CAROLE SATYAMURTI'S "MAHABHARATA," A REVIEW

Despite the availability of various versions of the Mahabharata, on page, screen, and in live performance, I am assuming that it will be less familiar to the average American or European reader than the Iliad or the Aeneid, for instance. I have seen my task as one of trying to open the reader's eyes--as my own were opened--to the richness of a literary masterpiece they may hardly have heard of until now...

Carole Satyamurti, from her Preface

FIFTEEN TIMES THE LENGTH OF THE BIBLE, the Mahabharata is a sprawling saga of gods and mortals, demons and monsters, comedy and tragedy. It is the story of Kuruksetra, a cosmological war that ended the previous Golden Age and gave rise to our Age, the fallen Kali Yuga. On on side, divine beings incarnated in mortal form as Lord Krishna and the five Pandava brothers. On the other, demonic powers incarnated as Duryodhana and his ninety-nine Kaurava brothers. Disguised as a dynastic struggle between human cousins, it is actually a fight for the destiny of the Earth.

Composed around two thousand years ago, but with an oral tradition stretching back a millennium before that, the Mahabhrata is as familiar to the people of India and South Asia as the stories of Adam and Eve or Moses and Pharoah are to most Westerners. Usually compared to the Iliad and Odyssey, it certainly shares much in common with them; Sanskrit and classical Greek are close cousins, with vocabulary and grammatical structures strikingly similar. Both descend from an earlier Indo-European ancestor, and it is easy to see the linguistic and thematic relations between Greek and Vedic mythologies (a clear example is the god Uranus and the god Varuna, both lords of the night sky). But the Mahabhrata differs sharply from its classical Greek cousins in that for hundreds of millions it remains a religious scripture, and enjoys a position in Indian culture that is more Biblical than Homeric. The Bhaghavad Gita, the section Westerners are most likely to have heard of, is still a source of moral, ethical, and spiritual teachings to many on the subcontinent, and indeed has inspired people far beyond. Because it is such a significant text, people have been attempting English translations since the 19th century. The best known is probably KM Ganguli's, but despite being the most complete translation in English, its stilted Victorian prose is nearly as alien to modern readers as the Sanskrit. Several others, among them William Buck, R.K. Naryan, and C. Rajagopalachari, have published condensed versions also in prose. All seem to be missing something.

The problem seems to be that its very heart, the Mahabharata is a poem. Traditionally, audiences would have experienced it in song or chant (indeed Bhaghavad Gita means "the song of God"). The English retellings, concentrating on making it clear and comprehensible for modern audiences, have generally ignored this, opting for prose instead. This isn't necessarily a bad decision; any attempt to directly imitate the metrical form of the shlokas (the stanzas used in classical Sanskrit literature) in English would sound jarring anyway. But undeniably something is lost by changing it to prose, and these Mahabhratas all seem drier and dustier for it. So while there are certainly good translations to be had in terms of accuracy and keeping alive the stories, no one has really been able to make the epic sing in English as it must have sung to its audiences so very long ago.

No one until Carole Satyamurti, that is.

Mahabhrata, a Modern Retelling is glorious, and like so many brilliant ideas you are dumbfounded no one ever got around to thinking of it before. It starts with the realization that retelling the Mahabharata isn't a job for scholars, it's work that requires a poet. Satyamurti, an award-winning poet with several published collections under her belt, comes at the work not as a Sanskritist would--primarily concerned with hewing close to the original language--but as an artist who paints pictures with English verse. Since she does not, by her own admission, read Sanskrit, she allows herself to trust the most respected translations of those who do, soaking them up and respinning them in a way that sings to the English ear. The result is the Mahabharata I first longed for twenty years ago, when I read it in Sanskrit, and desperately wanted to share it with my English-speaking friends and family. It's the retelling you can hand to English speakers and say "this is why it has been loved for two thousand years."

This is no mean feat. Satyamurti has distilled 100,000 Sanskrit shloka couplets into 27,000 lines of English blank verse, keeping the structure of the original 18 books largely intact. Her choice of blank verse, with nine to eleven syllables per line and an average of five stresses, is perfect. The Sanskrit shloka, consisting of 32 syllables in two 16 syllable lines, was a widespread and well known form in ancient and classical India, just as blank verse--the meter of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's Paradise Lost--is for modern English speakers. Reading Mahabharata in this form is a subconscious cue that we are reading a classic.

It is also vibrant. With all due respect to Ganguli, his 5000 page retelling is often numbingly dull to even devoted Sanskritists and scholars. Satyamurti's poem by contrast is nearly impossible to put down, racing through the massive storyline with lithe, economical verse. On the crucial scenes she slows to focus attention, then picking up pace to speed through the less vital sections of the narrative. In addition to her story-telling skills her sense of character is pitch-perfect. Each of the twenty four or so principal figures she portrays in all their multiple dimensions, and the secondary characters are consistently distinct and memorable. This is the work of an artist just as devoted to her craft as she clearly is the Mahabharata, and the fact that this is a retelling should never detract from the fact that Satyamurti has composed one of the longest narrative poems In English history, and is it masterful.

I simply cannot recommend this retelling enough.

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GOTHIC and GOTHICKA: A Look at Victoira Nelson's New Book

Gothic [ˈgɒθɪk]

adj

3. (Literary & Literary Critical Movements) (sometimes not capital) of or relating to a literary style characterized by gloom, the grotesque, and the supernatural, popular esp in the late 18th century: when used of modern literature, films, etc., sometimes spelt: Gothic

For the last twenty-five years of my life I have been playing with a dark jigsaw puzzle.  Perhaps you have seen the pieces strewn across the entries of this blog; religion, occultism, dreams, horror, imagination, the fantastic, the macabre.  I've never met Victoria Nelson, but having just finished her fascinating new Gothicka (Harvard University Press, 2012), it is clear that she has been playing with the same puzzle.  Gothicka shifts back and forth between literary criticism and spirituality, tracing the origin of "Gothick" (her spelling) as a post-Enlightenment genre of fiction and following its shadowy trail through Western society into the present.  She leaves no stone unturned as she tries to understand how the genre came to be, how it has grown into a thriving subculture, and where it might be leading us.     

Generally said to have all started with Horace Walpole's 1764 The Castle of Otranto, Gothic fiction is the precursor of the modern horror tale.  Like all genre fiction it is littered with certain tropes; the innocent young heroine, a dark and menacing stranger, grim family secrets, brooding and ancient architecture, and the power of the past to act upon the present.  But the black heart of the Gothic isn't these trappings.  It is about the intrusion of the supernatural into a rational and ordered world.  I think it is important to emphasize this because it is what separates Gothic from fantasy fiction.  In fantasy, the supernatural belongs.  It is part of the fabric of the setting.  In the Gothic, the supernatural is the iceberg and rational reality the Titanic.

