Here's the thing...

“The labyrinth is thoroughly known.  We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the centre of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”

Joseph Campbell

So, where were we? Where was I?  Ah yes. I was telling you what happened a year ago when I went plunging into the labyrinth.  About those neat precise steps I took that changed my life.  You know, the not eating so much thing. The not drinking alcohol thing.  The exercising thing. The meditation thing. The breathing thing.  All pretty average really.  Pick up any self-help or spiritual development book and it will tell you more or less the same stuff, tell you to do more or less the same things. Thing. Isn’t that a wonderful word?

It comes from the Old English, þing. No, no, not 'ping' – the symbol at the front is a ‘thorn’ pronounced ‘th’ (a soft th). You find the same word in Old Norse and proto-Germanic. Originally it meant a meeting or assembly but later on came to mean a being, an entity or a matter (in other words the thing that was discussed at the thing). Even more interestingly, thorn was originally a rune (there are several which were incorporated into Old English).

There are many various readings of Thorn in a runespread but, amongst other things ;) it can mean a gateway, a place where one becomes ready to contact the numinous, the Divine. A place where you are confronted with the true reflection of what is hidden inside.  In one of my rune books it says:

'Visualise yourself standing before a gateway on a hilltop. Your entire life lies out behind you and below. Before you step through, pause and review the past: the learning and the joys, the victories and the sorrows - everything it took to bring you here. Observe it all, bless it all, and release it all. For in letting go of the past, you reclaim your power.

Step through the gateway now.'

(Wow. What a thing! Never underestimate a word, a letter, eh?)

Anyhow.  Let’s pull back a bit here.  Firstly, you’re assuming this change thing was/is a good thing, right? And yes, as far as I’m concerned, it was, it is, hopefully it will be.  But a lot of people, looking in, from other perspectives, would say it was a bloody disaster.  *grin*  It depends what you want, I suppose.  Jung said that the ‘job’ of the first half of one’s life is to find one’s way in the world and the work of the second half is to find meaning; to find oneself, to ‘individuate’ as he put it.  Trouble is, if you’re like me, you’ve spent a whole lifetime putting up barriers to who you are.  I had so many people, so many personae, so many entity-things rattling round inside my head, it wasn’t so much an orchestra as a horrible cacophony of sound – a string quartet playing music wars with a brace of death metal bands, Brian Eno, The Pogues, Hildegard of Bingen and, um, Donovan.

We find ways of moulding ourselves to the world, to fit in, to belong to our various tribes. We validate ourselves with our positions in life; our friends; our work; our status; our 'brand'; our houses; our cars; our holidays; our hobbies.  Some people get it right. They are congruent. Everything fits, more or less neatly. They know who they are and what they’re about. There aren’t too many contradictions; too many paradoxes.

But for me it never really fitted. I love/d spiritual stuff but I hate/d New Age waffle. I love/d nature and ecology and felt hugely strongly (still do) that the environment is THE biggest issue we have (truly, how can it not be?)  – yet I wince/d at the worthy hemp bag/ranty leftwing political stuff.  I love/d writing and reading but didn’t/don't wanna talk about it all the time; didn’t/don't wanna discuss the nuts and bolts, didn’t/don't want to dissect it.  And so on and so forth.  

You know how some people have their ‘thing’? (btw, dontcha just love the way language evolves??) I envied that. I wanted a ‘thing’. So so desperately.  If I had a thing, I thought, everything would be so clear, so simple. Because once you know what you want you can go after that thing single-mindedly, single-heartedly – and with the right prevailing wind, you can get it.  Yeah, pretty much any thing. 

But if you don’t…

Anyhow, there I was, not a clue in the world, wanting a thing but neck deep in muck.  And I stumbled into the labyrinth.  And, as I said in a few posts last year, it really wasn’t a neat walking down an ordered flight of stairs. It was more of a headlong (I typed headless there and really that’s right) stumble, trip and tumble down a rabbit hole.

Did I follow those precise step things I mentioned? Did I hell!  I just went mad, pretty much.  Something or other in my psyche responded to a trigger. What?  I have no idea.  The scrolls to the Labyrinth were burned. I can’t pinpoint the exact thing that prodded me in the back and pushed me down the hole. Oh, okay, the trigger that made me jump.

