Gwyllm.com

Yep, The Brewers of Laguanitas celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Mothers Of Inventions release of “Freak Out!” with this excellent beer….

I was gifted with a couple of these from Mix Master Morgan for my birthday, and I have to say, this is a worthy tribute to Frank and the Boys.

Brewed in a limited edition, I suggest you find some before they all sell out!

The Hymn to Ninkasi – Making Beer

The Hymn to Ninkasi, inscribed on a nineteenth-century B.C. tablet, contains a recipe for Sumerian beer.)

Translation by Miguel Civil

Borne of the flowing water (…)

Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,

Borne of the flowing water (…)

Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,

Having founded your town by the sacred lake,

She finished its great walls for you,

Ninkasi, having founded your town by the sacred lake,

She finished its great walls for you

Your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,

Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake,

Ninkasi, Your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,

Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake.

You are the one who handles the dough,

[and] with a big shovel,

Mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics,

Ninkasi, You are the one who handles

the dough, [and] with a big shovel,

Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date]-honey.

You are the one who bakes the bappir

in the big oven,

Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,

Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes

the bappir in the big oven,

Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,

You are the one who waters the malt

set on the ground,

The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,

Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt

set on the ground,

The noble dogs keep away even the potentates.

You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar

The waves rise, the waves fall.

Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks

the malt in a jar

The waves rise, the waves fall.

You are the one who spreads the cooked

mash on large reed mats,

Coolness overcomes.

Ninkasi, you are the one who spreads

the cooked mash on large reed mats,

Coolness overcomes.

You are the one who holds with both hands

the great sweet wort,

Brewing [it] with honey and wine

(You the sweet wort to the vessel)

Ninkasi, (…)

(You the sweet wort to the vessel)

The filtering vat, which makes

a pleasant sound,

You place appropriately on [top of]

a large collector vat.

Ninkasi, the filtering vat,

which makes a pleasant sound,

You place appropriately on [top of]

a large collector vat.

When you pour out the filtered beer

of the collector vat,

It is [like] the onrush of

Tigris and Euphrates.

Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the

filtered beer of the collector vat,

It is [like] the onrush of

Tigris and Euphrates.

_________

On The Menu

The Links

The Article: THE NECTAR OF DELIGHT

The Poetry: Sufi Poems, Collected

Todays article and poetry are linked in the expression of Divine Inebriation, either by plant based methods or the Love of the God.

Enjoy,

G

________

The Links:

The 51 Funniest Things about 9-11

Britain’s 700,000 years of immigrants

Fishing Lines: Is the tale of the whooper a whopper?

Ohio farmers frustrated by crop circles

Idols emit water, ‘miracle’ draws devotees

___________

THE NECTAR OF DELIGHT

from Plants of the Gods – Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers

by Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hoffman

Healing Arts Press (Vermont) 1992

Tradition in India maintains that the gods sent man the Hemp plant so that he might attain delight, courage, and have heightened sexual desires. When nectar or Amrita dropped down from heaven, Cannabis sprouted from it. Another story tells how, when the gods, helped by demons, churned the milk ocean to obtain Amrita, one of the resulting nectars was Cannabis. It was consecrated to Shiva and was [the godess] Indra’s favourite drink. After the churning of the ocean, demons attempted to gain control of Amrita, but the gods were able to prevent this seizure, giving Cannabis the name Vijaya (“victory”) to commemorate their success. Ever since, this plant of the gods has been held in India to bestow supernatural powers on its users.

The partnership of Cannabis and man has existed now probably for ten thousand years – since the discovery of agriculture in the Old World. One of our oldest cultivars, Cannabis has been a five- purpose plant: as a source of hempen fibres; for its oil; for its akenes or “seeds,” consumed by man for food; for its narcotic properties; and therapeutically to treat a wide spectrum of ills in folk medicine and in modern pharmacopoeias.

Mainly because of its various uses, Cannabis has been taken to many regions around the world. Unusual things happen to plants after long association with man and agriculture. They are grown in new and strange environments and often have opportunities to hybridize that are not offered in their native habitats. They escape from cultivation and frequently become aggressive weeds. They may be changed through human selection for characteristics associated with a specific use. Many cultivated plants are so changed from their ancestral typed that it is not possible to unravel their evolutionary history. Such is not the case, however, with Cannabis. Yet, despite its long history as a major crop plant, Cannabis is still characterised more by what is not known about its biology than what is known.

The botanical classification of Cannabis has long been uncertain. Botanists have not agreed on the family to which Cannabis belongs; early investigators put it in the Nettle family (Urticaceae); later it was accommodated in the Fig family (Moraceae); the general trend today is to assign it to a special family, Cannabaceae, in which only Cannabis and Humulus, the genus of Hops, are members. There has even been disagreement as to how many species of Cannabis exist: whether the genus comprises one highly variable species or several distinct species. Evidence now strongly indicates that three species can be recognised: C. indica, C. ruderalia, and C. sativa. These species are distinguished by different growth habits, characters of the akenes, and especially by major differences in structure of the wood. Although all species possess cannabinols, there may possible be significant chemical differences, but the evidence is not yet available.

We cannot known now which of the several uses of Cannabis was earliest. Since plant uses normally proceed from the simpler to the more complex, one might presume that its useful fibers first attracted man’s attention. Indeed remains of hempen fibers have been found in the earliest archaeological sites in the cradles of Asiatic civilisation: evidence of fiber in China dating from 4000 B.C. and hempen rope and thread from Turkestan from 3000 B.C.. Stone beaters for pounding hemp fiber and impressions of hempen cord bakery into pottery have been found in ancient sites in Taiwan. Hempen fabrics have been found in Turkish sites of the late eighth century B.C., and there is a questionable specimen of Hemp in an Egyptian tomb dated between three and four thousand years ago.

The Indian vadas sang of Cannabis as one of the divine nectars, able to give man anything from good health and long life to visions of the gods. The Zend-Avesta of 600 B.C. mentions an intoxicating resin, and the Assyrians used Cannabis as an incense as early as the ninth century B.C..

Inscriptions from the Chou dynasty in China, dated 700-500 B.C., have a “negative” connotation that accompanies the ancient character for Cannabis, Ma, implying its stupefying properties. Since this idea obviously predated writing, the Pen Tsao Ching, written in A.D. 100 but going back to a legendary emperor, Shen-Nung, 2000 B.C., may be taken as evidence that the hallucinogenic properties at very early dates. It was said that Ma-fen (“Hemp fruit”) “if taken to excess, will produce hallucinations [literally, ‘seeing devils’]. If taken over a long term, it makes one communicate with spirits and lightens one’s body.” A Taoist priest wrote in the fifth century B.C. that Cannabis was employed by “necromancers, in combination with Ginseng, to set forward time and reveal future events.” In these early periods, use of Cannabis as an hallucinogen was undoubtedly associated with Chinese shamanism, but by the time of European contact 1500 years later, shamanism had fallen into decline, and the use of the plant for inebriation seems to have ceased and had been forgotten. Its value in China then was primarily as a fiber source. There was, however, a continuous record of Hemp cultivation in China from Neolithic times, and it has been suggested that Cannabis may have originated in China, not in central Asia.

About 500 B.C. the Greek writer Herodotus described a marvelous bath of the Scythians, aggressive horsemen who swept out of the Transcaucasus eastward and westward. He reported that “they make a booth by fixing in the ground three sticks inclined toward one another, and stretching around them woollen plets which they arrange so as to fit as close as possible: inside the booth a dish is place upon the ground into which they put a number of red hot stones and then add some Hemp seed … immediately it smokes and gives out such a vapour as no Grecian vapour bath can exceed; the Scyths, delighted, shout for joy….”

Only recently, archaeologists have excavated frozen Scythian tombs in central Asia, dated between 500 and 300 B.C., and have found tripods and pelts, braziers and charcoal with remains of Cannabis leaves and fruit. It has generally been accepted that Cannabis originated in central Asia and that it was the Scythians who spread it westward to Europe.

While the Greeks and Romans may not generally have taken Cannabis for inebriation, there are indications that they were aware of the psychoactive effects of the drug. Democritus reported that it was occasionally drunk with wine and myrrh to produce visionary states, and Galen, about A.D. 200, wrote that it was sometimes customary to give Hemp to guests to promote hilarity and enjoyment.

Cannabis arrived in Europe from the north. In classical Greece and Rome, it was not cultivated as a fiber plant. Fiber for ropes and sails, however, was available to the Romans from Gaul as early as the third century B.C.. The Roman writer Lucilius mentioned it in 120 B.C.. Pliny the Elder outlined the preparation and grades of hempen fibers in the first century A.D., and hempen rope was found in a Roman site in England dated A.D. 140-180. Whether the Vikings used Hemp rope or not is not known, but palynological evidence indicates that Hemp cultivation had a tremendous increment in England from the early Anglo-Saxon period to late Saxon and Norman times – from 400 to 1100.

Henry VIII fostered the cultivation of Hemp in England. The maritime supremacy of England during Elizabethan times greatly increased the demand. Hemp cultivation began in the British colonies in the New World: first in Canada in 1606, then in Virginia in 1611; the Pilgrims took the crop to New England in 1632. In pre-Revolutionary North America, Hemp was employed even for making work clothes. Hemp was introduced quite independently into Spanish colonies in America: Chile, 1545; Peru, 1554.

There is no doubt that hempen fiber production represents an early use of Cannabis, but perhaps consumption of its edible akenes as food predated the discovery of the useful fiber. These akenes are very nutritious, and it is difficult to imagine that early man, constantly searching for food, would have missed this opportunity. Archaeological finds of Hemp akenes in Germany, dated with reservation at 500 B.C., indicate the nutritional use of these plant products. From early times to the present, Hemp akenes have been used as food in eastern Europe, and in the United States as a major ingredient of bird food.

The folk-medicinal value of Hemp – frequently indistinguishable from its hallucinogenic properties – may even be its earliest role as an economic plant. The earliest record of the medicinal use of the plant is that of the Chinese emperor herbalist Shen Nung who, five thousand years ago, recommended Cannabis for malaria, beri-beri, constipation, rheumatic pains, absent-mindedness, and female disorders. Hoa-Glio, another ancient Chinese herbalist, recommended a mixture of Hemp resin and wine as an analgesic during surgery.

It was in ancient India that this “gift of the gods” founded excessive use in folk medicine. It was believed to quicken the mind, prolong life, improve judgement, lower fevers, induce sleep, cure dysentery. Because of its psychoactive properties it was more highly valued than medicines with only physical activity. Several systems of Indian medicine esteemed Cannabis. The medical work Sushruta claimed that it cured leprosy. The Bharaprakasha of about A.D. 1600 described it as antiphlegmatic, digestive, bile affecting, pungent, and astringent, prescribing it to stimulate the appetite, improve digestion, and better the voice. The spectrum of medicinal uses in India covered control of dandruff and relief of headache, mania, insomnia, venereal disease, whooping cough, earaches, and tuberculosis!

The fame of Cannabis as a medicine spread with the plant. In parts of Africa, it was valued in treating dysentery, malaria, anthrax, and fevers. Even today the Hottentots and Mfengu claim its efficacy in treating snake bites, and Sotho women induce partial stupefaction by smoking Hemp before childbirth.

Although Cannabis seems not to have been employed in medieval Europe as an hallucinogen, it was highly valued in medicine and its therapeutic uses can be traced back to early classical physicians such as Diosco-rides and Galen. Medieval herbalists distinguished “manured hempe” (cultivated) from “bastard hempe” (weedy), recommending the latter “against nodes and wennes and other hard tumors,” the former for a host of uses from curing cough to jaundice. They cautioned, however, that in excess it might cause sterility, that “it drieth up… the seeds of generation” in men “and the milke of women’s breasts.” An interesting use in the sixteenth century – source of the name Angler’s Weed in England – was locally important: “poured into the holes of earthwormes [it] will draw them forth and… fishermen and anglers have used this feate to baite their hooks.”

The value of Cannabis in folk medicine has clearly been closely tied with its euphoric and hallucinogenic properties, knowledge of which may be as old as its use as a source of fibre. Primitive man, trying all sorts of plant materials as food, must have known the ecstatic hallucinatory effects of Hemp, and intoxication introducing him to an other-worldly plane leading to religious beliefs. Thus the plant early was viewed as a special gift of the gods, a sacred medium for communion with the spirit world. Although Cannabis today is the most widely employed of the hallucinogens, its use purely as a narcotic, except in Asia, appears not to be ancient. In classical times it euphoric properties were, however, recognised. In Thebes, Hemp was made into a drink said to have opium-like properties.

Galen reported that cakes with Hemp, if eaten to excess, were intoxicating. The use as an inebriant seems to have been spread east and west by barbarian hordes of central Asia, especially the Scythians, who had a profound cultural influence on early Greece and eastern Europe. And knowledge of the intoxicating effects of Hemp goes far back in Indian history, as indicated by the deep mythological and spiritual beliefs about the plant. One preparation, Bhang, was so sacred that it was thought to deter evil, bring luck, and cleanse man of sin. Those treading upon the leaves of this holy plant would suffer harm or disaster, and sacred oaths were sealed over Hemp. The favourite drink of Indra, god of the firmament, was made from Cannabis, and the Hindu god Shiva commanded that the word Bhangi must be chanted repeatedly during sowing, weeding, and harvesting of the holy plant. Knowledge and use of the intoxicating properties eventually spread to Asia Minor. Hemp was employed as an incense in Assyria in the first millennium B.C., suggesting its use as an inebriant. While there is no direct mention of Hemp in the Bible, several obscure passages may refer tangentially to the effects of Cannabis resin or Hashish.

It is perhaps in the Himalayas of India and the Tibetan plateau that Cannabis preparations assumed their greatest hallucinogenic importance in religious contexts. Bhang is a mild preparation: dried leaves or flowering shoots are pounded with spices into a paste and consumed as candy – known as maajun – or in tea form. Ganja is made from the resin-rich dried pistillate flowering tops of cultivated plants which are pressed into a compacted mass and kept under pressure for several days to induce chemical changes; most Ganja is smoked, often with Tobacco. Charas consists of the resin itself, a brownish mass which is employed generally in smoking mixtures.

The Tibetans considered Cannabis sacred. A Mahayana Buddhist tradition maintains that during the six steps of asceticism leading to his enlightenment, Buddha lived on one Hemp seed a day. He is often depicted with “Soma leaves” in his begging bowl and the mysterious god-narcotic Soma has occasionally been identified with Hemp. In Tantric Buddhism of the Himalayas of Tibet, Cannabis plays a very significant role in the meditative ritual used to facilitate deep meditation and heighten awareness. Both medicinal and recreational secular use of Hemp is likewise so common now in this region that the plant is taken for granted as an everyday necessity.

Folklore maintians that the use of Hemp was introduced to Persia during the reign of Khursu (A.D. 531-579), but it is known that the Assyrians used Hemp as an incense during the first millennium B.C..

Although at first prohibited among islamic peoples, Hashish spread widely west throughout Asia Minor. In 1378, authorities tried to extirpate Hemp from Arabian territory by the imposition of harsh punishments. As early as 1271, the eating of Hemp was so well known that Marco Polo described its consumption in the secret order of Hashishins, who used the narcotic to experience the rewards in store for them in the afterlife.

