Gwyllm.com

Yesterday was pretty busy… Andy stopped by with his books for Dale to sign, and we got to hang out for awhile, which doesn’t happen. I went out and did some prints at Doran & Sue’s, who are rearranging the house now that Katherine has moved out with her young gentleman.
Victor and his lady friend stopped by, bringing his books for Dale to sign, and we sat around for awhile catching up. I tried to convince him to come in from the Dalles for the talk, but he starts work at 4:30AM (Ack!)
Later on I went and helped my sister get a bed with the assistance of Andrew, and we got to spend some time on the road going up above PSU to venture down a road that more resembled a road in a mountain pass in the Siskiyous than in the heart of Portland. I am always surprised to find new locations in Portland. What a fine city!
Rowan came by from his house-sitting (for Trish & Kyle) for dinner, and to talk about his first day at Art School. This seems like a deal made in heaven for him. He was positively Glowing. It makes my heart happy to see that!
Mary has been performing her special magick around the house. I love the atmosphere she gives a place.
Dale and Laura will be arriving today. Everyone is pretty excited!
See ya all tonight!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
PS: Radio Free Earthrites is back up! Thanks Doug!

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On The Menu:

Dale Pendell in Portland

The Links

Guy Debord Quotes

The Stranglers: Get A Grip On Yourself

Dale Pendell: Green Flames – Thoughts on Burning Man, the Green Man, and Dionysian Anarchism, with Four Proposals

The Poetry of Laura Pendell

The Stranglers – No More Heroes

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Dale Pendell in Portland

So… Dale and Laura will be arriving in Portland today for Dales’ talk.
Here is the info again:

Dale Pendell October 8th 2008 07:30 PM

(at Powell’s Hawthorne)

In Walking with Nobby (Mercury House), retired professor Norman O. Brown and author Dale Pendell, during walks taken along the coast of California, discuss many concepts and characters, including paganism and world religions, Dionysus, Marx, and Freud, presented as footnoted conversations.
We hope to see you. This will a great event, free, and will give you an opportunity to meet with Dale & Laura.
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The Links:

Spider eats snake

Payday….

Possession….

ATT Shenanigans…

You’ve Been Left Behind…

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Guy Debord Quotes

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.
Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.
Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs. 80)
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Changes are coming… I suggest you –Get A Grip On Yourself–

The Stranglers… of course.

>
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Dale Pendell: Green Flames – Thoughts on Burning Man, the Green Man, and Dionysian Anarchism, with Four Proposals

(originally posted on Turfing last year)

Burning Man as a “temporary autonomous zone.”
Burning Man was born in free and visionary revelry, and matured on the Black Rock Desert into a great gathering of the tribes, from the cyber-freaks to the lushy rednecks to the altered-consciousness pentathletes to the nasty punks to the fuckin’ hippies. And everything in between. This alone, from a historical perspective, is a matter of wonder and for rejoicing.
There was another big event, not as big as Burning Man in numbers, but also historically important, in Golden Gate Park, forty years ago, that was called “Gathering of the Tribes.” Gary Snyder spoke at that event, as did Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, and others.
Such gatherings often take place in what Hakim Bey calls a “temporary autonomous zone,” in cracks and hidden openings overlooked by the guardians of the State. Bey was careful to refrain from defining TAZ rigorously, but it is clear that TAZ is applicable to the free spirit and the festive excesses of Burning Man:
The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.

–Hakim Bey
Other forces besides the State can quell a temporary autonomous zone: it can be co-opted by the market; it can exhaust its imagination and good will; or it can compromise itself into a more acceptable form. All of these forces continue to exert tremendous pressure on Burning Man.
Many burners feel that the “true TAZ” aspect of Burning Man peaked in the mid-1990s, and has declined ever since. Others, of course, say “stop complaining and party.” Whatever the truth, Burning Man is still a vibrant force with far-reaching social, political, and artistic potential.

Dionysian Anarchism

There has been a debate going on in philosophy for 2500 years about human nature. In fact, it is the only really crucial question of philosophy. At stake is the rationalization for a hierarchical, oppressive state. Before philosophers, religion imputed that human society should be like that of the gods, usually with a top god, and with the others doing their respective parts. These early state religions stressed that the kings on earth, if not divine themselves, were reflections of the order of heaven.
Plato, in the Republic, introduced the “Noble Lie,” that the wise should tell the commoners lies and myths to keep them in their place. A corollary is that if you don’t assist this process, you are not one of the wise, and you will be punished, if not with death or imprisonment, at least with marginalization.
Thomas Hobbes said that people were rapacious beasts, who would start killing and eating each other if it weren’t for an armed police force. Our mainstream culture seems desperate to maintain this viewpoint. During Hurricane Katrina, while the self-organizing cooperative efforts of thousands and tens of thousands of citizens to help each other went largely unreported, a scene of looting was replayed over and over. The clear message is “see, people can’t be trusted. We need the police.” In fact, police (or private security goons) broke up, and even fired on, the emerging cooperatives.
So who is on the other side? Many, actually. First off, we have the evidence of anthropology and human prehistory, which is overwhelmingly cooperative. We have the core teachings of deep mystical traditions.
Jean Jacques Rousseau offered that much of the sickness, the antisocial, and criminal behavior in society was not the result of our intrinsic natures, but of the society itself. Many are quick to dismiss Rousseau with a put-down—“ahh, the Noble Savage.” Rousseau never talked about any noble savage. The term was invented by a mid-nineteenth century pro-slavery American anthropologist, and has been an astoundingly effective little lie to cut off discussion on this topic.
Dionysian anarchism sides with the mystics and with anthropology. It sides with the way that people carry on their affairs most of the time: that is, cooperatively, and generally with a sense of good will. It sides with the spirit of DIY: do-it-yourself. Dionysian anarchists stress that means and ends have to be in accord, and if we can just stop things from getting worse, society will spontaneously realign itself towards freedom. That is our nature. As long as we have free horizons, as long as we are headed towards freedom and not away from it, we can relax a little with a long term view.
Forty years ago poet Gary Snyder, in answer to those who say that cooperative, non-coercive living is against human nature, wrote that we must patiently remind such people that they must know their own true natures first, before they can say that. That those who have gone furthest into deep mind, into deep nature–mystics, meditators, and visionary explorers—have been reporting for several thousand years that we have nothing to fear.
Gary’s solution included Buddhism and other inward-looking spiritual traditions, working within the context of tribal community, and opening to the radical teachings of the wild: wild places, wild animals, and wild plants—the true sources of our culture from our earliest beginnings. Timothy Leary stressed psychedelic visioning. Alan Watts talked about a philosophical sensualism. Ginsberg modeled the ecstatic spontaneity of the dancing bhakti.
But let’s look briefly at where we are.
Despite the pervasive rhetoric of progress from our politicians and media, for most people in the United States, for most plant and animal species, things are not getting better.
Real wages have been declining for over a generation. Measures of the quality of life have been declining. How much someone has to work to get by has been increasing. Infant mortality has been increasing. The percentage of the population in poverty has been increasing. Both the number of people and the percentage of the population in prison has risen dramatically. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, both in numbers and by percentage. Plants, animals, and habitat are being consumed at an ever increasing rate by global corporations which, by their definition and legal charter, can never have enough.
There is of course an upside—for those near the top of the heap, things are better than ever. There is sort of a choice here, aristos vs. demos. One can get with the program, stop complaining, and with some smarts and a good birth you can join the winners.
The Aztecs had a pathway for the commoners to gain entrance to the elite by becoming warriors and capturing sacrificial victims in the “flower wars”—wars maintained not for conquest of territory but for just that reason of providing victims. (One had to capture five victims to gain the highest ranking, with its attendant privileges, such as the right to drink chocolate.)

Freeing the Imagination
The first anarchist act is to free the imagination, to cut through our years of conditioning about what is “unthinkable.” By imagination, we do not mean mere reverie, but our imaging of the world, our mental picturing of who we are and the fundamental nature of existence, of reality. This is imagination in the sense that Blake used the word: the fire of consciousness, the fire of mind. Freeing the imagination means that you can act spontaneously in the world, not only artistically but in all of your interactions.
This is not as easy as it sounds. How to do that?
For poets, artists, musicians, dancers, meditators, and visionaries, it is a matter of continuing practice: plumbing the depths of mind, learning how to listen, and then sharing our insights through performance. This is the ancient wisdom of all gift economies.

Ecology and Deep Ecology
The Black Rock Desert was one of Gary Snyder’s favorite places to come and camp long before Burning Man ever came here, and it is one of the major inspirations for his poem “Mountains and Rivers without End.”
On the Black Rock, the environment is impossible to ignore: it fills our eyes and tents and drinking cups with every dust storm. It roasts us or freezes us. On the Playa, the spirit of place is never far away, even for newbies who have never heard of Lake Lahontan.
At first glance, Burning Man, with its penchant for fire, excess, inebriation, celebration, sexuality, radical self-expression, and generators, hardly seems a candidate for greenness. But there is a connection—a connection in mythopoesis, at a deeper level than our laudable efforts at recycling and solar electricity and “leave no trace.”
This connection relates to the difference between management ecology and deep ecology. Management ecology we need, desperately, but deep ecology we need even more. The Green Man is deep ecology—his leafy speaking is animistic. Plant intelligence, with its sense of place, and wild intelligence, with its sense of freedom, speak through his mouth.
The Green Man is the bridge, and the Green Man is madness. Ecstatic madness. Madness that recognizes that the earth is alive. What do we mean by that? Not that the earth is composed of cells with a DNA library, but that the earth is not a separate thing, distinct from our own living minds. Buddhists state that, ultimately, the seeming objectivity of the “external” world, is an illusion, that our own true nature and the salt of the playa are not separate. This is the message that mystics and yogis and shamans have maintained for millennia. Once this is realized, the problems don’t go away, but cutting away a hillside, building a house or factory, putting explosives into the earth, are all recognized as having a transgressive nature. We then have a tendency to try to ask permission—what does the earth have to say about what we are doing, the hillside, the animal that we are going to eat? And then we try to make things right, with a sense of gratitude and perhaps a bit of shame, or even guilt, to bring things back into harmony with the spirits. We recognize that we are being gifted, that countless generations of effort, sacrifice, and imagination make possible our birth and our sustenance. So we want to give something back. Snyder states: “Performance is currency in the deep world’s gift economy.”
The Green Man, Dionysus, and Divine Madness
In his last published essay, “Dionysus in 1990,” philosopher Norman O. Brown extended ideas of Georges Bataille and Marcel Mauss and others to invert the Marxist focus on production to that of consumption–more to the point, “wasteful consumption.” The idea of wasteful consumption is anathema to conservationists (and to all sane and rational people). The idea is, frankly, madness. Brown bets all with Socrates that if the madness is inspired by a god, that is, divine madness, it is the source of our greatest blessings. We might say that divine madness is the “wild” of consciousness.
The name of the god, for Brown, is Dionysus. Iconographically, it is easy to recognize Dionysus in the Green Man, the one whose very speech is wild nature.
Now Brown is not expecting people to actually bow down and worship Dionysus. For Brown, Dionysus is a shorthand for an irrepressible wild and joyful energy. The opposite of this energy is the Grand Inquisitor, with his benevolent lies. Success or failure seems to pivot on the issue of passive entertainment—Blake’s “spectral enjoyment.” The Inquisitor is betting that circuses will satisfy the masses. The Dionysian bets he is wrong. That is the idea behind “no spectators.”
The traditional manifestation of Dionysian energy has always been through festivals. Barbara Ehrenreich points out that in medieval Spain a third of the days of the year were holidays for festivals. There was a backwards day, a Feast of Fools when a donkey was led into the cathedral and the bishop’s miter placed on his head. Blasphemies were uttered, echoes of the Dionysian festivals of Greece. The Greeks were wise enough to recognize that although Dionysus meant trouble, the suppression of Dionysus was even worse—that trying to suppress the Dionysian spirit entirely, to end all licentiousness, all blasphemy, all risk, led to false madness, profane madness, and the sacrifice of children. Moloch. That is the true idolatry, when the blasphemies of art are petrified into literalism. The Romans, by the way, an Apollonian people, suppressed the Bacchanalia with much bloodshed—perhaps the first “War on Drugs.”
The church made occasional attempts to suppress the festivals—these moves mostly coming from Rome. The local priests generally resisted this suppression, saying that without the festivals they would have no congregation. Festivals, it should not surprise us, were sometimes the springboards for political rebellion.
A hardier force against the festival was the Enlightenment, along with mercantilism, and the Industrial Revolution. “Reason,” remember. Lenin even went so far as to praise the capitalists for disciplining the working classes.
We must remember that anytime large groups of people can get together cooperatively, it puts the lie to the Hobbesian thesis that people are innately irresponsible and dangerous. That is the real reason that the government insists on police presence—even though they are clearly unnecessary. Free festivals are a threat to the whole rationalization for the existence of the armed, coercive forces of “internal security.” Such a free festival would be a light to the world for centuries: proof that cooperative living, free from armed coercion, is not “unthinkable,” but the way things should be. Free the imagination!
In Brown’s system (which I go into more deeply in my Inspired Madness, The Gifts of Burning Man, published last year by North Atlantic Books), the rites of Dionysus, with their attendant licentiousness, danger, fire, blasphemy, and wasteful consumption (combustion for its own sake), must be seen as prophylactic: they protect us from calamity—the Greeks certainly understood them thus. I like to joke that in a more enlightened age Burning Man would be given a grant from the Defense Department, in gold. The alternative worship, as Brown clearly stated, is war.
There is, alas, no proof for this thesis. The mythopoetic foundation is very strong, but in the end it comes down to a wager. Everyone must choose a square.
A Few Proposals for Burning Man, LLC.
1. Stop the undercover stings by police. If you can’t stop them, at least speak out against them, LOUDLY and PUBLICLY. This violation of trust and goodwill is the opposite of everything that Burning Man stands for. Smoking cannabis may be illegal, but lying and violating another’s trust—“hey man, you got any weed you can share?”—is immoral and despicable. It is a poison that spreads distrust and division. It is the worst model of civic behavior. In the face of such behavior for Burning Man to state “we have an excellent relationship with law enforcement” amounts to collusion.
Personally, I believe that all police presence should be reduced. And reduced again. Let’s free our imaginations and not dismiss this possibility as “impossible.” Why do we let police strut through the dance clubs? It’s time to push back. Tell the BLM we’ll take the festival somewhere else—see what they say then. (The High Sierra Music Festival had some remarkable success with this tactic.)
2. Stop the car searches. This one is easy. It’s wrong that the very first encounter upon arriving at Burning Man is someone demanding to search one’s car, someone who tells me “I can’t take your word for it.” That’s “spectator” thinking.
How big a problem would it be if a few people who can’t afford a ticket sneak in? Maybe they should be there. Maybe they have something important to contribute. How many would there be? Three percent?
Five percent? I’ll pay five percent more to cover them, until they can get their acts together. Isn’t our way to educate by example? Let’s see if we can make it work through the peer pressure of responsibility and good citizenship. Spirit of giving, anyone?
3. Consider dropping charges against Paul Addis (the man who set fire to the Man on Monday night). Perhaps such a benevolent act of clemency could bring him back into the fold. Make him do community service at Camp Arctica to cool him off and help him make some new friends. At least talk to the guy—he clearly wants to say something.
4. Wouldn’t ”Dreaming America” or just “Dreaming” be a better theme for 2008 than “The American Dream.” Consider the contradictions in the theme announcement.
Beneath a background of red, white, and blue (originally the flag of the East India Company, the English-speaking world’s first transnational corporation), Burning Man has announced that next year’s theme will be “about patriotism.” While one might pledge some allegiance to “the soil of Turtle Island,” the Burning Man theme is presented entirely in a nationalistic context. This kind of patriotism is one of the greatest diseases of civilization, responsible not only for the deaths of many millions of persons, but for wide scale scorching of the earth.
While waving a flag, Burning Man says this theme is not about flag worship (and, as well, that “flag burning [will] play no part in this year’s theme,” a rather ironic proscription). Presenting us with ideology, they say “leave ideology at home.” They seem to think that politics has to do with “the blue states and the red,” politics only in its most myopic and degenerate condition.
Astonishingly, beneath this banner of patriotism and the American Dream, we are given a (misquoted) fragment of Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Shine, Perishing Republic.” Jeffers, a wise man, is not turning in his grave, but, rather, “sadly smiling.” The point is the next line of the poem (not quoted):
“But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption Never has been compulsory.”
Time for a regional?
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The Poetry of Laura Pendell

– Originally published in ‘The Invisible College’ 1st edition

MASK of SHARDS
I have been broken and crushed.