Nelson clearly places the Gothic into historical context.  It appears during the Enlightenment, a period in which the earlier, medieval view of the world--a supernatural hierarchy ruled by God, administered by angels, and seeped in magic and miracles--has by and large been shattered.  To the medieval mind the world was supernatural and mysterious; to the minds of the Enlightenment it was something ordered and rational.  Reality could be studied and understood.  The Gothic emerges to preserve that earlier world view.  It seems to suggest that maybe we are wrong...maybe the world is irrational after all.  This is why we call it Gothic, a name that conjures up the Dark Ages.  In the Gothic story, scratch the surface of the modern world and the medieval is there looking back at us.

Which, of course, explains the disproportionate presence of Catholicism in the Gothic tale.  Roman Catholicism and medievalism are inextricably linked in the Western mind.  The Church dominated that era.  Thus whether it is The Amityville Horror, The Conjuring, The Rite, The Exorcist, The Last Exorcism, or even the classic vampire tale ('Salem's Lot, Fright Night), it is to Catholicism and the trappings of Catholicism that people automatically turn in the face of the supernatural.  When was the last horror film in which you saw a Baptist minister summoned to cleanse a haunted house?  A Lutheran pastor?  Deep inside, we understand that these newer protestant sects have no power over the intrusion of the Dark Ages back into our lives.  It has to be the Church that was there.

Gothic fiction thrived in the 19th and 20th centuries in the vacuum created when the supernatural was banished from daily life.  People now continued to experience the supernatural in the pages of fiction or on the silver screen.  But as we drew closer to the 21st century, something unexpected began to happen to the Gothic, and this is the core of Victoria Nelson's book.  Since the 1960s the monsters have been undergoing a transformation.  The Witch became the beautiful Samantha Stevens, the feisty Willow Rosenberg, the ladies from Charmed.  The Werewolf became sexy hunks like Jacob Black and True Blood's Alcide Herveaux.  And the Vampire, from True Blood to The Vampire Diaries and Twilight, is the brooding heartthrob.  And across the board they all had one thing in common...the transformation of the human being into something larger, greater, "higher."  The monsters of Gothic fiction stopped representing states of damnation and became instead paths to ascension.

None of which is as strange as it seems.  Again, we must remind ourselves that in the medieval imagination nothing, not even Satan, was as terrifying as God.  It was God who sent the Black Death, it was God who watched you at all times, it was God who would punish you if you disobeyed.  God, as the ultimate representative of the supernatural was terrible, awful, and inexplicable.  It was wise to be "God fearing."  But at the same time, God was the gateway to the numinous, to transformation, to becoming something greater than your self.  Horror and awe go hand-in-hand.  

Modern religions have been increasingly about the evolution of the self into a state of godhood.  The doctrine of salvation from above has become one of self-transformation.  We see this in Scientology, Mormonism, and Christian Science.  We see it in newer occult movements like Thelema, Satanism, or some schools of Wicca.  And we see it happening in the heart of the Gothic.  The shock and terror of the supernatural breaking down the walls of ordered reality has given way to possibility...to the notion of escaping the rational world into a higher state of potential and power.  Where once the Vampire was the ultimate state of damnation, cast forever from the grace of God, in the absence of God he becomes a transformative savior figure who offers liberation from human frailty and death.

It is clear that in the Gothic genre and the subculture it has spawned, Nelson sees a kind of emerging spirituality.  Though she mentions Anton LaVey several times in the book, in many ways she echoes exactly what he envisioned.  This is particularly the case when she discusses "Primary Believers" (religious practitioners who inhabit an ultimately supernatural world) and "Secondary Believers" (people who suspend disbelief and enter into a supernatural world temporarily).  This is exactly what LaVey believed his new religion to be, a society of Secondary Believers who experience the supernatural as self-created and self-transformational psychodrama.  I suspect the Church of Satan is a precursor of the kind of experience she sees Gothic heading for.

There is a lot going on in this book, too much to sum up here.  For me, reading it was a sort of validation for things I've been trying to express for years.  I would strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the Gothic, in horror, or the supernatural. It was a gripping, highly informative and provocative read.              

  

   

ZEALOT: Some Thoughts on Reza Aslan's Book

It would have been impossible to have written a book like Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, without it generating a bit of controversy.  For starters, there is that title.  Today, we hear the word "zealot" and think of Osama bin Laden.  It has landed in the same category as "fundamentalist," "fanatic," and "extremist."  Sure enough, the dictionary tells us a zealot is a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.  If you read a bit further down, however, you come across the older, original meaning of the word;

a member of an ancient Jewish sect aiming at a world Jewish theocracy and resisting the Romans until ad 70.   

Hmm.  Someone advocating a universal "Kingdom of God" who challenged the might of the Romans.  Sound like any biblical figures you know?

But here is where it gets really controversial...for some people, at least.  Aslan's book is a meticulously researched, highly readable study of 1st century Roman Judea and the historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth.  It is not, however, about Jesus the Christ.  This is not to say that Aslan sets out to prove Christianity is all wrong or that Jesus was just an ordinary man.  He is very careful not to do that.  Rather, he is trying to write a modern history of Jesus, a concept that did not exist when the Gospels were written.  He points out that the authors of the Gospels had no intention of relaying historical facts, but rather were attempting to convey spiritual Truths as they understood them.  The question of his birthplace is a good example.

All four Gospels call him "Jesus of Nazareth," and agree he was a Nazarene.  It was common practice in an age when people lacked surnames to specify your birthplace in this way  to avoid confusion (in fact, of the many 1st century charismatic leaders in Judea who claimed to be the messiah there was even another "Jesus," Jesus of Ananias).  The author of Luke, however, tells us Jesus was actually from Bethlehem, and concocts a story that his contemporary readers would all have known was absurd.  In this tale, the Romans call for a census that requires families to uproot and return to the place where the head of the household was born to wait there and be counted.  It is ridiculous of course, and the Romans never did anything of the sort (how can you take count of persons and property when the property was left behind?).  But the point is Luke's Roman audience would have known it was not factually accurate, but it did explain how Jesus was born in Bethlehem in fulfilment of prophecy (Micah 5:2).  Matthew goes even further and adds another absurdity, having the family flee soon after into Egypt to escape Herod, who is killing infants in the area.  This also never happened, but in fulfils yet another conflicting prophecy that the messiah would come out of Egypt like Moses (Hosea 11:1).  Contemporary readers would likely have also known this was not a description of real events, but the ancients were not as unsophisticated as we like to think.  They understood that something could be inaccurate but also reveal a Truth.

