming more faithful followers of that guy who reputedly said, "My kingdom is not of this world" and "The kingdom of heaven is within."

Much stranger, it seems to me, is that such a system of belief could form the one of roots of the Western tradition of sex-magical practices, filtering through Catharism and the Knights Templar. Perhaps the Gnostics were just the honest Christians of their time. Most Christians saw the world as the creation of their good Father in the sky, but their ascetic and generally anti-sex behaviour contradicted this. The Gnostics came out in the open and declared this world of matter and carnality as an evil creation in which we are trapped, and maybe this honesty allowed them to form a direct relationship with the world, free to an extent of the confusions implied in the ideas of an omnipotent good God and an inexplicable Fall from grace.

One may still perceive the remnants of this paradoxical mixture of alienated dualism and relatedness to the flesh in the modern heresy of occultism (although visions of matter as something ‘unclean’ are now quite rare). "The body, as born into this world is a sacred object and the essential spiritual implement of the Higher Self in the work of evolution. Like any tool, it is the prerogative of the craftsperson to modify, fine-tune and alter the tool to meet the needs of the project at hand."1 The shift from Gnosticism to the above brand of occultism is like changing your rusty, unreliable Skoda with doors that are jammed for a sleek, open-topped Porsche, and taking a course in mechanics. The ride may be less stressful, but a more radical shift in consciousness is needed if we are to escape the boxed-in separateness of being drivers, and realise that we are interrelated organisms.

The curious correspondences between ancient heresies and modern popular Christianity become clear when we reach the origins of Protestantism in Martin Luther. "The Devil is the lord of the world," said Luther, "Let him who does not know this, try it. I have had some experiences of it: but no one will believe me until he experiences it too." Again we find the co-existence of a diabolic view of the world—mundus est diablo—with the emphasis on personal experience and the rejection of hierarchical authority. Luther’s refusal of the papacy rested on the same grounds on which I have presumed the Gnostics’ rejection of orthodoxy lay: that this world is evil, and so all worldly power is corrupt. Well, Luther never got into sex magic, but he did challenge the authority of the Pope, which has to be commended. However, he bequeathed to us yet another legitimization of our mysterious alienation from the world, our revulsion at our bodies.

III. United

As I have said before, the edifice of dogma and doctrine lumped together as ‘Christianity’ may well be a vast web of self-deception and industrious lying, all bound together by the fervent desire, born of terror, to avoid facing the Big Lie; that we are not of this world. So before we thrash around too much in this web, entangle ourselves and lose sight of anything resembling reality, let us withdraw for a moment and state the obvious esoterica:

ALL IS ONE

Got that? The infinite universe, our solar system, the Earth, you and your friends, your brain, heart and spine, down to the last sub-atomic wavicle; all are part of a tremendously connected web of interweaving events and processes. All Are One. Yes, it’s a cliché, but it’s true. But then I suppose truth should remain close friends with interest—otherwise we may become bored with reality, and seek diversion in games like… pretending we’re aliens to the Earth, injected into the world, or trying to convince ourselves that death isn’t a real.

The popularization of Eastern mysticism has, among other things, done a great disservice to attempts to evolve a firmly grounded holistic spirituality in the West. What seems to have happened is that the many systems, such as Buddhism and Taoism, whose most basic cosmology is contained in the above three words, have been absorbed—but many of the assumptions and blind-spots of Western religion and culture are left unquestioned.

Luther’s view of the world as the dominion of the Devil may well have been an accurate reflection of the many hideous social realities of his time. Today, however, the vast ‘achievements’ of capitalism (the rise of which Luther saw as proof of Satan’s power here2) have allowed enormous sections of the population a measure of material luxury. We have used our superior ability to manipulate matter to try and smooth over our culture’s view of the world as corrupt. We want to avoid the Devil; we pacify and smother disease with our allopathic medicine, deny death with cryogenics and self-induced myopia, avoid filth and waste with a system that dumps our garbage on someone else’s doorstep—usually Mother Earth’s.3 Those with the spare time to drop their culture’s dominant religion and sit around pondering religions from around the world— obviously mostly from the leisured classes—can very easily forget about this process of collective denial. They can happily believe that ‘All Is One’; all the problems of the world, poverty, torture, disease and despair, all can be happily absorbed into the soft mental cocoon created by luxury… and forgotten. All Is One, and All Is Lovely. It is this view, I think, with all its offensive niceties, which has made the idea of the fundamental unity of existence an ineffectual cliché.

We need to revitalize holism by integrating the darker portions of reality. We need to remember that integration is a project that cannot afford to avoid anything. And it is ironic that we may find some of the most lucid philosophical attempts to redress the balance by going back to one of the original popularizers of Eastern mysticism, Alan Watts. In The Wisdom of Insecurity he suggests that we must realize that those things we usually feel to be ‘alien’ and ‘horrifying’ in nature—"the clammy foreign-feeling world of the ocean’s depths, the wastes of ice, the reptiles of the swamp, the spiders and scorpions, the deserts of lifeless planets"—are also part of ourselves. "Our feelings about the crawling world of the wasps’ nest and the snake pit are feelings about hidden aspects of our own bodies and brains, and all of their potentialities for unfamiliar creeps and shivers, for unsightly diseases, and unimaginable pains." If one truly real-izes this unity with all of our environment, feels it as a living fact of existence, one is usually jolted out of any weary dismissal of the All Is One doctrine brought about by the warm coddling of popular spirituality.

Of course, as with any attempt to redress the balances in our profoundly unbalanced culture, many overshoot the mark and become obsessed with the darker shades of reality. One may argue that this is a natural result of our cultural emphasis on security, inoffensiveness and being ‘good’, which leads to a taboo around ‘darkness’, and hence a tendency to fetishize it. One may also argue that for society as a whole to gain balance, it is necessary for some individuals to initially bear the burden of bringing the dark to light; or that overshooting the mark is necessary, in a dialectical swing between extremes as we move forwards in history.

Whatever; we need to realize that if we desire to experience this world to the full, we cannot shun any aspect of our lives or our world. Much ‘spiritual’ philosophy and practice is burdened, in the hangover of Christianity’s drunken dominion of world-hating, with the idea that there is some sort of wonderful hassle-free place or state of being beyond this world where happiness is untainted by despair, peace undisturbed by violence. We need to see that we cannot embrace holism and cling desperately to that which we experience as ‘pleasurable’.

Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love;
if you wanted one moment twice, if you ever said: ‘You please me, happiness, instant, moment!’ then you wanted everything to return!
you wanted everything anew, everything eternal, everything chained, entwined together, everything in love, oh that is how you loved the world,
you everlasting men, loved it eternally and for all time; and you say even to woe: ‘Go, but return!’ For all joy wants—eternity!

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I have often felt that every pristine moment of joy in my life justifies all suffering before it, for if anything had been different, I would not be experiencing that joy. Conversely, however, every moment of razor-sharp pain and dejection pulls the rug out from under the feet of all my memories of happiness. Then there are the transcendent moments of over-view, where all this tumultuous weighing-up is resolved into a chaotic love for the process of it all.

But this monumentous embrace, this world-affirming acceptance, it will mean nothing if woe and joy are diffused into a swampy mess. Intrinsic to acceptance of reality is acceptance of paradox. The phrase ‘unity in diversity’ has become something of a slogan in liberal social activism, and the slogan’s over-use should not blind us to its profundity. Any diligent student of Eastern spirituality will have penetrated beyond the populist conception of the mystic’s ‘union with the world’ as a hazy dissolution of all oppositions and distinctions; rather, it entails a positive affirmation of differences within the holistic process of the world. The unity of the Taoist yin-yang symbol does not dissolve the complementary difference between these two entwining energies.