I am tired of closing my eyes.

I am tired of closing my mouth.
I think life is a series of steps.

I think the sky is a compass of remedies.

I think water overflows with offers,

and the river is fringed with answers.
Perhaps the answer is too deep

the river’s banks are muddy

the weeds work their way between.
Then it is time to be still.

Then it is time to sit with the earth.

Let the days stretch beyond shadow

and into a season of light.
This is the practice of self-reflection.

This is the practice of not following

the illusive thread of suffering.
Do not stray.

—-
INNER ALCHEMY
reddened reflection

of time before space

and cycles

transformed
semen of cinnabar

sulfur sentience

meditation

and breath
cavernous sky doors

pour dimensions

of purple ichor

gold and jade
Eight Gems soar

elixir flows

and flowers breathe

the Dragon Fetus
finds its secret place

lunar liquor

the spiritual feather

of a Phoenix flown
peruse the pattern

follow the mandala

and glow

—
GRATITUDE
the gold film

that washes across vision

the shimmer that swims

across time

whispers or shouts

the only language

o carillon of color

spinning/swirling

across the ceiling of infinity

with the geometric precision

of ancient arabian cupolas

crescents squares and triangles

all iridescence and incense

space roils around us

billowing howls

and exclamations of rainbow

premonitions of the sacrament

of bedlam and insight

both amplitudes and maxitudes

wonderment and wows
whirring extremities

of shape shifters

rosewood and cordwood

and myrrh

and waves of time

sense thickened
and spherical

swelling and thrusting

and white capped

the blinding broth

of unimagined horizons
and then finally

the sunrise

well traveled and bright

its innocence

cruising and actual

precarious and enough
I am drowsy, irrational,

sated by the singular beauty

of the earth

birdsong and wonder

all that green

the long swell into daylight

the long spell of you

everything still a sparkle

rippling and lyrical

relinquished

remembering

festooned in mirth

scattered and gleaming
miseries unfamiliar

at least for this day

this life conjectured

imagined, the illusion

complete/so sweet.

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No More Heroes… The Stranglers

_______________________

In fact, let us not mince words… The Management is terrible! We’ve had a string of embezzelers, frauds, liars and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who elected these people! You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you! While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me nothing short of deliberate. You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You have allowed them to fill your workspace with dangerous and unproven machines. You could have stopped them. All you had to say was ‘No’….

V, in V for Vendetta.

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Radio Free EarthRites will be down for awhile. Whilst changing out phone lines in the UK, our server was cut off, and due to the British mindset, it isn’t going to be fixed anytime soon. I will keep you posted for when it will be back up.
Rowan starts school today at The Art Institute of Portland. We went out and picked up 3 books, to the tune of close to 300 dollars! Not a hardback to be found among them! Amazing….Anyway, he has had a hard time of it over the last few days, catching a stomach bug along with his Mom that I gifted them from who knows where. I think he is on the mend now…
Worked much of the weekend on the magazine. It is finally taking shape. It seemed to take longer to develop the theme for this edition. I have been sidelined frequently with other projects at this point…
Anyway, looking forward to this Wednesday!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

Dale Pendell Will Be In Portland at Powells’ Hawthorne

The Links

Bells & Robes…

H.U.V.A Network live at Les Dominicains 2/6-07

Drag the Archaic into our Present for the sake of a Future

The Poetry Of The Dao Te Ching

h.u.v.a. network / time circles / distant system rmx

Art: John Duncan
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Be There Or Be Square:

Dale Pendell Will Be In Portland at Powells’ Hawthorne Wednesday, October 8th 2008 07:30 PM

In Walking with Nobby (Mercury House), retired professor Norman O. Brown and author Dale Pendell, during walks taken along the coast of California, discuss many concepts and characters, including paganism and world religions, Dionysus, Marx, and Freud, presented as footnoted conversations.
This should be a good one! If you haven’t heard Dale speak, you are in for a treat. Some of the most stimulating subject matter, and entertaining ideas I have come across… I am very excited to have Dale back in Portland. This is a must see event!
So we will see you there, right? Mary, Rowan & I will see ya there

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The Links:

Blue Light Info….!

It helps if your a bit toasted…

Make Believe Maverick…

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Bells and Robes
Ummon asked: `The world is such a wide world, why do you answer a bell and don ceremonial robes?’
Mumon’s Comment: When one studies Zen one need not follow sound or colour or form. Even though some have attained insight when hearing a voice or seeing a colour or a form, this is a very common way. It is not true Zen. The real Zen student controls sound, colour, form, and actualizes the truth in his everyday life.
Sound comes to the ear, the ear goes to the sound. When you blot out sound and sense, what do you understand? While listening with ears one never can understand. To understand intimately one should see sound.
When you understand, you belong to the family;

When you do not understand, you are a stranger.

Those who do not understand belong to the family,

And when they understand they are strangers.
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H.U.V.A Network live at Les Dominicains 2/6-07

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Drag the Archaic into our Present

for the sake of a Future

-jesse mabus
We Irish, born into that ancient sect

But thrown upon this filthy modem tide

And by its formless spawning fury wrecked

Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace

The lineaments of a plummet measured face

– W.B. Yeats, ‘The Statues’
Since we have been given the admonition to avoid the conquest, as there will be sorra’ galore soon enough, I will instead contain myself to elucidating the archaic qualities of the Irish, which for me represent examples of a world-view worth conserving and transplanting. First we will look at the Megalithic culture of the Atlantic coast of Europe and contrast it with the Iron age Celtic culture as seen in the Táin Bó Cuailnge. The most vital bit of information I discovered in Every Earthly Blessing relates how the saints were associated with the Druidic and Poetic schools, and consequently often used the leitmotifs, of these ancient ‘technicians of the sacred’ in their own hagiographic constructions. This consequently makes the Irish church and its patrons much closer to the Indo-European Paganism eradicated on the Continent by the Roman Church. The survival of this religious caste and its corpus into the 17th century, in both the manuscripts of the Irish Monasteries and the poetics of the Bardic Order, gives us an opportunity to reconstruct aspects of the Gaelic world-view prior to it being tossed in the boiling cauldron of the European Nation States. Much of the material we have on the religious castes of Ireland comes through the less then objective lens of their conquerors and would-be conquerors. Consequently we have a shadowy and biased view of them, especially the much-maligned final leg of their tripartite organization, the Vates or Seers. Yet in looking at them we can discern both the reason for their dismissal and their importance in the transition from archaic shamanism.
I
Isle a ho boys, let her go boys

swing her head round into the weather

Isle a ho boys, let her go boys

sailing homeward to Mingulay

-traditional (Casey Neill Trio), ‘Mingulay Boat Song’
Along the Atlantic seaboard of the European continent from Ireland to the Mediterranean islands of Malta are megalithic structures, which mark the steps of a migration of people from the cradle of civilization to the very periphery of the farthest Western shores. The purpose of these monuments, often described as communal burial tombs, remains an ambiguous assertion. Some call attention only to their contents of bones and material remains and maintain they were tombs for an elite social order. While others interpret their placement and architecture and suggest they are astronomical observatories designed to measure the solar year and thus act as an agricultural calendar. Some suggest that their purpose was more religious and the Winter Solstice ritual at Newgrange, or Brugh na Bóinne, in the interaction of dark and light, cave and sunbeam, the sacred marriage of the chthonic: feminine earth and the luminescent masculine sky is enacted.
In the film The Atlanteans, there is a concerted attempt to draw a connection between the North African and Mediterranean cultures with Ireland through the vehicle of maritime trade routes and cultural similarities. With only a brief mention of these megalithic structures, it is no wonder that the effort comes off as incomplete. These megaliths point to a cultural source for the ancient Irish not solely in the Celtic world of the European heartland, but in the wine-dark sea of the Mediterranean and the north coast of Africa. I see an important linguistic point to address in the argument; how long has the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language tree been separated from the main trunk, or from the branch associated with Greek and Italic? The American Heritage Dictionary suggests that Proto Indo-European was likely spoken around 5th millennia BCE, which fits approximately with the time this migration of the megalithic builders began. Perhaps this is also around the time of the first Kurgan invasions of the Indo-European lands, which began a major cultural shift from the matrilineal or kin relations to patriarchal or power relations, from an egalitarian to a domination model of social interaction.
In the Bronze Age the mythic template was the Goddess and her consort, the Dying God of Vegetation. This is itself an overlay on the Hymn to Demeter, or the relations between a Mother and Daughter, the major trope in Eavan Boland’s ‘Pomegranate’ (or see ‘Brugh na Bóinne and the Triple Irish Goddess’ by the author). It represents the turning of the agricultural round and the connectivity of life’s cycles, from birth to death and back again ? letting go and embracing change (a salmon leap?!). In the Iron Age the myth becomes the hero’s individual fame or infamy in cattle raids and the subjugation of women as possessions, whether in the battle for the Brown Bull in the Táin or the capture of Helen in the Trojan War. This is a move from the agency of being as seen in the Gaelic “ag”, to the subordination of having, not a descent of godhead into the individual as the hero’s birth represents, but the original fall from our connection to the universal.
Ironically even though the Táin is a heroic saga for an audience of prepubescent boys, being at its heart misogynist, it contains elements that point out the path this shift traversed. Deirdre, the self-possessed Maiden refusing to be a sacrifice to a vainglorious king’s pride and desire, and likewise the curse on Ulster by Macha’s “A mother bore each one of you,” in the film A Celtic Trilogy are examples of the agency and respect women had. As is the connection of Medb with the Goddess of Sovereignty and her claims of preeminence over Aillil’s in the ‘Pillow Talk’ section of the Táin. The agency of these women directly contradicts the image of women as chattel and the cause of men’s struggle for honor or infamy found in the Táin. In addition to these triune Goddesses, the story of Nes, mother of Conchobor, and her maneuvers to get her and the Druid Cathbad’s son on to her husband Fergus’ throne at Emain Macha, illustrates the agency women had in the political sphere. In fact without Lugh, who some sources suggest is actually a British solar deity not indigenous to Ireland, the only aspects of the divine present would be the triune Goddesses Nemain, Badb, and (as the) Morrigan; albeit their function is confined to the masculine arts of warfare. Morrigan is likely another manifestation of a Goddess of Sovereignty, her name being mor ‘great’ and rigan ‘queen(s)’. So why weren’t there queens in Ireland? Was it this masculine overlay that turns the maiden into “a sheep between two rams”, the pregnant mother into a horse race contestant, and the crone, as the sacred hills of Ath Lúain and Brugh na Bóinne, into the mutilated body of the Goddess of Sovereignty? If these stories are propaganda for the patriarchy, why are these remnants of a matrilineal culture where wisdom, inspiration, and agency, as seen in the blood which is not Gods, but instead belongs to thee all of creation, still remaining so prominently in the text? What lesson is learned by the juxtaposition of these starkly different foci in the tales, the misogyny of the warrior’s deeds of exploitation and honor, and the Goddess with her daughter a salmon’s leap up the great yew tree teaching the power of the Gae Bolga, to the hero?
II
I am the God who created in head the fire

Who is it that throws light into the meeting on the mountain?

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun? (If not I?)

– Amergin the Milesian, ‘The Mystery’
The first references we have to Druids, which is also concurrent with the first notice of the Keltoi is around the 4th century BCE, well into the Iron Age. The Indo-European root of Druid is deru – meaning tree (concrete), and solid, strong or true (abstract). The definition given for Druid is ’strong seer’ in turn points to the IE root weid – meaning to see (concrete) and wisdom or knowledge (abstract) (AmHer, 2099, 2131). Druids were part of the tripartite priestly class made up of themselves, the Poets or Bards, and the Vates or Seers. They encompassed the powers of the other two, with the additional responsibility of being king’s council and natural philosophers. Much of the lore we have of their function is seen through the occluded lens of their Roman adversaries and Christian commentators, for they were doubly damned by being the priestly class of the Pagan Celtic culture. As the Táin is a repository for certain elements of the pre-patriarchal, or matrilineal, so too the Christianity of Erigeana contains remnants of the Pagan cultural tradition of the Druids, Poets and Seers.
There is an argument in Indo-European studies that these ‘technicians of the sacred’ were the inheritors of a shamanism itself as old as the Neolithic. In effect the Oral Traditional material contains many references to the activity of this priestly class as mediators between the divine and the temporal, from the Indus to the Sinann. One of the common motifs of the Druidic references, and by default, due to the absorption of the Druidic/Bardic colleges, many of the lives of the Irish Saints, which points to this shamanism, is the shape changing and close association with animal totems. Whether it be Patrick’s transformed deer escaping the king’s insult and anger, Kevin’s mothering a nest of blackbirds, or Bede’s otter moccasin walk across the strand, these suggest not so much a connection to the “family of things” as the ages old accretion of Paganism. The frequency with which the early saints are associated, both with “animal presence”, and with or as Poets suggests that infiltration might be a more apt description of the process of Ireland’s conversion of Christianity.
An example of this difference between the animism of Druidry and the appropriation of animal motifs by the Irish saints is the fox. The fox is the original animal totem of a Poet named Crimthamn, who would later change that totem to a dove when he took the name Colm Cille. Likewise the fox is imaged in the stories of saints in Every Earthly Blessing as malicious and in need of forgiveness because of its innate tendencies. Is it these innate tendencies of cunning and wiliness that made them appropriate totems for a Poet or Druid? Oddly enough, the cat Pangur Ban is neither a vegetarian, nor criticized for cruelty towards the mouse. This need to ‘tame’ the wildness of these trickster animals is in essence an ongoing manichaeism between order and chaos. “That academic dichotomy gone forever/It is not that they are tame/But that we become wild.” And that was what was feared most and hence required eradication, the wildness of it all.
Another important indicator of Druidical residue is the frequency with which monasteries are associated with Oaks or dairí, which is most likely a cognate of the IE root daru Kildare or ‘Oak Church’ and Derry being the most obvious examples. In European Paganism it is suggested that the reason the Oak was singled out as sacral is its inability to ground lightning, often described as being ‘lightning-blasted’, showing the favor of the sky Gods. It is possible that the Oak is consequently to be associated with the Iron Age gods of “displaced responsibility”, and that a likely candidate for an earlier pre-Celtic world tree is the Yew. It is associated both with death and immortality, and its relative placement at burial sites, suggests use by Saxons, Celts or even the enigmatic Megalith builders of the late Neolithic.
III