Aslan's book, then, is not an attempt to reveal that Truth but rather to be factual accurate.  It is not debunking the biblical narrative, but relating the facts as we known them.  There is the Jesus that people accept as Truth--the Son of God, the peacemaker who died for our sins--and there is also Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew who existed before Christianity, and of whom all written accounts we have come from decades after his death.  By sticking to the facts that all accounts agree on, and comparing them to what we know of the period, a very interesting figure emerges.

1st century Roman Judea was a volatile, violent place about to be completely and literally wiped off the map in 70 C.E.  Under the Roman occupation, the local peoples saw their culture and values under assault by foreigners and foreign ideas.  Essentially a theocracy (the word was actually invented to describe the ancient Jewish state), it was a land divinely ordained, giving to the Hebrews by their God.  How then could something ordained by God be taken away from them?  The answer was, it couldn't.  A messiah would emerge and drive the Romans out.

Interesting word, that.  Messiah in ancient times meant a "king."  David, for example, was a messiah.  Under the Roman occupation it came to mean the "true king" rather than the false puppets the Romans had installed, a king anointed by God who would restore the old Jewish state (the "Kingdom of God").  Under Roman rule there were literally dozens of men claiming to be that messiah, and nearly all of them met with the same fate.

It is a simple fact that the Romans reserved crucifixion for one crime and one crime only; sedition or treason.  It is also a fact that they placed a sign over the victim's head to announce the nature of his treason.  Though the English translation for those who died alongside Jesus is "thieves," this is in fact a mistranslation.  A closer word would be "bandit," and it meant people who hid in the hills like modern Al Qaeda fanatics, robbing passerbys to fund their campaign against the state.  The Romans never crucified simple "thieves."  Nor was the charge levelled against Jesus a joke.  To the Romans, at least, "I.N.R.I" was his crime.  He had claimed to be King of the Jews.

Given that fact, it becomes clear that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Romans for the crime of defying Caesar.  The bit about Pontius Pilate being reluctant to kill Jesus and forced into it by the Jewish establishment is almost comical.  The historical Pilate had nothing but contempt for the Jews and ordered hundreds of crucifixions, and actually had to be scolded by the Emperor Tiberius for going out of his way to antagonise the Jewish people.  He was eventually recalled for his treatment of them.  After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., however, Christianity was fast becoming a Roman religion, and it became necessary to soften the Roman involvement in his death.

Looking back at Jesus as one of the men crucified for the crime of claiming to be the messiah, Aslan examines his life and doings in this light.  What emerges is a fascinating picture of a revolutionary, quite possibly a disciple of John the Baptist who would eventually take over and expand his movement after John's arrest.  From his birth (possibly as an illegitimate child--when he first returns to Nazareth the locals call him son of Mary, which meant only one thing in a culture where "son of" was followed by the father's name) to his terrible death, Aslan retraces his steps, and it is a gripping account.

In the end, the most controversial thing about Zealot is how uncontroversial it really is.  There is little in this book that I was not taught twenty years ago studying the history of early Christianity. It does disturb some sacred cows, but doesn't attempt to butcher them as Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens night have.  Aslan is not out to rob you of your faith.  He simply presenting the facts as academics have done time and time again before him.  But Aslan has a knack for breathing life and passion into what otherwise might be dry and dusty history, and Zealot is a surprising page turner.  Further, its theme--a fundamentalist religion that feels it is under attack by foreign influences and changing times--is as relevant now as it was twenty centuries ago.

Highly recommended for those interested in the historical Jesus, believer or non-believer alike.     

  

THE ANGEL MOST HIGH, PART 3, The Fifth Article on the work of Andrew Chumbley

...again we come face to face with the magical theme of the mask and the mirror; if you look into the face of the Devil and see only wickedness and sin, that is because you are seeing your own wickedness and sin reflected...

The Yezidi people of Iraq's Nineveh province have long been accused of being "Devil worshipers."  In a sense they are.  The Yezidi religion, which is neither an off-shoot of Christianity nor of Islam but a parallel tradition in its own right, teaches that God left the task of creation--and governing the universe--to seven angels, emanations of Himself (a very Qabalistic concept).  The leader of these angels, the Angel Most High, is Tawuse Melek, the "Peacock Angel."  He rules creation on God's behalf.  What gets the Yezidi into trouble with their Muslim neighbors are the parallels between Tawuse Melek and the Islamic Shaytan (aka Iblis).  Both are the highest of God's angels, and both--in nearly identical stories--are brought before Adam after his creation and told to bow before him by God.  In the version told in the Quran, Shaytan refuses to kneel and asks why a creature of air and fire should bow before one formed of water and clay.  For that, he is condemned by Allah, and falls.  But in the Yezidi telling, Tawuse Melek refuses because it is lawful to bow before only one being; God himself, and for this he is praised rather than condemned.  The Yezidi acknowledge that Iblis and Tawuse Melek are one in the same, but they no not call him "Shaytan" and deny that he is evil.  He is Lucifer Unfallen.  And here again we come face to face with the magical theme of the mask and the mirror; if you look into the face of the Devil and see only wickedness and sin, that is because you are seeing your own wickedness and sin reflected.  As the Buddhists point out, one who is enlightened can find the Buddha nature in anything.  The Yezidi understanding of the Angel Most High embraces this.  And so, apparently, does the work of Andrew Chumbley, who refers to the Peacock Angel throughout Qutub, and for whom the Angel Most High represents something other than temptation.

We have spent nearly three essays now on Chumbley's own version of why the Angel Most High refused to bow, and it should be clear that his Crooked Path is taking us in a direction different from either the Islamic or Yezidi stories. In all three versions, God orders the Highest Angel to bow before Adam, signifying of course that mankind is his second-in-command, the divine vice-regent of God.  The Muslim Angel refuses out of wounded pride, the Yezidi Angel refuses out of love for God. Chumbley's Angel refuses because he knows a secret even the One God doesn't; Man has the capacity to rise higher than the One himself.  He is not God's subordinate...God is man's subordinate.

And now the final veil is lifted from this fable, and reveals the deepest truth of all.

...from the Adept's point of view, these believers have counted down to "One" and forgotten to go all the way to "Zero."  They have forgotten the Buddhist exhortation "if on the road to Enlightenment you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha."  This applies to Allah and Yahweh too...

Nearly all men--one could comfortably say 99%--are mainly atheists.  Even the most pious Christian, Muslim, or Jew disbelieves in far more gods that he believes in.  The Muslim or Christian denies a million gods; the 'total' atheist denies just one more god than them.  But all will agree that mankind has invented countless deities throughout history to satisfy his needs.    The only difference between the believer and the atheist is that the former have convinced themselves that of countless false gods, only the one they believe in is true.  The believer is an atheist 99 times out of a hundred.  From Chumbley's point of view, indeed from the Adept's point of view, these believers have counted down to "One" and forgotten to go all the way to "Zero."  They have forgotten the Buddhist exhortation "if on the road to Enlightenment you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha."  This applies to Allah and Yahweh too.