Buddhism, too, recognizes the reality of division. Here is the jijimuge doctrine of the Kegon School of Japanese Buddhism: "All things are one and have no life apart from it; the One is all things and is incomplete without the least of them. Yet the parts are parts within the whole, not merged in it; they are interfused with Reality while retaining the full identity of the part, and the One is no less One for the fact that it is a million-million parts."4

Dualism is not overcome by its abolition, but through its acceptance and transcendence. The paradox is that all ‘things’ are at the same time themselves and part of an indivisible continuum. Likewise, different as they may be, dark and light, pain and pleasure, may not be separated. If we wish to experience more of one, we must embrace more of the other. As Nietzsche has written in his scathing condemnation of the bourgeois Christian compulsion to reduce suffering: "How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together."5

IV. Being a Body

Let us return now to that most basic of dualisms, the root of the ‘split’ in our being: the flesh and the spirit, the dominion of ‘Satan’ and the domain of ‘God’, or Christ.

We humans are creatures whose nervous systems have evolved into wondrous structures, crowned by a brain, the size and complexity of which is the result of an unprecedented spurt of growth still mysterious to science. Indeed, as Terence McKenna has pointed out, "there is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes.".6 The brain consists of an estimated 10 billion brain cells, each of which may be related to 25,000 others, making the number of possible neural associations larger than the number of atoms in the universe. Perhaps, then, we may forgive ourselves for our tendency to be a little ‘stuck in the head’. A little harder to leave be, though, is the tendency to tear the activities of this organ (and the rest of the body) away from their origins, to wrestle thought and the ‘higher’ functions away from their connection to physiology.

We exist in a cultural climate where to believe that ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ cannot be set apart from our flesh (however complex) means automatically taking sides with ‘materialism’, ‘reductionism’, and other such dead and unmagickal views of the world. Looking beyond knee-jerk reactions to certain formations of ink on paper, we may begin to see that ‘materialism’, as is commonly understood, is merely one of many forms of reductionism. Reductionism, which is often seen as a sin unique to ‘materialists’, stores its magical explaining-away powers in language, in words like ‘just’, ‘nothing but’, and ‘merely’. Whether the ‘real and only cause’ posited is political, social, material, psychological or spiritual, reductionism removes dynamism and wonder by sweeping all phenomena under a single word-carpet.

Beyond its role in rational, conceptual discourse, reductionism is essentially an attitude to the world. It is born of a certain weariness, and a shrinking-away from parts of reality. The mechanically-minded scientist may dismiss certain ‘religious’ experiences as ‘nothing but’ the result of ‘aberrations’ in the chemical configuration of the brain—a dismissal which is an exercise in cynical narrow-mindedness, showing that the scientist in question hasn’t actually experienced the full force and mystery of those chemical configurations. If these were experienced, the scientist would then no longer be able to use the phrase ‘nothing but’ in such a dismissive way. She or he would see those chemical configurations as the truly marvellous things that they are.

Then, in another example of over-shooting in redressing the balance, some may declare that it is only the ‘spiritual’ realm which exists, mysteriously generating this cumbersome illusion we call matter. Granted, most spiritual reductionists possess a greater appreciation of sensations of wonder and mystery than their materialist counterparts, but their position often leads to a perpetuation of the flesh-hate and impractical other-worldliness of Christianity.

All reductionism uses linguistic categories to forget that reality is nothing other than our experience of the world, which embraces all phenomena, however we may want to label them. This is not a retreat to subjective isolation—do you not experience other people, other creatures, the Earth and sky, the stars and the vast oceans? A true sensitivity to what we actually experience, before we can explain away with language, reveals a flowing interconnection between your ‘self’ and everything you come into contact with.

By seeing that we are organisms, emerging from and not into this world, by feeling ourselves as bodies, not minds driving bodies, we can began to reverse our alienation from ourselves and the world. Some have proposed terms like ‘bodymind’ to express the indivisibility of our dual being. I suggest, with a little caution, that we consciously overshoot the mark as an exercise in balance. See emotions in terms of the streams of energy that enliven our viscera when we experience them; see thoughts as experiences accompanying the dense activity of the neural network; see spirit as an as yet unmeasurable force existing in mysterious sub-atomic processes.

If we accept the terms ‘body’ and ‘spirit’ as designating different perceptual categories of our total unity of being, we may say that body is a form of spirit or that spirit is a form of body. We shall come to the qualities of these differing realms of perception later, but for now I propose that we use the word ‘body’ to encompass each of our experiencing selves. In the context of scientific materialism, emphasis on ‘spirit’ may serve balance well. However, in the context of the burgeoning soul-centric New Age, it is the body that demands attention and emphasis. "The awakened, enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body." (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra) "What is soul? I don’t know. Soul is… rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps." (Funkadelic) To think, feel, and live through the consequences of seeing oneself as a body and nothing else is an exercise that, like embracing the darker portions of reality, cannot fail to revitalize spiritual paths still infected with the vestiges of the Christian virus.

First, being a body means that death is real. There is no more potent antidote to the Christian illusion of a nice place to hang out with you dead friends and relatives after you die than a good, long meditation on being a body that will cease to exist one day. If you really want to go for it, try the Tantric method of meditating on death and transience in a cemetery at midnight. The whole question of ‘life after death’ is muddied by fear of the unknown. We quite simply don’t know. Death is a mystery; as is life, if we are honest. Some may feel it is best to assume there is nothing after death, and use that as a goad to action while we are alive.7 But perhaps this is just more motivation through fear (this time, not of eternal torture, but of nothingness). Some, like Colin Wilson, have seen in evidence from ‘near-death experiences’ conclusive proof of life after death. "I don’t think that there’s any possible doubt about it," he says, an amazing statement from such a rigorous thinker.8 Both positions avoid the obviously scary fact that, while it may be fun to guess, in the end we do not know.

The advocates of cryogenic preservation of our hardware (most notably Robert Anton Wilson), while obviously motivated by a true zest for life, don’t seem to have realized how closely their attempts to ‘defeat death’ align them with Christianity. Talk of abolishing death, like Christianity, alienates us from our present situation, and is demeaning to nature. I do not doubt that, given enough time free from planetary catastrophe, technology may advance sufficiently to endow the pattern of energy called Bob Wilson with something approaching immortality. I do not think, however, that death is the demonic adversary to be ‘defeated’ that we have been conditioned to see it as. Death is necessary to life, for otherwise we simply wouldn’t know what life is.

I think of David Cronenberg’s early experimental film Crimes of the Future, in which he depicts a world where women have died out due to a cosmetics disaster. "Men have to absorb the femaleness that is gone from the planet. It can’t just cease to exist because women aren’t around. It starts to bring out their own femaleness more, because that duality and balance is necessary."9 Even if we lived forever, we would still have to die.

Naturally, an exercise in re-visioning ourselves as bodies involves a deeper look at what the body actually is. It is not the particular cells, molecules, and atoms that at any instant constitute our physical being. Seven years from now, all the particles that make up your body will be somewhere else, having migrated through constant ecosystematic renewal into the biosphere, possibly into deep space. What is left to define our being is its pattern and process.

And when we begin to think in these terms, we must inevitably realize that our bodies exist only in relation to the multitude of event-processes surrounding us; everything inter-penetrates, each action is a reaction and each reaction an action. No body is an island. All sensations, sights, sounds, tastes and smells must be included in what we define as our true body, along with the rushing pleasures and aching pains felt within; and thus ‘body’ becomes synonymous with that all-embracing category, experience—that is, reality. If we were to slip once more into seeing ourselves as separate from the world, we may be tempted to say that our body is the interface between our selves and the world, perhaps a standing wave-form emerging from the interference pattern produced by our interaction with the environment. But the idea of the body being ‘ours’ can only serve to reinvoke the abstracted ‘soul’, the ghost in the machine. Concepts of possession may only be salvaged if we see everything as belonging to itself.

Such are the convolutions we are forced into by trying to understand the world with language. I suggest that you leave these words for a while, and allow all these concepts to dissolve by just becoming aware of all your internal and external sensations, all the tingles and aches in your flesh, all the sounds and patterns of light around you, concentrating on everything you are experiencing right HERE, right NOW.