Mise Rafteraí an file

Lán dóchais is grá

Le súil gan solas

Le ciúnas gan crá

Dul siar m’aistir

Le solas mo chroí
I am Raftery the poet

Full of hope and love

Eyes without light

Calm without sorrow

Going west on my journey

With light in my heart
Fán agus tuirseach

Go deireads mo shlí

Féach anois mé

Is m’agaith ar balla

Ag senim ceoil

Da phócaí folarnh
Wandering and weary

To the end of my way

Look at me now

With my face to the wall

Playing music

For empty pockets
– Anthony Raftery, ‘Mise Rafteraí’
A certain irony can be seen in the way that the Irish monks and many of the saints have affiliations with, were trained as, or maintain the traditions of the Poets. This further points to the possibility that the Druidic and Poetic functions of the Pagan religious caste infiltrated the Christian clergy in Celtic Ireland and consequently mediated the form it took there. Because of the power of this caste, whereas elsewhere in Europe the Church was bringing a destruction to Pagan venerated wells, sacred trees and groves, Pagan Ireland maintained these sacred spaces by converting their activities to Christian use; thereby preserving their ability to inform us of their earlier connections. In the same way that we can see the residue of Druidic shamanism in the use of animal totems by saints, the close connection between the Poets and the saints and monks highlights how thin the veneer of Christianity was on the Pagan practices of Celtic Ireland.
The Poets and the Bards were the information technology of their time because of their ability to encode and preserve the Oral Traditional material of Ireland. In their stories and songs we get a picture, although incomplete, of the Gaelic world-view. Their preservation of the Gaelic language made it possible for us to look back past the Greek and Roman models of social organization and see vestiges of an earlier Indo-European culture in the “psycholinguistics” of its syntax. Their destruction is illustrated in both the Raftery poem above, and in the Brian Friel play Translations, where the Gaelic names from the Dindshenchas are being Anglicized by the English. The repartee between the Hedge School master and his students could be taken as an example of how their academic discourse carried on. Before the monks copiously reproduced the classics, these Poetic students were trained to have the Greek, Latin and Celtic cultures all present and interacting in their education. Their importance to a conception of a national culture (which they were on the verge of birthing before the English exiled the Wild Geese), as well as the continued destruction of these sages of ages past is suggested in a poem by Ted Hughes ‘Hear it Again’ excerpt here:
Tyrants know where to aim/As Hitler poured his petrol and tossed his matches

Stalin collected the bards … /In other words the mobile and only libraries…

of all those enslaved peoples from the Black to/the Bering Sea

And made a bonfire/ Of the mainsprings of national identities to melt

the folk into one puddle/And the three seconds of the present moment

By massacring those wordy fellows whose memories were/bigger than armies.
Their colleges had to have been seats of great learning, for “invaders and conquerors don’t easily admit to the existence of admirable qualities”, and the tendency for Irish monks to establish monasteries and colleges as far afield as Russia is well established. Anytime one of these Poets or Bards passed into the West without transmitting their songs and stories what was lost amounted to an entire library being incinerated. A library, not simply filled with dusty old tomes and colorful manuscripts constructed by monks, but a multi-media collection, made up of poetry, song, and stories, covering history, genealogy, geography, and religion (a religion not based on the received and mediated word, but the manifest living word). These were not mere artifacts from a golden age long past, they were the living and breathing cultural traditions, which continued to interact with the people and shape their world-view; even in the face of outside attempts at cultural conquest from Roman Catholicism and the English.
IV

Sun’s in the mirror, red and gold

in the sky behind me,

one huge crimson blazing globe –

Glas Gaibhneach’s heart milk through a sieve

her drops of blood strained out

like a picture of the Sacred Heart.

Three scarlet brightnesses are there

and pain so sharp, and sob so short.

I stared at the drops

afraid but almost unaware –

like Sleeping Beauty when she gazed

at her thumb pricked by the wheel,

she turned it over, and over once more

as if her actions were unreal.

When Deirdre saw the blood on the snow

did she know the raven’s name?
Then I realize I drive towards you

my dearest friend and lovely man

(may nothing keep me from your bed tonight

but miles of road and truffic lights)

and your impatience like a stone

falls upon us from the skyand adds to our uneasiness

the awkward weight of my hurt pride.

And more great loads will fall on us

if the omen comes to pass

much greater than the great sun’s globe

that lately bled into glass

And so, Great Mother, cave of awe –

since it’s towards you we race –

is it the truth? Is your embrace

and kiss more fine

than honey, beer, or Spanish wine?

– Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, ‘An Rás’ (The Race)
Another aspects of the tripartite Indo-European religious caste, the vates, Ovates, or alternately in the Gaelic Literature, Seers, were incorporated in the new religious system, this is seen in the frequency with which saints prophecy. It is well known that the Romans made slander of these Seers, particularly the form of their prophecy, by the continual discussion of reading omens in the spilt organs of animals (and humans, if we can believe their claim to ubiquity in that). As European Paganism shows not only was this haruspicy practiced among the Romans, but human sacrifice was something they were familiar with as well. They had of course long since abandoned such barbarity, although this didn’t stop them from using their knowledge of it as political and religious propaganda to discredit the Celts. Prophecy and Seership is common among Indo-European cultures, including the Greek and Roman, the Pythian oracle at Delphi is one of the most well known examples.
This brings up another point, which illuminates the bias of the Roman historiographers. Many of the Celtic cultures, like the Romans and Greeks, had female Seers, yet few appear in their descriptions of this religious caste. Both genders were allowed access to their schools and women functioned within the caste as Seers, Poets, as well as Druids, yet few examples exist. One of the most powerful envisioning of a female Seer, or any seer for that matter is Fedelm the poet-seer who warns Medb of the disaster she was embarking on in the Táin. I am struck as much by her description as I am by the line “I am Fedelm. I hide nothing,” Is this perchance recognition of another role of these caste members responsibilities to, not only speak honestly, but to witness, or act as Brehons? The similarity between the functions of the Druids, Poets, and Seers, the tendency of these functions to overlap, and the close relationship with power, suggests in those words, not so much truth in prophecy as it does her responsibility to tell power of its would-be folly. The weaving-rod, which according to the notes is associated with prophecy, points to the potentiality that these traditions, particularly of prophecy being originally the purview of women. Weaving is perhaps one of the oldest arts and to my mind it is exclusively feminine. It is directly connected in numerous cultures with magick and the occult, or to use the Gaelic phrase, contact with the Otherworld.
This heightens the discrepancy we are given in the Táin with regard to the Iron Age Celtic culture, where women’s role, though still evident, are generally being eroded and replaced by the power of men, might, and kings. The Brehon laws suggest that this patrician attitude was not indigenous to Ireland, and is likely therefore a derivation from Greeco-Roman influence or the Continental Celtic culture. The ability of women to participate at the highest levels of the Indo-European religious caste in Ireland, at a time when Roman women were viewed as possessions, which had no place in the business of power, suggests that perhaps we lost something when we accepted the consolidation of power at the hands of European national interests and the Roman Church. Fedelm’s ability to face a Queen, if not The Queen of Ireland in the guise of Sovereignty, and to tell her that the course of action she was about to undertake would be disastrous, is representative of the degree of agency women once had in their relations with power. An agency we stepped away from in the twist of the matrilineal to the patriarchal, from the blood-line of a Mother, to the blood-sacrifice by the Father.
V

“We are merely restoring to the corpse buried in a manuscript

the soul that once animated it.”

– Kevin Collins, Cultural Conquest of Ireland
The title of this paper is my own personal raison d’être, it informs much of my academic work. I look for the connections, which point towards a world-view that is not dissimilar from that expressed among the Archaic Gael. This is a place where gender and ethnic considerations are moot in light of the concerns of the tribe or tuatha. A world-view invested in the place and space, in time and tide, of our spinning, hurtling spaceship earth. Where the realm of the Otherworld has as much importance and function as the boiling cauldron of the daily grind. The Archaic is manifest for me in the connection and connectivity of the blood, which is not God’s, from which we all spring. It is invoked and evoked by the efforts of various ‘technicians of the sacred’ who are “priests of the eternal imagination transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life” in poetry, in ritual, or in prophecy. They are the pontifex maximus the bridge builders who cross the boundaries others only see as obstacles and limitations. They are the bridges between the world-views of Pagan Ireland and Roman Christianity, because of them we have a fuller view of what Christianity could and should have been, and yet may be. My task is not to escape into the mists of prehistory in some fantastic transcendence of our ‘filthy modern tide’. It is to strive in hope of re-visioning a whole and healthy story which lives and breathes, and which is a model for right livelihood for all in this great tide of pulsing and throbbing life.
I hope that this has elucidated some of the differences I see between the early Indo-European Megalithic Builders and the Iron Age Continental Celts, and why they are important in relation to the change in gender focus seen in the Táin. Likewise, the discussion of how the Indo-European religious castes were instrumental in the adoption and adaptation of Christianity in Ireland. I realize that there is little of the I you might have been seeking in this paper, these are issues which are highly significant to me and the work I have done and will continue to do. They are not merely mediated through the obfuscating lens of academia, which has become my primary mode of discourse they are a passion. I still write poetry and sing and chant, participating in the living and breathing of these ideas as much as I dissect and reintegrate them for the academy’s gristmill. I leave you with a poem about the Patriarchs of the Old Testament:
Jacobite

That’s right sheep & goats, you too cows,

Eat the grass, eat it down to the ground.

Damnit I want sand I tell ya, sand.

The more sand there is, the more sons I get.

One day all this sand will be mine, & my sons.

We’ll destroy the cities, & take their goods,

All the old oaks and shrines in the hills,

We’ll build altars to YHVH and burn the animals,
It’ll be a great big party for all the family,

Everyone will talk about it for days, forever;

Because we have a blessing especially from God.

____________________
The Poetry Of The Dao Te Ching

Whoever is planted in the Tao

will not be rooted up.

Whoever embraces the Tao

will not slip away.

Her name will be held in honor

from generation to generation.
Let the Tao be present in your life

and you will become genuine.

Let it be present in your family

and your family will flourish.

Let it be present in your country

and your country will be an example

to all countries in the world.

Let it be present in the universe

and the universe will sing.
How do I know this is true?

By looking inside myself.

—
He who is in harmony with the Tao

is like a newborn child.

Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak,

but its grip is powerful.

It doesn’t know about the union

of male and female,

yet its penis can stand erect,

so intense is its vital power.

It can scream its head off all day,

yet it never becomes hoarse,

so complete is its harmony.
The Master’s power is like this.

He lets all things come and go

effortlessly, without desire.

He never expects results;

thus he is never disappointed.

He is never disappointed;

thus his spirit never grows old.

—
Those who know don’t talk.

Those who talk don’t know.
Close your mouth,

block off your senses,

blunt your sharpness,

untie your knots,

soften your glare,

settle your dust.

This is the primal identity.
Be like the Tao.

It can’t be approached or withdrawn from,

benefited or harmed,

honored or brought into disgrace.

It gives itself up continually.

That is why it endures.

—
If you want to be a great leader,

you must learn to follow the Tao.

Stop trying to control.

Let go of fixed plans and concepts,

and the world will govern itself.
The more prohibitions you have,

the less virtuous people will be.

The more weapons you have,

the less secure people will be.

The more subsidies you have,

the less self-reliant people will be.
Therefore the Master says:

I let go of the law,

and people become honest.

I let go of economics,

and people become prosperous.

I let go of religion,

and people become serene.

I let go of all desire for the common good,

and the good becomes common as grass.

___________________

h.u.v.a. network / time circles / distant system rmx

___________________

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted”

Dear Friends,
Recovering from being down for a couple of days with a stomach bug, or massive sinus/allergies. Hard to tell the diff… A different entry today, including a speech from Tony Benn, one of my favourite Labour Party Members.

Some new music from Sophie and Ives…

And Art and Poetry from William Blake (a hero, a true star!)
We have moved into October, a wonderful time of the year. I love the changes, but I feel the grief of summer passing… ah.
Much Love,