Cannabis extended early and widely from Asia Minor into Africa, partly under the pressure of Islamic influence, but the use of Hemp transcends Mohammedan use. It is widely believed that Hemp was introduced also with slaves from Malaya. Commonly known in Africa as Kif or Dagga, the plant has entered into primitive native cultures in social and religious contexts. The Hottentots, Bushmen, and Kaffirs used Hemp for centuries as a medicine and as an intoxicant. In an ancient tribal ceremony in the Zambesi Valley, participants inhaled vapours from a pile of smouldering Hemp; later, reed tubes and pipes were employed, and the plant material was burned on an altar. The Kasai tribes of the Congo have revived an old Riamba cult in which Hemp, replacing ancient fetishes and symbols, was elevated to a god – a protector against physical and spiritual harm. Treaties are sealed with puffs of smoke from calabash pipes. Hemp-smoking and Hashish-snuffing cults exist in many parts of east Africa, especially near Lake Victoria.

Hemp has spread to many areas of the New World, but with few exceptions the plant has not penetrated significantly into many native American religious beliefs and ceremonies. There are, however, exceptions such as its use under the name Rosa Maria, by the Tepecano Indians of northwest Mexico who occasionally employ Hemp when Peyote is not available. It has recently been learned that Indians in the Mexican states of Veracruz, Hidalgo, and Puebla practice a communal curing ceremony with a plant called Santa Rosa, identified as Cannabis sativa, which is considered both a plant and a sacred intercessor with the Virgin. Although the ceremony is based mainly on Christian elements, the plant is worshipped as an earth deity and is thought to be alive and to represent a part of the heart of God. The participants in this cult believe that the plant can be dangerous and that it can assume the form of a man’s soul, make him ill, enrage him, and even cause death.

Sixty years ago, when Mexican labourers introduced the smoking of Marihuana to the United States, it spread across the south, and by the 1920s, its use was established in New Orleans, confined primarily among the poor and minority groups. The continued spread of the custom in the United States and Europe has resulted in a still unresolved controversy.

Cannabis sativa was officially in the United States Pharmacopoeia until 1937, recommended for a wide variety of disorders, especially as a mild sedative. It is no longer an official drug, although research in the medical potential of some of the cannabinolic constituents or their semi-synthetic analogues is at present very active, particularly in relation to the side-effects of cancer therapy.

The psychoactive effects of Cannabis preparations vary widely, depending on dosage, the preparation and the type of plant used, the method of administration, personality of the user, and social and cultural background. Perhaps the most frequent characteristic is a dreamy state. Long forgotten events are often recalled and thoughts occur in unrelated sequences. Perception of time, and occasionally of space, is altered. Visual and auditory hallucinations follow the use of large doses. Euphoria, excitement, inner happiness – often with hilarity and laughter – are typical. In some cases, a final mood of depression may be experienced. While behaviour is sometimes impulsive, violence or aggression is seldom induced.

In relatively recent years, the use of Cannabis as an intoxicant has spread widely in Western society – especially in the United States and Europe – and has caused apprehension in law-making and law- enforcing circles and has created social and health problems. There is still little, if any, agreement on the magnitude of these problems or on their solution. Opinion appears to be pulled in two directions: that the use of Cannabis is an extreme social, moral, and health danger that must be stamped out, or that it is an innocuous, pleasant pastime that should be legalised. It may be some time before all of the truths concerning the use in our times and society of this ancient drug are fully known. Since an understanding of the history and attitudes of peoples who have long used the plant may play a part in furthering our handling of the situation in modern society, it behooves us to consider the role of Cannabis in man’s past and to learn what lessons it can teach us: whether to maintain wise restraint in our urbanised, industrialised life or to free it for general use. For it appears that Cannabis may be with us for a long time.

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Sufi Poems, Collected

(Afternoon in Algiers by Frederick Arthur Bridgman)

The Spilled Cup

Mahmud Shabestari (d.ca. 1320) from the Gulshan-i raz or

Rosegarden of the Mystery

The Universe: His wine cellar;

the atom’s heart: His measuring cup.

Intellect is drunk, earth drunk, sky drunk,

heaven perplexed with Him, restlessly seeking,

Love in its heart, hoping at least

for a single whiff of the fragrance

of that wine, that clear wine the angels drank

from that immaterial pot, a sip of the dregs –

the rest poured out upon the dust:

one sip, and the Elements whirl in drunken dance

falling now into water, now in blazing fire.

And from the smell of that spilled cup

man rises from the dust and soars to heaven.

—

Quatrain

-Binavi Badakhshani

I became water

and saw myself

a mirage

became an ocean

saw myself a speck

of foam

gained awareness

saw that all is but

forgetfulness

woke up

and found myself

asleep.

—

Quatrain

-Sarmad

I plucked the rose cups by the garden wall,

filled sleeves with petals: I desired them all.

The equinox of Spring’s overflowing Grace

is nothing. I desire to bloom in Fall.

—

The Wild Horse

-Rabi’ah bent Ka’b

Again trapped, chained by his love.

All struggle to escape, vain.

Love, an ocean with invisible shores,

with no shores.

If you are wise, you will not swim in it.

To reach the end of love you must suffer

many unpleasantries and think it good,

drink poison and find it sweet.

I acted like a wild horse not knowing:

to struggle draws the noose tighter.

—

(The Siesta by Frederick Arthur Bridgman)

Morning High

-Rick Parsons

This is MY principle of the Good and Beautiful. I’ll never falter in my atrocious boasting fanfare. Hooray for unknown alchemy and the marvelous body – for the first time ever. It began under the laughter of children and will end the same way. This poison will stay diffused through every vein even when our fanfare fades and folds us back into the old inharmony. And now let us (so worthy of these tortures) feverishly reassemble that surhuman promise once made to our created body and soul, that promise, that madness. Elegance. Science. Violence. We’ve been promised that the tree of good and evil will be buried in shadow and the tyranny of honesty be deported – all that we might fetch forth our purest love. It began with a certain disgust. It ends (with us unable to seize this eternity on the spot) – it ends in a riot of perfumes.

Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror of all shapes and objects here: Bless you all in memory of this holy vigil. Yes it began with goofiness but ends with angels of flame and ice. Little stoned vigil how holy you were. If only for the mask you bestowed upon us. We can vouch for your system. And we won’t forget how (last night) you glorified our every century. We have faith in poison. We know how to give up our lives entirely every day.

Here’s to THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS.

—-

The Many Wines

-Rumi

God has given us a dark wine so potent that,

drinking it, we leave the two worlds.

God has put into the form of hashish a power

to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.

God has made sleep so that

it erases every thought.

God made Majnun love Layla so much that

just her dog would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines

that can take over our minds.

Don’t think all ecstacies

are the same!

Jesus was lost in his love for God.

His donkey was drunk with barley.

Drink from the presence of saints,

not from those other jars.

Every object, every being,

is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoisseur,

and taste with caution.

Any wine will get you high.

Judge like a king, and choose the purest,

the ones unadulterated with fear,

or some urgency about “what’s needed.”

Drink the wine that moves you

as a camel moves when it’s been untied,

and is just ambling about.

(The Rug Merchants by Frederick Arthur Bridgman)

“I advise any bashful young man to take hashish when he wants to offer his heart to any fair lady, for it will give him the courage of a hero, the eloquence of a poet, and the ardour of an Italian”

Dr Meredith in Loisa May Alcott’s Perilous Play

Hashish Poem

– attributed to Ibn Khamis, 13th cen. Spain

or Ibn al-A’ma, 12th cen. Egypt/Syria

Swear off wine and drink from the cup of Haydar,

amber-scented, smarigdite green.

Look: it is offered to you

by a slender Turkish gazelle who

sways delicate as a willow bough.

As he prepares it, you might

compare it to the traces of

fine down on a blushing cheek

since even the slightest breeze

makes it move as if in the

coolness of a drunken morning when

silvery pigeons might whisper in

branches filling its vegetal soul with

their mutual emotions.

How many meanings it has,

significances unknown to wine!

So close your ears

to the Old Censor’s slander!

_________

And for Friday we end with A Taste Of Eden… This is dedicated to the Plant, and the People of the Plant. Perhaps the oldest of cultivated plants (on evidence from SE Asia) Cannabis has been growing along our paths and roads for countless thousands of years. Its demonization at the hands of Anslinger and Hearst has led to a cascade effect, with millions, millions spending time in prison for possession of a substance praised throughout history for the gifts it brings.

I have seen it relieve pain, comfort troubled souls, and suspend time and space. It can also baffle and confuse, and cause panic if used in poor judgement (everything is two sided in this place, don’tcha know?)

Pax….

On The Menu:

Cannabis Links

AGAINST “LEGALIZATION” – Hakim Bey

The Hashish Eater -or- The Apocalypse of Evil – Clark Ashton Smith

Hashish Art…..

Have a brilliant weekend. Walk the path of joy and love.

Gwyllm

__________

Cannabis Links:

“Weeds” Viral Advert…

98 Percent Of All Domestically Eradicated Marijuana Is “Ditchweed,” DEA Admits

Pot-luck dog dinners a hazard, says vet

Pot plants seized in Marin raid disappear

_______________

AGAINST “LEGALIZATION” By Hakim Bey

As a writer, I am distressed and depressed by the suspicion that “dissident media” has become a contradiction in terms – an impossibility. Not because of any triumph of censorship however, but the reverse. There is no real censorship in our society, as Chomsky points out. Suppression of dissent is instead paradoxically achieved by allowing media to absorb (or “co-opt”) all dissent as image.

Once processed as commodity, all rebellion is reduced to the image of rebellion, first as spectacle, and last as simulation. (See Debord, Baudrillard, etc.) The more powerful the dissent as art (or “discourse”) the more powerless it becomes as commodity. In a world of Global Capital, where all media function collectively as the perfect mirror of Capital, we can recognize a global Image or universal imaginaire, universally mediated, lacking any outside or margin. All Image has undergone Enclosure, and as a result it seems that all art is rendered powerless in the sphere of the social. In fact, we can no longer even assume the existence of any “sphere of the social. All human relations can be—and are—expressed as commodity relations.

In this situation, it would seem “reform” has also become an impossibility, since all partial ameliorizations of society will be transformed (by the same paradox that determines the global Image) into means of sustaining and enhancing the power of the commodity. For example, “reform” and “democracy” have now become code-words for the forcible imposition of commodity relations on the former Second and Third Worlds. “Freedom” means freedom of corporations, not of human societies.

From this point of view, I have grave reservations about the reform program of the anti-Drug-Warriors and legalizationists. I would even go so far as to say that I am “against legalization.”

Needless to add that I consider the Drug War an abomination, and that I would demand immediate unconditional amnesty for all “prisoners of consciousness”—assuming that I had any power to make demands! But in a world where all reform can be instantaneously turned into new means of control, according to the “paradox” sketched in the above paragraphs, it makes no sense to go on demanding legalization simply because it seems rational and humane.

For example, consider what might result from the legalization of “medical marijuana”—clearly the will of the people in at least six states. The herb would instantly fall under drastic new regulations from “Above” (the AMA, the courts, insurance companies, etc.). Monsanto would probably acquire the DNA patents and “intellectual ownership” of the plant’s genetic structure. Laws would probably be tightened against illegal marijuana for “recreational uses.” Smokers would be defined (by law) as “sick.” As a commodity, Cannabis would soon be denatured like other legal psychotropics such as coffee, tobacco, or chocolate.

Terence McKenna once pointed out that virtually all useful research on psychotropics is carried out illegally and is often largely funded from underground. Legalization would make possible a much tighter control from above over all drug research. The valuable contributions of the entheogenic underground would probably diminish or cease altogether. Terence suggested that we stop wasting time and energy petitioning the authorities for permission to do what we’re doing, and simply get on with it.

Yes, the Drug War is evil and irrational. Let us not forget, however, that as an economic activity, the War makes quite good sense. I’m not even going to mention the booming “corrections industry,” the bloated police and intelligence budgets, or the interests of the pharmaceutical cartels. Economists estimate that some ten percent of circulating capital in the world is “gray money” derived from illegal activity (largely drug and weapon sales). This gray area is actually a kind of free-floating frontier for Global Capital itself, a small wave that precedes the big wave and provides its “sense of direction.” (For example gray money or “offshore” capital is always the first to migrate from depressed markets to thriving markets.) “War is the health of the State” as Randolph Bourne once said—but war is no longer so profitable as in the old days of booty, tribute and chattel slavery. Economic war increasingly takes its place, and the Drug War is an almost “pure” form of economic war. And since the Neo-liberal State has given up so much power to corporations and “markets” since 1989, it might justly be said that the War on Drugs constitutes the “health” of Capital itself.

From this perspective, reform and legalization would clearly be doomed to failure for deep “infrastructural” reasons, and therefore all agitation for reform would constitute wasted effort—a tragedy of misdirected idealism. Global Capital cannot be “reformed” because all reformation is deformed when the form itself is distorted in its very essence. Agitation for reform is allowed so that an image of free speech and permitted dissidence can be maintained, but reform itself is never permitted. Anarchists and Marxists were right to maintain that the structure itself must be changed, not merely its secondary characteristics. Unfortunately the “movement of the social” itself seems to have failed, and even its deep underlying structures must now be “re-invented” almost from scratch. The War on Drugs is going to go on. Perhaps we should consider how to act as warriors rather than reformers. Nietzsche says somewhere that he has no interest in overthrowing the stupidity of the law, since such reform would leave nothing for the “free spirit” to accomplish—nothing to “overcome.” I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend such an “immoral” and starkly existentialist position. But I do think we could do with a dose of stoicism.

Beyond (or aside from) economic considerations, the ban on (some) psychotropics can also be considered from a “shamanic” perspective. Global Capital and universal Image seem able to absorb almost any “outside” and transform it into an area of commodification and control. But somehow, for some strange reason, Capital appears unable or unwilling to absorb the entheogenic dimension. It persists in making war on mind-altering or transformative substance, rather than attempting to “co-opt” and hegemonize their power.

In other words it would seem that some sort of authentic power is at stake here. Global Capital reacts to this power with the same basic strategy as the Inquisition—by attempting to suppress it from the outside rather than control it from within. (“Project MKULTRA” was the government’s secret attempt to penetrate the occult interior of psychotropism-–it appears to have failed miserably.) In a world that has abolished the Outside by the triumph of the Image, it seems that at least one “outside” nevertheless persists. Power can deal with this outside only as a form of the unconscious, i.e., by suppression rather than realization. But this leaves open the possibility that those who manage to attain “direct awareness” of this power might actually be able to wield it and implement it. If “entheogenic neo-shamanism” (or whatever you want to call it) cannot be betrayed and absorbed into the power-structure of the Image, then we may hypothesize that it represents a genuine Other, a viable alternative to the “one world” of triumphant Capital. It is (or could be) our source of power.