V. Sensuous Satan

The previous little exercise is the basis of all meditation, and through it one may catch a glimpse of that nonverbal arena where sensuality and spirituality merge into something approaching unfettered experience. It is the Satanic heresy of accepting this world we experience, for there is no other world… until it is experienced. It is Blake’s apocalypse, wherein the apprehension of the world as "infinite and holy . . . will come to pass as an improvement of sensual enjoyment."10; it is Thoreau’s claim that "We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but rudiments of what they are destined to become."

And, turning to modern science, where matter and energy have replaced flesh and spirit, we find that Thoreau’s claim that our present senses are drastically limited (through conditioning) is borne out:

Our tactile perception of the gravitational effects of mass (e.g. a grain of sand falling onto the skin) requires a stimulus of at least 0.1 gram, say about 1020 ergs; the kinaesthetic sense (e.g. lifting a weight) is coarser still. On the other hand, the eye in rod-vision is sensitive to less than 5 quanta of radiant energy, about 10-10 ergs or rather less. In detecting energy therefore man’s perceptual apparatus is 1030 times more sensitive than it is in detecting mass. Had the perception of mass been as delicate as the perception of energy, the identity of the two would have seemed self-evident instead of paradoxical. When seeing light we should at the same time have felt the pressure or impact of the photons, and mass and energy would from the outset have been regarded as merely two different ways of perceiving the same thing…

Sir Cyril Burt in The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler

This ‘thing’ is the universe, the sum totality of all that exists. It is often seen as some form of ultimate organism, but this cannot be: "Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply?"11 It has also been envisioned as a vast machine, but this also proves false, when we see that machines are constructed, which presupposes something outside which constructs. Annoyingly enough, reality just is. And all we ever know of reality, our experience, exists in terms of the incredibly complex folds and twists in the space-time continuum we call our bodies.

I believe that a true consciousness of the body is identical with the mystics’ awareness of the eternal present, the undefinable moment called ‘now’ that we exist in all the time, which only seems illusory to the linguistics and analysis. The past and the future only exist as abstract cognitive processes, and it is always our obsession with the past and anxiety about the future that distance us from the felt presence of immediate experience, to steal McKenna’s phrase.

Of course, all our memories and future projections themselves exist only in the present moment, and as such should be accepted along with everything else as valid aspects of reality. The supposedly abstract nature of memory and forethought is no longer so abstract when we realize that all such cognitive activity is accompanied by the frenetic electrochemical activity of myriad neurons in the here-and-now of the brain, which are usually, in turn, accompanied by bodily sensations… a memory of a lover evokes a tingle in the groin… excitement about an upcoming journey sends rushes of anticipation down the spine…

If we can then value and accept out own immediate experience of the world, value and accept our bodies, we may make Nietzsche’s leap into the Yea-sayer’s love for the world, and love of our bodies. Obviously, if we value our bodies, and truly value the experiences that they consist of, we refuse to submit to any outside authority that may try to convince us we are ‘wrong’ or ‘insane’. We no longer believe what parents, politicians, scientists or ‘experts’ tell us is and is not possible or permissible in the world. It’s all there for you; the world is your guru.

We must still be wary and destroy that in us which has been planted there by those who mean to control us, but only through the monumentous act of total self-acceptance, love of the body, may we move toward a whole-hearted affirmation of existence. A rejoicing in the ever-divided, ever-united nature of creation implied in the jijimuge doctrine. Accepting suffering and death because we accept and love pleasure and life: all is necessary in nature, and thus in ourselves as organisms.

This is redemption.

The highest plateau of human development is awareness of the flesh!

Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible

VI. Dreambody

Any argument that seeing ourselves as only bodies removes the mystery, the spirit, from life falls flat on the ground if we can just take away the reductionist attitude hiding behind that little word ‘only’. This attitude betrays a denigration of the body, a refusal to accept that electrochemical events can produce utterly astounding experiences—or rather, that they are indivisible from, and are part of such experiences. The ‘only’ disappears as we embrace experience of ‘spiritual’ reality in our use of the word ‘body’. This is the true body. Yet the jijimuge doctrine, affirming dualism and unity, obviously requires that we recognize the division of flesh and spirit at the same time as knowing that these are united in one body of experience. Let us look at each of the realms of perception in turn.

When one thinks of ‘flesh’ or ‘body’, one may see a mish-mash of body images culled from visual media, mirrors and lovers. Perhaps one thinks of animal flesh, meat; or, if one is infused with a particularly strong taboo against carnality, the very word ‘flesh’ may conjure a mire of sordid sexual images, to be quickly suppressed. Our distance from our own experience of ourselves is such that relatively few people would primarily associate, not with mental imagery, but with internal feeling.

These sensations are called ‘proprioceptions’: stimuli produced and perceived within an organism. While external material perceptions are equally part of our body of experience, the heightening and deepening of our proprioceptions seems to be a prime key in unlocking true body-consciousness. Actually, this process eventually reveals the underlying unity of the internal/external, subject/object dualism. Anyone who has endeavoured to intensify the internal feelings of their body cannot have failed to notice an accompanying intensification of external perception.

Exercise: Here is a very useful meditative practice picked up from Christopher S. Hyatt’s powerful exercise regime detailed in his Undoing Yourself. It is best practised immediately following some form of physical exertion, whether it be a simple work-out, weight-training or possibly hyper-ventilation—anything which gets your body racing with energy. Lie down flat, with eyes closed, motionless, for 5-10 minutes. Concentrate on your body’s internal sensations. As an aid to this, it is helpful to vocalize any proprioceptions, e.g. "Muscle tremor in right calf", "Tingling in left arm", "Ache in lower back", etc. This helps focus, and ensures that no sensations are just ignored. Do it every day.

The most effective form of this meditation is the experience of sensory deprivation—accomplished most totally in a floatation tank (or, of course, in sleep). Sound and light are excluded, and skin surface sensations are melted away by immersion or near-immersion in water maintained at body temperature. Extensive use of float tanks leads to experiences which seem to be waking dreams, and can lead into the realm of what are commonly known as out-of-body experiences.

Out-of-body experiences seem to be the classic refutation of purely bodily existence, but if we see that what is happening in float tanks is a radical heightening of proprioceptions, we may begin to strike at the heart of the unity of flesh and spirit. Many assume that if all sensory input is excluded, nothing ‘material’ is left to be perceived. In fact, it intensifies our most immediate material experiences, as consciousness descends deeper and deeper into the body’s proprioceptions… and eventually ‘switches channels’; alters perception. What were internal bodily feelings become external scenes. ‘Out-of-body’ experiences, then, may be more elegantly modelled as into-the-body experiences.

We find confirmation for this model in Freudian dream theory: "The womb into which the sleeper withdraws is at the same time his own body. The dreamer sinks into himself . . . in dreams the whole landscape is made out of the dreamer’s body."12 Following this, we encounter the dreambody theory of Arnold Mindell’s Process Oriented Psychology. In Process therapy, one works simultaneously with bodily symptoms and dream states, and both are seen as manifestations of the ‘dreambody’ (which signifies the same totality of experience we have come to see here in the word ‘body’). In his work as a therapist, Mindell has noted how bodily processes are precisely reflected in dreams; and just as Jungian therapists may ask their patients to focus on and amplify dream symbols to unearth their core meaning for the patient’s life, Process therapy requires that one also amplifies bodily symptoms. To the allopathic approach of dulling or removing painful symptoms with drugs and surgery (while often useful) is added the homeopathic approach—bodily sensations are seen as manifestations of urgent messages arising from the ‘unconscious’, and must be intensified to release meaning. The healing process is contained within the process of the illness itself. Often the patient is asked to switch channels as they amplify proprioceptions, from physical sensation to imaginative fantasy; the symbolism of the fantasy may then reveal the message of the physical symptom, usually a violent urge to change. Similarly, a dream may bring to light previously unconscious bodily processes, either as an immediate experience or through working with the dream content and switching channels the other way.

