Magic Forums

A.K.A The Druids knot
BY
THESSALONIUS LOYOLA (enjoy ;)

Have you ever pondered, Gentle Reader, over why it is that you live in a universe where everything you enjoy is bad for the health of your body and where you can?t even smell you own neck without the aid of some sophisticated contrivance designed for the purpose? Or why everyone jumped up and down about some guy who turned water into wine but no-one noticed when you turned plutonium into porridge to demonstrate one of the more obvious basic magical paradigms? Confused? You?re in the right universe for that whether you read me or you don?t. Strange, is it not, that confusion should spring from their order and clarity from our chaos? Peace from our Dogmas of Darkness and strife from their purity of purpose? I spit three times in the eye of their spirituality. My spirituality doesn?t want to be found ? it wails to be left alone. And where should my Self be found? For sure this is not my Body, I just rent space here. For sure I find my Self anywhere I care to be, often times in many wheres and whens with space and time coincident (but never in a fly on the wall). Beware of your eyes! They give the apparency of attachment to the Self and this is a lie that even your feet won?t tell. Please your eyes and lose yourself in their stupid blinking. Where starts this knot? It starts before time.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing (in the right hands). A more dangerous thing is no knowledge at all - with no knowledge of any universe. No knowledge of substance or space, power or time. The little knowledge was of the Self as yet unfettered. Self then was in no thing and nothing has changed. For the mystic there may be nothing in the universe but for the sorcerer there are two. Self and not-self. Self perceives the universe into existence in order to perceive itSelf. Here continues this knot. In the beginning were the words and the words were misunderstood. The words were my and Self. Can I own mySelf as I own my Body and my boots? My Self is free to occupy whatsoever it perceives but chooses, more often than not, to dwell in some living thing, basking in the waves of perception.

Wizards, like sailors, are spinners of yarns. The Druid?s Knot is not a wizard?s yarn. Thanateros is the knot or web of deadly poison in which all who seek pleasure must become entangled. Body makes it so and Self looks on.

I am not alone on this planet but I wonder where the others are.

Magick as an exact science was the dream of the small minded. This knot is not the MathemaTICS of crystallisation, it is the confusion of the awareness of change.

I conceive of mySelf and find that I am interested in my Body. Interest is a yoga, an attachment of two things, the yoke of Self and Body. The fool who chases riches can have no freedom from gold. But when I ride a horse my lack of interest permits me to dismount. Body fails to interest me while it sleeps and then I play at what I please. And when Body dies I lose interest entirely and out I go without so much as a ?thanks for all the perceptions?. I remember.

?Know thyself? is no help with this knot. I conceive of mySelf in long meditations and guard against madness.

Is three score years and ten enough of the Bastard Time? Time enough for wisdom? And is Time the thief who will bear away your body and your memory leaving self in vacuo? Nequequam vacuum! Thanateros! Morituri non salutandem!

My Body sits in a triangle of mirrors, a candle in front of it, its nakedness fed with fungi. Behind it the bodies of two soulmates have the remaining angles. Self sits behind my eyes, enjoys a long stare at Body?s image, then sits behind the eyes of image and enjoys a long stare back at Body. Self selects another image from the many available and sits behind its eyes looking back into the infinite triangle and Body goes blind. For my next trick I occupy a soulmate image looking back from there into the triangle of excorcism. I do this many times, always forced to look back in. Sometimes I see the body which generates the image I am in and often I see my own Body from behind, pleased that some other self is in there, looking out through my eyes at the reflection of a Body I no longer inhabit. Later I take especial care to know who I am.

Body is an oubliette and thinking is its symptom. Trapped inside this Body I am a prisoner of perception. Outside of Body I am a prisoner of no-perception.

I have no confidence in the future - the future is chaos. I have every confidence in the future - the future is chaos. Nihil sine kaos.

In the stumblelight of evening I stand one-legged, arms akimbo, at the edge of a deep ravine, eyes cast down. In this asana, the wind playfully threatening Body?s continued existence, I quietly contemplate falling away from the earth. My terror will lend reality to future meditations.

Body does as it?s told. The only crime is waste.

All the meanwhile I keep my eyes in both directions, alert to ferversion, mine and other people?s. Ferverts preach a simple solution to this knot without ever having teased a single strand.

Should I be concerned that after I have cast off this mortal coil some demented sorcerer might extemporise horribly on a trumpet made from one of my two favourite femurs?

The beginning of a knot is the end of a knot. The one is the one. Alpha and Omega is the lie of substance, the trick of the Bastard Time. Perception makes it so. Should I perceive mySelf enmeshed with Body, convince mySelf that two are one, or should I enrole as an outsider, to be truly outside of all things, as I choose? No fixed abode