I stopped eating. I stopped sleeping. I shook all the time. My mind exploded into a thousand fragments and came back with a totally different formation; then exploded again and again and again.  

I scribbled occasional notes in my diary…like this…

12 December

‘I can’t sleep again.  This time, though, it’s different.  I fall into bed at about 1am and crash, only to wake up at 2.30am with my brain fizzing.  It’s like my body and mind are recalibrating themselves.  I can’t eat either:  just don’t feel like it.  All in all, I really do think I’m going ever so slightly crazy.

And I’m plunging down astral pathways, frantically searching.  It’s a multi-dimensional maze, a crazy labyrinth.  It’s like life’s been on hold for years and now I’m suddenly waking up. 

I know that sounds crazy; it probably is crazy.  It’s scary as hell but it feels horribly right.  Even the not sleeping bit.  I’m writing this at 4.30am.  I’ve been awake for two hours.  I’ve read a book already and my eyes are red sore.  I’m shaking, as if all my cells were being rearranged, being put back into the right order. 

Weirdly, it feels good.’

So. Was that a good thing? Is that a good thing? Is that something you’d want to do?  Is that something anyone should do?  Even if it meant you lost four stone? *wink*  

Have you *got* this thing yet? 

By the way (buy the way!) I would hasten to add that this whole bonkers tumbling thing is all my own.  It’s not remotely what my quasi/pseudo/anti-guru recommended. I hold nobody responsible. Nobody. J  Only my self.  My thing. 

Hell - Part Two

This hell question.  I just don’t know.  I do know it isn’t in the places you might imagine.  I looked in a fair few of those.  I tried finding it in people too but each and every one, no matter how hard and tough and mean they looked on the outside, just turned nice on me.  Angels and demons eh?  Honestly, life is mirroring art – or is it the other way around? 

I suspect hell is hidden out of sight really, not down the dark alleys or in the mudflats, or in street-wise kids with sneers or big men with tattoos on their faces.  Hell is probably a flat, the warm yeasty smell of posset mingling with stale fat; and a baby that won’t stop screaming. Or a gleaming penthouse in which two beautiful people sit either end of a white leather sofa, staring into their perfect space.  Or maybe Hell is simply being trapped inside a mind where the synapses are misfiring. 

The closest I came to it on my London trip was sitting in an Internet café in Islington.  The computer was old, the keyboard sticky. The place smelled of stale cigarette smoke, Bombay mix and sweat.  I was swiftly catching up on emails, knowing I’d be offline for 24 hours (hmm, maybe Hell is being out of touch? Or is that Heaven? Do we know the difference anymore?). 

‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’  The chair behind me scraped along the scuffed vinyl floor. I kept typing – as you do.

‘No! This cannot be happening.’  Keys being crashed.  The air crackled.  A phone rang.

‘No. You don’t understand.’  Pause.  Scrape of chair.

‘No. You’re not listening.’  Pause.
‘But I’ve lost everything. Everything.’  Pause.  A strangled sob turning into anger.

‘WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO ME?’

Roses for Hecate by Solange Noir

She threw back her chair and stumbled out of the café, leaving her coat behind.  I went to pick it up and run after her but realised she had stopped outside, on the pavement. Even in the middle of meltdown, she was being polite.  Sheesh, us humans and our social mores.  I watched her through the glass front.  She looked stricken. 

What had she lost?  And who wouldn’t listen? 

What is worse, the losing or the not being heard?

Some music?  Wyrdly, I left my iPod behind when I was in London...but these have been playing non-stop since I returned.

Hell - Part One

So you wanna know about hell?  You wanna know about demons? Honestly, you lot…  As you may know, I’m writing a series of YA novels about a girl who falls in love with someone who is…what?  Demon? Angel? Something inbetween?  Anyhow, without giving too much away, when Book Two opens my main character is in metaphorical hell while her ex is sojourning in the actual destination: Hell with a capital H.  So, I had figured I’d go to the capital L (tell me you got that?) to get in the mood, so to speak.  And to meet a few demons.