The “Magic of the State” (as M. Taussig calls it), which is also the magic of Capital itself, consists of social control through the manipulation of symbols. This is attained through mediation, including the ultimate medium, money as hieroglyphic text, money as pure Imagination as “social fiction” or mass hallucination. This real illusion has taken the place of both religion and ideology as delusionary sources of social power. This power therefore possesses (or is possessed by) a secret goal; that all human relations be defined according to this hieroglyphic mediation, this “magic.” But neo-shamanism proposes with all seriousness that another magic may exist, an effective mode of consciousness that cannot be hexed by the sign of the commodity. If this were so, it would help explain why the Image appears unable or unwilling to deal “rationally” with the “issue of drugs.” In fact, a magical analysis of power might emerge from the observed fact of this radical incompatibility of the Global Imaginaire and shamanic consciousness.

In such a case, what could our power consist of in actual empirical terms? I am far from proposing that “winning” the War on Drugs would somehow constitute The Revolution—or even that “shamanic power” could contest the magic of the State in any strategic manner. Clearly however the very existence of entheogenism as a true difference—in a world where true difference is denied—marks the historic validity of an Other, of an authentic Outside. In the (unlikely) event of legalization, this Outside would be breached, entered, colonized, betrayed, and turned into sheer simulation. A major source of initiation, still accessible in a world apparently devoid of mystery and of will, would be dissolved into empty representation, a pseudo-rite of passage into the timeless/spaceless enclosure of the Image. In short, we would have sacrificed our potential power to the ersatz reform of legalization, and we would win nothing thereby but the simulacrum of tolerance at the expense of the triumph of Control.

Again: I have no idea what our strategy shall be. I believe however that the time has come to admit that a tactics of mere contingency can no longer sustain us. “Permitted dissent” has become an empty category, and reform merely a mask for recuperation. The more we struggle on “their” terms the more we lose. The drug legalization movement has never won a single battle. Not in America anyway—and America is the “sole superpower” of Global Capital. We boast of our outlaw status as outsiders or marginals, as guerilla ontologists; why then, do we continually beg for authenticity and validation (either as “reward” or as “punishment”) from authority? What good would it do us if we were to be granted this status, this “legality”?

The Reform movement has upheld true rationality and it has championed real human values. Honor where honor is due. Given the profound failure of the movement however, might it not be timely to say a few words for the irrational, for the irreducible wildness of shamanism, and even a single word for the values of the warrior? “Not peace, but a sword.”

_______

(Allumeuse de Narghilé by Jean-Léon Gérome)

____________________

A long, but interesting poem about…

The Hashish Eater -or- The Apocalypse of Evil Clark Ashton Smith

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;

I crown me with the million-colored sun

Of secret worlds incredible, and take

Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,

Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume

The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.

Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,

The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,

By jealous moons maleficently urged

To follow me for ever; mountains horned

With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed

With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,

Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;

And continents of serpent-shapen trees,

With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,

Pursue my light through ages spurned to fire

By that supreme ascendance; sorcerers,

And evil kings, predominanthly armed

With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon

Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,

Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,

With foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,

Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons

Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,

With antic gnomes abominably wise,

Heave up their icy horns across my way.

But naught deters me from the goal ordained

By suns and eons and immortal wars,

And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name

Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs

By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ

For ending of a brazen book; the goal

Whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand

In amplest heavens multiplied to hold

My hordes of thunder-vested avatars,

And Promethèan armies of my thought,

That brandish claspèd levins. There I call

My memories, intolerably clad

In light the peaks of paradise may wear,

And lead the Armageddon of my dreams

Whose instant shout of triumph is become

Immensity’s own music: for their feet

Are founded on innumerable worlds,

Remote in alien epochs, and their arms

Upraised, are columns potent to exalt

With ease ineffable the countless thrones

Of all the gods that are or gods to be,

And bear the seats of Asmodai and Set

Above the seventh paradise.

Supreme

In culminant omniscience manifold,

And served by senses multitudinous,

Far-posted on the shifting walls of time,

With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields

Of utter night and chaos, I convoke

The Babel of their visions, and attend

At once their myriad witness. I behold

In Ombos, where the fallen Titans dwell,

With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat,

The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug

Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list,

Too late, the clam of adamantine gongs

Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet

Have fell the wasp-like sting of little knives

Embrued With slobber of the basilisk

Or the pail Juice of wounded upas. In

Some red Antarean garden-world, I see

The sacred flower with lips of purple flesh,

And silver-Lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes

Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests

At moonless eve in terror seek to slay

With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood

That hide a hueless poison. And I read

Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,

The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote

In gall of slain chimeras; and I know

What pentacles the lunar wizards use,

That once allured the gulf-returning roc,

With ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause

Midmost an alabaster mount; and there,

With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’ gut

Uplift by cranes a captive giant built,

They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird,

And plucked from off his saber-taloned feet

Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood,

And amethysts from Mars. I lean to read

With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,

The monstrous archives of a war that ran

Through wasted eons, and the prophecy

Of wars renewed, which shall commemorate

Some enmity of wivern-headed kings

Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms

Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury,

That bloat within the creators of the moon,

And in one still, selenic and fetor; and I know

What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown,

Are proffered to their gods in Uranus

By mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed

Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate,

Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor,

Took root between the burnished flags, and now

Hath mounted and become a hellish tree,

Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths,

Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne,

And strain at starting pillars. I behold

The slowly-thronging corals that usurp

Some harbour of a million-masted sea,

And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold—

Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed

And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns

The octiremes of perished emperors,

And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed

From a sea-fled haven.

Swifter and stranger grow

The visions: now a mighty city looms,

Hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar

To domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged

With tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned

In shifting erubescence. But whose hands

Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought

To semblance of prodigious blooms of old,

No eremite hath lingered there to say,

And no man comes to learn: for long ago

A prophet came, warning its timid king

Against the plague of lichens that had crept

Across subverted empires, and the sand

Of wastes that cyclopean mountains ward;

Which, slow and ineluctable, would come

To take his fiery bastions and his fanes,

And quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now

I see a host of naked gents, armed

With horns of behemoth and unicorn,

Who wander, blinded by the clinging spells

O hostile wizardry, and stagger on

To forests where the very leaves have eyes,

And ebonies like wrathful dragons roar

To teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom;

Where coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs,

From writhing palms with swollen boles that moan;

Where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked

The eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled

To bask upon his azure-spotted spine;

Where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing,

Or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew

Whose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then

I watch a war of pygmies, met by night,

With pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide,

On plains with no horizon, where a god

Might lose his way for centuries; and there,

In wreathèd light and fulgors all convolved,

A rout of green, enormous moons ascend,

With rays that like a shivering venom run

On inch-long swords of lizard-fang.

Surveyed

From this my throne, as from a central sun,

The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass;

Forgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold

Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns,

Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring

Their rays about me like the colored lights

Imploring priests might lift to glorify

The face of some averted god; the songs

Of mystic poets in a purple world

Ascend to me in music that is made

From unconceivèd perfumes and the pulse

Of love ineffable; the lute-players

Whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon,

Call forth delicious languors, never known

Save to their golden kings; the sorcerers

Of hooded stars inscrutable to God,

Surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls,

lnscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies

And awful transformations.

If I will

I am at once the vision and the seer,

And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,

And still abide their suzerain: I am

The neophyte who serves a nameless god,

Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos

Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear,

Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am

The god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds

Into the nave where suns might congregate

And veils the darkling mountain of his face

With fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests

Amass their monthly hecatomb of gems

Opals that are a camel-cumbering load,

And monstrous alabraundines, won from war

With realms of hostile serpents; which arise,

Combustible, in vapors many-hued

And myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I,

The king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand

The helm of some great barge of orichalchum,

Sailing upon an amethystine sea

To isles of timeless summer: for the snows

Of Hyperborean winter, and their winds,

Sleep in his jewel-builded capital,

Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry,

Nor conjured suns may rout them; so he fees,

With captive kings to urge his serried oars,

Hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn

Hath never left the faintly sighing lote

And lisping moly. Firm of heart, I fare

Impanoplied with azure diamond,

As hero of a quest Achernar lights,

To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames

That feed upon the sullen marl, and soar

To wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap

With tongues intolerably lengthening

That lick the blenchèd heavens. But there lives

(Secure as in a garden walled from wind)

A lonely flower by a placid well,

Midmost the flaring tumult of the flames,

That roar as roars a storm-possessed sea,

Impacable for ever; and within

That simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies

One drop of an incomparable dew

Which heals the parchèd weariness of kings,

And cures the wound of wisdom. I am page

To an emperor who reigns ten thousand years,

And through his labyrinthine palace-rooms,

Through courts and colonnades and balconies

Wherein immensity itself is mazed,

I seek the golden gorget he hath lost,

On which, in sapphires fine as orris-seed,

Are writ the names of his conniving stars

And friendly planets. Roaming thus, I hear

Like demon tears incessant, through dark ages,

The drip of sullen clepsydrae; and once

In every lustrum, hear the brazen clocks

Innumerably clang with such a sound

As brazen hammers make, by devils dinned

On tombs of all the dead; and nevermore

I find the gorget, but at length I find

A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner

Moans with a nameless torture, and would turn

To hell’s red rack as to a lilied couch

From that whereon they stretched him; and I find,

Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor,

The loveliest of all beloved slaves

My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side

A serpent rises, whiter than the root

Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown,

And gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem

Like drops of cold, congealing poison.

Hark!

What word was whispered in a tongue unknown,

In crypts of some impenetrable world?

Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy

I cannot share, though I am king of suns,

And king therewith of strong eternity,

Whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard

My gates, and slay the intruder? Silence loads

The wind of ether, and the worlds are still

To hear the word that flees mine audience.

In simultaneous ruin, al my dreams

Fall like a rack of fuming vapors raised

To semblance by a necromant, and leave

Spirit and sense unthinkably alone

Above a universe of shrouded stars

And suns that wander, cowled with sullen gloom,

Like witches to a Sabbath. . . . Fear is born

In crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled

Reaching the floor of space, and waits for wings

To lift it upward like a hellish worm

Fain for the flesh of cherubim. Red orbs

And eyes that gleam remotely as the stars,

But are not eyes of suns or galaxies,

Gather and throng to the base of darkness; flame

Behind some black, abysmal curtain burns,

Implacable, and fanned to whitest wrath

By raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom,

And make a brief and broken wind that moans

As one who rides a throbbing rack. There is

A Thing that crouches, worlds and years remote,

Whose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth

A note to shatter the donjon-keeps of time,

Or crack the sphere of crystal. All is dark

For ages, and my toiling heart-suspends

Its clamor as within the clutch of death

Tightening with tense, hermetic rigors. Then,

In one enormous, million-flashing flame,

The stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls,

And beam to their responding planets; time

Is mine once more, and armies of its dreams

Rally to that insuperable throne

Firmed on the zenith.

Once again I seek

The meads of shining moly I had found

In some anterior vision, by a stream

No cloud hath ever tarnished; where the sun,

A gold Narcissus, loiters evermore

Above his golden image. But I find

A corpse the ebbing water will not keep,

With eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell|

And felt the hissing coals; and all the flowers

About me turn to hooded serpents, swayed

By flutes of devils in lascivious dance

Meet for the nod of Satan, when he reigns

Above the raging Sabbath, and is wooed

By sarabands of witches. But I turn

To mountains guarding with their horns of snow

The source of that befoulèd rill, and seek

A pinnacle where none but eagles climb,

And they with failing pennons. But in vain

I flee, for on that pylon of the sky

Some curse hath turned the unprinted snow to flame—

Red fires that curl and cluster to my tread,

Trying the summit’s narrow cirque. And now

I see a silver python far beneath-

Vast as a river that a fiend hath witched

And forced to flow reverted in its course

To mountains whence it issued. Rapidly

It winds from slope to crumbling slope, and fills

Ravines and chasmal gorges, till the crags

Totter with coil on coil incumbent. Soon

It hath entwined the pinnacle I keep,

And gapes with a fanged, unfathomable maw

Wherein Great Typhon and Enceladus

Were orts of daily glut. But I am gone,

For at my call a hippogriff hath come,

And firm between his thunder-beating wings

I mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon

And see the earth, a spurnèd pebble, fall—

Lost in the fields of nether stars—and seek

A planet where the outwearied wings of time

Might pause and furl for respite, or the plumes

Of death be stayed, and loiter in reprieve

Above some deathless lily: for therein

Beauty hath found an avatar of flowers-

Blossoms that clothe it as a colored flame

From peak to peak, from pole to sullen pole,

And turn the skies to perfume. There I find

A lonely castle, calm, and unbeset

Save by the purple spears of amaranth,

And leafing iris tender-sworded. Walls

Of flushèd marble, wonderful with rose,

And domes like golden bubbles, and minarets

That take the clouds as coronal-these are mine,

For voiceless looms the peaceful barbican,

And the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft

To grin a welcome. So I leave awhile

My hippogriff to crop the magic meads,

And pass into a court the lilies hold,

And tread them to a fragrance that pursues

To win the portico, whose columns, carved

Of lazuli and amber, mock the palms

Of bright Aidennic forests-capitalled

With fronds of stone fretted to airy lace,

Enfolding drupes that seem as tawny clusters

Of breasts of unknown houris; and convolved

With vines of shut and shadowy-leavèd flowers

Like the dropt lids of women that endure

Some loin-dissolving ecstasy. Through doors

Enlaid with lilies twined luxuriously,

I enter, dazed and blinded with the sun,

And hear, in gloom that changing colors cloud,

A chuckle sharp as crepitating ice

Upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned

Who strive in Antenora. When my eyes

Undazzle, and the cloud of color fades,

I find me in a monster-guarded room,

Where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd

On walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts

Wherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite,

Pendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze,

Usurp the shadowy interval of lamps

That hang from ebon arches. Like a ripple

Borne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool

In fields where wide Cocytus flows his bound,

A crackling smile around that circle runs,

And all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me

With eyes that turn to glowing coals. A fear

That found no name in Babel, flings me on,

Breathless and faint with horror, to a hall

Within whose weary, self-reverting round,

The languid curtains, heavier than palls,

Unnumerably depict a weary king

Who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands

In lakes of emerald evening, or the field

Of dreamless poppies pure with rain. I flee

Onward, and all the shadowy curtains shake

With tremors of a silken-sighing mirth,

And whispers of the innumerable king,

Breathing a tale of ancient pestilence

Whose very words are vile contagion. Then

I reach a room where caryatids,

Carved in the form of voluptuous Titan women,

Surround a throne flowering ebony

Where creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne

There lolls a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk,

Tumid with all the rottenness of kings,

Overflows its arms with fold on creasèd fold

Obscenely bloating. Open-mouthed he leans,

And from his fulvous throat a score of tongues,

Depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers,

Drivel with phosphorescent slime, that runs

Down all his length of soft and monstrous folds,

And creeping among the flowers of ebony,

Lends them the life of tiny serpents. Now,

Ere the Horror ope those red and lashless slits

Of eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn

And follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom,

Lined by the statues with their mighty limbs,

Ends in golden-roofèd balcony

Sphering the flowered horizon.

