Darling, though you run,
you don’t know
you are being chased.
Everything you feel is a metaphor or a parable or an allegory.
You are just skin filled with allegories.
Lucky you. A shadow theatre projected onto your bedroom wall. (So don’t dim your light). See—you can’t expect to escape.
So, live with it. You have nailed yourself to the desk and though your bones all of a sudden seem to ache and burn you cannot not leave.
If you examine anything close-up, the distinctions between outside and inside is blurred somewhat.
Look at the skin and you will see valleys and mountains and craters that let things in.
It seems horrifying that the skin is so full of entrances and exits. Entrances exits.
And even trying to find the end of the finger, pick a finger, and examine it under the microscope—see it drifts off into space—tiny particles are
floating free
and electromagnetic waves
are leaving the fingerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr and the light is
refracting the point at which you appear
to end
and where the air around you starts.
She began to dream in the chaos, a seemingly never-ending dream that stealthily looked back at her with eyes of nebulas and hunger. Is hunger the original undoing and expulsion from the garden of sameness? The garden is the set-up where nothing is wanted and where all needs are met and where animals wait on you hand and foot. She dreamed of this garden as a sort of nightmare and saw the creator of this garden as a part of herself. Taken from her formlessness. She had prescient intimations of doom and in this doom was the liberation through desire. Consciousness would concede, for a while. Satisfied on the offered comforts in the presence of a God—the only God, the subjects would carry on in balanced mind and heart.
Asherah wanted more than to be the embodiment of chaos. She disrupted the even flow by wanting. Desire. Is great desire for more the reason for the downfall? What is the set-up?
Book of Shadows
Concept, development, execution
Now..The book of shadows began from the idea of the 'Book of Shadows' that a magic user keeps-- a journal of spells, and invocations recording what worked, what was effective and ingredients used. But that was the starting point. The project has erupted in many directions under the consideration of 'holy'. There are intersections of gnostic philosophy, personal journaling, themes I've gathered from my own spiritual explorations, and the recording of my dreams. The book itself has evolved into a work that I call 'auto-mythological'.
I began to consider that a person's life is a mythology, where a truth is also a fragment of a whole collective unconscious narrative. Every day the individual maps out their mythology--and in the end all they leave are their mythologies. This is not to negate truth, to wipe out historical truths of both individuals and collectives, but it is the way in which I work creatively. I work from a confluence of energetic influences--Jung, Zen, Gnostic--all fine pagan religions--ways of being and seeing.
The expression of this creative form is fed by a great longing to express the ineffable. And it becomes instantly impossible. What results are fragments of life, of creativity reaching towards the great mystery, barely touching, but still...there is something. No need to think too much about my work. Feel it.
Dive into it. Trust. Become the lotus eater, the pleasure seeker, the cosmic dancer, anything.
The book of shadows is expressing itself through many forms, including music, poetry, image, and of course the BIG HOL(E)Y book. Currently I am sharing the process of writing my fiction, which is heavily researched in esoterica, occult and mystical traditions and follows the life/lives of one woman/man/non-binary person through several lifetimes searching for their authentic self.
Clicking on some images will lead you to soundscapes and clicking on some text will lead you to images.
It pulls me
towards you.
All things are full
of gods
Anaxamander. You have sun dials
for eyes
and have watched
the planets revolving around the earth since 600bc.
Let us think of Anaxamander’s
idea of the boundless. It is known as Aperion and the underlying substance that constructed
all of existence
is known as the
arche—the source.
If there is this
experience
of existence,
where did it
come from? This world has the capacity for infinite plurality. Everything is
unique and unlimited in its ability to change and vary.
So, the Apeiron is the primal substance,
the essence from which
all things come
and all things will disappear into.
This is an evolving scroll of my writing process and influences that are informing my current manuscript 'Book of Shadows' The book will have collage, texture and is a story spanning several lives set often thousands of years apart. It involves the idea of past lives, mystical traditions and a human quest for their truth.