Gwyllm

________________
On The Menu:

Sophie & Ives

TONY BENN ON SLAVERY, RELIGION AND JUSTICE

The Poetry Of William Blake

Sophie & Ives – Clouds
_________________

Sophie & Ives – Awaken

__________________
TONY BENN ON SLAVERY, RELIGION AND JUSTICE

Tony Benn’s talk at the Victoria & Albert museum, May 2007
Thank you very much indeed for inviting me. May I just begin by describing how my interest in the abolition of slavery began? I learned to fly during the war in Zimbabwe, they sent RAF pilots there because it was safer than learning to fly there, than in Britain where you might be shot down.
When Zimbabwe was an English colony, Rhodesia, not a single black was allowed to vote. Cecil Rhodes was shown a land in the 1890s and seized all the land, handed it to the white farmers and in 1937, Southern Rhodesia, and laws of assembly, made it a criminal offence for an African to have a skilled job. So that interested me in the African cause and all my life I’ve worked with all the people that were involved in it.
And I’ve been interested in all the people we locked up. I met Gandhi once, we locked him up; I met Nehru, he was locked up, Mandela was locked up. I think Nicoma was locked up, certainly Kenneth Kaunda from Zambia was locked up, we locked up Nkrumah, and all the people we locked up ended their lives having tea with the Queen as head of Commonwealth countries. And so historical perspective helps a little bit.
Then I became a Member of Parliament for Bristol and, of course, Bristol was one of the great slave cities and the interesting thing about going to Bristol was it wasn’t discussable, oh no you couldn’t talk about slavery, they had all the statues of the benefactors, huge statues, who’d given money to churches and schools, who made all their money out of the slave trade. There was a very bright, black Bristolian called Paul Stevenson who led a boycott because they wouldn’t let blacks drive the buses and now he’s persuaded Bristol to have a Museum of Slavery and they’re coming to terms with what’s happened, and it’s quite a difficult thing because you don’t like finding you did the awful things, that you always assumed foreigners did [laughter].
And, of course, you musn’t think it’s so very long ago because I knew the son of a slave, his name will be familiar to you – Paul Robeson, he came to London in 1958, gave him tea at the House of Commons with my dad. He’d had his passport taken away because he was supporting the colonial freedom movement, so it’s living issue, it’s not just the past and I think that’s worth remembering. Then the other thing too, is to look at Wilberforce.
Now Wilberforce very interesting man, he was a Conservative, he supported Pitt, he voted for the Combination Act which made it a criminal offence for more than three people to get together to call for a trade union or political reform, and then he became a Christian and he was stirred by the injustice of it and campaigned, and that’s what we’re celebrating this year, the abolition of the slave trade. And, might I add, not the abolition of slavery, don’t think that Wilberforce brought about the abolition of slavery but only the slave trade.
And the funny thing is somebody sent me a leading article from The Economist the other day about the slave trade. Now as you know The Economist is a very responsible newspaper that everybody should read [laughter] and what it said was this – this is an edition from 1848, two years before my grandfather was born. The Economist said you can’t abolish the slave trade, ’cause there are all these ignorant blacks in Africa with nothing whatever to do and they’re needed on the plantations of America, so said The Economist, you should regulate the slave trade. And I thought of an organisation called Ofslave, headed by Chris Woodhead which would name and shame slave ships where the sanitary arrangements fell below acceptable standards.
But I mention it all because, you see, we are a bit Anglo oriented. Ten million Africans were shipped, ten million of them, many died on the way, were thrown overboard and we now claim the credit for ending it. I think that the denial of the role of the Africans themselves in ending the slave trade is something we really do have to take much more seriously. All sorts of people supported the slave trade, of course, at one time the churches thought the slave trade could be justified because the Africans could be converted to Christianity when they were slaves. It was interesting idea: you imprison them and then you persuade them that Jesus brought a message of love, but they were still slaves.
The other thing that interests me about Wilberforce and the slave trade was when slavery was abolished, which was a bit later, the Government compensated the slave owners but not the slaves. So if you’d had slaves like some bishops had, you got money from the Government for giving up your slave but the guys who’d been slaves got absolutely nothing at all.
It is, of course, a very old tradition, slavery’s as old as history because rich and powerful people, land owners, owned the land and they owned the workers on the land. The brutality of it was horrific, slaves who escaped were crucified. Slaves who had been made slaves were branded with the name of their owner and–, and when you bring it right up to date, because you have to, there are – according to the definition of slavery, which is that you lose the right to control your own life – there are 27 million slaves, still many of them, of course, women bought and trafficked. And that is part of the slave trade, and all sorts of bondage and indebtedness makes you a slave.
But just to come back for a moment to the question of how it ended. There were strikes by slaves in British colonies. In the 1730s, the 1760s, 1780s and the 1800s. When we talk about the role of Wilberforce – now I’m not belittling him in anyway because he was dedicated man who fought a wonderful parliamentary campaign. But in the 1780s, 27 years before that, the northern states in the United States abolished slavery. In 1787, as you’ve heard, there was the first British campaign against slavery, the Danes banished the slave trade in 1792, in 1794, after the French revolution, the revolutionary French abolished slavery and Haiti in 1804 was liberated by slaves, they just went against their owners and took over the country and liberated it from the slave trade. And so that’s the background against which you have to look at the achievements of Wilberforce, and I don’t belittle him at all. But you mustn’t think that every good thing comes from our race because we have been responsible for some of the things we now claim to have abolished.
The other thing to remember is this, it wasn’t just the black slaves, we sold white slaves to Ireland. We took convicted people and criminals and so on, and we shipped them off to Ireland as slaves. When Michael Manley, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, whom I knew very well, came to London I was asked to introduce him, which I did, and I gave a lot of examples of the slave trade and he said to me afterwards, “I’d like you to tell me more about this because I got a museum of slavery in Jamaica on black slavery.” And I said, “Oh Michael that wasn’t black slavery, that was slavery in Britain and Medieval times of slavery.” And so you have to think of slavery as being broader than colour though, of course, it’s identified very largely–, very largely in those terms. It was therefore an economic phenomenon, not just phenomenon of lack of political democracy. And remember this, that Africa, which is still rich in gold and copper and oil, was conquered for economic reasons. Indeed Bush is now following it out with his own version of the empire, he goes to the Middle East ’cause he wanted oil, and that’s quite straight forward.
Sir John Boyd-Orr a very, very famous Nobel prize winner, once said most empires conquer for physical resources, and that was why we went there. And there’s a very interesting aspect of this that links to the movement Make Poverty History. I think they asked the wrong question, they always say why are the poor poo
r? Right question to ask is why are the rich rich? This–, well you come to totally different conclusions, ’cause the rich are rich ’cause they live off the backs of the poor and if that sounds very controversial to you, Adam Smith said the rich are the pensioners of the poor, the rich live off the backs of the poor, so it’s not just a racial, it’s a class, in the economic sense, a class issue, and has always been that.
In this country, I come back to the Combination Act which made trade unionism illegal. Until 1834, it was illegal for people to form a union and if you were a worker in on a farm in Britain, the land owner owned the land, and he also owned the cottage. If you went to him and said, “I can’t live on the money, you’re treating me badly.” he’d get you off the farm and pinch your cottage, so you were homeless and poor. So they thought if we get together we might be able to solve it and, of course, trade unionism was illegal. So when the unions tried to be formed they were sent to Australia as convicts.
I’ve got an American friend who’s just been in Australia and I said, “How did you get on?” “Oh Tony,” he said, “the Oz’s were great but by God,” he said, “they’re really tough.” Said, “What do you mean?” “Well,” he said, “when I applied for a visa they asked me if I had any previous convictions and I said ‘no’, is it still required?”
So, you see, it all comes together it’s all part of a bigger picture and this is what happens whenever you take an issue, it seems very narrow, you suddenly find it explodes into a million other issues which are equally interesting and important.
Now the other thing that interests me very much is the role of religion in all this, and I know the question ‘am I my brother’s keeper’ has been raised. On the internet, from which, I get a lot of very useful information, I got the other day a summary of what all the religions of the world say. The Judaism, ‘what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow men’, that is the entire law, all the rest is commentary. Then Christianity, ‘all things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do even so to them’. Mohammed, where are we, yes, ‘no one of you is a believer until he desires to his brother what he desires for himself’. And the same with Brahmans, the same with Buddhists, the same with the Confucians, and that’s also what’s on every trade union banner, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’.
So you can see it all coming together as a recognition that you cannot build a society on other than on a moral basis. And that I find very, very interesting because nowadays, you see, religion is being used as a way of dividing us, you only have to look at what’s said now about Islam and the use of God. Bush said God told him to go to Iraq, I didn’t know God worked in the White House, but apparently he did, and then they say Moses went up Mount Siani and got Palestine allocated to the Jews, I didn’t know God was an estate agent. But the way in which you use religion to justify your power is a tremendously important question.
If you now look at it in a cultural sense, all the religions apart from people who control them, all the religions are part of our culture. I was brought up as a Christian and when I go to church I like the churches, I like seeing bishops in funny outfits. I sing hymns like ‘onward Christian soldiers marching as to war with the cross of Jesus going on before’,
Now if anyone sang ‘onward Muslim soldiers going as to war’ with Mohammed’s banner going’…., they’d all be locked up at once by John Reid and so you have to recognise that there is, in every religion, a culture. There’s nothing whatsoever in the culture of religion to divide one from another. The people I’m nervous of are the people who use religion to get control of us, and that is the difference.
I mentioned that I was bought up as a Christian, my mother taught me that the story in the bible was the story of the conflict between the kings who had power and the prophets who preached riotousness, and she taught me to support the prophets against the kings. It’s got me into a lot of trouble in my life but it explained so much. Because it’s one thing to be told love your neighbours as yourself, it’s another thing to be told be a bishop, “If you don’t do what I tell you, you will rot in hell.”
Using religion to get control of people is an abuse, I think, of religious teaching and to rediscover Moses and Jesus, Carpenter – of Nazareth and Mohammed, rediscover what they were saying gives you some opportunity to learn how to live your life in peace, but it has to relate to the present. You can’t just have some dream of the future because in the old days you went to a bishop and you said, “Bishop it’s a very unfair world.” And the bishop would say, “I know my child, but if only the rich were kind and the poor are patient, we shall all be rewarded in heaven.” And people said, “That’s wonderful news bishop, but could we possibly have it while we’re still alive?” And out of that came a political movement, where heaven on earth is what people want.
And so that is a conflict and that’s why I think the use of religion for political purposes is such a desperately dangerous thing to do and it goes on all the time. One of the ways in which you control people of course is to frighten them, divide them and demoralise them and those are instruments of control that have been used from the time the slavery right through to the present time. And so then you say, well what did this lead to?
And, of course, it led to a demand for justice. When I look back is in every period of history, two flames have always been burning in the human heart, the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope that you can build a better world and those two flames are really material by which we make progress and to understand that is very, very important, because if you don’t have some aspiration then you find yourself in a position, which I think about most of the time now – and that is how the human race is going to cope with its problems.
We live in a very remarkable period, quite unlike any other in history, when the human race has the capacity to destroy itself, and you can kill one man with a spear, a few more with a bayonet, one or two with a machine gun or a plane, but with chemical, nuclear and biological weapons it is possible to destroy the human race, that has never, ever been true before.
But it’s also the first generation in history which has the technology and the know-how and the money to solve the problems of the human race. And that’s where you really come right into the contemporary political scene, because a fraction of the cost of the war now would see that everyone in Africa with Aids would have free drugs. A fraction of the cost of the war would see everyone in America has a health service, would protect New Orleans from the Katrina Hurricane and that is the choice.
So the question then you have to ask yourself is, well how do you change the situation? ‘Cause there are only three interesting questions in politics, what’s going on? Which is not always easy to find out, why is it going on? Which is harder to find out and the third question is, what are you going to do about it? And if you look at the way in which it all developed, it developed really with the greatest revolution of all, far more revolutionary than the French or Russian or American revolution, it was the revolution of democracy and the reason.
I mention it is because throughout the 19th Century a huge change in power occurred, in the olden days all the power was in the hands of the rich and if you were rich you didn’t need a school, you hired tutors, you didn’t have a mortgage from a local authority for your castle because you owned it, you didn’t have to bother about anything else, if you were ill you hired a doctor, when you were old you were okay, you were never unemployed because you never did any work anyway, and that was the basis of society and what happened
during the 19th Century explains everything, I think, including the national independence movements.
Power, when people had the vote power was transferred from the people with money to the people who didn’t have money. In 1837 when the Birmingham Corporation became law the people of Birmingham, or some of them anyway, had the vote, so how did they use the vote? They used to the vote to buy with their vote what they couldn’t afford personally, municipal hospitals, municipal schools, municipal fire brigade, municipal museums, municipal art gallery and what democracy did was to transfer power from the market place to the polling station, from the wallet to the ballot.
What then happened was the whole prospect changed, that’s how the welfare state came about, of course, in the end, the idea of a national health service, idea of state education, the idea, even, of a fire brigade, in the olden days there was no fire brigade, you–, you–, you insured your own house was an insurance company. So if your neighbours house burned down they didn’t bother to put that out ’cause he wasn’t insured and that would obviously threaten your house and this idea of–, of welfare, which is looked down on in mockery, is on the basis that actually the interest of all of us are in the interests of all of us.
If you meet a diseased person your health is threatened, if you work with an uneducated person your work is threatened and so the recognition of the common interests we have in survival and prosperity was a product of democracy, and nobody really likes democracy very much, nobody in power likes democracy very much. I mean, Hitler didn’t like it, Stalin didn’t like it, the Pope doesn’t allow the clergy to elect the Pope, it’s all done by shares of cardinals whom he appoints. I can’t say I find all that much enthusiasm for democracy even in a capitalist society of where the market is everything, because the thing about having a market society is that you don’t have systems, you only have consumers. Now to be a consumer you have to have some money, I mean homeless people in the streets of London need homes more than anybody else but as they can’t afford them they’re not consumers, and the language used to belittle collective activity is very noticeable.
Now when I look again at the future I think of what’s called ‘cultural diversity’, when I was born it was terribly boring, everybody–, they were all white, they had fish and chips, they watched cricket, a little bit of ballroom dancing, and now we’ve got such a fantastic cultural diversity in Britain. Two of my granddaughters are at a primary school in London with 77 nationalities in the school and a refugee centre in the school, so when I go and talk at the school it’s like addressing a meeting of the General Assembly [of the United Nations]. My granddaughters have got Russian friends, American friends, Malaysian friends, West Indian, for them that’s normal, that is the world we live in. It’s complete generational change because I think younger people understand it, very often, much, much better than older people who were brought up in a different tradition.
That’s really what we have to try and–, and utilise, which is why I think the internet is very, very valuable because you get access to things which you wouldn’t necessarily find described in The Sun or The Mail and the information you get allows you to reach a judgement of your own which is independent and probably puts you in the category of the prophets against the king. So I warn you don’t use the internet too loosely or you’ll be in trouble yourself.
I mentioned the trade unions and apartheid. I spoke in Trafalgar Square in 1964 in support of a very, very well known terrorist and I got denounced in the tabloids, I didn’t meet him for a bit, next time I met him he had an Nobel peace prize and was president of South Africa. Well look at the suffragettes who were locked up for just wanting votes for women.
The way I think progress occurs, you see, is this: to begin with is you’ve got a sensible idea like abolishing slavery or votes for women or trade unions or end apartheid, and they ignore you. Then if you go on you’re stark staring bonkers, I’ve had a touch of that myself, then if you go on after that you’re dangerous, then there’s a pause and then you can’t find anyone at the top who doesn’t claim to have thought of it in the first place – and that is how progress is made.
It’s made by movements, by people who understand the world, who feel a sense of commonality with other people and say, “Why don’t we get together and do it ourselves”. In order for that to succeed you need to have encouragement and I think encouragement is the most important quality in political leadership, because they do try, all the time, to put you down. I don’t know what you feel but the league tables in schools, this idea that a school has failed, well I know schools have problems, but a school has failed.
I went the other day to a failed school, they were utterly demoralised and I had an example of it myself which I might mention. I went to the Labour conference 18 months ago and the Prime Minister made a speech which I listened to and I got up to go to the loo and I collapsed, and I was taken to the Brighton hospital and given a pacemaker. I had a letter from the Prime Minister saying “hope my speech didn’t cause it” and I was too polite to reply.
The interesting thing was this, when I left I discovered that was the worst hospital in Britain under the league tables. Well what if you’re the nurse or a sister or a doctor or porter, what do you make of it if you’re told you work in the worst hospital in Britain?
People want encouragement and that’s what they don’t always want to give you, but if we encourage each other, my God there’s nothing you cannot do. And so that’s how the slave trade really ended, people got together and saw the truth and realised we’re brothers and sisters and then we made an advance.
But one final warning, every generation has to do it for themselves again, there is no railway station called justice that if you catch the right train you get there, every generation has to fight for their rights because rights are taken away. They concede what they have to, and then when the pressure’s off, they try and recapture the territory they’ve lost. So it’s an ongoing struggle and at my age, I’m 82 now, (and its wonderful, if I’d known what fun it was to be 80 I’d have done it years ago) because you have a bit of experience and you don’t want anything. And when I speak, as I do tonight to you, I say you can relax, I am not asking you to vote for me and there’s a great sigh of relief and people saying, “Well if he doesn’t want anything we may as well listen to him.” So that is really the function of the old, I think it’s to encourage people and understand. So thank you for asking me and I do hope we have some questions, and as I’m a bit deaf [to V&A staff] you’re going to tell me what the questions are otherwise you’ll all say typical politician he doesn’t answer the questions. Thank you very much.

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The Poetry Of William Blake

Ah! Sun-Flower

Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the Sun,

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller’s journey is done:
Where the Youth pined away with desire

And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow

Arise from their graves, and aspire

Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

—
A Song

Sweet dreams, form a shade

O’er my lovely infant’s head!

Sweet dreams of pleasant streams

By happy, silent, moony beams!
Sweet Sleep, with soft down

Weave thy brows an infant crown

Sweet Sleep, angel mild,

Hover o’er my happy child!
Sweet smiles, in the night

Hover over my delight!

Sweet smiles, mother’s smile,

All the livelong night beguile.
Sweet moans, dovelike sighs,

Chase not slumber from thine eyes!

Sweet moan, sweeter smile,

All the dovelike moans beguile.
Sleep, sleep, happy child!

All creation slept and smiled.

Sleep, sleep, happy sleep,

While o’er thee doth mother weep.
Sweet babe, in thy face

Holy image I can trace;

Sweet babe, once like thee

Thy Maker lay, and wept for me:
Wept for me, for thee, for all,

When He was an infant small.

Thou His image ever see,

Heavenly face that smiles on thee!
Smiles on thee, on me, on all,

Who became an infant small;

Infant smiles are his own smiles;

Heaven and earth to peace beguiles.

—
To The Accuser Who is The God of This World

Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce

And dost not know the Garment from the Man

Every Harlot was a Virgin once

Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan
Tho thou art Worship’d by the Names Divine

Of Jesus & Jehovah thou art still

The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline

The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill

—
The Angel

I dreamt a dream! What can it mean?

And that I was a maiden Queen

Guarded by an Angel mild:

Witless woe was ne’er beguiled!
And I wept both night and day,

And he wiped my tears away;

And I wept both day and night,

And hid from him my heart’s delight.
So he took his wings, and fled;

Then the morn blushed rosy red.

I dried my tears, and armed my fears

With ten-thousand shields and spears.
Soon my Angel came again;

I was armed, he came in vain;

For the time of youth was fled,

And grey hairs were on my head.

—
Love’s Secret

Never seek to tell thy love,

Love that never told can be;

For the gentle wind does move

Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,

I told her all my heart;

Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,

Ah! she did depart!
Soon as she was gone from me,

A traveler came by,

Silently, invisibly

He took her with a sigh.

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Sophie & Ives – Clouds

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Well, I had all kinds of things to say last night when I finished this up, but I left it for this morning to write, and I am absolutely empty of thoughts. Odd.
Anyway, just a couple of points. Watching the inception of the new Republican ‘Trickle Up Theory‘ of Economics is exciting beyond belief. I always feel privileged to insure that the shackles of Capitalism stay in place and I am honoured to do my bit to keep someone else in guccis’, penthouses, lear jets and cocaine. I feel it is our patriotic duty to keep that boot on our neck and pass it on to our posterity, don’t you? You too can do your part to keep the inequality going by not commenting on this to your local gov’t rep (who probably is in on this little dance), and to top it off kids, the Democrats capitulated on drilling for oil off our coast! Wow, both sides of the corporate party are dancing to this tune!
On our front: Sophie was found, and she is home. Rowan’s friends have all headed off to college, the leaves are falling, the cat is staying in for the night and the garden has reached it’s peak.
May your day be filled with love….
More Later!

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

Where the hell is Matt?