We are moving here, through into-the-body experiences and dreams, into the realm of spirit, which we may see as the realm of perception removed from what we normally consider ‘the real world’, ‘material’ or ‘objective’ reality. Spiritual reality encompasses dreams, visions, hallucinations, astral projection, shamanic journeying, psychedelic voyages… And on all frontiers of this arena of human experience we find support for the unification of flesh and spirit found in intensified proprioception and dreambody theory. "What we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, in the body, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the Self, the richest part of life." (McKenna, Alien Dreamtime lecture)

John C. Lilly, during intensive experimentation with the psychedelic anaesthetic ketamine in 1974, began to contact an alien intelligence network which he called SSI (for ‘Solid State Intelligence’). It was composed of computerlike, solid state lifeforms bent on dominating biological life. This network opposed the efforts of another he had encountered, which he called ECCO (‘Earth Coincidence Control Office’); ECCO worked to order the world. In a bizarre move, echoing Allen Ginsberg’s attempt on his first psilocybin trip to phone Kennedy and Kruschev and "settle all this about the Bomb once and for all",13 Lilly went to Washington to warn politicians and the media of the impending ‘threat’ posed by SSI. He later ‘dismissed’ this period of confrontation with SSI as "just getting in touch with my bones and my teeth", realizing that we ourselves are in fact partially ‘solid state’.

And if one suspects that these explorers have merely allowed their spiritual experiences to be infected with the materialism of the culture in which they live, one may be surprised to find equivalent philosophies among the Mazatec Indian shamans of Central America. Henry Munn, an anthropologist who lived with the Indians for a long time to learn the techniques and lore surrounding their use of psychedelic mushrooms, notes in his essay ‘The Mushrooms of Language’:

There is a very definite physiological quality about the mushroom experience which leads the Indians to say that by a kind of visceral introspection they teach one the workings of the organism: it is as if the system were projected before one into a vision of the heart, the liver, lungs, genitals, and stomach.14

The biopsychiatry of Wilhelm Reich reveals a similar perception. In his paper ‘The Schizophrenic Split’,16 Reich has detailed how the schizophrenic’s perception of malign outside ‘forces’ may be seen as dissociated projections of powerful internal sensations, which he calls plasmatic streamings. Such psychotic sublimation of biophysical energy is understood in psychoanalysis as yet another method of repression. Hallucinations, visual and aural, are seen as a way of avoiding bodily reality: "The audiovisual sphere is preferred by sublimation because it preserves distance." (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body)

However, if we are to learn from Nietzsche’s recognition that all dualities are twins which must "grow up together or . . . remain small together", we must follow the shamans as well as the biotherapists, and move forward with a two-pronged exploration of our bodies. Intensifying sensual fleshy feeling and navigating that hyperspatial realm of surreal inner landscapes, vistas of dreamtime, and interactive entities. Gods, goddesses, elementals, angels, demons, allies… aliens.

VII. Dionysus

Christ and Satan must be reconciled.

Robert de Grimston, Process Number Five

There are many accounts of Satan’s mythical evolution. Some refer to corruptions of the Judaic concept of an ‘adversary’; some relate the figure of Satan to evil deities from other religions, such as the Egyptian Set, or Ahriman of Zoroastrianism; some trace his lineage back to trickster figures such as Loki. None resolve the perverted Christian associations of the Devil with sex, death, flesh and nature… My own story of the origins of Satan begins with the origins of Jesus.

It is a mighty disillusionment for Christians, and a sudden view of a previously submerged pattern for the rest of us, to see that Jesus was not entirely a burst of original revelation into the religious history of humanity. Long before the followers of that wandering rabbi set about bastardizing his teachings and misinterpreting his death, humans evolved religious practices based around—what else?—their most basic perceptions of the natural environment. The sun rose, day dawned. The sun set, night began. After a while, it grew colder; trees and plants withered. Time passed, and warmth returned; vegetation regenerated miraculously in a glorious florescence. The first religious conceptions evolved from this fractal and ceaseless natural cycle. In the beginning, the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature. And so, as cultures evolved, so too evolved various godforms which represented this churning round of death and rebirth, deities commonly known as dying-and-rising gods.

Jesus, when seen with eyes that look beyond theology and into archetypes, is yet another dying-and-rising god. His ‘death and resurrection’ was latched onto and distorted by world-haters vainly grasping at the hope of a life beyond this one. In fact, his death and resurrection derived, speaking mythically, from an archetype that had grown from the natural dialectics of this world.

However, starkly missing from the figure of the Christian Jesus is the juice of this world. Intimately bound as the older dying-and-rising gods were with the seething of the biosphere—life, death, sex and regeneration—their images and attributes naturally reflected these processes. But in Jesus, all vegetal vitality is lost or neglected. He seemed to have plenty of life, storming around the Temple upsetting the proto-banks, preaching angrily against corruption and hypocrisy—but these aspects are mostly played down in conventional Christianity. He died and returned, but the underlying cyclic process is smoothed over with his ethereal flight back to Daddy.

As for sex—this is obviously a mine of controversy. But Jesus never preached celibacy, and if he had practised it, this would have been such a drastic deviation from the Jewish tradition of marriage and procreation that it should have left some trace in writings about him. No—we are asked to believe that God came to Earth and refused to take part in the act He had devised to ensure the continuance of His beloved children.17 We are left with an emasculated shell of a god, a dying-and-rising god stripped of all connection to life as we know it.

When we look at the traditional associations of Satan with carnality, death and the Earth, we can see a pattern emerging. Simply put: Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two. One half is an ethereal, goody-goody shell; the other a virile beast, dwelling beneath the ground we walk on and utterly evil; both at war with each other. Redemption in Christianity is a puny cop-out. Their god is a man stripped of what we feel guilty about, all sex and visceral energy thrown into a reviled scapegoat called Satan.

If the West is to begin to heal this split, we must re-fuse these elements, and rediscover the whole. And as we experience the flesh and spirit coming together in the true body, so we must experience the union of Satan and Christ in a living archetype, a true dying-and-rising god, embodying the life and death of biological existence. Let us experience…

Dionysus, the vegetation god…

The myths of the Greeks tell us that Dionysus was the only god of the Olympic pantheon to be of partly mortal parentage. Zeus, disguised as a mortal, bedded Semele, daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes. The jealous Hera advised Semele, who was already six months pregnant, to ask of her mysterious lover that he reveal his true form. Suspicion instilled, Semele did so, and on Zeus’ refusal, barred him from her sexual favours. Mightily miffed, Zeus appeared to Semele as thunder and lightning, and killed her. However, Hermes saved the unborn child from her womb, and sewed him into Zeus’ thigh, from which he was born three months later. Dionysus thus earned the cultic epithet ‘twice-born’.

But Hera had not finished with her jealousy. She ordered the Titans to seize the child and they tore him to shreds. As the pieces were boiled in a cauldron, Dionysus was rescued once more, this time by his grandmother Rhea, who reconstituted him, and he came back to life.

Such myths obviously derive from the motifs of the proto-religious traditions of shamanism: the shaman’s initiatic descent into the underworld often entails being ripped apart by spirits and reconstituted in a cauldron or furnace by some chthonic blacksmith. Dionysus’ death and resurrection, or rebirth, form the first of a series of resonances that repeatedly associate him, and at some level identify him, with the mythical Jesus. Indeed, John M. Allegro has traced the etymology of Jesus and Dionysus—words still sharing the same final three letters—back to a shared root-word in Sumerian. As we shall see, Dionysus may equally be identified with Satan. We shall explore Dionysus, and his split reflection in Jesus and Satan, for their many resonances, and eventually trace their mythical lineage back to a single primal source.