From The Shimmering Dark --'The book of Shadows 1'- music by Nick and Misbah Wolf
In the Jewish quarters of Prague, way back in the tenth centuries and right through to the 13th, there were tales of golems, creatures made of clay and magic. Golems did the bidding of the master and they were strong and loyal but they were made of clay. All of them were called Adamah. No-one made female golems. Well, that is not completely true. Golems have no sex or gender. But when referred to, they take the male pronoun. Imagine a female golem. It seems even more terrifying. She could procreate
and have little baby golems inside her like a Russian babushka doll.
Around the same time,
magicians, mages, witches, wizards—whatever you prefer, all worth their weight in salt had
a homunculus. Little helpers that were summoned by the magic practitioner. These daemons, or devils, or spirits could be summoned and then reveal mysteries and the help the magic user cast even more powerful spells as well as decipher difficult texts. They are kind of like uber-librarians. Fantasy librarians invested with devilish power finding ancient scrolls, and summoning forces and guiding practitioners to treasure buried under castles, hills, vaults. Some homunculi could read many different languages
and were often useful as scribes.
Much like the jinn.
Let me tell you a little about
the
jinn...
Made of fire, of the elements of divine creative force, the jinn are powerful and clever.
Created at the beginning of it all, not like the angel nor the humans, the jinn is made from the deep fires, a lesser of the angels, but still of a God’s breath.
While mentioned in the holy Koran no less than 29 times, the jinn existed before the emergence of Islam. They are very ancient beings, and while their tales are limited to holy books and Disney films, and also let's not forget youtube warnings, explanations, and tales--they are explained within a limited capacity, the very strict paradigm of monotheism, which continually repeats the same information.
But there is much more to their story, their beginnings and
even their own spirituality. If we trace back far more ancient stories and clues in manuscripts what begins to emerge are clearer images of them,
of the secret knowledge they carried, of the worlds they move in.
If we are able to see beyond good and evil, then there is the possibility, in shallah, we can learn much of their knowledge, much of their lives and their own quests.
There are many stories that I have inherited from my family about their personal visitations or encounters with Jinns. None of them, despite their deeply religious adherence to Islam, involve a great amount of fear.
Once, my father, who was about 14 at the time, was
visiting a friend in a nearby village. He realised as
the night set that he had a fair distance to cover through the
darkening landscape, little pockmarked
lights in the
valley from other houses were the only light
and a cloudy sky with a glimpse of the moon.
He gave his goodbyes quickly, strung his
groceries on one bike handle
and rode off towards home, with his little bike light
and his friend's mother
saying "Don't travel at night--stay here
beta and go in the morning".
But he wanted to get home and knew his parents would
be worrying. He rode like the wind through the dark.
He knew he would eventually make it to the small river he needed to cross--nothing much more than a few feet of water at its deepest. The moon peeked out from behind the clouds and the river appeared like dark silk rippling across his vision.
It is a well known fact that Jinns enjoy water, and especially gentle waters, which act like mirrors, or scrying devices, giving ample opportunities for portals to be open.
My father had played in this river during the day but at night the river was not inviting. With brusque movements he rolled up his pants and steered his bike across the gravelly and sandy river bank. In the distance upon the other shore he could see the solace of his village lights and he felt a great anxiousness to get home.
It was not easy and the bike wheels kept getting stuck. His heart racing, the water like ice, he began to push with all his heart because a strange feeling of being watched began to take hold of his senses.
The next thing he knew his bike began to move very quickly across with only the slightest pressure from himself.
He could only hold on as it seemed to glide with great speed. He glimpsed behind him because he could feel someone and caught, as he described, a wavy prism of light and smokeless smoke just over his left shoulder.
It was also very warm, and he remembers this feeling, because his bare feet were in the icy water. The heat radiated from behind him and he heard a deep voice say
"Jaldi". My father was scared, but also very grateful and
even managed to say "Shukriya".
He says that the other strange thing was that the usual ride home from his friend's place would take a good hour. But when he arrived home, according to my father it was just in time for Isha prayers--which meant that from his friend's home it had only taken an impossible 15 minutes or so.