Now, this is not to say that there isn't a "God," an ultimate reality, out there, but in the words of the Egyptian Sufi saint Dhu'l Nun, "God is the Opposite of anything you can imagine."  The parade of gods marched out by organized religions are all of human manufacture, and any God the priests, imams, or rabbis can tell you about is not really God at all; because the divine is ineffable.  God cannot be communicated by others.  God can only be experienced directly.  And by "God" we don't mean his false anthropomorphic face, "the One that men have named falsely," but the Qabalitsic Zero.

Magical power radiates from the center, and to find it, the Adept must seek the center first. 

Aleister Crowley, in his Eight Lectures on Yoga, asks us to consider what the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad all had in common.  The answer is surprisingly simple.  All of them went alone into the wilderness for a period of isolation, mediation, fasting, and concentration.  All of them rid themselves of distractions.  All of them became emptied.  All of them reached "Zero."  After their withdrawal from the world they return to it different, changed by their contact with the highest levels of reality.  Because for knowledge to flow in, an empty space must first be made.  Magical power radiates from the center, and to find it, the Adept must seek the center first.  He 'concentrates.'  He reaches the point or Qutub that exists yet has no dimension or form.  The point that is "without form and void."

Which brings us at last to our final destination: Genesis 1:1-2, with a brief detour first through Job.

In the Book of Job, Yahweh unashamedly launches into an extended rant about just how wonderful he is, and produces Leviathan as "Exhibit A" of his ultimate badassness...

Many of the myths in the Old Testament echo even earlier stories from Mesopotamia. The story of the ark and the flood, for example, was well known in Mesopotamia and India before Noah took it over; it is even mentioned in Gilgamesh, which precedes Genesis by many centuries.  Gilgamesh also contains an earlier version of the Garden of Eden, with a man created from the dust and a woman who tempts him.  Once again he accepts food from her, covers up his nakedness, and is exiled.  Gilgamesh even has a snake that cheats mankind of immortality.  But one of the most interesting echoes of older mythology is found in Job, and involves another serpent.  And for this tale, "we are going to need a bigger boat."

We are talking about the titanic sea serpent Leviathan.  In the Book of Job, Yahweh unashamedly launches into an extended rant about just how wonderful he is, and produces Leviathan as "Exhibit A" of his ultimate badassness;

"Can you pull in the Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down his tongue with a rope?  Can you put a cord through his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook?  Will he keep begging you for mercy?  Will he speak to you with gentle words?  Will he make an agreement with you for you to take him as your slave for life?  Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?"  (Job 41)

...aside from the comical imagery of God leading his pet dragon around on a leash to impress girls, we might well be asking ourselves why exactly we are expected to be impressed with this feat...

Basically, the Lord God is pleased with himself for having made Leviathan his bitch.  Now aside from the comical imagery of God leading his pet dragon around on a leash to impress girls, we might well be asking ourselves why exactly we are expected to be impressed with this feat.  After all, in Psalm 104 we are told God made all things, including Leviathan.  Are we really supposed to praise God for beating up on something he himself created?  It's a bit like a father swaggering around patting himself on the back for smacking down his five-year-old.  The whole episode is absurd.

Unless you look at it in the light of earlier versions.

In the Babylonian creation epic, for example, the titanic sea serpent is the cosmic dragon goddess Tiamat, the embodiment of the Primordial Chaos that exists before Creation.  Tiamat is before all things, the oldest of all that exists, and gives birth to the other gods.  Another of her forms is the ocean, the ultimate symbol in ancient times for the "negative existence" the universe arose from.  One of Tiamat's children is the warrior chief Marduk, who rises up and defeats her, and from her immense body fashions the universe.  He splits her corpse into two halves to fashion heaven and earth.  Marduk becomes the creator of the universe by defeating his dragon and shaping her Primal Chaos.

Before receiving the ultimate promotion Yahweh was neither the only god nor the first.  It took the Babylonian Captivity, and prolonged exposure to Zoroastrianism, to put that idea into Hebrew-speaking heads.

Yahweh's boast makes a lot more sense if we step back and remind ourselves that monotheism is a late comer to his party.  He wasn't always the One God; he started out as just one god.  He was a very typical Near Eastern "divine warrior chief," like Marduk, Ninurta, or Indra, all of whom conquer dragons to prove their might.  In the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Yahweh was the patron of the royal court and the leader of a pantheon that included El, Baal, and his consort Asherah.  Over time (from about the tenth century BC forward) his cult became increasingly intolerant of rivals, until finally in the sixth century BC the authors of Isaiah proclaimed Yahweh as the sole deity and creator of the universe.  Before receiving the ultimate promotion Yahweh was neither the only god nor the first.  It took the Babylonian Captivity, and prolonged exposure to Zoroastrianism, to put that idea into Hebrew-speaking heads.

If Yahweh did not create Leviathan, if the dragon was there before him like Tiamat and Marduk, his boast suddenly starts to make sense.  Indeed, there is some indication of this right there in the very beginning of Genesis;  "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."  The Hebrew word for "the deep" in that sentence was tehom, derived from the same source as "Tiamat."  Read with this in mind, Yahweh, like Marduk, becomes the creator when he fashions heaven and earth from her body.  He becomes the Creator by shaping the Primordial Chaos that comes before him.

...in order to do this he needs to ignore the One and go on to Zero; he cannot stop and worship any god invented by man, but push forward into that ineffable silence which exists before all things.  

And if Yahweh can become God by shaping Primal Chaos, surely the being that invented him is capable of the same.

Chumbley very explicitly tells us all this.  "... in the Fullness of Time Man would claim for Himself the substance of his own Creation and Know Himself as the One True-born of the Elder Gods."  But in order to do this he needs to ignore the One and go on to Zero; he cannot stop and worship any god invented by man, but push forward into that ineffable silence which exists before all things.  This is what the Indians called samadhi, and what Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, Mohammad, and others seem to have achieved by becoming empty in the wilderness.  It is what transforms the substance of a man into an Adept.  It is what modern Chaos Magicians refer to as "Gnosis."  Chumbley's Angel Most High is telling us not to make idols and of those who achieve this state, but rather to seek it ourselves.

In this he echoes Aleister Crowley again. In his Confessions he writes;

"I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle."