Ere my heart

Hath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses,

I listen, from beyond the horizon’s rim,

A mutter faint as when the far simoom,

Mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth,

Wide as the waste, those wings of torrid night

That shake the doom of cities from their folds,

And musters in its van a thousand winds

That, with disrooted palms for besoms, rise,

And sweep the sands to fury. As the storm,

Approaching, mounts and loudens to the ears

Of them that toil in fields of sesame,

So grows the mutter, and a shadow creeps

Above the gold horizon like a dawn

Of darkness climbing zenith-ward. They come,

The Sabaoth of retribution, drawn

From all dread spheres that knew my trespassing,

And led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors

That owned my sway aforetime! Cockatrice,

Chimera, martichoras, behemoth,

Geryon, and sphinx, and hydra, on my ken

Arise as might some Afrit-builded city

Consummate in the lifting of a lash

With thunderous domes and sounding obelisks

And towers of night and fire alternate! Wings

Of white-hot stone along the hissing wind

Bear up the huge and furnace-hearted beasts

Of hells beyond Rutilicus; and things

Whose lightless length would mete the gyre of moons—

Born from the caverns of a dying sun

Uncoil to the very zenith, half-disclosed

From gulfs below the horizon; octopi

Like blazing moons with countless arms of fire,

Climb from the seas of ever-surging flame

That roll and roar through planets unconsumed,

Beating on coasts of unknown metals; beasts

That range the mighty worlds of Alioth rise,

Afforesting the heavens with mulitudinous horns

Amid whose maze the winds are lost; and borne

On cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras,

The shell-wrought towers of ocean-witches loom;

And griffin-mounted gods, and demons throned

On-sable dragons, and the cockodrills

That bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs;

And blue-faced wizards from the worlds of Saiph,

On whom Titanic scorpions fawn; and armies

That move with fronts reverted from the foe,

And strike athwart their shoulders at the shapes

The shields reflect in crystal; and eidola

Fashioned within unfathomable caves

By hands of eyeless peoples; and the blind

Worm-shapen monsters of a sunless world,

With krakens from the ultimate abyss,

And Demogorgons of the outer dark,

Arising, shout with dire multisonous clamors,

And threatening me with dooms ineffable

In words whereat the heavens leap to flame,

Advance upon the enchanted palace. Falling

For league on league before, their shadows light

And eat like fire the arnaranthine meads,

Leaving an ashen desert. In the palace

I hear the apes of marble shriek and howl,

And all the women-shapen columns moan,

Babbling with terror. In my tenfold fear,

A monstrous dread unnamed in any hall,

I rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings,

And in a trice the wizard palace reefs,

And spring to a single tower of flame,

Goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! Flown

Beyond the world upon that fleeing wind

I reach the gulf’s irrespirable verge,

Where fads the strongest storm for breath, and fall,

Supportless, through the nadir-plungèd gloom,

Beyond the scope and vision of the sun,

To other skies and systems.

In a world

Deep-wooded with the multi-colored fungi

That soar to semblance of fantastic palms,

I fall as falls the meteor-stone, and break

A score of trunks to atom powder. Unharmed

I rise, and through the illimitable woods,

Among the trees of flimsy opal, roam,

And see their tops that clamber hour by hour

To touch the suns of iris. Things unseen,

Whose charnel breath informs the tideless air

With spreading pools of fetor, follow me,

Elusive past the ever-changing palms;

And pittering moths with wide and ashen wings

Flit on before, and insects ember-hued,

Descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom

And quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard

Far off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown

Resounds at measured intervals of time,

Shaking the riper trees to dust, that falls

In clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me

Beneath an irised pall.

Now the palmettoes

Grow far apart, and lessen momently

To shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them

I see an empty desert, all ablaze

With ametrysts and rubies, and the dust

Of garnets or carnelians. On I roam,

Treading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me

With leaping waves of endless rutilance,

Whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom

Through which I wander blind as any Kobold;

Till underfoot the grinding sands give place

To stone or metal, with a massive ring

More welcome to mine ears than golden bells

Or tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom

Of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge

Of a broad black plain of adamant that reaches,

Level as windless water, to the verge

Of all the world; and through the sable plain

A hundred streams of shattered marble run,

And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze,

Like to the ruin of all the wars of time,

To plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts

Adown the gulfs eternal.

So I follow

Between a river of steel and a river of bronze,

With ripples loud and tuneless as the clash

Of a million lutes; and come to the precipice

From which they fall, and make the mighty sound

Of a million swords that meet a million shields,

Or din of spears and armour in the wars

Of half the worlds and eons. Far beneath

They fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void,

And vanish like a stream of broken stars

into the nether darkness; nor the gods

Of any sun, nor demons of the gulf,

Will dare to know what everlasting sea

Is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore

In one unebbing tide.

What nimbus-cloud

Or night of sudden and supreme eclipse,

Is on the suns opal? At my side

The rivers run with a wan and ghostly gleam

Through darkness falling as the night that falls

From spheres extinguished. Turning, I behold

Betwixt the sable desert and the suns,

The poisèd wings of all the dragon-rout,

Far-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold

Through stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds,

Upon my trail of terror! Griffins, rocs,

And sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged

After the ravin of dispeopled lands,

And harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell,

Hot from abominable feasts, and fain

To cool their beaks and talons in my blood—

All, all have gathered, and the wingless rear,

With rank on rank of foul, colossal Worms,

Makes horrent now the horizon. From the wan

I hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill

As tempests in a broken fane, and roar

Of sphinxes, like relentless toll of bells

From towers infernal. Cloud on hellish cloud

They arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind

Falls from them like the wind before the storm,

And in the wind my riven garment streams

And flutters in the face of all the void,

Even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost

On the pit s undying tempest. Louder grows

The thunder of the streams of stone and bronze—

Redoubled with the roar of torrent wings

Inseparable mingled. Scarce I keep

My footing in the gulfward winds of fear,

And mighty thunders beating to the void

In sea-like waves incessant; and would flee

With them, and prove the nadir-founded night

Where fall the streams of ruin. But when I reach

The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom

To measure with my gaze the dread descent,

I see a tiny star within the depths-

A light that stays me while the wings of doom

Convene their thickening thousands: for the star

increases, taking to its hueless orb,

With all the speed of horror-changèd dreams,

The light as of a million million moons;

And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed

It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face

That fills the void and fills the universe,

And bloats against the limits of the world

With lips of flame that open . . .

____________

Clark Ashton Smith -the Bard of Auburn (1893-1961)

Born on January 13th, 1893, in Long Valley, California, Clark Ashton Smith began to write at the age of eleven and was wholly self-educated.

At seventeen, he sold stories to The Black Cat, The Overland Monthly, and other magazines. His first collection of verse was published only two years later, and was hailed as the work of a prodigy and classed with Chatterton, Rossetti and Bryant.

By the age of thirty-five Smith focused on writing short stories and it was then, with publication in Weird Tales of “The End of the Story,” that he discovered his unique prose voice. The success of that story inspired others tales: all weird, macabre, fantastic or pseudo-scientific.

He has contributed poetry and fiction to over fifty magazines, including The Yale Review, The London Mercury, Munsey’s, Asia, Wings, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Philippine Magazine and the Mencken Smart Set and has been included in more than a dozen anthologies.

His early book-length publications were all printed in limited editions, with the result that they are all collectors’ items today. Four of his five volumes are entirely poetry: The Star-Treader, Odes and Sonnets, Ebony and Crystal, and SandalWood. The fifth is a pamphlet of tales: The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies. Later, in 1941, Out of Space and Time, a volume of stories selected by Smith himself, was released. It represented the best of his writings to that point.

Smith was also a painter and sculptor. His sculptures, which are especially powerful and fascinating, are cut largely from strange and unusual minerals and have been compared to pre-Columbian art.

Smith has had many careers: journalist, fruit picker and packer, wood chopper, typist, cement-mixer, gardener, hard-rock miner, and mucker and windlasser.

Smith’s lineage is the descendant of Norman-French counts and barons, of Lancashire baronets and Crusaders. One of his Ashton forebears was beheaded for his part in the famed Gunpowder Plot. His mother’s family, the Gaylords, came to New England in 1630—Huguenot Gaillards who fled persecution in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Smith’s father, Timeus Smith, was a world-traveler in his early years, but settled at last in Auburn, where he lived until his death in the 1930′s.

Readers of weird lore in our time are familiar with the famed Cthulhu mythology of H. P. Lovecraft, the mythology to which other writers added bits and portions; of those writers, none added so much as Clark Ashton Smith. Yet Smith found time to invent his own fantasy worlds: the fabled land of Averoigne, Zothique, Vulthoom, Hyperborea, and other lost worlds. His hyperborean settings have achieved a popularity equaled only by the lore of legend-haunted Arkham that was Lovecraft’s.

For a time it was said by many that he was the greatest living American writer of macabre and fantastic tales, and certainly the greatest living stylist in the genre.

Much of his work is being reissued by Hippocampus Press. Two examples are The Black Diamonds (a novel written at the age of 14) and The Last Oblivion (best of Smith’s fantastic poetry).

Clark Ashton Smith died in California in August, 1961, at the age of 68. His ashes were buried near where he lived, in Auburn, California, on a high hill.

January 2003, a historical marker was laid near the county courthouse that honors Smith. A large boulder from his original home site was also relocated to the same spot.

(Keef – a picture for Chaffyn)

(Modron)

Welcome To Thursday….

On The Menu:

The Links

The Lady of The Lake

Poetry Taliesin

Art :Jen Delyth

Some nice stuff, getting back to one of the main themes of Turfing, Celtic Culture. We have a delightful story from Wales (The Lady Of The Lake), and wonder filled Poetry from Taliesin, the ancient Prophet/Bard of Arthurian times…

It is a time of beauty, be part of it.

Enjoy,

Gwyllm

___________

The Links:

Research links obesity to religious-media use

No fowl play for four-legged chicken

Mansion fire tied to occult intruder?

Sounding out those voices that nobody else can hear

I am an independent (Anarchist actually) But I support this effort: Keep “Path to 9/11″ Propaganda Film Off The Air

__________

From Wales: The Lady of the Lake

High up in a hollow of the Black Mountains of South Wales is a lonely sheet of water called Llyn y Fan Fach.

In a farm not far from this lake there lived in the olden time a widow, with an only son whose name was Gwyn. When this son grew up, he was often sent by his mother to look after the cattle grazing. The place where the sweetest food was to be found was near the lake, and it was thither that the mild-eyed beasts wandered whenever they had their will. One day when Gwyn was walking along the banks of the mere, watching the kine cropping the short grass, he was astonished to see a lady standing in the clear smooth water, some distance from the land.

She was the most beautiful creature that he had ever set eyes upon, and she was combing her long hair with a golden comb, the unruffled surface of the lake serving her as a mirror.

He stood on the brink, gazing fixedly at the maiden, and straightway knew that he loved her. As he gazed, he unconsciously held out to her the barley-bread and cheese which his mother had given him before he left home. The lady gradually glided towards him, but shook her head as he continued to hold out his hand, and saying:

Cras dy fara, — O thou of the crimped bread,

Nid hawdd fy nala, — It is not easy to catch me,

she dived under the water, and disappeared from his sight.

He went home, full of sorrow, and told his mother of the beautiful vision which he had seen. As they pondered over the strange words used by the mysterious lady before she plunged out of sight, they came to the conclusion that there must have been some spell connected with the hard-baked bread, and the mother advised her son to take with him some “toes,” or unbaked dough, when next he went to the lake.

Next morning, long before the sun appeared above the crest of the mountain, Gwyn was by the lake with the dough in his hand, anxiously waiting for the Lady of the Lake to appear above the surface. The sun rose, scattering with his powerful beams the mists which veiled the high ridges around, and mounted high in the heavens. Hour after hour the youth watched the waters, but hour after hour there was nothing to be seen except the ripples raised by the breeze and the sunbeams dancing upon them. By the late afternoon despair had crept over the watcher, and he was on the point of turning his footsteps homeward when to his intense delight the lady again appeared above the sunlit ripples. She seemed even more beautiful than before, and Gwyn, forgetting in admiration of her fairness all that he had carefully prepared to say, could only hold out his hand, offering to her the dough. She refused the gift with a shake of the head as before, adding the words:

Llaith dy fara, — O thou of the moist bread,

Ti ni fynna. — I will not have thee.

Then she vanished under the water, but before she sank out of sight, she smiled upon the youth so sweetly and so graciously that his heart became fuller than ever of love. As he walked home slowly and sadly, the remembrance of her smile consoled him and awakened the hope that when next she appeared she would not refuse his gift. He told his mother what had happened, and she advised him, inasmuch as the lady had refused both hard-baked and unbaked bread, to take with him next time bread that was half-baked.

That night he did not sleep a wink, and long before the first twilight he was walking the margin of the lake with half-baked bread in his hand, watching its smooth surface even more impatiently than the day before.

The sun rose and the rain came, but the youth. heeded nothing as he eagerly strained his gaze over the water. Morning wore to afternoon, and afternoon to evening, but nothing met the eyes of the anxious watcher but the waves and the myriad dimples made in them by the rain.

(Herons)

The shades of night began to fall, and Gwyn was about to depart in sore disappointment, when, casting a last farewell look over the lake, he beheld some cows walking on its surface. The sight of these beasts made him hope that they would be followed by the Lady of the Lake, and, sure enough, before long the maiden emerged from the water. She seemed lovelier than ever, and Gwyn was almost beside himself with joy at her appearance. His rapture increased when he saw that she was gradually approaching the land, and he rushed into the water to meet her, holding out the half-baked bread in his hand. She, smiling, took his gift, and allowed him to lead her to dry land. Her beauty dazzled him, and for some time he could do nothing but gaze upon her. And as he gazed upon her he saw that the sandal on her right foot was tied in a peculiar manner. She smiled so graciously upon him that he at last recovered his speech and said, “Lady, I love you more than all the world besides and want you to be my wife.”

She would not consent at first. He pleaded, however, so earnestly that she at last promised to be his bride, but only on the following condition. “I will wed you,” she said, “and I will live with you until I receive from you three blows without a cause–tri ergyd diachos. When you strike me the third causeless blow I will leave you for ever.”

He was protesting that he would rather cut off his hand than employ it in such a way, when she suddenly darted from him and dived into the lake. His grief and disappointment was so sore that he determined to put an end to his life by casting himself headlong into the deepest water of the lake. He rushed to the top of a great rock overhanging the water, and was on the point of jumping in when he heard a loud voice saying, “Forbear, rash youth, and come hither.”

He turned and beheld on the shore of the lake some distance from the rock a hoary-headed old man of majestic mien, accompanied by two maidens. He descended from the rock in fear and trembling, and the old man addressed him in comforting accents.

“Mortal, thou wishest to wed one of these my daughters. I will consent to the union if thou wilt point out to me the one thou lovest.”

Gwyn gazed upon the two maidens, but they were so exactly similar in stature, apparel and beauty that he could not see the slightest difference between them. They were such perfect counterparts of each other that it seemed quite impossible to say which of them had promised to be his bride, and the thought that if perchance he fixed upon the wrong one all would be for ever lost nearly drove him to distraction. He was almost giving up the task in despair when one of the two maidens very quietly thrust her foot slightly forward. The motion, simple as it was, did not escape the attention of the youth, and looking down he saw the peculiar shoe-tie which he had observed on the sandal of the maiden who had accepted his half-baked bread. He went forward and boldly took hold of her hand.

