A Narrative In Several Parts

Harlequin - Doug Nox

There's blood upon the bridal wreath

The bridal wreath, the bridal wreath

The Devil shows his shiny teeth

His shiny teeth, his shiny teeth, all shiny teeth

Now take a seat there by the door

He'll leave you on the killing floor

He's gonna set the clouds on fire

They're burning there forever more

- Chase the Clouds, verse 1

That first black breath we take all full up with lust and drugs is the beginning of the end.  This is the secret truth of the deal at the cross roads.  Death is the beginning and not the end.  True autonomy is hidden here, is the occulted relevance of the cross roads deal.  The only choice you will ever really get to make is what you will suffer for, is how you will submit, is to whom you shall bargain your soul.  Surrender is the only victory to be had for a sorcerer, a real one anyway.

Counter-intuitive I guess.  We are collectively drawn to magic because of a sense of the greater universe, the realization of our fleeting smallness in the timelessness of existence.  We seek control over our destinies when in fact there is no destiny.  It is a profound vanity to believe the universe has a plan for you because it does not.  You are the manifestation of a natural biological imperative, you are an accidental masterpiece of evolution and when creation is done with you it will portion you out at the molecular level in service of something greater and more profound.  There is no pure state of being; enlightenment was the Buddha’s mischievous talk.  The black ink of my tattoos, the poisons in my blood, none of it worse for me than breathing in the living death of my existence.

I have been set to a pilgrimage and I am unsure of where it is taking me.  In my dreams I have come back to the Nails of my youth but Qemetiel is no longer a purity of burning fields.  Now I see a ramshackle of shanties hobbled together along the banks of anti-freeze rivers, darkly haunted by inhabitants without a connection to their Other.  Beneath that endless expanse of poverty and suffering is a temple city much older than the Old Victorian that used to inhabit that space, still the colours of rust and sunset yellows but now Corinthian and Ionic pillars hold up its iron sky. 

I have wandered since December, from luxury condo to luxury condo in the ever-increasing number of sky-scrappers in Toronto.  A blur of swimming pools and hot tubs and impossible vista’s, staring out over the urban sprawl of Canada’s largest city from its center point downtown.  Cut free of the whole of an old incarnation, the woman I have loved the whole of my adult life clings to my hand, my fat cock, we are two people but one demon.  What new forms will have us?  We orbit the core of this city like a satellite picking up escape velocity. 

Qemetiel is an endless shanty town and the crowd of impoverished gods huddle about their oil drum fires, rubbing their hands together and telling stories of their lives before the fall.  Mostly lies I suspect.  I tuned up my 12-string guitar so that I could sing along with the howling winds buffeting the austere heights of the Neptune Tower on Queens Quay.  The Invisibles love the lyrical purity of a lonely musician.  I gave up the first part of my soul for all the world's magic, the second to sing like the devil himself, the third to fuck like a satyr.  Worth every penny.  Of the four mortal parts, I got one left to bargain with.  As for the three immortal parts, well they were never really mine to sell.  So I am making my way to that Black Buddha to strike my final bargain, across the endless shanties and anti-freeze rivers.  Through the poverty of your Gods, their oil-drum fires and tall tales, past the dark silhouettes of the Ha’wiyah who praise the Tetragrammaton while they jerk off to clockwork hookers and sacrifice their children in pursuit of self-deification. 

Just a crusty sorcerer with a bit of soul to sell and a knack for the hard bargain.  It is has been more than a decade since I last undertook the ordeal of the Pilgrimage and I am the wiser for them.  I will burn incense before the mask of Harlequin and let the God-who-is-Not fill it up.  I will spill blood and semen and cheap whiskey upon an altar for the Circus-Burlesque because that is what your religion is to me.  A cock-tease and a wondrous spectacle.  I will sing songs with the four winds until the Tower falls down in its joyous destruction.

And this time, I will write the whole damned thing down.

Think Like a Wizard

or Sigils, Wildlings and Wizards That Make You Want to be Gay

I am a reader, I read.  Recently I have gotten to consume some excellent books and they convinced me that my hipsterish assumption that occulture was entirely devoid of substance and incapable of impressing me was entirely premature.  I’ll get to the books eventually, the Garden of Blood and Bones has had an especially profound impact on my personal practices but for now I am just enjoying the raw exploration of that.  That realization also got me reading some blogs.

I am also a writer, I write.  I prefer just shooting my big mouth off on whatever topic has crossed my mind at that particular moment and so the blog format kind of suits me better than most but currently I just don’t have much time for my blog.  This makes me cranky but nothing can be done about it.  Instead of being cranky at you, my beloved readers I am going to reference some cool mother-fucking blogs that other more industrious individuals have written for your ravenous and relentless appetites.

First up is runesoup.com, now Gordon is a witty and insightful guy regardless of what he’s writing about but he has a sigil magic technique that could make everyone in the world who practices juju way better that he calls shoaling.  Go there and read everything he has written about shoaling sigils and black swans and be made into a generally more efficient human being.

Good

places

to

start.

Next is witchofforestgrove.com, I think that in general the magical culture of the west has gotten kind of cerebral about the whole thing and so a practitioner that actually does something always impresses me.  A witch with her hands in the dirt becomes an increasing rarity these days and this witch perfectly demonstrates that practicality is the mother of both art and grace.  Better than I could by yelling at you about it, that’s for sure.  Both Vanessa and I happily concede that this is one of the best articles either of us had read regarding sex magic in ages.  Get lost in the forest for while, good wildcrafters rarely maintain blogs.

I also read William Burroughs ‘the Place of Dead Roads’ and finally after many years of reading Burroughs completed the Lost Boys trilogy.  I am told that Americans generally try to avoid reading Burroughs because they (quite rightly) fear that it will make them gay.   There is so much truth to this accusation that I see absolutely no point in contending it.  Burroughs wasn’t just a literary genius he was also probably the last great sex magician of the contemporary West and he was amazingly gay.  So yeah, laying your eyes upon his text (especially the Lost Boys books, which were his magical opus) is in fact the exact same as putting a penis in your ass.  Not just putting a penis in your ass though, wanting to put a penis in your ass which needless to say makes you officially gay. 

The Lost Boys trilogy isn’t fiction or at least it shouldn’t be thought of in that way unless you’re also willing to include Kenneth Grant, Michael Bertiaux and the entirety of the Gnostic catalogue.  He is really quite explicit in Dead Roads and the Western Lands that these are his books about magic and that’s why they don’t make any sense as fiction.  Generally the first retort to this argument is that all of Burroughs books didn’t make any sense as fiction but that’s not really true.  The cut-up technique he and Brion Gyson developed in Paris turned around the idea that the reader invents his own narrative regardless of the writer’s intention.  This is not a denial of narrative but rather a surrender to it, in the Lost Boys Burroughs is attempting to meaningfully convey his own magical life and so hidden there in all that randomness and chaos is Burroughs himself, he isn’t even hidden properly but rather he just is the randomness and chaos.  That makes a tremendous amount of sense if you think about it like a wizard. 

Or everyone could continue being terrified of perhaps loving gay butt-sex, I suppose that is the other option.

(The one that makes you retarded.)

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