Crowley was adamant about this.  His Book of the Law, which he conspired a piece of "divinely inspired writing," came with the warning that every reader had to interpret it for themselves.  It was forbidden for anyone to preach about its meaning.  This is because the Adept knows that truth must be won, it can not be echoed and passed down.  Again it is a core way that Magick differs from religion, which claims not only to be able to interpret scriptures for you, but to have the accurate interpretation of their meaning.

Chumbley's Angel Most High is thus a Shadow, a dark reflection that is, in fact, Nothing.  It is the emissary of emptiness.  But it leads us towards emptiness--samadhi--Gnosis with a very specific purpose.  Again, from Chumbley's Commentary on the Qutub;

The aim of the Adept is union with the Absolute; this is the summit of True Mysticism, and yet, for the Adept, this height of attainment has a distinct interpretation. Rather than his own identity dissolving within the Absolute State of Being, merging and unifying like the droplet within the ocean, the Adept realises himself as Absolute: a Perfected Unique Being, and thus as an Active Principle of New Creation. Taking Himself to be the Hand of Fate, the struggle of the Adept is that of Lucifer: a War against That which resists or denies his Will to become the Sole and Unique One, a Singularity of Unique Power, the Polestar of his own Universe: QUTUB.

Or in the words of famed artists and magician Austin Spare; "Demand equality of God--usurp!"

THE ANGEL MOST HIGH, PART 2; The fourth article on the work of Andrew Chumbley

As I mentioned before, the word "occult" simply means "hidden," and the word "esoteric" means "inner" (its opposite is "exoteric," the outer appearance of things).  These definitions must always be kept in mind by those approaching literature of this kind.  The really great occultists, and I think Chumbley belongs in this category, write passages like Russian matryoshka dolls.  If you look at the surface of what is written, you are missing what is hidden inside.  You need to dig, dig again, and then dig some more.  The reasoning behind this sort of thing is not merely to encode it--something that was desperately necessary in the centuries when the Church had the power to execute those who questioned its doctrines--nor to keep it from the eyes of the 'profane.'  The fact is occultists are often trying to communicate something incommunicable, or more to the point, something that the reader must seek for himself.  Once more, the world of magic is a mirror, and in digging through a layers of a passage like this, the reader is looking deeper and deeper into himself.  You cannot simply be "told" any meaningful secret...it has to be discovered and earned.  My purpose is unpacking this 300-word passage of Chumbley's is not only to illuminate his philosophy, but to demonstrate to the reader the intricacy of this kind of work.

You cannot simply be "told" any meaningful secret...it has to be discovered and earned. 

And so Chumbley has given us a recycled version of the myth of Lucifer, simultaneously drawing us deeper and earlier to the Hebrew "fallen angel" myth that precedes the Christian retelling.  In doing so, he has tipped his Gnostic hand.  There are at least two deeper levels ahead, but we need to stop a minute and consider the meaning of what we have already discovered.  We need to dwell on "Gnostic" for a bit.

"Gnosticism" is an umbrella term for hundreds of sects, but what they all share is an approach to truth if not the same conclusions on what the "truth" is.  The Indian subcontinent, which gave rise to some of the richest philosophical and religious traditions in the world, often employs the word yoga when discussing spiritual practices.  This is not merely stretching and breathing exercises; in India it is synonymous with "religion."  In fact, the word yoga is connected to the English "yoke," both Sanskrit and English being descendants of a common Indo-European tongue.  They both mean the same thing; something that "joins" two things together.  This is exactly the meaning of "religion," from the Latin re ligio (to bind two things together; "ligature" comes from the same source).  

India recognizes many types of yoga, or religious approaches, three of the most common being bhakti yoga (joining yourself to the divine through love and faith), karma yoga (joining yourself to the divine through good works and proper conduct), and jnaya yoga (joining yourself to the divine through knowledge and direct experience).  Historically, the Christian Church in the west decided early on that bhakti was the official method of coming to God, with karma running second.  But Christianity has always been uncomfortable with "knowledge," a word again linguistically related to both the Sanskrit jnaya and the Greek gnosis through those same Indo-European roots.  It is a matter of historical record that the Church tried relentlessly to eradicate any knowledge that contradicted its teachings--the Renaissance only could occur after prolonged contact with Islamic civilization, which had preserved classical writings instead of destroying them.  The church discouraged seeking direct knowledge of the divine in favor of serving as the sanctioned intermediary between man and God.  The Gnostics, as their name implies, rebelled against this.  What joins all the various Gnostic sects is the doctrine of initiation, of discovery, of knowledge and personal experience as the road to truth.

Who the heck are these "Elder Gods" Chumbley is talking about?

We cannot blame the Church entirely for its discomfort with knowledge...it inherited this from the Hebrew priesthood it is modeled upon.  In retrospect it was probably Islam's lack of an institutionalized religious authority that left it more open to knowledge; there was no Islamic church or temple that needed a monopoly on knowledge to justify is existence.  Twice in the Hebrew myths connected to this passage we have seen God frown upon "leaks" in heaven's knowledge monopoly.  First in the passage's reference to Eden and the serpent (the fall of Man caused by eating the fruit of knowledge) and second in its reference to the fall of the Watchers in 1 Enoch (damned for teaching the arts and sciences to men).  Ironically, the Church seems to have inherited its "we have all the answers" mentality from the very priesthood that Christ accused of not having all the answers.  But the Gnostics were having none of it, and Chumbley is throwing his lot in with theirs.

Which brings us to the part where we must lift the next veil.

Who the heck are these "Elder Gods" Chumbley is talking about?

While many readers are familiar with the story of Lucifer and the that of the serpent in Eden, and careful readers of the Bible are aware of the Watchers and their dalliance with the daughters of men, this notion of gods existing before (G)od probably comes out of nowhere to them.  Well buckle those seat-belts gentle reader, this is where the real fun begins.  

Let's start with the most obvious.  I cannot say with absolute certainty, but I would be more than willing to wager, that Chumbley is sneaking in a reference to H.P. Lovecraft's fictional brood here.  Lovecraft--who was himself a materialist and atheist--wrote weird fiction and horror tales that often included the "Old Ones" or "Elder Gods."  These were vast and incomprehensible alien beings who reigned over the cosmos long before man evolved, and fell into decline before the first human civilizations appeared.  Now they are somehow locked "outside" of our universe, and much of his fiction deals with them trying to get back in.  These Elder Gods were purely fictitious, but--as we shall see--reflective of genuine mythological beings.  More importantly, they found their way into occultism around the mid-20th century.  Anton LaVey--who like modern Chaos Magicians viewed belief as a tool and all gods as symbols--published two rituals dedicated to these Elder Gods.  Several other occultists, most notably the anonymous "Simon" and more recently Donald Tyson, have published their own versions of the Necronomicon, a book Lovecraft invented detailing these Old Ones.  But the reason I am quite comfortable in linking Chumbley with them is that Chumbley was a member of Kenneth Grant's British offshoot of Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis from 1993-1999.  While Grant is a fascinating figure in his own right, what matters here is that he wrote extensively about Lovecraft's prehistoric gods and included them in his magical teachings.  I have no doubt this is how Chumbley comes to incorporate them.