“Thou hast chosen rightly,” said the old man, “be to her a kind and loving husband, and I will give her as a dowry as many sheep, cattle; goats, swine and horses as she can count of each without drawing in her breath. But remember, if thou strikest her three causeless blows, she shall return to me.”

Gwyn was overjoyed, and again protested that he would rather lop off all his limbs than do such a thing. The old man smiled, and turning to his daughter desired her to count the number of sheep she wished to have. She began to count by fives–one, two, three, four, five–one, two, three, four, five–one, two, three, four, five–as many times as she could until her breath was exhausted. In an instant as many sheep as she had counted emerged from the water. Then the father asked her to count the cattle she desired. One, two, three, four, five–one, two, three, four, five–one, two, three, four, five–she went on counting until she had to draw in her breath again. Without delay, black cattle to the number she had been able to reach came, lowing out of the mere. In the same way she counted the goats, swine and horses she wanted, and the full tale of each kind ranged themselves alongside the sheep and cattle. Then the old man and his other daughter vanished.

The Lady of the Lake and Gwyn were married amid great rejoicing, and took up their home at a farm named Esgair Llaethdy, where they lived for many years. They were as happy as happy can be, everything prospered with them, and three sons were born to them.

When the eldest boy was seven years old, there was a wedding some distance away, to which Nelferch–for that was the name the Lady of the Lake gave herself–and her husband were specially invited. When the day came, the two started and were walking through a field in which some of their horses were grazing, when Nelferch said that the distance was too great for her to walk and she would rather not go. “We must go,” said her husband, “and if you do not like to walk, you can ride one of these horses. Do you catch one of them while I go back to the house for the saddle and bridle.”

“I will,” she said. “At the same time bring me my gloves. I have forgotten them–they are on the table.”

He went back to the house, and when he returned with the saddle and bridle and gloves, he found to his surprise that she had not stirred from the spot where he had left her. Pointing to the horses, he playfully flicked her with the gloves and said, “Go, go (dos, dos).”

“This is the first causeless blow,” she said with a sigh, and reminded him of the condition upon which she had married him, a condition which he had almost forgotten.

Many years after, they were both at a christening. When all the guests were full of mirth and hilarity, Nelferch suddenly burst into tears and sobbed piteously. Gwyn tapped her on the shoulder and asked her why she wept. “I weep,” she said, “because this poor innocent babe is so weak and frail that it will have no joy in this world. Pain and suffering will fill all the days of its brief stay on earth, and in the agony of torture will it depart this life. And, husband, thou hast struck me the second causeless blow.”

After this, Gwyn was on his guard day and night not to do anything which could be regarded as a breach of their marriage covenant. He was so happy in the love of Nellerch and his children that he knew his heart would break if through some accident he gave the last and only blow which would take his dear wife from him. Some time after, the babe whose christening they had attended, after a short life of pain and suffering, died in agony, as Nelferch had foretold. Gwyn and the Lady of the Lake went to the funeral, and in the midst of the mourning and grief, Nelferch laughed merrily, causing all to stare at her in astonishment. Her husband was so shocked at her high spirits on so sad an occasion, that he touched her, saying, “Hush, wife, why dost thou laugh?”

“I laugh,” she replied, “because the poor babe is at last happy and free from pain and suffering.” Then rising she said, “The last blow has been struck. Farewell.”

She started off immediately towards Esgair Llaethdy, and when she arrived home, she called her cattle and other stock together, each by name. The cattle she called thus:

Mu wlfrech, moelfrech, — Brindled cow, bold freckled,

Mu olfrech, gwynfrech, — Spotted cow, white speckled;

Pedair cae tonn-frech, — Ye four field sward mottled.

Yr hen wynebwen, — The old white-faced,

A’r las Geigen, — And the grey Geigen

Gyda’r tarw gwyn — With the white bull

O lys y Brenin, — From the court of the King,

A’r llo du bach, — And thou little black calf,

Sydd ar y bach, — Suspended on the hook,

Dere dithe, yn iach adre! — Come thou also, whole again, home.

They all immediately obeyed the summons of their mistress. The little black calf, although it had been killed, came to life again, and descending from the hook, walked off with the rest of the cattle, sheep, goats, swine and horses at the command of the Lady of the Lake.

It was the spring of the year, and there were four oxen ploughing in one of the fields. To these she cried:

Y pedwar eidion glas, — Ye four grey oxen,

Sydd ar y ma’s, — That are on the field,

Deuweh chwithe — Come you also

Yn iach adre! — Whole and well home!

Away went the whole of the live stock with the Lady across the mountain to the lake from whence they had come, and disappeared beneath its waters. The only trace they left was the furrow made by the plough which the oxen drew after them into the lake; this remains to this day.

Gwyn’s heart was broken. He followed his wife to the lake, crushed with woe, and put an end to his misery by plunging into the depths of the cold water. The three sons distracted with grief, almost followed their father’s example, and spent most of their days wandering about the lake in the hope of seeing their lost mother once more. Their love was at last rewarded, for one day Nelferch appeared suddenly to them.

She told them that their mission on earth was to relieve the pain and misery of mankind. She took them to a place which is still called the Physician’s Dingle (Pant y Meddygon), where she showed them the virtues of the plants and herbs which grew there, and taught them the art of healing.

Profiting by their mother’s instruction, they became the most skilful physicians in the land. Rhys Grug, Lord of Llandovery and Dynevor Castles, gave them rank, lands and privileges at Myddfai for their maintenance in the practice of their art and for the healing and benefit of those who should seek their help. The fame of the Physicians of Myddfai was established’ over the whole of Wales, and continued for centuries among their descendants.

_________

Poetry: Taliesin (Shining Brow)

(Taliesin)

A Poem for the Wind

Guess who it is.

Created before the Flood.

A creature strong,

without flesh, without bone,

without veins, without blood,

without head and without feet.

It will not be older, it will not be younger,

than it was in the beginning.

There will not come from his design

fear or death.

He has no wants

from creatures.

Great God! the sea whitens

when it comes from the beginning.

Great his beauties,

the one that made him.

He in the field, he in the wood,

without hand and without foot.

Without old age, without age.

Without the most jealous destiny

and he is coeval

with the five periods of the five ages.

And also is older,

though there be five hundred thousand years.

And he is as wide

as the face of the earth,

and he was not born,

and he has not been seen.

He on sea, he on land,

he sees not, he is not seen.

He is not sincere,

he will not come when it is wished.

He on land, he on sea,

he is indispensable,

he is unconfined,

he is unequal.

He from four regions,

he will not be according to counsel.

He commences his journey

from above the stone of marble.

He is loud-voiced, he is mute.

He is uncourteous.

He is vehement, he is bold,

when he glances over the land.

He is mute, he is loud-voiced.

He is blustering.

Greatest his banner

on the face of the earth.

He is good, he is bad,

he is not bright,

he is not manifest,

for the sight does not see him.

He is bad, he is good.

He is yonder, he is here,

he will disorder.

He will not repair what he does

and be sinless.

He is wet, he is dry,

he comes frequently

from the heat of the sun and the coldness of the moon.

—-

Song Before the Sons of Llyr

I will adore the love-diffusing Lord of every kindred

The sovereign of hosts manifestly round the universe.

A battle at the feast over joyless beverage,

A battle against the sons of Llyr in Ebyr Henfelyn.

I saw the oppression of the tumult, and wrath and tribulation

The blades gleamed on the glittering helmets,

Against Brochwel of Powys, that loved my Awen.

A battle in the pleasant course early against Urien,

There falls about our feet blood on destruction.

Shall not my chair be defended from the cauldron of Cerridwen?

May my tongue be free in the sanctuary of the praise of Gogyrwen.

The praise of Gogyrwen is an oblation, which has satisfied

Them, with milk, and dew, and acorns.

Let us consider deeply before is heard confession,

That death is assuredly coming nearer and nearer.

And round the lands of Enlli the Dyfi has poured,

Raising the ships on the surface of the plain.

And let us call upon him that has made us,

That he may protect us from the wrath of the alien nation.

When the isle of Mona shall be called a pleasant field,

Happy be the mild ones, the affliciton of the Saxons.

I came to Deganwy to contend

With Maelgwn, the greatest in delinqencies,

I liberated my lord in the presence of the distributor.

Elphin, the sovereign of greatly aspiring ones.

There are to me three chairs regular, accordant,

And until doom they will continue with the singers.

I have been in the battle of Godeu, with Lleu and Gwydion,

They changed the form of the elementary trees and sedges.

I have been with Bran in Ireland.

I saw when Morddwydtyllon was killed.

I hears a meeting about the minstrels,

With the Gaels, devils, distillers.

From Penryn Wleth to Loch Reon

The Cymry are of one mind, bold heroes.

Deliver you the Cymry in tribulation.

Three races, cruel from true disposition,

Gael, Briton, and Roman,

Create discord and confusion.

And about the boundary of Prydein, beautiful its towns,

There is a battle against the chiefs above the mead-vessels.

In the festivals of the Distributor, who bestowed gifts upon me.

The chief astrologers received wonderful gifts.

Complete is my chair in Caer Siddi,

No one will be afflicted with disease or old age that may be in it.

Manawyddan and Pryderi know it.5

Three utterances, around the fire, will he sing before it,

And around its borders are the streams of the ocean.

And the fruitful fountain is above it,

The liquor Is sweeter than white wine.

And when I shall have worshipped you, Most High, before the sod,

May I be found in the covenant with You.

—

Juvenile Ornaments of Taliesin

I will address my Lord,

To consider the Awen.

What brought necessity

Before the time of Cerridwen.1

Primarily through my life

Poverty has been.

The wealthy monks

Why will they not speak to me?

Why will they not cause me to tremble?

One hour that I was not followed,

What disappearance of smoke?

why sang he evil?

What fountain breaks out

Above the covert of darkness?

When the reed is white,

When it is moonlight night.

Another was not sung,

It was shaken out,

When is apt to be forward

The noise of waves on the shore.

In the vengeance of the ocean,

A day will reach them.

When a stone is so heavy,

When a thorn is so sharp.

Knowest thou which is best?

Its base or its point,

Who caused a partition

Between man and frigidity?

Whose is the wholesomest sore?

The young or the old?

Kuowest thou what thou art

When thou art sleeping?

Whether a body or a soul,

Or a secresy [sic] of perception?

The ingenious minstrel,

Why does he not inform me?

Knowest thou where should be

The night waiting the passing of the day?

Knowest thou a sign,

How many leaves there are?

Who uplifted the mountain,

Before the elements fell?

Who supports-the structure

Of the earth for a habitation?

The soul of whom is complained of?

Who has seen it, who knows?

I wonder in books

That they know not truly

The soul, what is its seat.

What form its limbs,

Through what part it pours out,

What air it respires?

A war petulant,

A sinner endangered.

A wonder in mockery,

What were its dregs.

Which is the best intoxication,

Of mead or of bragget?

When their happiness

Was protected by the God of Trinity

Why should I utter a treatise,

Except of thee?

Who caused coin

Of current silver?

When is so current

A car so prickly;

Death having a foundation,

In every country is shared.

Death above our head,

Wide is its covering,

High above the canopy of heaven.

Man is oldest when he is born.

And is younger (and) younger continually.2

What is there to be anxious about,

Of the present attainment?

After a want of property,

Does it not make to us a shortness of life?

Enough of sadness,

The visitation of the grave.

And the One that made us,

From the supreme country,

Be he our God, and bring us

To him at the end!

NOTES

This is one of the many “question” poems ascribed to the young Taliesin, who displays his knowledge by asking questions of the reader; the same can be seen in Amergin’s famous poem from the Lebor Gabala Erenn.

1. Cerridwen: goddess of Awen, divine inspiration

2. Man… younger continually: an example of Celtic paradox, something found quite a bit in medieval Welsh literature.

(Tree Of Life)

Taliesin or Taliessin (c. 534–c.599) is the earliest poet of the Welsh language whose work has survived. His name is associated with the Book of Taliesin, a book of poems written down in the 10th century but which most scholars believed to date in large part from the 6th century. He is believed to have been the chief bard in the courts of at least three British kings of that era. In legend he attained the status “Chief Bard of Britain” and as such would have been responsible for judging poetry competitions among all the royal bards of Britain. A few of the marks awarded for poems are extant in the margins of manuscripts. Taliesin’s life was later the subject of 16th century mythological work by Elis Gruffydd, who may have relied on existing oral tradition about him.

On The Music Box: Parachute Woman~The Rolling Stones…

So, I survived the changes wrought on the old birthday, and had a great time to boot! Good friends came over, and we ate and drank together until late in the evening. I heard from several friends as well, with an especially kind note from Will Penna.

Friends are the jewels in our life, I swear, I swear. A big thank you to all!

Rowan headed off to school today, the summer has come to a crashing close. He is just 1/2 inch shorter than me, and looks like he will pass me this year coming. His hair comes down to the bottom of his back when wet, but being so curly, it sits just below his shoulders. This was a good summer for him, he learned a lot, and grew in so many directions.

Todays Entry is an interesting one, ancient poetry (actually it was translated as prose) by Sextus Propertius. Take your time, and enjoy. He was very influencial, and his work is worth going over again and again. It still sings after 20+ centuries….

On The Menu:

The Links

“Cynthia: The Love Elegies”

Ancient Roman Erotic Art

Enjoy!

Gwyllm

________________

The Links:

Study uncovers ‘chimp cross code’

Mao Zedong: the God of China

Back From the Dead

Treatment with ‘friendly’ bacteria could counter autism in children

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Cynthia: The Love Elegies – Sextus Propertius

After A Night’s Drinking

Just as Ariadne, the girl of Cnossus, lay on the naked shore, fainting, while Theseus’s ship vanished; or as Andromeda, Cepheus’s child, lay recumbent in her first sleep free now of the harsh rock; or like one fallen on the grass by Apidanus, exhausted by the endless Thracian dance; Cynthia seemed like that to me, breathing the tender silence, her head resting on unquiet hands, when I came, deep in wine, dragging my drunken feet, and the boys were shaking the late night torches.

My senses not totally dazed yet, I tried to approach her, pressing gently against the bed: and though seized by a twin passion, here Amor and there Bacchus, both cruel gods, urging me on, to attempt to slip my arm under her as she lay there, and lifting my hand snatch eager kisses, I was still not brave enough to trouble my mistress’s rest, fearing her proven fierceness in quarreling, but, frozen there, clung to her, gazing intently, like Argus on Io’s newly horned brow.

Now I freed the garlands from my forehead, and set them on your temples: now I delighted in playing with your loose hair, furtively slipping apples into your open hands, bestowing every gift on your ungrateful sleep, repeated gifts breathed from my bowed body. And whenever you, stirring, gave an infrequent sigh, I was transfixed, believing false omens, some vision bringing you strange fears, or another forced you to be his, against your will.

At last the moon, gliding by distant windows, the busy moon with lingering light, opened her closed eyes, with its tender rays. Raised on one elbow on the soft bed, she cried: ‘Has another’s severity driven you out, closing her doors, bringing you back to my bed at last? Alas for me, where have you spent the long hours of this night, that was mine, you, worn out now, as the stars are put away? O you, cruel to me in my misery, I wish you the same long-drawn out nights as those you endlessly offer to me. Till a moment ago, I staved off sleep, weaving the purple threads, and again, wearied, with the sound of Orpheus’s lyre. Until Sleep impelled me to sink down under his delightful wing I was moaning gently to myself, alone, all the while, for you, delayed so long, so often, by a stranger’s love. That was my last care, amongst my tears.’