Dionysus and Jesus are both intimately associated with vines. Dionysus was credited with the introduction of vine cultivation, and the invention of wine. Jesus claimed to be the "true vine" (John 15,1), is notorious for his water-into-wine sorceries, and asked his disciples to remember him by drinking wine, his blood. Another link to vegetation, and thus the cycles of nature, is the mushroom. We shall return to this later; suffice it to say that both Dionysus and Jesus have been intimately linked by scholars to hallucinogenic fungi. Allegro persuasively argues that the whole Christ story is a fungal allegory. Until microscopes were invented, the regeneration of this plant, carried out as it is through the dispersion of tiny spores, remained a veritable mystery to humans. Mushrooms simply appeared, miraculously. In the words of R. Gordon Wasson’s guide in the Sierra Mazateca, "The little mushroom comes of itself, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes we know not whence nor why." A virgin birth indeed. There was one widespread belief among the ancients regarding mushroom genesis: that they were born of lightning, as they invariably arose from the ground after rainstorms. We may note here that Dionysus was torn from his mother’s womb after Zeus destroyed her with lightning. Mushrooms, through their apparently mysterious nativity, were thus perfect symbols of the apparently miraculous regeneration of the biosphere after the cold death of winter.

Dionysus, the horned god…

Together with their associations with plant life, the dying-and-rising gods inevitably demonstrated their links with nature through displaying animalistic aspects. This animality apparently arose voraciously in some Dionysian rites in the hills of ancient Greece, his worshippers reportedly tearing animals (representing their god) limb from limb and eating them in ecstatic frenzy… a holy communion that contrasts in a revealing way with its reserved Christian counterpart.

A key iconic link between the old dying-and-rising gods and Christianity’s Satan is the image of horns. Dionysus was born horned, and crowned with serpents. In his mythical history, he appeared variously as a bull, a panther, and a lion, and has been variously worshipped as a bull, a stag, a ram and a goat. One of the titles of Dionysus was Melanaigis, ‘he of the black goatskin’. Close to Dionysus in his horned image, proximity to nature and wild reputation is Pan, goat-god of the Arcadian pastures. It is widely thought that it was from representations of Pan that medieval Christianity derived its image of Satan as a horned, cloven-hoofed beast.

Not only are we distanced from the life-and-death of vegetation by the religious underpinnings of our culture, we are split from our animal heritage, from our instincts for self-preservation and sexual vitality, from our origins in this world. Most nature religions and fertility cults seem to hold a horned god or goddess to be central, including the viciously persecuted witches of Europe. Christianity was obviously moved to identify the Devil with horned half-animal deities in its efforts to suppress witchcraft and paganism in particular, and ‘beastliness’ in general. In The God of the Witches Margaret Murray notes that during his reign from 668 to 690, Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, fulminated against anyone who "goes about as a stag or a bull, that is, making himself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a herd animal, and putting on the heads of beasts; those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, penance for three years because this is devilish."

Dionysus, the intoxicated god…

The connection of Dionysus and Jesus with psychedelic fungi has already been noted. Allegro, in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, voluminously documents the evidence for the New Testament being a coded guide to an ancient fertility cult centred around mushroom-fuelled mystery rites. Mushrooms obviously lend themselves to a host of sexual allusions, and it is on such natural resonances of form and process that ancient fertility cults based the sympathetic magic of their rituals. Here, the mushroom is Christ; as the sky-god shoots lightning and rain into Mother Earth, producing the revelatory natural drug, so God descends and immaculately fucks Mary, producing the redemptive revelation of God-made-flesh that is Jesus.18

Though Dionysus is popularly associated with wild revels induced by wine intoxication, Robert Graves has argued that the original Dionysian rites were only partially wine-inspired. He has insisted, through his combination of sound scholarship and poetic insight, that the worship of Dionysus once also involved the ingestion of the hallucinogenic fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria.

The psychedelic mushroom, the flesh of the gods and the food of the gods, is a living holistic symbol of the unity of spirit and matter. It seems no coincidence that this plant, whose ingestion activates a maelstrom of neural activity and experience of the divine that testifies to the indivisibility of body and soul, nature and mind, lies in the roots of Dionysus and Jesus. Christ’s position as a demonstration that God is also a man, that spirit is matter, has been systematically co-opted and disfigured by anti-life lunatics. Dionysus, at once vegetal, animal, human and divine, retains a wealth of vital significance which may still be fruitfully mined.

Dionysus, the god of masks…

As befits a psychedelic god, Dionysus was given to a bewildering series of mutations and transformations. Again echoing shamanism, with its traditions of shape-shifting, Dionysus variously appeared as a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther. He was also an occasional cross-dresser, and was the god of the theatre, masks and illusion. Use of psychedelics inevitably reveals the role-playing nature of identity, and the story of Dionysus shows that we may take advantage of this shifting quality of the masks we wear to the world. The metamorphic god persistently used his transformations to conquer foes and work his way out of difficult situations.

The first modern Dionysian prophet, Nietzsche, was not able to integrate his masks, and suffered through descent into ‘insanity’. Approaching his breakdown, he began signing letters with different names: Dionysus, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Crucified… He may have escaped his plunge into an uncontrollable shifting, or loss, of identity, had he existed in a less rigidly Apollonian society; but he was too far ahead of his time. Nietzsche correctly prophesied a coming era of violent transition. His own life was evidence that Dionysus, god of this transition, must also be a god of madness— insanity being a violent disparity between individual and society, a situation obviously rife in times of great change.

Aleister Crowley, who identified Dionysus with Pan, Pan with the Devil, and the Devil with himself, was better able to ride the turbulence created by the contrast between his own temperament and the culture he existed in. Through his magickal disciplines, he was able to live out his various masks in a way Nietzsche could only dream of. "Crowley took his personal experience, magical and otherwise, and created his own enclave, beyond the boundaries of conventional morality. He deliberately sought extremes of experience, concealing, and at the same time, revealing himself through a series of colourful personalities."19

Both Nietzsche and Crowley set themselves defiantly against the Christian Church and monotheism; both in some way identified themselves as anti-Christs; both believed they were heralding a time of violent change; both—Nietzsche through Dionysus and Crowley through Pan—sought to reawaken the old nature gods. Both also, in differing ways, experienced the revelation of the mask-wearing, no-self nature of identity, a revelation only now reaching fruition in the post-modern practices of chaos magic.20

Dionysus, the dancing god…

Like most frenzied ancient religious ceremonies, the rites of Dionysus involved dancing, an ecstatic abandonment of the codes of social order that are delineated in our normally reserved bodily movements. Dancing is a bodily gnosis, a release of powerful internal stimulants and a revelling in the physical excitement these stimulants inspire. Dancing (and its partner music) is also a celebration of the experience of the true body, our immediate experience felt in all its power, which is timeless because it knows no past or future. "…the present moment—the moment in which our entire lives are lived—has the greatest value to us when we approach it as we approach the present of music… The present moment is valued not because it serves as a means to an ultimate assumed gratification, but because it is an immediate source of joy in itself."21 "The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance."22

And now, with ‘dance culture’ being the widest label that can be used to express the tendencies of modern sub-cultures, we find a spontaneous rediscovery of Dionysian values. The involvement of psychedelic substances is too widely recognized to need comment, but we can also draw attention to the popularity of shifting one’s identity around, through increasing sexual experimentation and gender ambiguity, body modification, dress style and involvement in the myriad techniques of psychic mutation. The popularity of outdoor festivals, raves and parties has also engendered a growing enthusiasm for the natural environment; and the unprecedented rise in ecological activism testifies to this being more than a passive hedonistic interest.

Techno, a musical form that has now surpassed the confines of being a singular ‘genre’, is often reviled as an inhuman bastardization of musical form. But what it has actually done, as anyone who has participated in a good rave can tell you, is to exponentially evolve the physical hedonism of rock, and reconnect many people with the most human of experiences—being a body.