We need to remember the mask and the mirror, the lies that point to truth.  

Am I telling you that Chumbley is now talking about fictional entities in his occult teachings?  Yes, and no.  We need to remember the mask and the mirror, the lies that point to truth.  I spoke at length in my article on Qutub on the Qabalistic concept of zero, of nothingness, and the true nature of God (ultimate reality).  Basically, the "real" God is by definition ineffable and incomprehensible.  Anything less and it could not be God.  Yahweh, like all gods, is a human invention, an attempt for the sake of convenience to put a face and a name to that which is nameless and faceless.  Yahweh is thus no more real than Lovecraft's gods; but God being omniversal, these gods can tell us something true about God's nature just as surely as Yawheh can.  In fact, from the Gnostic point of view, the Elder Gods are closer to an accurate conception of God than Yawheh is because Lovecraft's deities are themselves incomprehensible.  By being outside our ability to understand, the Elder Gods are more reflective of real ultimate reality.  Further, the Gnostics believed that the "true" God existed outside of the universe, something we touched on in talking about the Azoetia.  For them, the universe was far too imperfect to be the handiwork of a perfect being, and thus ascribed Creation to the "Demiurge," a manifestation of the true God with delusions of grandeur.  In their conception, this tyrannical God manufactures the universe and traps humanity within it.  Having fashioned the cosmos and shut himself away from the True God, the Demiurge becomes the "jealous" god of the Old Testament, convincing himself he is the one and only god and setting himself up as a despot.  The Gnostic path was to escape our prison and return to the True God outside of it.  Chumbley is clearly merging Lovecraft's extra-dimensional deities with the Gnostic one.

Again, he has a sound reason for doing this, but before we get there a moment must be taken to scratch our heads over his cryptic "Those who are without number and yet are numbered as Eight."   The first half should be easy to understand by now; without number is 0, the Qabalistic conception of nothingness.  The Eight is a bit more problematic.  I will submit three points for your consideration.

It is possible that Chumbley is taking a page from Crowley's play book, and that this "Eight" is a sly reference to the "infinity" symbol (an 8 on its side).  Those who are without number and yet are infinite.

It is possible that Chumbley is nodding his head towards Chaos Magicians, another group he had close contact with (having written for the journal Chaos International).  Without getting distracted now--I plan on talking about Chaos Magic in a future entry--it is enough to say now that this school uses Chaos as a way to describe the same idea as the Qabalistic Zero, and that the unofficial but widely used Chaos symbol is an eight-pointed star.  We will come back to Chaos at the close of this entry, so keep it in mind.

Or it could be that he means the Qabalistic "Eight."  Qabalah is another topic that demands an essay (or a hundred essays) unto itself, but to summarize here Qabalah ascribes symbolic meaning to numbers, especially the first ten, which form spheres of experience on a diagram called The Tree of Life.  We have already discussed the meaning of zero, but to fully grasp what Chumbley is telling us we need to breeze through the next ten.  I will use a model created by Aleister Crowley, the elegant and succinct "Naples Arrangement," to summarize for you. 

After the infinite, indescribable perfection of Qabalistic nothingness, we arrive at One.  This is the mathematical point, or Qutub, again.  It is the "I" and the "eye," a mystery we will save for later.  The point is the first manifestation of nothingness, positive yet undefinable.  It has position but nothing else.  It is the number of the Demiurge, the god who thinks it is the first to exist and the source for the rest of the universe (ie numbers).  "With the conception of the Universe was the Beginning and the Fall of the One, the One that men have named falsely," Chumbley tells us.  One thinks it is the first, but Nothing was before it.

In short, if all the pairs of opposites in the cosmos are viewed from a distance, everything vanishes into zero.  Observer and observed, hot and cold, light and dark...all of the positive "n" plus the negative "n" balance out to 0

"At the side of the One there was the Secret One, the Angel Most High, Emissary of the Elder Gods."  Here is the number Two, who Chumbley identifies with the Elder Gods (Zero).  Why?  The answer again is Crowley, who attempted to reconcile the old mystical question of whether the universe was dualistic, monistic, or nihilistic with an elegant equation.  The "dualistic" universe is that wherein God creates the universe but stands outside of it.  The monistic universe, most famously seen in the Indian Advaita Vedanta school, postulates that "all is One" and separateness is illusion.  The nihilistic school is typified by early Buddhism, and says the nature of the universe is nothingness.  This is also the Qablastic position.  Crowley stood forward and said "2=o," that the universe appears dualistic and is simultaneously nihilistic.  In short, if all the pairs of opposites in the cosmos are viewed from a distance, everything vanishes into zero.  Observer and observed, hot and cold, light and dark...all of the positive "n" plus the negative "n" balance out to 0 (n + -n = 0).  It was a cornerstone of his system of Thelema.  "One" is leap-frogged over because it is not as perfect as Zero and cannot be defined without Two; "...position does not mean anything at all unless there is something else, some other position with which it can be compared.  One has to describe it.  The only way to do this is to have another Point, and that means one must invent the number Two..."  Here then is Chumbley's Angel Most High, the number Two that is secretly the true manifestation of Zero and the "Secret One" that the One needs to even exist.

Then comes Three, a number that is necessary for the universe to begin.  Two points makes a line, but we cannot even say how long that line is without a third coordinate to measure it.  Three gives us the first geometric shape, the Triangle (the circle belongs to Zero), it gives us the synthesis that reconciles thesis and antithesis.  It is the child of the Mother and Father.  

Four is the manifestation of Matter, a point defined by three coordinates, the birth of the Third Dimension.  The first Pythagorean solid, the three sided pyramid, now is possible.  Five introduces Motion, and therefore "time."  Six is said to be where the Point becomes conscious, able to define itself by position, direction, and form.  Now the next three are forms of experience drawn from Indian philosophy, Ananda, Chit, and Sat.  These are the things the conscious and manifested point experiences on its journey.  Ananda is "bliss" or "sensation," and is associated with Seven.  Sat is "being," the awareness of existence.  That is number 9.  But the number 8, which I skipped over briefly, is "Knowledge."  And this brings us back to Chumbley's "Those who are without number and yet are numbered as Eight" and the third possibility.  