—

Cynthia’s Infidelities

Cynthia I’ve often feared great pain from your fickleness, yet I still did not expect treachery. See with what trials Fortune drags me down! Yet you still respond slowly to my anxiety, and can lift your hands to last night’s tresses, and examine your looks in endless idleness, and go on decking out your breast with Eastern jewels, like a beautiful woman preparing to meet a new lover.

Calypso didn’t feel like that when Odysseus, the Ithacan, left her, when she wept long ago to the empty waves: she sat mourning for many days with unkempt hair, pouring out speech to the cruel brine, and though she would never see him again, she still grieved, thinking of their long happiness. Hypsipyle, troubled, didn’t stand like that in the empty bedroom when the winds snatched Jason away: Hypsipyle never felt pleasure again after that, melting, once and for all, for her Haemonian stranger. Alphesiboea was revenged on her own brothers for her husband Alcmaeon, and passion broke the bonds of loving blood. Evadne, famous for Argive chastity, died in the pitiful flames, raised high on her husband’s pyre.

Yet none of these alters your existence, that you might also be known in story. Cynthia, stop now revoking your words by lying, and refrain from provoking forgotten gods. O reckless girl, there’ll be more than enough grief at my misfortune if it chances that anything dark happens to you! Long before the love for you changes in my heart, rivers will flow out of the vast ocean, and the year reverse its seasons: be whatever you wish, except another’s.

Don’t let those eyes appear so worthless to you through which your treachery was so often believed by me! You swore by them, if you’d been false in anything, they’d vanish away when your fingers touched them. And can you raise them to the vast sun, and not tremble, aware of your guilty sins? Who forced your pallor of shifting complexion, and drew tears from unwilling eyes? Those are the eyes I now die for, to warn lovers like me: ‘No charms can ever be safely trusted!’

—

His Mistress’s Harshness

First you must grieve, many times, at your mistress’s wrongs towards you, often requesting something, often being rejected. And often chew your innocent fingernails in your teeth, and tap the ground nervously with your foot, in anger!

My hair was drenched with scent: no use: nor my departing feet, delaying, with measured step. Magic plants are worth nothing here, nor a Colchian witch of night, nor herbs distilled by Perimede’s hand, since we see no cause or visible blow from anywhere: still, it’s a dark path so many evils come by.

The patient doesn’t need a doctor, or a soft bed: it’s not the wind or weather hurts him. He walks about – and suddenly his funeral startles his friends. Whatever love is it’s unforeseen like this. What deceitful fortune-teller have I not been victim of, what old woman has not pondered my dreams ten times?

If anyone wants to be my enemy, let him desire girls: and delight in boys if he wants to be my friend. You go down the tranquil stream in a boat in safety: how can such tiny waves from the bank hurt you? Often his mood alters with a single word: she will scarcely be satisfied with your blood.

—-

Sinful Cynthia

Is it true all Rome talks about you, Cynthia, and you live in unveiled wantonness? Did I expect to deserve this? I’ll deal punishment, faithless girl, and my breeze will blow somewhere else. I’ll find one of all the deceitful women who wishes to be made famous by my song, who won’t taunt me with such harsh ways: she’ll insult you: ah, so long loved, you’ll weep too late.

Now my anger’s fresh: now’s the time to go: if pain returns, believe me, love will be back. The Carpathian waves don’t change in the northerlies as fast, or the black storm cloud, in a shifting southwest gale, as lovers’ anger alters at a word. While you can take your neck from the unjust yoke. Then you won’t grieve at all, except for the very first night: all love’s evils are slight, if you are patient.

But, by the gentle laws of our lady Juno, mea vita, stop hurting yourself on purpose. It’s not just the bull that hits out with a curving horn at its aggressor, even a sheep, it’s true, opposes an enemy. I won’t rip the clothes off your lying flesh, or break open your shut doors, or tear at your plaited hair in anger, or dare to bruise you with my hard fists. Let some ignoramus look for quarrels as shabby as these, a man whose head no ivy ever encircled. I’ll go write: what your lifetime won’t rub out: ‘Cynthia, strong in beauty: Cynthia light of word.’ Trust me, though you defy scandal’s murmur, this verse, Cynthia, will make you pale.

—-

The Spartan Girls

I admire many of the rules of your training, Sparta, but most of all at the great blessings derived from the girls’ gymnasia, where a girl can exercise her body, naked, without blame, among wrestling men, when the swift-thrown ball eludes the grasp, and the curved rod sounds against the ring, and the woman is left panting at the furthest goal, and suffers bruises in the hard wrestling.

Now she fastens near the glove the thongs that her wrists delight in, now whirls the discuss’s flying weight in a circle, and now her hair sprinkled with hoar frost, she follows her father’s dogs over the long ridges of Taygetus, beats the ring with her horses, binds the sword to her white flank, and shields the virgin head with hollow bronze, like the crowd of warlike Amazons who bathe bare-breasted in Thermodon’s stream; or as Helen, on the sands of Eurotas, between Castor and Pollux, one to be victor in boxing, the other with horses: with naked breasts she carried weapons, they say, and did not blush with her divine brothers there.

So Sparta’s law forbids lovers to keep apart, and lets each man walk by her side in the crossways, and there is no fear for her, no guardians for captive girls, no dread of bitter punishment from a stern husband. You yourself can speak about things without a go-between: no long waiting rebuffs you. No Tyrian garments beguile roving eyes, no affected toying with perfumed hair.

But my love goes surrounded by a great crowd, without the slimmest chance of getting an oar in: and you can’t come upon how to act, or what words to ask with: the lover is in a blind alley.

Rome, if you’d only follow the rules and wrestling of Sparta, you’d be dearer to me for that blessing.

——

Sextus Propertius (50—16 B.C.), the greatest of the elegiac poets of Rome, was born of a well-to-do Umbrian family at or near Asisium (Assisi), the birthplace also of the famous St. Francis. We learn from Ovid that Propertius was his senior, but also his friend and companion; and that he was third in the sequence of elegiac poets, following Gallus, who was born in 69 B.C., and Tibullus, and immediately preceding Ovid himself, who was born in 43 B.C. We shall not then be far wrong in supposing that he was born about 50 B.C. His early life was full of misfortune. He lost his father prematurely; and after the battle of Philippi and the return of Octavian to Rome, Propertius, like Virgil and Horace, was deprived of his estate to provide land for the veterans, but, unlike them, he had no patrons at court, and he was reduced from opulence to comparative indigence. The widespread discontent which the confiscations caused provoked the insurrection generally known as the bellum frerusinum from its only important incident, the fierce and fatal resistance of Perugia, which deprived the poet of another of his relations, who was killed by brigands while making his escape from the lines of Octavian. The loss of his patrimony, however, thanks no doubt to his mother’s providence, did not prevent Propertius from receiving a superior education. After, or it may be, during its completion he and she left Umbria for Rome; and there, about the year 34 B.C., he assumed the garb of manly freedom. He was urged to take up a pleader’s profession; but, like Ovid, he found in letters and gallantry a more congenial pursuit. Soon afterwards he made the acquaintance of Lycinna, about whom we know little beyond the fact that she subsequently excited the jealousy of Cynthia, and was subjected to all her powers of persecution (vexandi). This passing fancy was succeeded by a serious attachment, the object of which was the famous ” Cynthia.” Her real name was Hostia, and she was a native of Tibur. She was a courtesan of the superior class, somewhat older than Propertius, but, as it seems, a woman of singular beauty and varied accomplishments. Her own predilections led her to literature; and in her society Propertius found the intellectual sympathy and encouragement which were essential for the development of his powers. Her character, as depicted in the poems, is not an attractive one; but she seems to have entertained a genuine affection for her lover. The intimacy began in 28 and lasted till 23 B.C. These six years must not, however, be supposed to have been a period of unbroken felicity. Apart from minor disagreements an infidelity on Propertius’s part excited the deepest resentment in Cynthia; and he was banished for a year. The quarrel was made up about the beginning of 25 B.C.; and soon after Propertius published his first book of poems and inscribed it with the name of his mistress. Its publication placed him in the first rank of contemporary poets, and amongst other things procured him admission to the literary circle of Maecenas. The intimacy was renewed; but the old enchantment was lost. Neither Cynthia nor Propertius was faithful to the other. The mutual ardour gradually cooled; motives of prudence and decorum urged the discontinuance of the connexion; and disillusion changed insensibly to disgust. Although this separation might have been expected to be final, it is not certain that it was so. It is true that Cynthia, whose health appears to have been weak, does not seem to have survived the separation long. But a careful study of the seventh poem of the last book, in which Propertius gives an account of a dream of her which he had after her death, leads us to the belief that they were once more reconciled, and that in her last illness Cynthia left to her former lover the duty of carrying out her wishes with regard to the disposal of her effects and the arrangements of her funeral. Almost nothing is known of the subsequent history of the poet. He was alive in 16 B.C., as some allusions in the last book testify. And two passages in the letters of the younger Pliny mention a descendant of the poet, one Passennus Paullus. Now in 18 B.C. Augustus carried the Leges Juliae, which offered inducements to marriage and imposed disabilities upon the celibate. Propertius then may have been one of the first to comply with the new enactments. He would thus have married and had at least one child, from whom the contemporary of Pliny was descended.

Propertius had a large number of friends and acquaintances, chiefly literary, belonging to the circle of Maecenas. Amongst these may be mentioned Virgil, the epic poet Ponticus, Bassus (probably the iambic poet of the name), and at a later period Ovid. We hear nothing of Tibullus, nor of Horace, who also never mentions Propertius. This reciprocal silence is probably significant. In person Propertius was pale and thin, as was to be expected in one of a delicate and even sickly constitution. He was very careful about his personal appearance, and paid an almost foppish attention to dress and gait. He was of a somewhat voluptuous and self-indulgent temperament, which shrank from danger and active exertion. He was anxiously sensitive about the opinion of others, eager for their sympathy and regard, and, in general, impressionable to their influence. His over-emotional nature passed rapidly from one phase of feeling to another; but the more melancholy moods predominated. A vein of sadness runs through his poems, sometimes breaking out into querulous exclamation, but more frequently venting itself in gloomy reflections and prognostications. He had fits of superstition which in healthier moments he despised.

The poems of Propertius, as they have come down to us, consist of four books containing 4046 lines of elegiac verse. The first book, or Cynthia, was published separately and early in the poet’s literary life. It may be assigned to 25 B.C. The dates of the publication of the rest are uncertain, but none of them was published before 24 B.C., and the last not before 16 B.C. The unusual length of the second one (1402 lines) has led Lachmann and other critics to suppose that it originally consisted of two books, and they have placed the beginning of the third book at ii. 10, a poem addressed to Augustus, thus making five books, and this arrangement has been accepted by several editors.

The subjects of the poems are threefold: (I) amatory and personal, mostly regarding Cynthia—seventy-two (sixty Cynthia elegies), of which the last book contains three; (2) political and social, on events of the day—thirteen, including three in the last book; (3) historical and antiquarian—six, of which five are in the last book.

The writings of Propertius are noted for their difficulty and their disorder. The workmanship is unequal, curtness alternating with redundance, and carelessness with elaboration. A desultory sequence of ideas, an excessive vagueness and indirectness of expression, a peculiar and abnormal latinity, a constant tendency to exaggeration, and an immoderate indulgence in learned and literary allusions—all these are obstacles lying in the way of a study of Propertius. But ‘those who have the will and the patience to surmount them will find their trouble well repaid. For power and range of imagination, for freshness and vividness of conception, for truth and originality of presentation, few Roman poets can compare with him when he is at his best. And this is when he is carried out of himself, when the discordant qualities of his genius are, so to say, fused together by the electric spark of an immediate inspiration. His vanity and egotism are undeniable, but they are redeemed by his fancy and his humour.

Two of his merits seem to have impressed the ancients themselves. The first is most obvious in the scenes of quiet description and emotion. in whose presentation he particularly excels. Softness of outline, warmth of colouring, a fine and almost voluptuous feeling for beauty of every kind, and a pleading and melancholy tenderness—such were the elements of the spell which he threw round the sympathies of his reader, and which his compatriots expressed by the vague but expressive word bland itia. His poetic facundia, or command of striking and appropriate language, is noticeable still. Not only is his vocabulary very extensive, but his employment of it extraordinarily bold and unconventional. New settings of use, idiom and construction continually surprise us, and, in spite of occasional harshness, secure for his style an unusual freshness and freedom. His handling of the elegiac couplet, and especially of its second line, deserves especial recognition. It is vigorous, varied and even picturesque. In the matter of the rhythms, caesuras and elisions which it allows, the metrical treatment is much more severe than that of Catullus, whose elegiacs are comparatively rude and barbarous; but it is not bound hand and foot, like the Ovidian distich, in a formal and conventional system. An elaborate symmetry is observable in the construction of many of his elegies, and this has tempted critics to divide a number of them into strophes.

Propertius’s poems bear evident marks of the study of his predecessors, both Greek and Latin, and of the influence of his contemporaries. He tells us himself that Callimachus and Philetas were his masters (iii. I, seq.), and that it was his ambition to be the Roman Callimachus (iv. I, 64). But, as Teuffel has said, his debt to these writers is chiefly a formal one. Even into his mythological learning he breathes a life to which these dry scholars are strangers. We can trace obligations to Meleager, Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius and other Alexandrines, and amongst earlier writers to Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus and others. Propertius’s influence upon his successors was considerable. There is hardly a page of Ovid which does not show obligations to his poems, while other writers made a more sparing use of his stories.

A just appreciation of the genius and the writings of Propertius is made sensibly more difficult by the condition in which his works have come down to us. Some poems have been lost; others are fragmentary; and many are more or less disfigured by corruption and disarrangement. The manuscripts on which we have to rely are both late and deeply interpolated. Thus the restoration and interpretation of the poems is one of peculiar delicacy and difficulty.

(Alchemical Landscape – Laurel Price)

Tis the 5th of September and school is coming down the pike for many a kid….

On the Menu

The Links

God As Consciousness Without An Object – John Lilly

Poetry: Lady Mary Wroth

Lady Mary Wroth, an exception in her time with the most exquisite of poesy…. This edition is dedicated to her, and her works…

Gwyllm

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The Links:

The Twelve Monkeys

Psychologist who talks with the angels

Doctor leads time travel research

Paintings can be heard as well as seen, study shows

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GOD AS CONSCIOUSNESS-WITHOUT-AN-OBJECT

by John C. Lilly

Within the last two years I have come to know a man and his work who run counter to my own simulations and by whom I am influenced beyond previous influences. In 1936, Franklin Merrell-Wolff wrote a journal that was later published as Pathways Through to Space. In 1970 he wrote another book called The Philosophy 0f Consciousness-Without-an-Object.1 In studying his works, and the chronicle of his personal experience I arrived at some places new for me.