The Fairy Dance

The Bard Of Ireland: William Butler Yeats

Jette – Ives: Darker than You

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Now… this is a bit of loveliness. Major Loveliness. We need lunacy. I mean real Lunacy. Dancing in water lunacy, digging for ponies in horse manure lunacy. Lunacy to transform the world. Lunacy, that dares to live beautifully with all the crushing weight of the madness of civilization bearing down on you lunacy. Matt, has that gift of Divine Lunacy, yeah, now that is the type that gets it done.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
Thanks to Graham St. John for sharing this! Here is some info:Matt Dancing!

Here is some more! Where The Hell Is Matt?

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The Fairy Dance

The following story is from the Irish, as told by a native of one of the Western Isles, where the primitive superstitions have still all the freshness of young life.
One evening late in November, which is the month when spirits have most power over all things, as the prettiest girl in all the island was going to the well for water, her foot slipped and she fell, it was an unlucky omen, and when she got up and looked round it seemed to her as if she were in a strange place, and all around her was changed as if by enchantment. But at some distance she saw a great crowd gathered round a blazing fire, and she was drawn slowly on towards them, till at last she stood in the very midst of the people; but they kept silence, looking fixedly at her; and she was afraid, and tried to turn and leave them, but she could not. Then a beautiful youth, like a prince, with a red sash, and a golden band on his long yellow hair, came up and asked her to dance.
“It is a foolish thing of you, sir, to ask me to dance,” she said, “when there is no music.”
Then he lifted his hand and made a sign to the people, and instantly the sweetest music sounded near her and around her, and the young man took her hand, and they danced and danced till the moon and the stars went down, but she seemed like one floating on the air, and she forgot everything in the world except the dancing, and the sweet low music, and her beautiful partner.
At last the dancing ceased, and her partner thanked her, and invited her to supper with the company. Then she saw an opening in the ground, and a flight of steps, and the young man, who seemed to be the king amongst them all, led her down, followed by the whole company. At the end of the stairs they came upon a large hall, all bright and beautiful with gold and silver and lights; and the table was covered with everything good to eat, and wine was poured out in golden cups for them to drink. When she sat down they all pressed her to eat the food and to drink the wine; and as she was weary after the dancing, she took the golden cup the prince handed to her, and raised it to her lips to drink. Just then, a man passed close to her, and whispered–
“Eat no food, and drink no wine, or you will never reach your home again.”
So she laid down the cup, and refused to drink. On this they were angry, and a great noise arose, and a fierce, dark man stood up, and said–
“Whoever comes to us must drink with us.”
And he seized her arm, and held the wine to her lips, so that she almost died of fright. But at that moment a red-haired man came up, and he took her by the hand and led her out.
“You are safe for this time,” he said. “Take this herb, and hold it in your hand till you reach home, and no one can harm you.” And he gave her a branch of a plant called the Athair-Luss (the ground ivy). [a]
This she took, and fled away along the sward in the dark night; but all the time she heard footsteps behind her in pursuit. At last she reached home and barred the door, and went to bed, when a great clamour arose outside, and voices were heard crying to her–
“The power we had over you is gone through the magic of the herb; but wait–when you dance again to the music on the hill, you will stay with us for evermore, and none shall hinder.”
However, she kept the magic branch safely, and the fairies never troubled her more; but it was long and long before the sound of the fairy music left her ears which she had danced to that November night on the hillside with her fairy lover.
[a] In Ancient Egypt the ivy was sacred to Osiris, and a safeguard against evil.

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The Bard Of Ireland: William Butler Yeats

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG
The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears

Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,

And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries

Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.

We who still labour by the cromlec on the shore,

The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,

Being weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you,

Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

—
THE SECRET ROSE
Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,

Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those

Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre,

Or in the wine vat, dwell beyond the stir

And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep

Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep

Men have named beauty. Thy great leaves enfold

The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold

Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes

Saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise

In Druid vapour and make the torches dim;

Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him

Who met Fand walking among flaming dew

By a grey shore where the wind never blew,

And lost the world and Emer for a kiss;

And him who drove the gods out of their liss,

And till a hundred morns had flowered red,

Feasted and wept the barrows of his dead;

And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown

And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown

Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods;

And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods,

And sought through lands and islands numberless years,

Until he found with laughter and with tears,

A woman, of so shining loveliness,

That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,

A little stolen tress. I, too, await

The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.

When shall the stars be blown about the sky,

Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,

Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

—
HE TELLS OF A VALLEY FULL OF LOVERS
I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs,

For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood;

And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood

With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes:

I cried in my dream, O women, bid the young men lay

Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair,

Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair

Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away.

—
THE BLESSED
Cumhal called out, bending his head,

Till Dathi came and stood,

With a blink in his eyes at the cave mouth,

Between the wind and the wood.

And Cumhal said, bending his knees,

“I have come by the windy way

To gather the half of your blessedness

And learn to pray when you pray.
“I can bring you salmon out of the streams

And heron out of the skies.”

But Dathi folded his hands and smiled

With the secrets of God in his eyes.
And Cumhal saw like a drifting smoke

All manner of blessed souls,

Women and children, young men with books,

And old men with croziers and stoles.
“Praise God and God’s mother,” Dathi said,

“For God and God’s mother have sent

The blessedest souls that walk in the world

To fill your heart with content.”
“And which is the blessedest,” Cumhal said,

“Where all are comely and good?

Is it these that with golden thuribles

Are singing about the wood?”
“My eyes are blinking,” Dathi said,

“With the secrets of God half blind,

But I can see where the wind goes

And follow the way of the wind;
“And blessedness goes where the wind goes,

And when it is gone we are dead;

I see the blessedest soul in the world

And he nods a drunken head.
“O blessedness comes in the night and the day

And whither the wise heart knows;

And one has seen in the redness of wine

The Incorruptible Rose,
“That drowsily drops faint leaves on him

And the sweetness of desire,

While time and the world are ebbing away

In twilights of dew and of fire.”

—
THE POET PLEADS WITH THE ELEMENTAL POWERS
The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows

Have pulled the Immortal Rose;

And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept,

The Polar Dragon slept,

His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep:

When will he wake from sleep?
Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,

With your harmonious choir

Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,

That my old care may cease;

Unfold your flaming wings and cover out of sight

The nets of day and night.
Dim Powers of drowsy thought, let her no longer be

Like the pale cup of the sea,

When winds have gathered and sun and moon burned dim

Above its cloudy rim;

But let a gentle silence wrought with music flow

Whither her footsteps go.
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Jette – Ives
Darker than You Promo Video

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The Moorish Orthodox Catechism consists of no rules or dogmas, but only of adherance to the “Five Pillars” of Moorish Science as listed by Noble Drew: LOVE, TRUTH, PEACE, FREEDOM, JUSTICE to which we add a sixth, “Beauty.”—History & Catechism of the Moorish Orthodox Church of America

Come now, luxuriant Graces, and beautiful-haired Muses – Sappho
Well… this has been the longest with posting in quite awhile. Turfing went down, (the updating with photos etc., earlier last week. So, I had to pull a few things out of the hat and deal with providers to get it back up. I have been playing with this entry since Sunday. Sometimes it takes awhile to get it going. There are a couple of smaller entries before this that I didn’t notify people of… short and sweet, check them out.
Busy weekend; Rowan was filming at our house off and on from 10-6 on Saturday with a full crew, and then he hosted a D&D session on Sunday here. The house was packed for the whole weekend, it was nice, but loud.
Worked on the new system, and the house over the weekend. The change in weather here is nothing if not melodramatic! The cat stays in all night, I want to sleep and when awake just sit and read.
Deep Peace to You all.
Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

Erik Satie – Away – Monkmus

Account of Sappho

Poems Of Sappho….

Satiemania, by Zdenkó Gasparovich

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Raoul Vaneigem Quotes
Raoul Vaneigem & Guy Debord
“Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.”
“In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.”
“In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption. The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and race.”
“Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.”

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Erik Satie – Away – Monkmus

Account of Sappho

Sappho, whom the ancients distinguished by the title of the Tenth Muse, was born at Mytilene in the island of Lesbos, six hundred years before the Christian era. As no particulars have been transmitted to posterity, respecting the origin of her family, it is most likely she derived by little consequence from birth of connection. At an early period of her life she was wedded to Cercolus, a native of the isle of Andros; he was possessed of considerable wealth, and though the Lesbian Muse is said to have been sparingly gifted with beauty, he became enamoured of her, more perhaps on account of mental, than personal charms. By this union she is said to have given birth to a daughter; but Cercolus leaving her, while young, in a state of widowhood, she never after could be prevailed on to marry. The Fame which her genius spread even to the remotest parts of the earth, excited the envy of some writers who endeavoured to throw over her private character, a shade, which shrunk before the brilliancy of her poetical talents. Her soul was replete with harmony, that harmony which neither art nor study can acquire; she felt the intuitive superiority, and to the Muses she paid unbounded adoration. The Mytilenians held her poetry in such high veneration, and were so sensible of the hour conferred on the country which gave her birth, that they coined money with the impression of her head; and at the time of her death, paid tribute to their memory, such as was offered to sovereigns only. The story of Antiochus has been related as an unequivocal proof of Sappho’s skill in discovering, and powers of describing the passions of the human mind. That prince is said to have entertained a fatal affection for his mother-in-law Stratonice; which, though he endeavoured to subdue it’s influence, preyed upon his frame, and after many ineffectual struggles, at length reduced him to extreme danger. His physicians marked the symptoms attending his malady, and found them so exactly correspond with Sappho’s delineation of the tender passion, that they did not hesitate to form a decisive opinion of the cause, which had produced so perilous an effect. That Sappho was not insensible to the feelings she so well described , is evident in her writings but it was scarcely possible, that a mind so exquisitely tender, so sublimely gifted, should escape those fascinations which even apathy itself has been awakened to acknowledge. The scarce specimens now extant, from the pen of the Grecian Muse, have by the most competent judges been esteemed as the standard for the pathetic, the glowing, and the amatory. The ode, which has been so highly estimated, is written in a measure distinguished by the title of the Sapphic. Pope made it his model in his juvenile production, beginning—
“Happy the man—whose wish and care”—
Addison was of opinion, that the writings of Sappho were replete with such fascinating beauties, and adorned with such a vivid glow of sensibility, that, probably, had they been preserved entire, it would have been dangerous to have perused them. They possessed none of the artificial decorations of a feigned passion; they were the genuine effusions of a supremely enlightened soul, laboring to subdue a fatal enchantment; and vainly opposing the conscious pride of illustrious fame, against the warm susceptibility of a generous bosom. Though few stanzas from the pen of the Lesbian poetess have darted through the shades of oblivion: yet, those that remain are so exquisitely touching and beautiful, that they prove beyond dispute the taste, feeling, and inspiration of the mind which produced them. In examining the curiosities of antiquity, we look to the perfections, and not the magnitude of those relics, which have been preserved amidst the wrecks of time: as the smallest gem that bears the fine touches of a master, surpasses the loftiest fabric reared by the labours of false taste, so the precious fragments of the immortal Sappho, will be admired, when the voluminous productions of inferior poets are mouldered into dust. When it is considered, that the few specimens we have of the poems of the Grecian Muse, have passed through three and twenty centuries, and consequently through the hands of innumerable translators: and when it is known that Envy frequently delights in the base occupation of depreciating merit which it cannot aspire to emulate; it may be conjectured, that some passages are erroneously given to posterity, either by ignorance or design. Sappho, whose fame beamed round her with the superior effulgence which her works had created, knew that she was writing for future ages; it is not therefore natural that she should produce any composition which might tend to tarnish her reputation, or lessen that celebrity which it was the labour of her life to consecrate. The delicacy of her sentiments cannot find a more eloquent advocate than in her own effusions; she is said to have commended in the most animated panegyric, the virtues of her brother Lanychus; and with the most pointed and severe censure, to have contemned the passion which her brother Charaxus entertained for the beautiful Rhodope. If her writings were, in some instances, too glowing for the fastidious refinement of modern times; let it be her excuse, and the honour of her country, that the liberal education of the Greeks was such, as inspired them with an unprejudiced enthusiasm for the works of genius: and that when they paid adoration to Sappho, they idolized the Muse, and not the Woman. I shall conclude this account with an extract from the works of the learned and enlightened Abbé Barthelemi; at once the vindication and eulogy of the Grecian Poetess. “Sappho undertook to inspire the Lesbian women with a taste for literature; many of them received instructions from her, and foreign women increased the number of her disciples. She loved them to excess, because it was impossible for her to love otherwise; and she expressed her tenderness in all the violence of passion: your surprize at this will cease, when you are acquainted with the extreme sensibility of the Greeks; and discover, that amongst them the most innocent connections often borrow the impassioned language of love.” A certain facility of manners, she possessed; and the warmth of her expressions were but too well calculated to expose her to the hatred of some women of distinction, humbled by her superiority; and the jealousy of some of her disciples, who happened to be the objects of her preference. To this hatred she replied by truths and irony, which completely exasperated her enemies. She repaired to Sicily, where a statue was erected to her; it was sculptured by Silanion, one of the most celebrated staturists of his time. The sensibility of Sappho was extreme! she loved Phaon, who forsook her; after various efforts to bring him back, she took the leap of Leucata, and perished in the waves!
“Death has not obliterated the stain imprinted on her character; for Envy, which fastens on Illustrious Names, does not expire; but bequeaths her aspersions to that calumny which Never Dies. “Several Grecian women have cultivated Poetry, with success, but none have hitherto attained to the excellence of Sappho. And among other poets, there are few, indeed, who have surpassed her.”
____________________
The moon shone full

And when the maidens stood around the altar…

Poems Of Sappho….

HYMN TO APHRODITE
Throned in splendor, immortal Aphrodite!

Child of Zeus, Enchantress, I implore thee

Slay me not in this distress and anguish,

Lady of beauty.

Hither come as once before thou camest,

When from afar thou heard’st my voice lamenting,

Heard’st and camest, leaving thy glorious father’s Palace golden,

Yoking thy chariot. Fair the doves that bore thee;

Swift to the darksome earth their course directing,

Waving their thick wings from the highest heaven

Down through the ether.

Quickly they came. Then thou, O blessed goddess,

All in smiling wreathed thy face immortal,

Bade me tell thee the cause of all my suffering,

Why now I called thee;

What for my maddened heart I most was longing.

“Whom,” thou criest, “dost wish that sweet Persuasion

Now win over and lead to thy love, my Sappho?

Who is it wrongs thee?

“For, though now he flies, he soon shall follow,

Soon shall be giving gifts who now rejects them.

Even though now he love not, soon shall he love thee

Even though thou wouldst not.”

Come then now, dear goddess, and release me

From my anguish. All my heart’s desiring

Grant thou now. Now too again as aforetime,

Be thou my ally.
—
THE MOON
The stars about the lovely moon

Fade back and vanish very soon,

When, round and full, her silver face

Swims into sight, and lights all space.

—
ODE TO A LOVED ONE
Blest as the immortal gods is he,

The youth who fondly sits by thee,

And hears and sees thee, all the while,

Softly speaks and sweetly smile.

‘Twas this deprived my soul of rest,

And raised such tumults in my breast;

For, while I gazed, in transport tossed,

My breath was gone, my voice was lost;

My bosom glowed; the subtle flame

Ran quick through all my vital frame;

O’er my dim eyes a darkness hung;

My ears with hollow murmurs rung;

In dewy damps my limbs were chilled;

My blood with gentle horrors thrilled:

My feeble pulse forgot to play;

I fainted, sunk, and died away.

—
TO ONE WHO LOVED NOT POETRY
Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind

Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind

The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom

Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.

—
SONG OF THE ROSE
If Zeus chose us a King of the flowers in his mirth,

He would call to the rose, and would royally crown it;

For the rose, ho, the rose! is the grace of the earth,

Is the light of the plants that are growing upon it!

For the rose, ho, the rose! is the eye of the flowers,

Is the blush of the meadows that feel themselves fair,

Is the lightning of beauty that strikes through the bowers
On pale lovers that sit in the glow unaware.