Lyrics, and thus conceptual thought, are reduced to blasts of disconnected sampling, or zeroed altogether. The music itself focuses on physiologically energizing, ultra-low, pulsing bass frequencies and spiralling, neuron-tickling melodies, designed to obliterate internal chatter and leave one adrift in strobing lights and rushing proprioceptions. As Genesis P-Orridge has remarked, regarding his own musical output in the late eighties explosion of acid house, "There’s not really anything to ‘say’. Maybe I’m a moron, but I just can’t think of anything to say to people at the moment. Except that there are ways to express yourself that are non-verbal." Techno surges backwards to the percussive roots of ecstatic musical ceremonies, and forwards into a future of limitless, because unspoken, possibilities… all collapsed into a bewildering present of fleshy transcendence.

My own most profound experiences of the jijimuge doctrine have been at the end of superior raves. The night is over, and the strip lights are turned on to clear people out, revealing all resplendent in their sweat-drenched clothes and with wondrous expanded pupils. But the beats continue, no body wants to stop. And so it goes on, joyous dancing in the full glare of white light… and all bodies appear to me to be simultaneously connected, bound in a sweaty, writhing whole, and divided, each displaying their unique nature through disparate corporeal interpretations of the same thudding rhythms…

VIII. Mother

. . . and Jim kept saying over and over, kill the father, fuck the mother, and essentially it boils down to just this, kill the father means kill all of those things in yourself which are instilled in you and are not of yourself; they are not your own, they are alien concepts which are not yours, they must die, those are things that must die. The psychedelic revolution. Fuck the mother is very basic, and it means get back to the essence … mother-birth, real, very real, you can touch it, you can grab it, you can feel it, it’s nature, it’s real, it can’t lie to you … the end of alien concepts, the beginning of personal concepts. Get to reality, get to your own reality, get to your own in-touch-with-yourself situation…

Paul Rothchild on the Doors recording ‘The End’

If we delve further into the mysteries of Dionysus, we inevitably encounter vestiges of a powerful archaic reverence for the feminine. Dionysus himself was extremely effeminate, having been raised by nymphs on Mount Nysa. He was the god most favoured by women, who formed the greater part of his cultic following. And his rites, especially on the island of Myconos, were closely associated with the veneration of his mother…

Although Dionysus’ mother is usually given as the mortal Semele, other accounts tell us that his mother was the corn goddess Demeter, or her daughter Persephone. Also, Semele was often worshipped as divine in her own right; Apollodorus equated her with Ge, the Thracian form of Gaia. Speculation about Dionysus’ mother may then cease, if we take a broader view and realize that all candidates are Earth Goddesses. Similarly, Marija Gimbutas, in her archaeological survey of evidence for an archaic preponderance of Goddess worship in Europe, notes that "discussions about the origin of the Greek Dionysus—whether he came to Greece from Thrace, Crete or western Asian Minor—are pointless, since all these lands originally belonged to the same Mother Culture."

And if we return to the perversions of medieval Christianity, we find Satan (a demonized remnant of pagan nature gods) intimately associated with women, sex, matter and, of course, the Earth. The Mouth of Hell was often graphically associated with female genitalia.23 The underworld of shamanic traditions and their derivatives, associated with the regenerative furnaces of nature’s womb and the buried dead, has been systematically transformed by Christianity into a place of terrible, eternal torture. This fact of cosmographic distortion bears ample witness to Christian terror at the idea of death and disastrous alienation from nature. Given the widespread association of the Earth and femininity, Stuart and Jane Farrar are justified in remarking that "it is almost surprising that Satan has not been characterized as female." Despite this, Christianity pulled no punches in hating women as servants of the Lord of Darkness himself.

We should pause before going further to look at some revealing etymology. The word ‘matter’ derives from the Latin material, meaning wood, timber, or stuff, which in turn derives from mater, meaning mother. In the light of our previous attempts to earth our sense of being by stressing our material existence as bodies, this linguistic derivation hints that we are on the right track in reconciling spirit with matter through the vegetal Dionysian godform, and following his history back to Mother Earth. In our linguistic heritage, as in the roots of our culture (Gimbutas’ ‘Mother Culture’ of Old Europe), there is no split between this material world and the hyperspatial matrix (Latin, ‘womb’) of the divine Mother. I would also like to note the connotations of the word ‘matter’. It is listed in Roget’s Thesaurus as a synonym for excrement, pus and garbage, as well as its less defiled meanings. Bearing in mind the origin of the word ‘matter’, and Christianity’s replacement of a chthonic Goddess with a scatologized, flesh- and woman-ruling Devil, we can see here some of the linguistic roots of our culture’s notorious misogyny.

Dionysus, as well as being heralded by Nietzsche as the god of the violent transition period that is the twentieth century, has also been seen as part of another transition, in the historical era in which his rites were performed. In Food of the Gods, McKenna traces the ancient European Goddess culture back to the Tassili-n-Ajjer Plateau in the Sahara of around 12,000 BCE, and, via the Natufians of Palestine, through to the Neolithic city of Çatal Hüyük in central Anatolia (modern Turkey).24 Çatal Hüyük was destroyed by fire, leaving some traces of Goddess culture, mostly in the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete. Indo-European invaders overtook the mainland of Asia Minor, and brought with them a predominance of war-oriented kingship-centred cultural ideals that destroyed or scattered remains of the archaic Goddess principle of harmonious partnership between humans and nature.

McKenna’s key argument is that the defining element of Goddess culture was the sacramental use of psychedelic mushrooms; and though by no means air-tight, his book provides enough evidence for this theory to justify his search for changing use of, and attitudes towards psychoactive plants as correlates of cultural shifts. He makes much of the differing cultural styles of mushroom-fuelled Goddess societies and mead-fuelled warrior societies, in specific relation to the behavioural impact of psilocybin and alcohol respectively. Well, anyone who has witnessed the change of chemical habits and general atmospheres in dance clubs in Britain over the past ten years will have no difficulty in seeing the logic and cohesion of McKenna’s argument.

It is interesting, then, that around Dionysus, a paradoxical mixture of warrior and effeminate cross-dresser, whose rites have been shown to be intimately bound to those of his Mother, we find so much debate about whether his worshippers’ sacrament was wine or mushrooms. Most scholars who are not too bound by cultural prejudice to even consider the historical use of psychedelics conclude that Dionysus’ rites involved both intoxicants.

Astoundingly, McKenna does not pick up on this symbolic psychoactive cross-over, but clearly recognizes the importance of the figure of Dionysus as a transitional one: "Is not Dionysus, in his androgyny, in his madness, in his personification of ecstatic intoxication, the image of the spiritual crises that overcame the Minoan Archaic ideal? A male god, but softened by the androgynous values of Gaian culture, a dying god, personifying the death agony of the symbiotic relationship to vegetation that male dominance, Christianity, and the phonetic alphabet would finally overthrow." He perceives in the mystery cults of Dionysus, and in those of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, "the last frail outposts in the west of a tradition of using psychoactive plants to dissolve personal boundaries…" We may also see them as the dying gasps of the Great Goddess, whose cultures across Neolithic Europe—embodying a peaceful, holistic way of life, in harmony with nature—were trampled under the feet of invading Indo-European warrior tribes and eventually forgotten under the patriarchal rule of Christianity.

Erotic Jesus lays with his Marys / Loves his Marys / Bits of puzzle, fitting each other…

Perry Farrell, ‘Three Days’

Returning now to the Dionysus / Mother Goddess path, we can follow this further and uncover what I previously hinted at as the "single primal source" of the dying-and-rising godform lineage.

The first human conception of divinity, of universal creativity and intelligence, was female. The first humans discerned no connection between the sex act and the arrival of babies, due to the length of time between conception and birth. Thus, women were seen as the sole creators of life, primitive society was matrifocal and matrilineal, and the original Creator was naturally conceived in feminine terms. This may account for the belief of many researchers that archaic Goddess cultures represented a veritable paradise of sexual freedom—if sex was not connected to birth, it was obviously related to purely as a bodily pleasure. Male Creator gods and patriarchy probably evolved as a jealous backlash once the part played by the male in conception was discovered, and sexual repression instigated as a means for men to control procreation.