Wolff had been through the Vedanta training, through the philosophy of Shankara; he knew the philosophy of Kant and others of the Western world; and he spent twenty-five years working to achieve a state of Nirvana, Enlightenment, Samadhi, and so forth. In 1936 he succeeded in this transformation and with varying success maintained it over the subsequent years. He is an amazingly peaceful man now in his eighties. Meeting him, I felt the influence of his transformation, of his recognitions, of some sort of current flowing through me. I felt a peace which I have not felt in my own searchings; a certain peculiar kind of highly indifferent contentment took place, and yet the state was beyond contentment, beyond the usual human happiness, beyond bliss, beyond pleasure. This is the state that he calls the state of “High Indifference.” He experienced this at his third level of recognition, beyond Nirvana, beyond Bliss. His perceptions in this state are recounted in The Philosophy of Consciousness-Without-an-Object.

In his chapter “Aphorisms on Consciousness-With- out-an-Object” Merrell-Wolff expresses his discoveries in a series of sutra-like sentences, The first one is: “Consciousness-without-an-object is.” The culmination of the series is that Consciousness-without-an-object is SPACE. This is probably the most abstract and yet the most satifying way of looking at the universe which I have come across anywhere. If one pursues this type of thinking and feeling and gets into the introceptive spaces, the universe originates on a ground, a substrate of Consciousness-Without-an-Object: the basic fabric of the universe beyond space, beyond time, beyond topology, beyond matter, beyond energy, is Consciousness. Consciousness without any form, without any reification, without any realization.

In a sense, Merrell-Wolff is saying that the Star Maker is Consciousness-Without-an-Object. He does not give hints to how objects are created out of Consciousness-Without-an-Object. He does not give hints to how an individual consciousness is formed out of Consciousness-Without-an-Object. The details of these processes were not his primary interest. His primary interest apparently was in arriving at a basic set of assumptions upon which all else can be built. In this sense he is like Einstein, bringing the relativity factor into the universe out of Newton’s absolutes.

If we are a manifestation of Consciousness-Without-an-Object, and if, as Wolff says, we can go back into Consciousness-Without-an-Object, then my rather pessimistic view that we are merely noisy animals is wrong. If there is some way that we can work our origins out of the basic ground of the universe, bypassing our ideas that the evolutionary process generates us by generating our brains–if there is some contact, some connection between us and Consciousness-Without-an-Object and the Void, and if we can make that contact, that connection known to ourselves individually, as Wolff claims, then there is possible far more hope and optimism than I ever believed in the past. If what he says is true, we have potential far beyond that I have imagined we could possibly have. If what he says is true, we can be and realize our being as part of the Star Maker.

It may be that Wolff, like all the rest of us, is doing an over-valuation of his own abstractions. It may be that he is generating, i.e., seif-metaprogramming, states of his own mind and those of others in which the ideals of the race are reified as thought objects, as programs, as realities, as states of consciousness. It may be that this is all we can do. If this is all we can do, maybe we had better do it and see if there is anything beyond this by doing it.

If by getting into a state of High Indifference, of Nirvana, Samadhi, or Satori, then one can function as a teaching example to others and it may be that if a sufficiently large number of us share this particular set of metaprograms we may be able to survive our own alternative dichotomous spaces of righteous wrath. If righteous wrath must go as a non-surviving program for the human species, then it may be that High Indifference is a reasonable alternative.

Setting up a hierarchy of states of consciousness with High Indifference at the top, Nirvana next, Satori next, Samadhi next, and Ananda at the bottom is an interesting game, especially when one becomes capable of moving through all these spaces and staying a sufficient time in each to know it.

This may be a better game than killing our neighbors because they do not believe in our simulations of God. At least those who espouse these states claim that these states are above any other human aspiration; that once one has experienced them, he is almost unfit for wrath, for pride, for arrogance, for power over others, for group pressure exerted either upon oneself or upon others. One becomes fit only for teaching these states to those who are ready to learn them. The bodhisattva vow is no longer necessary for those who have had direct experience. One becomes the bodhisattva without the vow. One becomes Buddha without being Buddha.

One becomes content with the minimum necessities for survival on the planetside trip; one cuts back on his use of unnecessary articles-machines, gadgets, and devices. He no longer needs motion pictures, television, dishwashers, or other luxuries. One no longer needs much of what most people value above all else. One no longer needs the excitement of war. One no longer needs to be a slave to destructive thoughts or deeds. One no longer needs to organize.

Krishnamurti’s story of the Devil is pertinent here. Laura Huxley furnished me with a copy of it. The Devil was walking down the street with a friend, and they saw a man pick something up, look at it carefully and put it in his pocket. The friend said to the Devil, “What’s that?” The Devil said, “He has found a bit of the truth.” The friend said, “Isn’t that bad for your business?” The Devil said, “No, I am going to arrange to have him organize it.”

So it behooves us not to organize either the methods or the states which Wolff describes so well. It is better not to try to devise groups, techniques, churches, places, or other forms of human organization to encourage, foster, or force upon others these states. If these states are going to do anything with humanity, they must “creep by contagion,” as it were, from one individual to the next.

God as Consciousness-Without-an-Object, if real, will be apperceived and introcepted by more and more of us as we turn toward the inner realities within each of us. If God as Consciousness-Without-an-Object inhabits each of us, we eventually will see this. We will become universally aware. We will realize consciousness as being everywhere and eternal. We will realize that Consciousness-Without-an-Object in each of us is prejudiced and biased because it has linked up with a human brain.

REFERENCE

1. Merrell-Wolif, Franklin, Pathways Through to Space, and The Philosophy of Consciousness- Without-an-Object, both New York: Julian-Press, 1973.

Dr. John C. Lilly, M.D., Simulations of God

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Poetry: Lady Mary Wroth

Fie tedious Hope, why doe you still rebell?

Fie tedious Hope, why doe you still rebell?

Is it not yet enough you flatter’d me,

But cunningly you seeke to use a Spell

How to betray; must these your Trophees bee?

I look’d from you farre sweeter fruite to see,

But blasted were your blossomes when they fell:

And those delights expected from hands free,

Wither’d and dead, and what seemd blisse proves hell.

No Towne was won by a more plotted slight,

Then I by you, who may my fortune write,

In embers of that fire which ruin’d me:

Thus Hope your falshood calls you to be tryde,

You’r loth, I see, the tryall to abide;

Prove true at last, and gaine your liberty.

—-

Flye hence, O Joy, no longer heere abide

Flye hence, O Joy, no longer heere abide,

Too great thy pleasures are for my despaire

To looke on, losses now must prove my fare;

Who not long since on better foode relide.

But foole, how oft had I Heav’ns changing spi’de

Before of mine owne fate I could have care:

Yet now past time I can too late beware,

When nothings left but sorrowes faster ty’de.

While I enjoyd that Sunne, whose sight did lend

Me joy, I thought that day could have no end:

But soone a night came cloath’d in absence darke;

Absence more sad, more bitter then is gall,

Or death, when on true Lovers it doth fall;

Whose fires of love, disdaine reasts poorer sparke

—

You blessed shades, which give me silent rest

You blessed shades, which give me silent rest,

Witnes but this when death hath clos’d mine eyes,

And separated me from earthly tyes;

Being from hence to higher place adrest.

How oft in you I have laine heere opprest?

And have my miseries in wofull cryes

Deliver’d forth, mounting up to the Skyes?

Yet helplesse, backe return’d to wound my brest.

Which wounds did but strive how to breed more harm

To me, who can be cur’d by no one charme

But that of Love, which yet may me releeve;

If not, let Death my former paines redeeme,

My trusty friends, my faith untouch’d, esteeme,

And witnesse I could love, who so could grieve.

Return to List

—

How fast thou fliest, O Time, on Loves swift wings

How fast thou fliest, O Time, on Loves swift wings,

To hopes of joy, that flatters our desire:

Which to a Lover still contentment brings;

Yet when we should injoy, thou dost retire.

Thou stay’st thy pace (false Time) from our desire

When to our ill thou hast’st with Eagles wings:

Slow only to make us see thy retire

Was for Despaire, and harme, which sorrow brings.

O slake thy pace, and milder passe to Love,

Be like the Bee, whose wings she doth but use

To bring home profit; masters good to prove,

Laden, and weary, yet againe pursues.

So lade thy selfe with hony of sweet joy,

And do not me the Hive of Love destroy.

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Lady Mary Wroth

Lady Mary Wroth was born Mary Sidney, on October 18, 1587, into a family connected to the royal courts of Elizabeth I and James I. She was the daughter of Sir Robert Sidney, later Earl of Leicester, and Lady Barbara Gamage. She is best known as the first English woman to write a full-length prose romance and a sonnet sequence, departing from traditional “women’s” genres such as epitaph and translation. Her work helped to open up the English literary world to women, and allowed female writers to move beyond pious subject matter (Beilin 212).

Like other girls of her day, Wroth did not attend school. But unlike most, she was taught at home by private tutors. Her mother was known as a patron of the arts, and in 1973 a previously unknown manuscript containing 66 poems written by her father was discovered. Wroth was also heavily influenced by her father’s literary siblings. Her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, was famous as a soldier, statesman and poet, and her aunt, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, both composed her own and revised and edited her brother’s works.

In contrast to Mary Wroth’s literary family, her husband, Sir Robert Wroth, whom she married in 1604, had little to do with the arts. He preferred hunting and the life of the court. Husband and wife often clashed, though as much as Wroth grew to detest Sir Robert, his friendship with the King brought her into a close contact with Queen Anne (Roberts, Dictionary of Literary Biography 121: 297). She performed with the Queen in court masques early in James’ reign, including Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, in January of 1605. Jonson even dedicated The Alchemist (1612) to Wroth.

As a poet, Wroth reversed the customary gender roles of the sonnet sequence. The complaining Petrarchan lover attempting to court a cool, unwilling woman is replaced, in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, by a woman who wrestles with her own emotions and with the absence of her beloved. In Wroth’s own life the role of Amphilanthus seems to have been played by her first cousin, William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke, the father of two of Wroth’s three children. In contrast to Wroth’s husband, Herbert was a renowned patron of the arts. Sir Robert Wroth seems either to have been ignorant of, or untroubled by, this liaison; he named Pembroke as an executor of his will, and referred to Wroth as a “deere and loving wife.” After Robert Wroth’s death in 1614, Mary was left heavily in debt. She could not longer afford the lavish expenses attendance at court demanded, and she was plagued by vicious rumours, which led eventually to her fall from favour with Queen Anne. For a time Wroth lived in Pembroke’s London home.

Turning to writing after her alienation from the court, Wroth produced Urania, a pastoral romance containing thinly veiled references to court figures. To this work she appended the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The book was dedicated to another friend and literary patron, Pembroke’s sister-in-law, Susan (Vere) Herbert, Countess of Montgomery. One reader of the Urania, Sir Edward Denny, took the romance to contain an account of his own infidelities, and his complaints to the King succeeded in having Wroth’s book removed from circulation. The controversy did not end Wroth’s writing career, however, and she produced a pastoral tragicomedy, Love’s Victory, in the mid 1620s. Wroth spent the last years of her life in seclusion, and died in 1653, at the age of 66.

( Man Ray~Louise Brooks…. Screen Beauty of Early Cinema…)

Today being the 4th of September, dear to Hermes…

On the Menu:

The Links

On The Personal Side of Things…

Poetry: Robert Graves

Photography: Louise Brooks As Subject…

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The Links:

Stolen dinosaur fossils recovered

Stone by stone, craftsmen build medieval-style castle

Absolve Me!

Scientists pinpoint polar catastrophe

_________________

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On The Personal Side Of Things…

PK Graduates!

Our dear friend PK graduated from Oriental Medical School… Cramming 4 years into 3, while maintaining a job. I don’t know how he did it. He is now known as ‘Doctor Needles’ due to his drive to start up his practice with Acupuncture…

It was an amazing graduation, excellent speakers, wonderfully presented and heartfelt.

We got to hang with him through the evening afterwards, and watch the celebration at the graduating party. Though we left early, we heard PK ended up dancing with some 20 young ladies at the same time… Must of been his Indian charm, or maybe his imitation of Krishna which drove the young ladies wild!

Anyways… a big congratulations to Dr. Needles, and may he ever find the right meridian…. 8o)

Visiting The Folks….

We got to visit with Rowan’s Grandfather and Grandmother (my Dad n’ Step Mum) up in Washington. It was a quick visit, but we will be back there soon.

They recently moved into their new house…. ever the gypsies, they have moved some 3 times over the last 2 years! Now, my Father isn’t a spring chicken, but he is up for anything it seems. He is starting to slow down, and he has problems with his hips. I think he finds this a bit much at times, seeing as he jogged until he was 72 and skiied until he was 74. He ran 5 – 10 miles daily from his 50th birthday on. I should be so determined!

He keeps active with his religious studies, and taking care around the house, and my Step-Mum Gloria, really is a fantastic cook, having studied in Italy. She is also an accomplished artist in several areas. She still amazes me after all these years.

They are celebrating their 42nd year of marriage today, which coincidentially happens to be my birthday. It is an odd, conjunction, but somehow it works fine for us.

This is kind of a banner year, I am now on the slippery slope to sixty. I know it is an artifice, but it is fascinating (at least for yours truly) the changes wrought by another year of being exposed to the cosmic winds. Irridated from above, honed by the atmosphere, drenched in the industrial chemical stew we call the modern world, it is always a surprise to make it another year.

When younger, I honestly didn’t expect to make it to 30. At times, that seemed a real possibility with some of the stuff I got into, but I am happy to say that affectation passed when September 4th passed in 1981, accompanied with an earthquake just for good measure at our morning breakfast with champagne, and mushrooms over toast… 80)

My sister Rebecca, who is a few years older sent a message this morning: “At 55 your are at the beginning of a new cycle. May this year be gentle with you, full of fun and creativity, and may you move with your deepest purpose.”

One would hope so!

Much Love,

G

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Poetry: Robert Graves…

THE FINDING OF LOVE

Pale at first and cold,

Like wizard’s lily-bloom

Conjured from the gloom,

Like torch of glow-worm seen

Through grasses shining green

By children half in fright,

Or Christmas candelelight

Flung on the outer snow,

Or tinsel stars that show

Their evening glory

With sheen of fairy story–

Now with his blaze

Love dries the cobweb maze

Dew-sagged upon the corn,

He brings the flowering thorn,

Mayfly and butterfly,

And pigeons in the sky,

Robin and thrush,

And the long bulrush,

The cherry under the leaf,

Earth in a silken dress,

With end to grief,

With joy in steadfastness.

—-

To Be Called a Bear

Bears gash the forest trees

To mark the bounds

Of their own hunting grounds;

They follow the wild bees

Point by point home

For love of honeycomb;

They browse on blueberries.

Then should I stare

If I am called a bear,

And is it not the truth?

Unkept and surly with a sweet tooth

I tilt my muzzle toward the stary hub

Where Queen Callisto guards her cub,

But envy those that here

All winter breathing slow

Sleep warm under the snow,

That yawn awake when the skies clear,

And lank with longing grow

No more than one brief month a year.

—-

The Eremites

We may well wonder at those bearded hermits

Who like the scorpion and the basilisk

Couched in the desert sands, to undo

Their scrufy flesh with tortures.

They drank from pools fouled by the ass and the camel,

Chewed uncooked millet pounded between stones,

Wore but a shame-rag, dusk or dawn,

And rolled in thorny places.