Where do you find demons in London?  At a gathering of Chaos magicians in a backstreet occult bookshop surely?  It looked promising as I arrived.  There was a lot of black leather; plenty of facial hardware; tattoos and piercings; white faces and bloodshot eyes.  I wandered in and sniffed.  Sulphur?  Hmm, more like mandarin and floor polish really.  I browsed the bookshelves.  Necronomicon and Nocturnicon. Technomages and Pacts with the Devil. Low Magick and high risks. Getting closer.

A small woman with gimlet-bright eyes peered up at me and started to dance.  ‘Do you dance?’ she said.

‘Of course,’ I replied with a smile, following her in a bit of a cumbia. 

‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘One should always dance.’  Quite so.  She danced me down the stairs to where two tall men with long black hair were serving wine and proffering hummus and carrot sticks. 

The lecture, I have to say, was a huge disappointment.  The speaker was a PhD student who had perfected the art of obfuscation, made even more unintelligible by muttering in a transatlantic drawl.  I caught the odd word: exoskeleton, sigil, lobotomy, shame, subjugation, DNA, chimera, pack, pact, anomalous.  I started drawing sigils in my notebook and sketching faces.  I had kinda hoped to talk to people afterwards but they melted into the night…apart from an elderly woman with a face the colour and texture of a prune who thrust a small glass jar into my hand as I left. 

HEKATE of the cross-roads, keeper of the keys of the universe.  Storax, frankincense, myrrh, willow, aconite.
Hmm. 
Add 3 drops of blood to portion used in ritual, thus aligning self with intent.
Hmm

She smiled, shrugged and vanished.  In a puff of smoke?  Oh, how I wish…  But honesty impels me:  it was more like a fading away to grey... 

To be continued…in the meantime, some music...

http://youtu.be/e97isb0e5nQ

And a rather beautiful little film

http://youtu.be/2ePWK0qfisE

A whiff of sulphur...

There’s a definite whiff of sulphur in the air.  It’s been wafting around for the last couple of weeks, but I’ve kept ignoring me.  Me?  Did I really type that?  Dontcha just love the way the subconscious works?  Sigh. Sign. Cian. Kian. Oh my. A whole screed in a word there.  Let’s look at the other signs and portents, shall we?

In the post: the Egyptian Book of the Dead. O Bone-breaker; O Eater of Entrails; O Disturber; O Serpent. O yes. 

On the phone: Hecate and dark dark spells.  Incandescent necrophilosophy and a future with multiple, mistaken pasts.

On email: pacts and Chaos Magick. 

On my headphones: Dead Man's Bones, SoulSavers and Thea Gilmore. "Have you heard the Messiah went and joined the other side?"

On Twitter: Dante and domination, ego and id.  

Even, for pity’s sake the lamp-posts of town are in on the game, winking with Blake, memories of Milton.  Rags and bones.

How could I have been so dumb, so blind, so deaf? 
I’m trying to write a book about Hell while I’m living in an earthly Paradise.  I’m trying to remember brimstone while breathing bluebells. Go figure.

So I cast the tarot.  I haven’t done it for aeons and swiftly remember why.  My, but that’s one big mess of dark darn cards.  Death, The Devil, The Tower, The Wheel of Fortune, The Magician, Judgment, Strength.  Plus a small flurry of swords to dig in the knife.

Hermes, Hermes, you Trickster, you most fetching Fetch, you’re dogging my heels with the Fates giggling behind your back. You’re leading me a merry dance, through the swaying poppies again and back into Hecate's Cave; sliding past the old witch, sewing aconite; limping through the Labyrinth with Pan, that old goat.  And finally, deeper still, to the cold halls of Hades.  So, my old hermetic friend...do I follow you?  Are you wise?  Or do we follow one another in ever-decreasing circles? 

I know your game of old.  So I smile and sigh and tap out an email.
‘May I?’  
A swift reply: ‘Of course’. 
And my heart surges, my stomach flips over. Just three days to wait.  I’m going to the City of Dreadful Night.  Oh, and you do realise, don’t you?  You’re all coming too...  ;)

While we're waiting, let's have some music, eh?

http://www.youtube.com/embed/v10DNkeSct8