Knowledge is the union of two points.  One point-event experiences another when they collide.  If it helps, think of "knowledge" in the Biblical sense.  But this is 2=o again.  In knowing each other, two points become one and difference is erased.  The third possibility is a very Gnostic one, and ties up our entire discussion neatly.  The Eight could be Chaos, it could be Infinity or it could be Knowledge, all of which are expressions of the Qabalistic Zero or how to attain the ultimate reality of the Qabalistic Zero.  My suspicion is that it is simultaneously all three.

Next, in the third and final essay on this simple three-hundred word passage, we will tie up the lose ends and pull back the final veil on this deceptively simple myth.

THELEMA AT A GLANCE

For roughly the last two decades, one of the philosophies that has most influenced my thoughts and actions has been "Thelema," formulated by the late Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). As a guy who majored in religious studies, I thought I would turn the microscope on Thelema for a brief summary.

Ontology:

Only two qualities exist, the Observer and the Observed. These entities are not independent of one another, but polarities of the same thing. The Observer is the active pole. It actively engages with the Observed and in doing so defines it. The Observed plays the passive role, being shaped and defined by the attention of the Observer. Thelema tends to associate the Observer with the integer +n, the individual human consciousness, and the center of a circle. The Observed is associated with -n, the infinite universe, and the circumference of the circle.

Theology:

“God” (and by this term we mean the sum total of all that was, is, or could ever possibly be) cannot be perceived or defined directly. To say “God” is male robs him of being “female,” and thus limits him. To say “God” is “spirit” removes the possibility of his being “matter,” etc. Thus, Thelema understands “God” by the integer 0. It neither exists not does not exist, and contains all opposites within it. Thus, the Thelemite focuses on two opposite faces of “God,” the personification of the Observer, Hadit, and the personification of the Observed, Nuit. Hadit is the Divine Within, the spark of consciousness in every human being. Nuit is the Divine Without, the universe that human consciousness reaches out to touch and merge with. Hadit is generally seen as a “god” and Nuit as a “goddess.” Again, Hadit would be represented by the center of the circle and the integer +n, while Nuit would be the circumference and -n. Their union, +n + -n, is equal to 0, the undefined and unknowable “God.”

Cosmology:

The Universe (Nuit) is understood as being infinite. In such a situation, any single position (Hadit) within the body of the infinite would be the center. Thus both Nuit and Hadit are infinite qualities. Anything that exists in the body of Nuit can be understood as a “point-event,” a position and phenomenon in time and space. Nuit is imagined as being space, with Hadit as the stars that fill space. In all other respects, Thelema embraces all the realities embraced by the physical sciences; atomic particles, the four fundamental forces, etc. It is a strict rule in Thelemic philosophy that nothing in it must contradict logic and observation. Where Thelema differs slightly from modern materialistic science is in the notion that our ideas and thoughts are just as “real” as external, observable phenomena. These mental or “psychic” point-events are simply of a different character than the physical ones. Thus Thelema would allow for the existence of all sorts of gods, demons, angels, and thought-forms as a certain class of being, distinct from animals and plants.

Anthropology:

Thelemic anthropology divides the human being into roughly three layers of being. There is the “divine” level, or “Hadit.” This might be understood as pure consciousness. It would be the pronoun “I” in an English sentence, stripped of defining characteristics like actions or attributes. In such a case, each individual “I” is indistinct from every other, points whose only distinction is where they exist in time and space. At the next level, which we might call “angelic,” is the human's sense of individuality and self, the “I am I and not you” level. This is also the center of our True Will (see below). Finally, there is the “animal” level, the human being as a flesh and blood creature with instincts, needs, and drives.

Epistemology:

On one hand, Thelema would insist that reason, observation, and above all else, direct experience, are the only viable means of gaining Knowledge. On the other, there is a core belief that all Knowledge is essentially false, being the product of the Observer interacting with (and therefore shaping) the Observed. Like all things, Thelema prefers to tackle Knowledge in levels. For example, on one level a table can be proven to be a table. But on another, a table is just a physical object (“tableness” being a human concept imposed upon it). On another, the table is just an arrangement of chemical components, on yet another, atomic forces, etc. Thus the Thelemite is urged to used objective reason as the base of his understanding, but to simultaneously explore altered states of consciousness in the search for the experience of infinite nothing that the Buddhists would call “nirvana” (and the Thelemites, “crossing the Abyss”).

Special Qualities

1. Magick

   Thelema defines Magick as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will". In short, any time the Observer defines the Observed as a self-willed action, it is Magick. Acting is Magickal, reacting is not. Thelema vigorously strives to remove notions of the supernatural from Magick. Brushing your teeth, writing a sonnet, and balancing your checkbook are all Magickal acts. So, however, is conjuring a spirit to “visible appearance” (essentially causing yourself to see and interact with a thought-form). Everyone does Magick all the time. The only difference is that some are better than others at shaping the world in accordance with their Wills.

2. True Will

   Central to Thelema is the notion of True Will, and the highest law is do what thou wilt. It must be clearly understood that this is NOT synonymous with “do as you please.” For the Thelemite, every individual is his or her own god, a sovereign being, a sun in his or her own solar system. However, even gods and suns possess defining characteristics and functions. Your True Will is essentially your role and place in the universe. It is “who you are” and what you are “meant to do.” True Will is the result of genetic, social, and other factors, the trajectory given to you when you manifested as a point-event in space. Discovering your True Will is essential to any Thelemite. Further, it is felt that the only sin is to interfere with the True Will of another (see Liber OZ for expansion on this).

Further reading; http://www.thelemapedia.org/index.php/Thelema

WICCA....THE OTHER WHITE MEAT

I ran into a witch the other day. Not the broom-stick riding, cauldron-stirring, poison-apple kind; she was the Goddess-worshipping, matriarchy, earth-power variety. In short, a Wiccan.

I’ve always had something of a love-hate relationship with Wicca, a modern religion with somewhat nebulous ties to traditional witchcraft. My affection is based on its core assumption, that each of us possesses the power “…to initiate change. This recognition of ‘power within’ moves us from mass passivity to personal responsible action. We are co-creators and must act with knowledge and responsibility…” (Carl Llewellyn Weschcke, Foreward, The Grimoire of Lady Sheba But this notion is common in most so-called occult traditions, which in general prefer magic (the concept that ritual action can allow the individual to affect the outcome of events) to prayer (the concept that ritual action can beseech higher powers to intervene in events). Wicca is hardly unique, therefore, in shifting focus from priests, ministers, and prophets to the individual person. But where my affection for Wicca ends is in its constant attempts to gain mainstream acceptance, forcing it to adopt more and more traits of conventional religions like Christianity or Judaism, and to “tone down” elements that might make the suburban middle class uncomfortable.