The Mother Goddess, as depicted in Greek, Assyrian, Indian and Australian Aboriginal cosmology, was self-created, and She created all things. Cosmologies must inevitably account for duality, formed as they are by humans who exist only in relation to the male/female polarity, so in most myths the self-generated Mother gives birth to a Son, who becomes her Lover; thus begin the dual principles of creation. In matrifocal cultures, this Son/Lover consort of the Mother Goddess was, while necessary, subservient and secondary.

While there is no hard evidence for Dionysus ever being seen as a Motherlover, it seems reasonable to suspect that his close association with, and ancient subservience to his Goddess parent descended from this primal myth. McKenna notes Dionysus’ secondary nature in discussing the older, more Goddess-oriented Minoan cults, and we may mention that the poet Pindar called Pan the "dog of the Great Goddess." Also significant is the fact that in many Catholic cultures, particularly where Christianity has attempted to supplant an older pagan faith, the cultic worship of the Mother Mary often puts Jesus in the shade.

The male consort was usually seen as the instrument of the Goddess in the seasonal rounds of the biosphere: it is through suffering his death and bringing about his resurrection that the Mother participates in the vegetal life of the Earth. Of course, She is also seen to be the Earth, showing that the dying-and-rising Son/Lover myth, seen in the pairings of Isis and Osiris, Ishtar and Tammuz, and possibly Gaia and Dionysus, is a sophisticated gloss on the archaic pre-eminence of the Goddess.

If we see the figure of Dionysus, historically, as a final vestige of the atrophying Goddess, what does his mythical rise in the late twentieth century represent? What is the significance of the "Dionysian witches’ brew in the upheavals of modern history—in the sexology of de Sade and the politics of Hitler",25 and the subsequent rediscovery of a much older, less agonized Dionysian consciousness—in ecstatic dance ceremonies, psychedelic sacraments, the rise of feminism, and a rebirth of appreciation for the natural environment?

We could think poetically for a moment, and see import in Stanislav Grof’s research into the re-experiencing of birth during LSD therapy. He contrasts the oceanic bliss of foetal existence in the womb with the immense, volcanic ecstasy of the baby as it passes through the birth canal, and labels the rapture often felt during the reliving of this latter phase as "Dionysian". He incidentally notes that this volcanic ecstasy "can be reached in aboriginal ceremonies that involve wild dancing and loud intoxicating music, or even in their modern counterparts…"26 In this tumultuous existential struggle, the motifs of birth, life, sex and death intertwine, Eros and Thanatos locked in a tumbling embrace…

May we see the later, darker rites of Dionysus as the birth pangs and death throes of a European culture experiencing final separation from its old Mother Goddess—a traumatic birth into mechanism, patriarchy, alienation from nature, disgust for our bodies, and sexual repression? May we also see the recent rise of Dionysus as another collective birth, back to our Mother roots? Where will we land?

Perhaps in McKenna’s vision of humanity as a tool of nature used to develop communication technologies—to the extent that the Earth, through us, finally becomes a self-reflexive organism. Perhaps we are going back to make our peace with the Earth after our rape and abuse of Her, before being born as Her space-exploring child. Either way, the Goddess looks set to loom large again in human culture.

The rise of interest in the Great Goddess, in Her history and Her presence, has brought cautions from some quarters, wary of just swapping monotheisms. I hope there is something more profound at work than this.

The dualities of spirit/male, matter/female can be seen in a new light if we realize that patriarchy, through Christianity and Science, has worked with both sides, but in a mode of barren alienation. ‘Spirit’ has become an abstracted realm used to enforce repressive dogma, cut off from the gnosis of personal experience found in dream exploration, meditation and interior psychedelic journeys. ‘Matter’ has, through rigidified subject/object dualism, grown to signify a dead, lumpen world ‘out there’ which we manipulate and battle against… severed from our bodily existence, internal sensations, and ultimate quantum union with the material processes of our environment. It is the attitude with which patriarchal monotheism faces reality that distinguishes it from the Goddess cultures which it replaced—or, more precisely, it is the fact that it faces reality, in a mode of confrontation rather than integrated union.

If a revival of the Great Goddess means a return to ourselves and a return to the Earth, through the immediate experience of spiritual reality and awareness of ourselves as flesh, I’m all for it. The psychological importance of the conception of the Goddess seems to be that She is truly all-encompassing, and embraces all gods, spirits, creatures and aliens; all death, life, joy and pain. She is not a jealous, abstract deity who pretends to be good and all-loving, then reveals a violent paranoia in trying to supplant all other gods and goddesses, creates an eternal opponent/scapegoat, and withdraws from the world into an impalpable, invitation-only fortress called Heaven.

The Goddess is within and all around us, and stands for immediate experience of being and unity-in-diversity, as opposed to fundamentalist dualism, alienation, ontological insecurity, and the vicious loops of denial and negation these insidious diseases entail.

Whatever you call it, deified or not, we are an inextricable part of existence. We are bodily organisms, we are ecosystems within ecosystems, we are alive. All existence demands of us is that we affirm it, that we experience it as fully and intensely as possible in whatever ecstasies and agonies that we pass through. The streets are crammed with zombies who only have TV reminders and occasional, unasked-for jolts of harsh reality to let them know they’re living. Their fear of future death is unconscious horror at their present death, for the present is the only reality. Every instant contains the constant fact of the death of their imaginations, the death-like paralysis of their bodies.

Do you know you’re alive? Have you given in to the weight of this crawling mortification, this grey denial of real life and real death? Much better, we feel, is a surrender to the vital energy we embody, and a ceaseless effort to see, affirm, and make use of its possibilities unfolding in every moment.

Footnotes

1. Timothy O’Neill, ‘A Flame in the Holy Mountain’, in Fenris Wolf #3, edited by Carl Abrahamsson [back to text]
2. See the chapter ‘The Protestant Era’ in Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death for a fascinating psychoanalytical discussion of Luther, the Devil, scatology and capitalism. [back to text]
3. Recommended reading on this topic: ‘In Praise Of Devil Worship’ by Ramsey Dukes and ‘Nature Of The Beast’ by D.M. Mitchell in The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt [back to text]
4. Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism, p. 17 [back to text]
5. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 4, 338 [back to text]
6. Terence McKenna, Alien Dreamtime lecture [back to text]
7. See ‘You Could Be Dead Tomorrow‘ by John Eden in OV Magazine and Towards 2012 part I [back to text]
8. From an interview in Mavericks of the Mind edited by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick [back to text]
9. David Cronenberg in Cronenberg on Cronenberg edited by Chris Rodley [back to text]
10. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [back to text]
11. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 3, 109 [back to text]
12. Brown, Love’s Body, ‘Nature’ [back to text]
13. See Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens, p. 208 [back to text]
14. This does not limit ‘spiritual’ experience to the overt confines of the physical form. Quantum mechanics demonstrates that when one reaches the deepest layers of material reality, a form of connection to apparently distant physical structures exists, possibly accounting for the magical feats of perception-at-a-distance reported in shamanic ‘soul-travel’. [back to text]
15. Included as a chapter in Character Analysis. [back to text]
16. Intensive use of powerful psychedelics may also lead one to merge these two worlds. From Dream Matrix Telemetry, McKenna’s rant on DMT: "I somehow shattered the membrane between myself and ordinary space. I carried the trip into the room with me… an elf hanging off each hand." Here lurks the danger of psychotic breaks with consensus reality; but here also dances the possibility of a true alchemical wedding of spirit and matter, the real-ization of the surrealist project. Many other similar reports in psychedelic literature have made clear that the duality of these domains can be paradoxically preserved. Normal space and hyperspace may be experienced simultaneously, yet still perceived as distinct. [back to text]
17. Read Wilhelm Reich’s The Murder of Christ for a vivid, if laboured, portrayal of Christ as a fully red-blooded male. [back to text]
18. The reader is asked to ponder the fact that the Mexican mushroom-cultic name for their vegetal sacrament, teonanácatl, means ‘the flesh of the gods’ (they also believed that mushrooms were born of lightning). The Spanish invaders were understandably peeved at this, as it took a bit of wind out of their attempts to convert the natives to the ‘true’ religion of Christianity, with its rites of eating the flesh and blood of God’s material manifestation. Had the true psychedelic nature of the original Christian cult caught up with them? Despite the Spanish conquest, the native mushroom cults happily blended Christianity into their ceremonies, Christ being identified with the sacred fungi. See Munn’s ‘The Mushrooms of Language’. [back to text]
19. Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos, p .16 [back to text]
20. It is interesting that the largest magical organization based around the chaos approach, the Illuminates Of Thanateros, combine in their name Freud’s notorious battling dualities of Thanatos, the death instinct, and Eros, the life instinct. This hints at the yin-yang reintegration of polarities hoped for by Norman O. Brown in the final pages of Life Against Death. [back to text]
21. Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra [back to text]
22. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, p. 105 [back to text]
23. See The Silbury Treasure by Michael Dames, p. 111. This book is also essential reading for those interested in Britain’s Great Goddess heritage. [back to text]
24. The reader is directed to the following books for further research into these areas: Merlin Stone’s The Paradise Papers, Marija Gimbutas’ The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade and �atal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia by James Mellaart (the principal archaeological investigator of the site). [back to text]
25. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 176 [back to text]
26. Stanislav Grof, The Holotropic Mind, p. 63 [back to text]