Ho, the rose breathes of love! ho, the rose lifts the cup

To the red lips of Cypris invoked for a guest!

Ho, the rose having curled its sweet leaves for the world

Takes delight in the motion its petals keep up,

As they laugh to the wind as it laughs from the west.

—

Satiemania, by Zdenkó Gasparovich 1978

Zdenko Gasparovich’s 1978 film, Satiemania, set to the music of Eric Satie. Part of the Zagreb animation school. Presumably copywritten by Mr Gasparovich..
You can find the full version on rapidshare, with some searching.

Only as Bill Hicks could see it….!

Enjoy!
Gwyllm

The weekend started out beautifully, with a gathering for Scot Taylor with his companion Amanda visiting from Australia. Cymon hosted the gathering, and it was very nice. Scot gave an impassioned talk on the Cetacean Nation as well. Something has happened to Turfing so I cannot up load new pics, but once I get that sorted out, I will have some nice shots…. The local EarthRites members were there, even from as far as the Dalles and Eugene! Nice to see everyone! Scot and Amanda have since flown back to Australia…
The next day, well… things changed. We were moving furniture and re arranging stuff, and Sophie, our dog got out the front door. We now understand that she was picked up by some street kids down by the 7-11 on Saturday. We have been posting flyers, and driving around but to no avail at this point. Light a candle for our pup!
Talk Later….
Gwyllm
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Psychedelic Prayers -Timothy Leary

d’après le Tao Te Ching
I)Prayers for preparation – Homage to Lao Tse

I.5 All Things Pass
All things pass

A sunrise does not last all morning

All things pass

A cloudburst does not last all day

All things pass

Nor a sunset all night
But Earth… sky… thunder…

wind… fire… lake…

mountain… water…

These always change
And if these do not last

Do man’s visions last?

Do man’s illusions?
During the session

Take things as they come
All things pass

—
I.6 The Message Of Posture
During the session

Observe your body

Mandala of the universe
Observe your body

Of ancient design

Holy temple of consciousness

Central stage of the oldest drama
Observe its structured wonders

Skin… hair… tissus…

Bone… vein… muscle…

Net of nerve
Observe its message

Does it merge or does it strain?

Does it rest serene on sacred ground?

Or tilt, propped up by wire and sticks?
On tiptoe one cannot stand for long

Tension retards the flow
Superfluous noise and redundant action

Stand out-square, proud, cramped

Against the harmony
Observe the mandala of your body

—
II) The experience of elemental energy – Homage to the atom

II.5 Sheating The Self
The play of energy endures

Beyond striving
The play of energy endures

Beyond body
The play of energy endures

Beyond life
Out here

Float timeless

Beyond striving

—
II.8 Hold Fast To The Void
Notice how this space

Between Heaven and Earth

Is like a bellows
Always full, always empty
Come in here, go out there
Breathing…

Silence
This is no time for talk

Better to hold fast to the void

—
II.9 Take In-Let Go
To breathe in

You must first breathe out

Let go
To hold

You must first open your hand

Let go
To be warm

You must first be naked

Let go

—
III) The experience of seed-cell energy – Homage to DNA

III.3 Clear Water
The seed of mystery

Lies in muddy water
How can we fathom this muddiness?

Water becomes clear through stillness
How can we become still?

By moving with the stream

—
III.8 Fourfold Representation Of The Mystery
Before Heaven and Earth

There was something nebulous

Tranquil… effortless

Permeating universally

Revolving soundlessly

Fusing
It may be regarded as the Mother

Of all organic forms
Its name is not known nor its language

But it is called Tao
The ancient sages called it “great”

The Great Tao
Great means in harmony

In harmony means tuned in

Tuned in means going far

Going far means returning

To the harmony
The Tao is great

The coil of life is great
The body is great

The human is designed to be great
There are in existence four great notes

The human is made to be one thereof
When you place yourself in harmony with your body

The body tunes itself to the slow unfolding of life

Life flows in harmony with the Tao
All proceeds

Naturally

In tune

—
III.10 This Is It
The seed moves so slowly and serenely

Moment to moment

That it appears inactive
The garden at sunrise breathing

The quiet breath of twilight

Moment to moment to moment
When we are in tune with this blissfull rhythm

The ten thousand forms flourish

Without effort
It is all so simple

Each next moment…

This is it!

—-
III.11 Gate Of The Soft Mystery
Valley of life

Gate of the Soft Mystery

Beginnings in the lowest place

Gate of the Soft Mystery

Gate of the Dark Woman

Gate of the Soft Mystery

Seed of all living

Gate of the Soft Mystery

Constantly enduring

Gate of the Soft Mystery

Enter

Gently…

—
III.12 The Lesson Of Seed
The soft overcomes the hard

The small overcomes the large

The gentle survives the strong

The invisible survives the visible
Fish should be left in deep water

Fire and iron kept under ground

Seed should be left free

To grow in the rhythm of life
IV) The experience of neural energy – Homage to the external senses

IV.1 Seeing
Open naked eye

Light… radiant… pulsating…

“I’ve been blind all my life to this radiance”
Retinal mandala

Swamp mosaic of rods and cones

Light rays hurtle into retina 186,000 miles per second
Cross scope

Retinal scripture
The Blind I

Recoils at glittering energy

Impersonal, mocking

Illusions of control

“Too bright! Turn it off!

Bring back the shadow world!”
The Seer Eye

Vibrates to the trembling web of light

Merges with the seen

Merges with the scene

Slides down optical whirlpool

Through central needle point

—
IV.2 Hearing

Sound waves, sound waves

Uncover lotus membrane

Trembling tattoo of

Sympathetic vibrations

Float along liquid canals
Single piano note

Meteor of delight

Collides with quivering membrane
Eternal note

Spins slowly

On vibrating thread
Ear you are

Sound waves

—
V) The experience of the chakras – Homage to the internal senses

V.1 The Root Chakra
Can you float through the universe of your body

and not lose your way?

Can you dissolve softly?

Decompose?

Can you rest

dormant seed-light

buried in moist earth?

Can you drift

single-celled

in soft tissue swamp?

Can you sink

into your dark

fertile marsh?

Can you spiral slowly

down the great central river?

—
V.3 The Heart Chakra
Can you float through the universe of your body

and not lose your way?

Flow with fire-blood

Through each tissued corridor?
Can you let your heart

pump down red tunnels

stream into cell chambers?
Can you center on this

Heart-fire of love?
Can you let your heart

pulse for all love

beat for all sorrow

throb for all pain

thud for all joy

swell for all mankind?
Can you let it flow

With compassion

for all life?

—
V.4 The Throat Chakra
Can you float through the universe of your body

and not lose your way?

Breathing

Can you drift into free air?

Rise on the trembling vibration

of inhale and exhale?
Can you ascend the fragile thread of breath

into cloud-blue bliss?

Can you spiral up through soft atmosphere

Breathing

Catch the moment between in-breath and out-breath

Just there…
Can you float beyond life and death

Breathing

—
V.6 Ascending Ladder Of Chakras
Drift along your body’s soft swampland

where warm mud sucks lazily
Feel each cell in your body communicating

in serpent-coiled rainbow orgasm
Feel the sensuous rhythm of time

pulsing life along the arterial network
Bring the ethereal breath of life into

the white rooms of your brain
Radiate golden light out to

the four corners of creation
VI) Re-entry: the experience of the imprinted world – Homage to the symbolic mind

VI.1 The Moment Of Fullness
Grab hold tightly

Let go lightly
The full cup can take no more

The candle burns down

The taut bow must be loosed

The razor edge can no long endure
Nor this moment re-lived
So now…

Grab hold tightly

So now…

Let go lightly

—
VI.5 The Lesson Of Water
What one values in the game

is the play
What one values in the form

is the moment of forming
What one values in the house

is the moment of dwelling
What one values in the heart

is the beating
What one values in the action

is the timing
Indeed

Because you flow like water

You can neither win nor lose

—
VI.6 The Utility of Nothing
The Nothing at the center of the thirty-spoke wheel…
The Nothing of the clay vase…

The Nothing within the four walls…
The goal of the game is to go beyond the game
You lose your mind

To use your head
You lose your mind

To use your head

—
VI.10 Illustration Of A Tao Imprint
He stands apart

serene

curiously observing
He stands quietly

looking forlorn

like an infant who has not yet

learned to know what to smile at
He is a little sad for what he sees
While others enjoy their possessions

he lazily drifts, a homeless

do-nothing, owning nothing
Or he moves slowly close to the land
While others are crisp and definite

he seems indecisive
He does not appear to be making his way

in the world
He is different
A wise infant nursing at the breast

Of all life
Inside

—
VI.11 Keep In Touch
The Tao flows everywhere
Keep in touch

Be at home

Everywhere
He who loses the contact

Is alone

Everywhere
Keeping in touch with the Tao

Is called

Harmony

—
IV.13 The Conscious Application Of Strength
Force recoils

But

The time comes

When there is nothing to do

Except act consciously

With courage

—
VI.14 Victory Celebration
Celebrate your victory

with funeral rites

for your slain illusions
Wear some black at your wedding

—
VI.15 Along The Grain
The Tao is nameless

Like uncarved wood
As soon as it is carved

There are names
Carve carefully

Along the grain

—
VI.16 He Who Knows The Center Endures
Who knows the outside is clever

Who knows the center endures

Who masters others gains robot power

Who comes to the center has flowering strength
Faith of consciousness is freedom

Hope of consciousness is strength

Love of consciousness evokes the same in return
Faith of seed frees

Hope of seed flowers

Love of seed grows

Well…

Life moves at a pace. I completed another yearly revolution around the sun on Thursday, I awoke almost to the minute I came into the world. Later on after a day of working, Mary, Rowan and I went to a great restaurant for a quiet celebration. Wonderful place: Vindalho ‘Spice Route Cuisine’ (Yum!). I would suggest it to anyone! It was a lovely way to ease into another year.
Somehow I also managed to tweak the old back again, which has hampered any and all activities for the last three days. Saturday was almost a complete wash. Still dealing with it today…
Working on various projects, setting up the new computer system (a nice quad-core!) to handle the publishing end of things…

—–

Radio Free EarthRites: Lots of nice stuff on their recently, you should check it out. I listened to Jack Kerouac reciting poetry yesterday when I was laid out….

So… for today, I have picked a few items that you might like. There are two Niyaz remixes of note (if Youtube.com stays up) to check out. I have a real thing for Azam Ali… I have listened to her music for a very long time, from the first album of Vas until now. She gets better and better! We have a variety of linkage… and poetry as well.
Have a nice autumn day!
Blessings,

Gwyllm

__________
On The Menu:

The Links

Niyaz – Khuda Ki Marzi

Enchanted Woods

Poetry For The Early Days Of Autumn…

Niyaz – Allahi Allah ( Midival Pundiz Remix)

__________
The Links:

Drug expert facing criticism for claiming ecstasy better than binge drinking

Animal Lovers Angry Over Puppy (Body Bag) Offer

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

Spy Software Could ID You By Your Shadow

_________
This is an interesting remix… Not keen on the time spent on the images, but the music is very sweet. If you have a copy of this… let me know!
Niyaz – Khuda Ki Marzi

_________

—–

Enchanted Woods

-William Butler Yeats

I
LAST summer, whenever I had finished my day’s work, I used to go wandering in certain roomy woods, and there I would often meet an old countryman, and talk to him about his work and about the woods, and once or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heart more readily than to me, He had spent all his life lopping away the witch elm and the hazel and the privet and the hornbeam from the paths, and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures of the wood. He has heard the hedgehog–’grainne oge,’ he calls him–’grunting like a Christian,’ and is certain that he steals apples by rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking to every quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many in the woods, have a language of their own–some kind of old Irish. He says, ‘Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of some great change in the world. That is why they are hard to kill, and why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it might claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would be the serpent’s tooth.’ Sometimes he thinks they change into wild cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wild cats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in the woods. The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran away and became wild. He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels–whom he hates–with what seems an affectionate interest, though at times his eyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogs unroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning straw under them.
I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats like, above all, to be in the ‘forths’ and lisses after nightfall; and he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about a marten cat–a rare beast now-a-days. Many years ago he used to work in the garden, and once they put him to sleep in a garden-house where there was a loft full of apples, and all night he could hear people rattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft. Once, at any rate, be has seen an unearthly sight in the woods. He says, ‘One time I was out cutting timber over in Inchy, and about eight o’clock one morning when I got there I saw a girl picking nuts, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders, brown hair, and she had a good, clean face, and she was tall and nothing on her head, and her dress no way gaudy but simple, and when she felt me coming she gathered herself up and was gone as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed her and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to this, never again.’ He used the word clean as we would use words like fresh or comely.
Others too have seen spirits in the Enchanted Woods. A labourer told us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is called Shanwalla, from some old village that was before the weed. He said, ‘One evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he went away through the path in Shanwalla, an’ bid me goodnight. And two hours after, there he was back again in the yard, an’ bid me light a candle that was in the stable. An’ he told me that when he got into Shanwalla, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a head as big as a man’s body, came beside him and led him out of the path an’ round about, and at last it brought him to the lime-kiln, and then it vanished and left him.’
A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen by a certain deep pool in the river. She said, ‘I came over the stile from the chapel, and others along with me; and a great blast of wind came and two trees were bent and broken and fell into the river, and the splash of water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with me saw many figures, but myself I only saw one, sitting there by the bank where the trees fell. Dark clothes he had on, and he was headless.’
A man told me that one day, when he was a boy, he and another boy went to catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of hazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with him, ‘I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will stay on it,’ meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not be able to go through it. So he took up ‘a pebble of cow-dung, and as soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music that ever was heard.’ They ran away, and when they had gone about two hundred yards they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white, walking round and round the bush. ‘First it had the form of a woman, and then of a man, and it was going round the bush.’

II
I often entangle myself in argument more complicated than even those paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at other times I say as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion about a nymph of the Illissus, ‘The common opinion is enough for me.’ I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me. You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our natures simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall unite us to all romance, and that some day we shall fight dragons among blue hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but
‘Foreshadowings mingled with the images

Of man’s misdeeds in greater days than these,’
as the old men thought in The Earthly Paradise when they were in good spirits.

___________

Poetry For The Early Days Of Autumn…
A blade of grass

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”
Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”
Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again — and she was a blade of grass.
And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such a noise! They scatter all my winter dreams.”

-K. Gibran

—-
Autumn Song
Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf

How the heart feels a languid grief

Laid on it for a covering,

And how sleep seems a goodly thing

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
And how the swift beat of the brain

Falters because it is in vain,

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf

Knowest thou not? and how the chief

Of joys seems–not to suffer pain?
Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf

How the soul feels like a dried sheaf

Bound up at length for harvesting,

And how death seems a comely thing

In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

-Dante

—-
10,000
Ten thousand flowers in spring,

the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer,

snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded

by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

-Wu Men

—-

Autumn
The autumn comes, a maiden fair

In slenderness and grace,

With nodding rice-stems in her hair

And lilies in her face.

In flowers of grasses she is clad;

And as she moves along,

Birds greet her with their cooing glad

Like bracelets’ tinkling song.

A diadem adorns the night

Of multitudinous stars;

Her silken robe is white moonlight,

Set free from cloudy bars;

And on her face (the radiant moon)

Bewitching smiles are shown:

She seems a slender maid, who soon

Will be a woman grown.

Over the rice-fields, laden plants

Are shivering to the breeze;

While in his brisk caresses dance

The blossomed-burdened trees;

He ruffles every lily-pond

Where blossoms kiss and part,

And stirs with lover’s fancies fond

The young man’s eager heart.