In its early stages, from its emergence in the 50s up until its explosion in the 80s, Wicca was charmingly loopy, making absurb claims and littered with a colorful cast of characters. It was more likely to just call itself Witchcraft in those days, and as a new faith worked overtime to suggest it was in fact an ancient tradition handed down in secret from ancient times. But we can hardly fault Wicca for this; all religions at the start concoct colorfully absurd origin stories. In the early days of Gerald Gardner, Alexander Sanders, Sybil Leek, and Lady Sheba, nobody seemed to be content to “just” be a witch, they had to be “kings and queens of the witches,” boasting that their families had been practicing the Craft in secret for generations and carrying out shouting matches and character assassinations against others with identical claims. As silly as this was, the tabloid spectacle of it all was still more amusing than what came later, as humorless feminists and crystal-clutching New Agers got their mitts on Witchcraft and made it painfully bland. Early on, one might catch witches dancing naked around a bonfire, howling at the moon on a spring night. Later on, they were far more likely to be in their jeans and t-shirts, sitting around a lump of quartz in the living room, holding hands and honoring “womyn power.” The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer pefectly summed up the 90s witch-scene in the fourth season episodeHush;

Buffy: (to Willow, who has just come from her first college witch circle meeting) “So, not stellar, huh?”

Willow “Talk, all talk. Blah, blah, blah Gaia. Blah, blah, blah moon. Menstrual life-force power thingy.”

Buffy: “No actual witches in your witch group?”

Willow: No. Bunch of blessedwannabes. You know, nowadays, every girl with a henna tattoo and a spice rack thinks she’s a sister to the dark ones.”

It was largely the mass-marketing of Wicca that leeched it of any color it once had. Where in the beginning you needed to seek out a coven and hand-copy their ritual book, the post-80s scene saw bookshelves groaning under the weight of self-help witch books, all of which had carefully exorcised “questionable” elements. It wasn’t enough to be about casting spells; Wicca needed to be feminist, politically correct, and environmentally conscious to sell. As it down-played spell-casting, backed away from practicing rituals in the buff, and did away with hiearchy and degrees, Wicca became acceptable to shy, mild-mannered boys and girls who wanted to be “different” without actually being different at all.

Despite the concessions it had to make (or more likely because of them), Wicca did succeed, far better than any other occult tradition could claim. It’s slow metamorphosis from lunatic fringe to pop phenomenon mirrored the journey of early Christianity (“Gee, if you guys could get rid of all those uncomfortable Jewish elements I’m sure the Romans would buy it”). Soon, with practioners estimated in the millions (high or low millions depending on who you ask), Wicca was head and-shoulders above similar alternatives to mainstream faith, and those others could not fail but take notice. In blatant imitation of Wicca’s success, Aleister Crowley’s own Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) has been restructuring and repackaging itself as a “Church,” with priests, bishops, and masses (ironic considering Crowley’s dim view of Christianity). Pointing out the fact that in his Magick Without Tears Crowley had disapproved of calling his philosophical system a “religion,” an O.T.O, member replied to me without blinking “but its more acceptable to the public if we call it that.” Had he not been cremated, ole’ Aleister would be rolling in his grave. It’s getting to be these days that the only occult traditions out there still willing to be politically incorrect, anti-consumerism, and unapologetically antagonistic towards conventional religions are Anton LaVey’s Satanists and the chaos magicians, God bless ‘em.

In short, I suppose I like my alternative religions alternative. I’m kind of crazy that way. While I have fond memories of my adventures in Wicca (dancing all night on May Eve, high in the Adirondacks, wearing nothing but a loin cloth and blue spirals all over my skin springs to mind), the bulk of the tradition has become something so tame and tidy it leaves me cold. To my mind, the whole point of magic is to steal fire from the gods, so an alternative religion based on worship and prayer hardly seems worth leaving mainstream faith for. To each is own, of course, but as even alternative religions go mainstream, I find myself being pushed further out into the fringe.

Which is good. I like it there.

ON THE "GOTHIC"

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

Shirley Jackson, “The Haunting of Hill House”

Though I don’t recall the percise wording, it was Clive Barker who described Gothic fiction as an art form which rejects psychological and pseudo-scientific explanations in favor of poetic, magical thinking. It earns the label, “gothic,” because it recreates the Dark Ages, a time of brooding uncertainty and dark superstition. Gothic came into its own with the Age of Enlightenment; as people turned increasingly towards rationality and reason in their daily lives, the superstitious and the sinister was repressed, predictably to find expression in art. Naturally it was in England—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—that it found its strongest voice and attracted its greatest practitioners before seeping out to infect the rest of the world.

I’ve written all sorts of things since I started around the age of 12, but it is invariably the Gothic that draws me back to write again. My attraction is twofold. On one hand, I write the Gothic because I am intellectually a rational materialist. My worldview does not generally include the supernatural (though I remain open to the possibility should evidence ever present itself). I don’t believe in the notion of devils, spirits, and gods except as projections of the human condition on the cosmos at large. Because of this, I suppose, the notion of them existing is particularly terrifying to me. Which brings me to the second point. I find it very difficult to understand people who do believe in the supernatural. That people chose to live in worlds where the disembodied dead continue to exist, where evil finds genuine personification in the guise of demons, where a single spiritual dictator sits in absolute judgement over all boggles my mind. Writing “Gothic” therefore is a way to explore that side of myself I usually deny, and to try to crawl into the worldview of people I do not easily understand.

My personal feeling is that man is by nature an amphibious being that swims in the lagoon of dreams and irrationality only to emerge and crawl about on hard, dry, logic. This seems natural and necessary: otherwise there would be no art, mythology, or religion. People with no poetry in their souls as at least as broken as those who cannot separate fantasy from reality, and the worst doom I can imagine is to “grow up” and become one of those 9 to 5 people who never allow themselves moments of childish terror and wonder. To characterize such pursuits as mere “escapism” is to mark yourself not as a human, but as some gray-faced automaton.

Aside from writing and telling stories, one of the ways I keep in touch with my irrational side is my “ritual chamber.” I keep a room in my house set aside for this, as what Anton LaVey so wonderfully called an “intellectual decompression chamber.” Inside that room, the unseen universe of devils, ghosts, and angels is real, and fantasies are indulged in. But these get left by the door. What happens in that room happens to scratch a primal, primitive itch, and when I emerge I can fully be the 21st century rationalist again. The same process occurs when I sit down to write (or role-play). I switch off the part of me that says “Humbug, bah!” and allow myself to think as a child again. I suppose because my world view is in general so bleak (we exist to propogate, life has no intrinsic meaning other than living, death is the end), I need these bouts of irrationality to vent off steam.

If I found religion, perhaps I would no longer need to write at all.