Recommended research material

• The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John M. Allegro. A dense work of etymology tracing the roots of Christianity back to Sumerian fertility cults, with particular focus on the possible central position of psychedelic mushrooms in mystery rites among early Christians. Valuable analysis of the sexual connotations of mushroom morphology, and of encrypted mushroom-related information in the New Testament. Allegro was one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.
• Life Against Death and Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown. Life Against Death is a rare thing: a classical scholar in the fifties grappling with the depths of Freudian psychoanalysis, and its implications for the meaning of human history and culture, with a refusal to settle for either nihilism or easy answers. Fascinating material on the psychological conceptions of time, language and sexuality, and their relationship to the human body. Although Brown fails to push far enough beyond Freud’s insidious misogyny, he has the courage to shatter much psychoanalytical orthodoxy, and ends with tentative moves towards the holism of Taoist philosophy and a call for a cultivation of a polymorphous, hermaphroditic sexuality. Love’s Body is the follow-up, with Brown’s academicism breaking down under the weight of his findings into a non-linear mine of aphoristic investigations. Together these works represent some of the finest eschatological writings of the twentieth century.
• Undoing Yourself by Christopher S. Hyatt. A highly potent synthesis of yoga, Reichian bodywork and zen. A crash course in proprioception.
• Dreambody by Arnold Mindell. The author details the relationship of his conception of the dreambody and his therapeutic work to mythology, fairy tales, and various religious conceptions of subtle energies.
• Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna. Bold speculations on the role of psychedelic plants in human evolution. with special focus on prehistoric shamanism and Goddess cultures, and their collapse in neolithic times. Also, convincing arguments against the previous identification of the Amanita muscaria mushroom as one of the key ancient psychedelics.
• The Invisible Landscape by Terence & Dennis McKenna. The background to what eventually becomes a radical new model of historical time provides important scientific and philosophical refutations of the mind/body split, as the authors attempt to "understand the mechanics of the mutual interrelatedness of mind and the organic matrix at formative submolecular junctures." Plus one of the best brief discussions of shamanism, and its relationship to schizophrenia.
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. If one can read around Nietzsche’s rabid hatred of femininity, this is an important work of poetic philosophy that transcends both materialism and abstract spirituality, prefiguring Norman O. Brown’s rediscovery of ‘body mysticism’. A profound, passionate statement against contempt for the world and hatred for nature.
• The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women’s Rites by Merlin Stone. One of many excellent feminist re-visions of history, detailing the violent transition from Goddess worship to patriarchal monotheism. Includes important analyses of the Old Testament and the roots of its destructive influence on the status of women.
• The Book, Nature, Man & Woman and The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Watts is quite simply the most clear-headed and accessible philosopher dealing with the untenable premises of fundamentalist dualism, reductionist materialism, and all forms of the anti-nature religious impulse. He is particularly adept at teasing actual states of non-verbal perception out of the reader through the use of words. All works here are highly recommended.
• Ishtar Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Excellent survey of the resurgence of reverence for the feminine in modern culture. There is a heavy focus on the breasts in Wilson’s analysis, whereas the cunt seems to be equally important in the symbolism of historical Goddess worship (as evidenced in Tantra and palaeolithic art); his editorship at Playboy magazine may explain and perhaps forgive this imbalance.

Other texts used

• The Fenris Wolf (issues 2 & 3) edited by Carl Abrahamsson
• The New Nietzsche edited David B. Allison
• The Holy Blood & The Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln
• The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece by Philippe Borgeaud
• Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis by Norman O. Brown
• William Blake: Selected Poems edited by P. H. Butter
• The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
• The Powers of Evil by Richard Cavendish
• The Holy Bible edited by The Christian Church
• The Gnostics by Tobias Churton
• Magick by Aleister Crowley
• The Silbury Treasure by Michael Dames
• Kantharos: Studies in Dionysiac and Kindred Cult by George W. Elderkin
• The Witches’ Goddess by Janet & Stewart Farrar
• The Golden Bough by J. G. Frazer
• The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas
• Food for Centaurs, The Greek Myths: 1 and The White Goddess by Robert Graves
• The Holotropic Mind by Stanislav Grof
• Nietzsche’s Zarathustra by Kathleen Marie Higgins
• Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine
• The Nietzsche Reader edited by R. J. Hollingdale
• Buddhism by Christmas Humphreys
• The Tree of Lies by Christopher S. Hyatt
• Metamorphosis in Greek Myth by Forbes Irving
• John Lilly, so far… by Francis Jeffrey & John C. Lilly
• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann
• Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life by C. Kerenyi
• A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Ernest Klein
• The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler
• Nietzsche and Modern Times by Lawrence Lampert
• The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey
• The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee & Madhu Khanna
• Info-Psychology by Timothy Leary
• The Dyadic Cyclone by John C. Lilly & Antonietta Lilly
• The Illusionist by Anita Mason
• The Archaic Revival, Psychedelics Before & After History (taped lecture), Alien Dreamtime (lecture with Spacetime Continuum) and Dream Matrix Telemetry (with Zuvuya) by Terence McKenna
• The God of the Witches by Margaret Murray
• ‘The Mushrooms of Language’ by Henry Munn (in Hallucinogens and Shamanism edited by Michael Harner)
• Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Dionysiac Mysteries by Martin P. Nilsson
• Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus by Rose Pfeffer
• Character Analysis, The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich
• Blissed Out by Simon Reynolds
• Cronenberg on Cronenberg edited by Chris Rodley
• The Making of a Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak
• Ecstasy and the Dance Culture by Nicholas Saunders
• The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt
• ‘Game of the Gods’ by Stephen Sennitt (in Rapid Eye 3 edited by Simon Dwyer)
• Plants of the Gods by Richard Evans Schultes & Albert Hoffman
• The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism edited by Stuart F. Spicker
• The Spiral Dance by Starhawk
• Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens
• The Doors: The Complete Illustrated Lyrics compiled by Danny Sugerman
• ‘The Individual as Man/World’ by Alan Watts (in The Psychedelic Reader edited by Gunter M. Weil, Ralph Metzner & Timothy Leary)
• World Mythology edited by Roy Willis