-Kalidasa

—-
Echoing Light
When I was beginning to read I imagined

that bridges had something to do with birds

and with what seemed to be cages but I knew

that they were not cages it must have been autumn

with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires

and those orange places on fire in the pictures

and now indeed it is autumn the clear

days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing

over dry grass that yesterday was green

the empty corn standing trembling and a down

of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields

and everywhere the colors I cannot take

my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams

red it is the season of migrants

flying at night feeling the turning earth

beneath them and I woke in the city hearing

the call notes of the plover then again and

again before I slept and here far downriver

flocking together echoing close to the shore

the longest bridges have opened their slender wings

– W.S.Merwin

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Another tasty Niyaz remix!

Niyaz – Allahi Allah ( Midival Pundiz Remix)

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Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

-William James

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On The Menu:
The Links
William James Quotes
The Other Gods
Selected Poetry: For A Monday Afternoon…
Art: Henry Siddons Mowbray

_____________
The Links:

‘Lost towns’ discovered in Amazon
Cthulhu’s Holiday Photos
A wonderful collection of H.P. Lovecraft!
EPA is Hiding Colony Collapse Disorder Information
How to explain Consciousness Shifts
Priest’s potty gift from God

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William James Quotes:

Belief creates the actual fact.

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

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___________

The Other Gods

-H.P. Lovecraft

Atop the tallest of earth’s peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer not man to tell that he hath looked upon them. Lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever the men from the plains would scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains till now only the last remains. When they left their old peaks they took with them all signs of themselves, save once, it is said, when they left a carven image on the face of the mountain which they called Ngranek.
But now they have betaken themselves to unknown Kadath in the cold waste where no man treads, and are grown stern, having no higher peak whereto to flee at the coming of men. They are grown stern, and where once they suffered men to displace them, they now forbid men to come; or coming, to depart. It is well for men that they know not of Kadath in the cold waste; else they would seek injudiciously to scale it.
Sometimes when earth’s gods are homesick they visit in the still of the night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes. Men have felt the tears of the gods on white-capped Thurai, though they have thought it rain; and have heard the sighs of the gods in the plaintive dawn-winds of Lerion. In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.
In Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, once dwelt an old man avid to behold the gods of earth; a man deeply learned in the seven cryptical books of earth, and familiar with the Pnakotic Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar. His name was Barzai the Wise, and the villagers tell of how he went up a mountain on the night of the strange eclipse.
Barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself. It was he who wisely advised the burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their remarkable law against the slaying of cats, and who first told the young priest Atal where it is that black cats go at midnight on St. John’s Eve. Barzai was learned in the lore of the earth’s gods, and had gained a desire to look upon their faces. He believed that his great secret knowledge of gods could shield him from their wrath, so resolved to go up to the summit of high and rocky Hatheg-Kla on a night when he knew the gods would be there.
Hatheg-Kla is far in the stony desert beyond Hatheg, for which it is named, and rises like a rock statue in a silent temple. Around its peak the mists play always mournfully, for mists are the memories of the gods, and the gods loved Hatheg-Kla when they dwelt upon it in the old days. Often the gods of earth visit Hatheg-Kla in their ships of clouds, casting pale vapors over the slopes as they dance reminiscently on the summit under a clear moon. The villagers of Hatheg say it is ill to climb the Hatheg-Kla at any time, and deadly to climb it by night when pale vapors hide the summit and the moon; but Barzai heeded them not when he came from neighboring Ulthar with the young priest Atal, who was his disciple. Atal was only the son of an innkeeper, and was sometimes afraid; but Barzai’s father had been a landgrave who dwelt in an ancient castle, so he had no common superstition in his blood, and only laughed at the fearful cotters.
Banzai and Atal went out of Hatheg into the stony desert despite the prayers of peasants, and talked of earth’s gods by their campfires at night. Many days they traveled, and from afar saw lofty Hatheg-Kla with his aureole of mournful mist. On the thirteenth day they reached the mountain’s lonely base, and Atal spoke of his fears. But Barzai was old and learned and had no fears, so led the way up the slope that no man had scaled since the time of Sansu, who is written of with fright in the moldy Pnakotic Manuscripts.
The way was rocky, and made perilous by chasms, cliffs, and falling stones. Later it grew cold and snowy; and Barzai and Atal often slipped and fell as they hewed and plodded upward with staves and axes. Finally the air grew thin, and the sky changed color, and the climbers found it hard to breathe; but still they toiled up and up, marveling at the strangeness of the scene and thrilling at the thought of what would happen on the summit when the moon was out and the pale vapours spread around. For three days they climbed higher and higher toward the roof of the world; then they camped to wait for the clouding of the moon.
For four nights no clouds came, and the moon shone down cold through the thin mournful mist around the silent pinnacle. Then on the fifth night, which was the night of the full moon, Barzai saw some dense clouds far to the north, and stayed up with Atal to watch them draw near. Thick and majestic they sailed, slowly and deliberately onward; ranging themselves round the peak high above the watchers, and hiding the moon and the summit from view. For a long hour the watchers gazed, whilst the vapours swirled and the screen of clouds grew thicker and more restless. Barzai was wise in the lore of earth’s gods, and listened hard for certain sounds, but Atal felt the chill of the vapours and the awe of the night, and feared much. And when Barzai began to climb higher and beckon eagerly, it was long before Atal would follow.
So thick were the vapours that the way was hard, and though Atal followed at last, he could scarce see the gray shape of Barzai on the dim slope above in the clouded moonlight. Barzai forged very far ahead, and seemed despite his age to climb more easily than Atal; fearing not the steepness that began to grow too great for any save a strong and dauntless man, nor pausing at wide black chasms that Atal could scarce leap. And so they went up wildly over rocks and gulfs, slipping and stumbling, and sometimes awed at the vastness and horrible silence of bleak ice pinnacles and mute granite steeps.
Very suddenly Barzai went out of Atal’s sight, scaling a hideous cliff that seemed to bulge outward and block the path for any climber not inspired of earth’s gods. Atal was far below, and planning what he should do when he reached the place, when curiously he noticed that the light had grown strong, as if the cloudless peak and moonlit meetingplace of the gods were very near. And as he scrambled on toward the bulging cliff and litten sky he felt fears more shocking than any he had known before. Then through the high mists he heard the voice of Barzai shouting wildly in delight:
“I have heard the gods. I have heard earth’s gods singing in revelry on Hatheg-Kla! The voices of earth’s gods are known to Barzai the Prophet! The mists are thin and the moon is bright, and I shall see the gods dancing wildly on Hatheg-Kla that they loved in youth. The wisdom of Barzai hath made him greater than earth’s gods, and against his will their spells and barriers are as naught; Barzai will behold the gods, the proud gods, the secret gods, the gods of earth who spurn the sight of man!”
Atal could not hear the voices Barzai heard, but he was now close to the bulging cliff and scanning it for footholds. Then he heard Barzai’s voice grow shriller and louder:
“The mist is very thin, and the moon casts shadows on the slope; the voices of earth’s gods are high and wild, and they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who is greater than they… The moon’s light flickers, as earth’s gods dance against it; I shall see the dancing forms of the gods that leap and howl in the moonlight… The light is dimmer and the gods are afraid…”
Whilst Barzai was shouting these things Atal felt a spectral change in all the air, as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws; for though the way was steeper than ever, the upward path was now grown fearsomely easy, and the bulging cliff proved scarce an obstacle when he reached it and slid perilously up its convex face. The light of the moon had strangely failed, and as Atal plunged upward through the mists he heard Barzai the Wise shrieking in the shadows:
“The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’s gods… There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging… Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!”
And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phlegethon of unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:
“The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!… Look away… Go back… Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite abysses… That cursed, that damnable pit… Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!”
And as Atal shut his eyes and stopped his ears and tried to hump downward against the frightful pull from unknown heights, there resounded on Hatheg-Kla that terrible peal of thunder which awaked the good cotters of the plains and the honest burgesses of Hatheg, Nir and Ulthar, and caused them to behold through the clouds that strange eclipse of the moon that no book ever predicted. And when the moon came out at last Atal was safe on the lower snows of the mountain without sight of earth’s gods, or of the other gods.
Now it is told in the moldy Pnakotic Manuscripts that Sansu found naught but wordless ice and rock when he did climb Hatheg-Kla in the youth of the world. Yet when the men of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg crushed their fears and scaled that haunted steep by day in search of Barzai the Wise, they found graven in the naked stone of the summit a curious and cyclopean symbol fifty cubits wide, as if the rock had been riven by some titanic chisel. And the symbol was like to one that learned men have discerned in those frightful parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts which were too ancient to be read. This they found.
Barzai the Wise they never found, nor could the holy priest Atal ever be persuaded to pray for his soul’s repose. Moreover, to this day the people of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg fear eclipses, and pray by night when pale vapors hide the mountain-top and the moon. And above the mists on Hatheg-Kla, earth’s gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of clouds and play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.
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Selected Poetry: For A Monday Afternoon…

Kore

-Frederic Manning
Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves,
And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms,
And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves.
Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms,
Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist,
And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist.
With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes,
And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep,
With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs,
She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep;
While the earth dreamed, and only I was ware
Of that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair.
The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams;
There was no sound amid the sacred boughs.
Nor any mournful music in her streams:
Only I saw the shadow on her brows,
Only I knew her for the yearly slain,
And wept, and weep until she come again.
(This poem was published under the title of ‘Persephone’ in the December 1909 edition of the ‘English Review’.)

—
A Cosmic Outlook

-Frederick William Henry Myers (1843-–1901)

Backward!—beyond this momentary woe!—
Thine was the world’s dim dawn, the prime emprize;
Eternal aeons gaze thro’ these sad eyes,
And all the empyreal sphere hath shaped thee so.
Nay! all is living, all is plain to know!
This rock has drunk the ray from ancient skies;
Strike! and the sheen of that remote sunrise
Gleams in the marble’s unforgetful glow.
Thus hath the cosmic light endured the same
Ere first that ray from Sun to Sirius flew;
Aye, and in heaven I heard the mystic Name
Sound, and a breathing of the Spirit blew;
Lit the long Past, bade shine the slumbering flame
And all the Cosmorama blaze anew.
Onward! thro’ baffled hope, thro’ bootless prayer,
With strength that sinks, with high task half begun,
Things great desired, things lamentable done,
Vows writ in water, blows that beat the air.
On! I have guessed the end; the end is fair.
Not with these weak limbs is thy last race run;
Not all thy vision sets with this low sun;
Not all thy spirit swoons in this despair.
Look how thine own soul, throned where all is well,
Smiles to regard thy days disconsolate;
Yea; since herself she wove the worldly spell,
Doomed thee for lofty gain to low estate;—
Sown with thy fall a seed of glory fell;
Thy heaven is in thee, and thy will thy fate.
Inward! aye, deeper far than love or scorn,
Deeper than bloom of virtue, stain of sin,
Rend thou the veil and pass alone within,
Stand naked there and feel thyself forlorn!
Nay! in what world, then, Spirit, wast thou born ?
Or to what World-Soul art thou entered in ?
Feel the Self fade, feel the great life begin,
With Love re-rising in the cosmic morn.
The inward ardour yearns to the inmost goal;
The endless goal is one with the endless way;
From every gulf the tides of Being roll,
From every zenith burns the indwelling day;
And life in Life has drowned thee and soul in Soul;
And these are God, and thou thyself art they.

—
A Memory of Loss

-William Wilsey Martin
I
The Beauty-cup that held his Joy was frail,
He knew, and brittle under shock or strain;
This knowledge gripp’d his heart till heat of pain
Burnt up his Joy and left him only bale.

II
His Beauty-cup still smiles–a dream of bright
Art-woven rays; but all it held has fled;
A ghostly fear has kill’d it, and instead
A Memory of Loss cries through the night.

—
A New Orphic Hymn

-Sir Lewis Morris
The peaks, and the starlit skies, the deeps of the fathomless seas,

Immanent is He in all, yet higher and deeper than these.
The heart, and the mind, and the soul, the thoughts and the yearnings of Man,

Of His essence are one and all, and yet define it who can?
The love of the Right, tho’ cast down, the hate of victorious Ill,

All are sparks from the central fire of a boundless beneficient Will.
Oh, mystical secrets of Nature, great Universe undefined,

Ye are part of the infinite work of a mighty ineffable Mind.
Beyond your limitless Space, before your measureless Time,

Ere Life or Death began was this changeless Essence sublime.
In the core of eternal calm He dwelleth unmoved and alone

‘Mid the Universe He has made, as a monarch upon his throne.
And the self-same inscrutable Power which fashioned the sun and the star

Is Lord of the feeble strength of the humblest creatures that are.
The weak things that float or creep for their little life of a day,

The weak souls that falter and faint, as feeble and futile as they;
The malefic invisible atoms unmarked by man’s purblind eye

That beleaguer our House of Life, and compass us till we die;
All these are parts of Him, the indivisible One,

Who supports and illumines the many, Creation’s Pillar and Sun!
Yea, and far in the depths of Being, too dark for a mortal brain,

Lurk His secrets of Evil and Wrong, His creatures of Death and of Pain.
A viewless Necessity binds, a determinate Impetus drives

To a hidden invisible goal the freightage of numberless lives.
The waste, and the pain, and the wrong, the abysmal mysteries dim,

Come not of themselves alone, but are seed and issue of Him.
And Man’s spirit that spends and is spent in mystical questionings,

Oh, the depths of the fathomless deep, oh, the riddle and secret of things,

And the voice through the darkness heard, and the rush of winnowing wings!

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. —Albert Einstein

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Caer Llywdd’s Late August Activities….
Click On The Images For Larger Pics…..

So you have to start somewhere…. this is a bit of an update and all. Here is a picture of the Absinthe fountain that Mary got me this last Winter Solstice, with the 50 centime coasters as well… this is a very sweet fountain, and has greatly added to the Absinthe Ceremony at Caer Llwydd….
There has been a bit of Absinthe imbibing as of late around here, leading to late starts, fuzzy thinking and general hilarity…
Both my friends Ryan and Terry have been by over the last couple of weeks for the celebrations….

—

The weekend before this one, I went with Gordon K to see STS-9. A wonderful show, great crowd and excellent location (McMenamins Edgefield) Nothing like an outdoor concert that fades brilliantly into the gloaming and then the darkness…
Gordon just moved to Portland from Eugene, with his lovely wife Heather and his son Zane. It is great seeing the community enlarge, and grow in such a nice way…
The show flowed nicely, with good sound, and a churning crowd of dancers… Incenses of various flavours wafted through the crowd as they danced and it was a beautiful evening in the Peoples Republic of Portland!

—

Rowan with his close friend Austyn Dancing….

We celebrated Rowan’s 18th this last weekend at the Redwing Cafe on Sunday evening… It was an overdue celebration, as Julie and Mike’s wedding occurred the night of Rowan’s birthday… so we waited a couple of weeks, and had a nice time together.
Mary prepared some great food, and I did a punch that everyone seemed to like (non-alcoholic) Rowan chose to have friends his own age, and members of our older community. It was a great evening filled with food, laughter, games, dancing and various other pleasantries…
Rowan said it was his best party ever… It had been planned to be a dance party, but for some reason the Cafe’s sound system wouldn’t play the mix disc that I had produced. We will be playing the whole 4 hour mix on Radio Free EarthRites soon!

—-
Carly, our nephews’ Ethan friend/Girlfriend of several years has arrived in Portland from her recent forays in Japan. Whilst there, she was riding a bicycle near Mt. Fuji where she got hit by a hit and run car-driver….
She is well, and settling in to Portland to do her last year of Architectural Studies for the U of O. I understand that she just got an apartment after some frantic searching this past week.
We had her and Ethan over this past Wednesday. It was a very pleasant evening!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

Caer Llywdd’s Late August Activities….

Forty Two Years Ago Today….

The Links…

Ustad Ail Akbar Khan

Chapter 21: Open Ending

The Poetry of Attar

Above &amp; Beyond presents OceanLab – Miracle [album edit]

Art: Rick Griffin

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Forty Two Years Ago Today….

Gwyllm as a young psychonaut….

Today marks the 42nd year from my first Psychedelic – Entheogenic Experience… I took a dose of LSD in Berkeley California, about 6:00pm, wandered down to The Jabberwocky Cafe with friends from the commune I was staying in, and as some say, the rest is history. I will not go over it all again, and you can read about it from the links at the bottom of this piece.
So, this is a time that I use to reflect on my life, and the changes wrought by Albert’s wondrous molecule; how this intervention of divine proportions weighing less than a hundred angels dancing on a pin transformed my consciousness to a point where the world as I knew it fell away forever.
Every act, moment, and thought had been altered by that moment in time… it is a bit like the prisoner emerging from confinement, to find an endless horizon of possibilities opening on a view of eternity unfolding. (over the top but you might catch my drift)
The world was indeed changed forever, and I moved into a territory uncharted in our times. It was never easy, and there were times when I wish the blinders had not been torn from my eyes. When I preferred to go asleep, I fell into patterns of self-annihilation. When I resumed/continued the quest, life expanded, and inner change moved my life forward in new and novel ways. Many moved into these uncharted waters of consciousness, and their efforts and lives have brought much value to the world.
Over the years I have revisited that space in various ways, but those first times leave an indelible mark. All that came before, and all that proceeded after….
Read The Story Here:

Teeming With Gods

The Story Finally Told 39 years ago…

________________
The Links…

Burning Man?

Mohegans’ ancient burial ground reclaimed and blessed

Religion and its mortifying history of self-inflicted pain

Theocratic Sect Prays for Real Armageddon

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Ustad Ail Akbar Khan

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Chapter 21: Open Ending

-Terence McKenna
A Lost Chapter of True Hallucinations….

My own ideas concerning the mechanics by which the oversoul creates the UFO encounters might take the following form. Dimethyltriptamine when smoked, snuffed, or injected induces a brief and extremely intense psychedelic experience whose overwhelming sense of contact with the Other is unparalleled. For the last decade or so this extraordinary property of DMT has made it seem to many who sought a chemical basis for schizophrenia as the long sought schizotoxin. Studies have proved inconclusive however. DMT concentration has not been proven to differ significantly in schizophrenic and normal controls. Studies have established the presence of DMT in the human body, however the origin and significance of the DMT is unknown. Although it may reflect endogenous synthesis, it could also result from diet, bacterial byproducts, human laboratory error, or other sources. Bearing in mind the bizarre power of the DMT experience, its presence and unknown role in human metabolism, add one more fact: the strange aura of suggestibility that can precede the onset of the intense hallucination phase of the DMT experience. This period of suggestibility may last 15 seconds to a minute, and is a time during which the assumptions which the experient projects concerning the unusual shift of sensory input acquires enormous power. A few moments later the power of the now numinous assumption overwhelmes the consciousness of the observer with a scenario while totally bizarre and outrageous nevertheless is somehow a complete psychological fulfillment of the expectations formed in the few minutes of transition that preceded the visionary engulfment.
What I am proposing is that something like this happens during a UFO close encounter and the cause may very well be something which must be partially sought in the human organism. Imagine a person wandering alone in unfamiliar country: suddenly there’s a hackle-raising sense of weirdness, then a feeling of numbness in the limbs, followed by a clearing of vision and a loud crackling sound. At this point the sense of strangeness within and without the body would trigger a fear reaction in most people. The fear reaction causes a rapid and automatic search for a culturally-validated explaination of what is going on, and an explaination will always be found. It may range from, ‘I am being bewitched by a demon,’ to ‘Surely it is a visitation of the Holy Mother,’ to ‘My God! It must be a UFO!’ In each case the abandonment of the ego to a culturally prescribed explaination of the experience of the Other causes the experience to exfoliate, exploit and elaborate all the themes that the culture’s current myth of the Other entails. It is known that DMT binds preferentially to certain tissue when introduced into the human body. Is it not possible that we human beings are occasionally susceptible to a kind of visionary seizure? When for reasons of stress or diet these factors combine with psychodynamic factors to initiate a sudden dumping of accumulated DMT? Pheremones may play a part in this experience and isolation may be its trigger. Whatever its cause, our conditioning as individuals causes the experience to plunge us into a numinous scenario that reflects the deepest concerns and yearnings of the current culture toward the Other. In our own time this has given rise to the hope of friendly visiting extraterrestrials. As late as 1917 the miracle at Fatima was interpreted worldwide as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Today it would surely be hailed as an extraterrestrial contact. If my suggestion regarding DMT were found to be correct, it would provide insight into the way in which the cultural feedback thermostat explaination of UFOs put forth by Vallee and others actually works. Those people who experience the DMT seizure and are plunged into the current myth of the Other actually return as apostles of that myth, able to clarify and refine it, and by those means to exert the tuning and control of historical development that may be the purpose of the agency behind the UFOs.
Stress, generalized as an impending sense of historical crisis, may be the factor that induces the UFO/close-contact experience. As the historical crisis deepens the number of contacts will increase until the atemporal portion of the mass psyche has effected enough individuals that there is actually a turning away from the stress-causing course of action. How well is the Superego able to play the role of God? Can it come in saucerian splendor to save the world from the flames at the end of time? Or can it only beckon and warn with visions and dire prophesy? These are questions that we might answer if we diligently explore the states of mind that DMT and psilocybin make available. Perhaps the UFO encounters involve nothing more than an autonomous and negative psychic complex able to emerge during the situation of unusual energy dynamics induced in the psyche by psilocybin. However, a different explainatory approach merges psyche and world by involving a continuum whose modalities bisect each other with equal ease. This is the approach which grants the phenomenological existence of the constructs seen in the Stropharia trance and in UFO encounters. Indeed, the vast and dreamy world that we call imagination, or the unconscious, may merge imperceptibly into autonomously existing worlds we would call ‘hyperdimensional’, indicating the paradox of their simultaneous invisibility and their here-and-nowness in the psilocybin trance with a presence which belies the term hallucination.
Ahead of us lies the future, where we can expect the ingression of the alternative dimension to intensify. It is therefore important for us to have a sense of the powers in that Other world and their shifting agencies. In a traditional society, our exploration of these matters would be firmly imbedded in the extant shamanic mythos concerning these forces. Techniques tried and true would be available to fortify our psychic constitution. Since we are members of a profane society whose relation to the unconscious is one of estrangement, we have no such consolation. No dispelling ritual or words of proven self-empowerment. By reason and intuition we must attempt to conquer the fears that attend journeys into the unknown. But reason and intuition need data with which to construct maps of reality. If we outdistance the inflow of fact we move beyond the safety zone of the conjuring rod of intuition and reason. For these reasons we move slowly and steadily. We are human factors in a multi-variable equation where the shift of unseen parameters can trigger large perturbations and resonances of unexpected types. Knowing this, and knowing how little we do know, we should be excused for this defense of caution when taking to ourselves the visions which the Stropharia brings.
Carl Jung’s ‘Mysterium Coniunctionis’ reminds us of the reality of the situation that insues once the psyche is hooked into making the transference to the alchemical or saucerian goal. Jung, citing Gerhart Dorn, stresses that the materialization of the stone is only a prologue to the experience of the perfected self in a state of illumination. Jung wrote, ‘Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists, or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psyche and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience.’ Of what does this relationship consist? My own hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that an explicitly spatial dimension – of a co-dimension inclusive of our continuum – allows a hologram of other realized forms of organization, far distant, to become visible at certain levels of quantum resonance in the synaptic field. These levels have been damped by selection in favor of mo
re directly relevant lines of information relating to animal survival. Evolution does not reinforce selectively the ability of an organism to perceive at a distance since such an ability has no selective advantage, unless the information it conveys falls upon the receptors of an organism already sophisicated enough in its use of symbols to abstract concepts for later application in different contexts.
Thus, these quantum resonances carrying intimations of events at a distance only begin to acquire genetic reinforcement once a species has already achieved sufficient sophistication to be called conscious and mind-possessing. The use of hallucinogens can be seen as an attempt at medical engineering which amplifies, for inspection by consciousness, the quantum resonance of the other parts of the spatial continuum holographically at hand. This experience is the vision which the UFOs and psilocybin impart: visions of strange planets, life forms, perspectives and societies, machines, ruins, landscapes. The hierophanies all unfold in a ‘nunc-stans’ that has all space—standing in it—like a frozen hologram. Thus, experimentation with hallucinogens by human beings and the rise in endogenously produced hallucinogens as one advances through the primate phylogeny could both be due to a slow focusing on the phenomenon of imagination. Imagination being the deepening involvement of the species with things beheld but not actually existing in the present at hand.
The conclusion such an idea makes necessary is that it is upon the ideological content of specific visions that empirical attention should center. What are the working details of the worlds whose presence impinges on ours so strongly? What of the beings sometimes confronted often furtively sensed, who seem to have some existence in a world of their own revealed by the psilocybin and in UFO contact? There may exist a vast communication network in the topological nature of things. A network that becomes a fact only for those species or individuals who will but have the intelligence enough to seek this vision. It will by them be found to be persistent in the nature of things. Alchemy thrives in a climate of such ideas. To validate the idea of the worth of the visions of worlds at a distance one must emerge with some idea spawned by the visionary Other but with a utility in the here and now. The wave quantification of the I Ching is the only idea of this sort that I personally have glimpsed in completeness. It took years to elaborate and its relation to the here and now is still elusive. Fragmentary themes abound: symbiosis, saucer-lens vehicles whose possessors navigate the higher topological oceans in our heads. All this could be transference and fantasy. In the classical sense of the word the experimenter with hallucinogens pursues gnosis: privileged knowledge concerning nature and vouchsafed by her in ecstacy.
The history of consciousness is the halting exploration of the once irrational images and processes met in dreams and trance. Such images become concepts and discoveries as information flows through the multiple-continuum of being seeking equilibrium, yet paradoxically carrying everywhere images of ways the flow towards entropy was locally reversed by this being or that society or phenomenon. We are immersed in a holographic ocean of places and ideas. We can understand this to whatever depth we are able. The ocean of images and the intricacy of their connections is infinite. It is perhaps why great genius preceeds by apparent leaps. Because the revolutionary idea which inspires the genius comes upon one complete, entire by itself, from the ocean of mind. History is the story of the search for the intuitive leap that will reveal the very mechanism of that other dimension. The need for such a leap by humanity will grow as we exhaust complexity in all realms save the microphysical and the psychological. My own method has been immersion in the images and self- examination of the phenomenon of tryptamine hallucinogenesis. This means taking the Stropharia psilocybe and pondering just what this all may mean. With confidence that as more people come to share this experience time will deepen our understanding, if not answer all questions. For psilocybin argues that hallucinogens are windows into higher dimensions. That even as a cone can yield circle, ellipse or parabola to an act of two-dimensional sectioning and yet remain intrinsically a cone, so reality is something that changes according to the angle of regarding. It argues that human beings are many forms over vast scales of time, that all life is unified at some level, and all intelligence in the universe are but facets of the mystery called humanness. In probing the Other we shall always come back with images of ourselves. In probing ourselves we shall return with images of the Other. In the phenomenon of being itself no less than in the phenomenon of the UFO encounters we are merely privileged observers of a relationship between what is naively called the world and the transpersonal portion of the human psyche. How this relationship came to be, and what its limitations are, we cannot know until we gain access to the transpersonal and atemporal part of the psyche. Of what this consists we do not know and no hypothesis can be ruled out. My hunch is that if we could really comprehend death then we could understand the UFO. But that neither can be understood unless they are looked at in light of the question, what is humanness? I believe that the transpersonal component of the human psyche is not distinct from matter and that therefore it can literally do anything. It is not subject to the will of any individual. It has a will and an understanding that is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any one of the individuals who compose it as cells compose a body. It has a plan, glimpsed by individuals only as vision or religious hierophany. Nevertheless, the plan is unfolding. There will be many more UFO sightings, many more close contacts. Our belief systems are undergoing accelerated evolution via increased input from the other. Somewhere ahead of us there is a critical barrier where we will at last have enough data to obtain an integrating insight into the riddle of humanity’s relation to the UFO. I believe that as this happens the childhood of our species will pass away and when this is done we will be free to use the staggering understanding that humankind and the UFO are one.

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The Poetry of Attar

Invocation
We are busy with the luxury of things.

Their number and multiple faces bring

To us confusion we call knowledge. Say:

God created the world, pinned night to day,

Made mountains to weigh it down, seas

To wash its face, living creatures with pleas

(The ancestors of prayers) seeking a place

In this mystery that floats in endless space.
God set the earth on the back of a bull,

The bull on a fish dancing on a spool

Of silver light so fine it is like air;

That in turn rests on nothing there

But nothing that nothing can share.

All things are but masks at God’s beck and call,

They are symbols that instruct us that God is all.

—
The Triumph of the Soul
Joy! Joy! I triumph! Now no more I know

Myself as simply me. I burn with love

Unto myself, and bury me in love.

The centre is within me and its wonder

Lies as a circle everywhere about me.

Joy! Joy! No mortal thought can fathom me.

I am the merchant and the pearl at once.

Lo, Time and Space lie crouching at my feet.

Joy! Joy! When I would reveal in a rapture.

I plunge into myself and all things know.

—
Looking for your own face
Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral.

You can never see your own face,

only a reflection, not the face itself.
So you sigh in front of mirrors

and cloud the surface.
It’s better to keep your breath cold.

Hold it, like a diver does in the ocean.

One slight movement, the mirror-image goes.
Don’t be dead or asleep or awake.

Don’t be anything.
What you most want,

what you travel around wishing to find,

lose yourself as lovers lose themselves,

and you’ll be that.

—
Mystic Silence
From each, Love demands a mystic silence.

What do all seek so earnestly? Tis Love.

Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts,

In Love no longer “Thou” and “I” exist,

For self has passed away in the Beloved.

Now will I draw aside the veil from Love,

And in the temple of mine inmost soul

Behold the Friend, Incomparable Love.

He who would know the secret of both worlds

Will find that the secret of them both is Love.

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Attar, Farid al-Din Muhammad ibn Ibrahim (1145?-1221?), Persian poet, a strong believer in the principles of Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism. He was born in present-day Khorasan Province, Iran. Attar’s most celebrated work is The Conference of the Birds, a poem consisting of 4600 couplets. The poem uses allegory to illustrate the Sufi doctrine of union between the human and the divine. His other important writings include Divan and Tazakor-ol-Oliah ( Biographies of the Saints), a prose work about the early Sufis.
Farid Od-din Attar Neyshaburi was one of the greatest Muslim mystical poets and thinkers of the 12th century. He has written at least 45,000 couplets and many brilliant prose works.
Attar travelled extensively, visiting Egypt, Syria, Arabia, India and Central Asia and finally settled in his native town Neishabour, northeastern Iran, where he spent many years collecting the verses and sayings of famous Muslim mystics.

As said before the greatest of his works is his well-known Manteq-u-ttair (the conference of the birds), which is an allegorical poem describing the quest of the birds. his other works include Elahinameh (divine book).

From the point of view of ideas, literary themes and style, Attar’s influence was strongly felt not in Persian literature but in other Islamic literatures.

His grand book of Tazakor-ol-Oliah is in prose and his most famous works in verse include: Asrarnameh, Elahinameh, Mosibatnameh, Manteq-u’ttair, Bulbulnameh, Heydarnameh, Mokhtarnameh and Khosrownameh.

Manteq-u-ttair or the Conference of Birds, sung in iambic hexameter, is an elegantly versified book. Following Solomon’s tradition the poet puts tongue in the mouths of the birds and enables them to warble his theme and fly high and high towards Mount Ghaf in search of the invincible Simorgh or Phoenix which he ascribes to the Almighty God, and by this metaphor Attar brings his episode to a surprising climax. Led by the unwavering hoopoe or Hod Hod, thirty birds out of many thousands manage to cross the seven fatal valleys in the Path and arrive at the majestic court of the Prince of Universe on the verge of annihilation.

What they see in amazement there is an enormous phantom mirror of a thousand molten planets which reflects their own shapes and purified selfs. Here they dissolve in the mirror and join the eternity.

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Above &amp; Beyond presents OceanLab – Miracle [album edit]

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