In the wilderness there are no women;

Yet hermits harbour in their shrunken loins

A penitential paradise,

A leaping-house of glory.

Solomons of a thousand lusty love-chants,

These goatish men, burned Aethiopian black,

Kept vigil till the angelic whores

Should lift the latch of pleasure.

And what Atellan orgies of the soul

Were celebrated then among they rocks

They testify themselves in books

That rouse Atellan laughter.

Haled back at last to wear the ring and mitre,

They clipped their beards and, for their stomachs’ sake,

Drank now and then a little wine,

And tasted cakes and honey.

Observe then how they disciplined the daughters

Of noble widows, who must fast and thirst,

Abjure down-pillows, rouge and curls,

Deform their delicate bodies:

Whose dreams were curiously beset by visions

Of stinking hermits in a wilderness

Pressing unnatural lusts on them

Until they wakened screaming.

Such was the virtue of our pious fathers:

To refine pleasure in the hungry dream.

Pity for them, but pity too for us –

Our beds by their leave lain in.

—-

The Siren’s Welcome to Cronos

Cronos the Ruddy, steer your boat

Toward Silver Island whence we sing;

Here you shall pass your days.

Through a thick-growing alder-wood

We clearly see, but are not seen,

Hid in a golden haze.

Our hair the hue of barley sheaf,

Our eyes the hue of blackbird’s egg,

Our cheeks like asphodel.

Here the wild apple blossoms yet;

Wrens in the silver branches play

And prophesy you well.

Here nothing ill or harsh is found.

Cronos the Ruddy, steer your boat

Across these placid straits,

With each of us in turn to lie

Taking your pleasure on young grass

That for your coming waits.

No grief nor gloom, sickness nor death.

Disturbs our long tranquility;

No treachery, no greed.

Compared with this, what are the plains

Of Elis, where you ruled as king?

A wilderness indeed.

A starry crown awaits your head,

A hero feast is spread for you:

Swineflesh, milk and mead.

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Have a great day!

Check Out Radio Free EarthRites Spoken Word Channel!

Paste this into your URL Stream on your media player: http://87.194.36.124:8002/spokenword

Something to tide everyone over for the weekend…. outa here until tomorrow.

On the Menu

The Real Work – Rumi

The Links

The Caravan of Summer by Peter Lamborn Wilson

Poetry: Rumi

Enjoy!

Gwyllm

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The Real Work – Rumi

There is one thing in this world that you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there’s nothing to

worry about; but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.

It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It’s a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It’s a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.

You say, “But look, I’m using the dagger. It’s not lying idle.” Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny, an iron nail could be bought to serve the purpose. You say, “But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and all the rest.”

But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself.

Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give your life to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don’t, you will be exactly like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You’ll be wasting valuable keenness and foolishly ignoring your dignity and your purpose.

From The Teachings of Rumi edited by Andrew Harvey

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Links…

DMT

‘Beast’ just a dog, DNA test shows

Jesus sighting bolsters believers in Eastern Connecticut

Fossils Suggest Chaotic Recovery from Mass Extinction

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The Caravan of Summer by Peter Lamborn Wilson

Something of the real difference between pilgrim and tourist can be detected by comparing their effects on the places they visit. Changes in a place a city, a shrine, a forest may be subtle, but at least they can be observed. The state of the soul may be a matter of conjecture, but perhaps we can say something about the state of the social.

Pilgrimage sites like Mecca may serve as great bazaars for trade and they may even serve as centers of production (like the silk industry of Benares) but their primary “product” is baraka or mana. These words (one Arabic, one Polynesian) are usually translated as “blessing”, but they also carry a freight of other meanings.

The wandering dervish who sleeps at a shrine in order to dream of a dead saint (one of the “people of the Tombs”) seeks initiation or advancement on the spiritual path; a mother who brings a sick child to Lourdes seeks healing; a childless woman in Morocco hopes the Marabout will make her fertile if she ties a rag to the old tree growing out of the grave; the traveler to Mecca yearns for the very center of the Faith, and as the caravans come within sight of the Holy City the hajji calls out, “Labaika Allahumma!” “I am here, O Lord!”

All these motives are summed up by the word baraka, which sometimes seems to be a palpable substance, measurable in terms of increased charisma or “luck.” The shrine produces baraka. And the pilgrim takes it away. But blessing is a product of the imagination and thus no matter how many pilgrims take it away, there’s always more.

In fact, the more they take, the more blessing the shrine can produce (because a popular shrine grows with every answered prayer.) To say that baraka is “imaginal” is not to call it “unreal.” It’s real enough to those who feel it. But spiritual goods do not follow the rules of supply and demand like material goods. The more demand for spiritual goods, the more supply. The production of baraka is infinite.

By contrast, the tourist desires not baraka but cultural difference. The tourist consumes difference. But the production of cultural difference is not infinite. It is not “merely” imaginal. It is rooted in languages, landscape, architecture, custom, taste, smell. It is very physical. The more it is used up or taken away, the less remains. The social can produce just so much “meaning,” so much difference. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

The modest goal of this essay is to address the individual traveler who has decided to resist tourism. Even though we may find it impossible in the end to “purify” ourselves and our travel from every last taint and trace of tourism, we still feel that improvement may be possible.

Not only do we disdain tourism for its vulgarity and its injustice, and therefore wish to avoid any contamination (conscious or unconscious) by its viral virulency, we also wish to understand travel as an act of reciprocity rather than alienation. In other words, we don’t wish merely to avoid the negatives of tourism, but even more to achieve positive travel, which we envision as a productive and mutually enhancing relationship between self and other, guest and host, a form of cross-cultural synergy in which the whole exceeds the sum of parts.

We’d like to know if travel can be carried out according to a secret economy of baraka, whereby not only the shrine but also the pilgrims themselves have blessings to bestow.

Before the Age of Commodity, we know, there was an Age of the Gift, of reciprocity, of giving and receiving. We learned this from the tales of certain travelers, who found remnants of the world of the Gift among certain tribes, in the form of pot latch or ritual exchange, and recorded their observations of such strange practices.

Not long ago there still existed a custom among South Sea islanders of traveling vast distances by outrigger canoe, without compass or sextant, in order to exchange valuable and useless presents (ceremonial art-objects rich in mana) from island to island in a complex pattern of overlapping reciprocities.

We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity, even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map, even though tourism seems to have triumphed. Even so, we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even “secret” pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel.

Perhaps the greatest and subtlest practitioners of the art of travel were the Sufis, the mystics of Islam. Before the age of passports, immunizations, airlines and other impediments to free travel, the Sufis wandered footloose in a world where borders tended to be more permeable than nowadays, thanks to the trans nationalism of Islam and the cultural unity of Dar al-Islam , the Islamic world.

The great medieval Moslem travelers, like Ibn Battuta and Naser Khusraw, have left accounts of vast journeys, Persia to Egypt, or even Morocco to China, which never set foot outside a landscape of deserts, camels, caravanserais, bazaars, and piety. Someone always spoke Arabic, however badly, and Islamic culture permeated the remotest backwaters, however superficially. Reading the tails of Sinbad the Sailor (from the 1001 Nights) gives us the impression of a world where even the terra incognita was still, despite all marvels and oddities, somehow familiar, somehow Islamic. Within this unity, which was not yet a uniformity, the Sufis formed a special class of travelers. Not warriors, not merchants, and not quite ordinary pilgrims either, the dervishes represent a spiritualization of pure nomadism.

According to the Koran, God’s Wide Earth and everything in it are “sacred,” not only as divine creations, but also because the material world is full of “waymarks,” or signs of divine reality. Moreover, Islam itself is born between two journeys, Mohammad’s hijra or “flight” from Mecca to Medina, and his hajj, or return voyage. The hajj is the movement toward the origin and center for every Moslem even today, and the annual Pilgrimage has played a vital role, not just in the religious unity of Islam, but also in its cultural unity.

Mohammad himself exemplifies every kind of travel in Islam; his youth with the Meccan caravans of Summer and Winter, as a merchant; his campaigns as a warrior; his triumph as a humble pilgrim. Although an urban leader, he is also the prophet of the Bedouin and himself a kind of nomad, a “sojourner”an “orphan.” From this perspective travel can almost be seen as a sacrament. Every religion sanctifies travel to some degree, but Islam is virtually unimaginable without it.

The Prophet said, “Seek knowledge, even as far as China.” From the beginning, Islam lifts travel above all “mundane” utilitarianism and gives it an epistemological or even Gnostic dimension. “The jewel that never leaves the mine is never polished,” says the Sufi poet Saadi. To “educate” is to “lead outside,” to give the pupil a perspective beyond parochiality and mere subjectivity.

Some Sufis may have done all their traveling in the Imaginal World of archetypal dreams and visions, but vast numbers of them took the Prophet’s exhortations quite literally. Even today dervishes wander over the entire Islamic worldbut as late as the 19th century they wandered in veritable hordes, hundreds or even thousands at a time, and covered vast distances. All in search of knowledge.

Unofficially, there existed two basic types of wandering Sufi: the “gentleman-scholar” type, and the mendicant dervish. The former category includes Ibn Battuta (who collected Sufi initiations the way some occidental gentlemen once collected Masonic degrees), andon a much more serious level the “Greatest Shaykh” Ibn Arabi, who meandered slowly through the 13th century from his native Spain, across North Africa, through Egypt to Mecca, and finally to Damascus.

Ibn Arabi actually left accounts of his search for saints and adventurers on the road, which could be pieced together from his voluminous writings to form a kind of rihla or “travel text”: ( a recognized genre of Islamic literature) or autobiography. Ordinary scholars traveled in search of rare texts on theology or jurisprudence, but Ibn Arabi sought only the highest secrets of esotericism and the loftiest “openings” into the world of divine illumination; for him every “journey to the outer horizons” was also a “journey to the inner horizons” of spiritual psychology and gnosis.

On the visions he experienced in Mecca alone, he wrote a 12-volume work (The Meccan Revelations), and he has also left us precious sketches of hundreds of his contemporaries, from the greatest philosophers of the age to humble dervishes and “madmen,” anonymous women saints and “hidden Masters.”

Ibn Arabi enjoyed a special relation with Khezr, the immortal and unknown prophet, the “Green Man,” who sometimes appears to wandering Sufis in distress, to rescue them from the desert, or to initiate them. Khezr, in a sense, can be called the patron saint of the traveling dervishes and the prototype. (He first appears in the Koran as a mysterious wanderer and companion of Moses in the desert.)

Christianity once included a few orders of wandering mendicants (in fact, St. Francis organized one after meeting with dervishes in the Holy Land, who may have bestowed upon him a “cloak of initiation” the famous patchwork robe he was wearing when he returned to Italy), but Islam spawned dozens, perhaps hundreds of such orders.

As Sufism crystallized from the loose spontaneity of early days to an institution with rules and grades, “travel for knowledge” was also regularized and organized. Elaborate handbooks of duties for dervishes were produced which included methods for turning travel into a very specific form of meditation. The whole Sufi “path” itself was symbolized in terms of intentional travel.

In some cases itineraries were fixed (e.g. the Hajj); others involved waiting for “signs” to appear, coincidences, intuitions, “adventurers” such as those which inspired the travels of the Arthurian knights. Some orders limited the time spent in any one place to 40 days; others made a rule of never sleeping twice in the same place. The strict orders, such as the Naqshbandis, turned travel into a kind of full-time choreography, in which every movement was preordained and designed to enhance consciousness.

By contrast, the more heterodox orders (such as the Qalandars) adopted a “rule” of total spontaneity and abandon “permanent unemployment” as one of them called it an insouciance of bohemian proportions a “dropping-out” at once both scandalous and completely traditional. Colorfully dressed, carrying their begging bowls, axes, and standards, addicted to music and dance, carefree and cheerful (sometimes to the point of “blameworthiness”!), orders such as the Nematollahis of 19th century Persia grew to proportions that alarmed both sultans and theologians. Many dervishes were executed for “heresy.”

Today the true Qalandars survive mostly in India, where their lapses from orthodoxy include a fondness for hemp and a sincere hatred of work. Some are charlatans, some are simple bums, but a surprising number of them seem to be people of attainment…how can I put it?…people of self-realization, marked by a distinct aura of grace, or baraka.

All the different types of Sufi travel we’ve described are united by certain shared vital structural forces. One such force might be called a “magical” world view, a sense of life that rejects the “merely” random for a reality of signs and wonders, of meaningful coincidences and “unveilings.” As anyone who’s ever tried it will testify, intentional travel immediately opens one up to this “magical” influence.

A psychologist might explain this phenomenon (either with awe or with reductionist disdain) as “subjective”; while the pious believer would take it quite literally. From the Sufi point of view neither interpretation rules out the other, nor suffices in itself, to explain away the marvels of the Path. In Sufism, the “objective” and the “subjective” are not considered opposites, but complements. From the point of view of the two-dimensional thinker (whether scientific or religious) such paradoxology smacks of the forbidden.

Another force underlying all forms of intentional travel can be described by the Arabic word “adab”. On one level “adab” simply means “good manners,” and in the case of travel, these manners are based on the ancient customs of desert nomads, for whom both wandering and hospitality are sacred acts. In this sense, the dervish shares both the privileges and the responsibilities of the guest.

Bedouin hospitality is a clear survival of the primordial economy of the Gift – a relation of reciprocity. The wanderer must be taken in (the dervish must be fed) but thereby the wanderer assumes a role prescribed by ancient custom and must give back something to the host. For the Bedouin this relation is almost a form of clientage Ð the breaking of bread and sharing of salt constitutes a sort of kinship. Gratitude is not a sufficient response to such generosity. The traveler must consent to a temporary adoption, anything less would offend against “adab”.

Islamic society retains at least a sentimental attachment to these rules, and thus creates a special niche for the dervish, that of the full-time guest. The dervish returns the gifts of society with the gift of baraka. In ordinary pilgrimage, the traveler receives baraka from a place, but the dervish reverses the flow and brings baraka to a place. The Sufi may think of himself (or herself) as a permanent pilgrim but to the ordinary stay-at-home people of the mundane world, the Sufi is a kind of preambulatory shrine.

Now tourism in its very structure breaks the reciprocity of host and guest. In English, a “host” may have either guests or parasites. The tourist is a parasite for no amount of money can pay for hospitality. The true traveler is a guest and thus serves a very real function, even today, in societies where the ideals of hospitality have not yet faded from the “collective mentality.” To be a host, in such societies, is a meritorious act. Therefore, to be a guest is also to give merit.

The modern traveler who grasps the simple spirit of this relation will be forgiven many lapses in the intricate ritual of “adab” (how many cups of coffee? Where to put one’s feet? How to be entertaining? How to show gratitude? etc.) peculiar to a specific culture. And if one bothers to master a few of the traditional forms of “adab”, and to deploy them with heartfelt sincerity, then both guest and host will gain more than they put into the relation and this more is the unmistakable sign of the presence of the Gift.

Another level of meaning of the word “adab” connects it with culture (since culture can be seen as the sum of all manners and customs): In modern usage the Department of “Arts and Letters” at a university would be called Adabiyyat. To have “adab” in this sense is to be “polished” (like that well-traveled gem) but this has nothing necessarily to do with “fine arts” or literacy or being a city-slicker, or even being “cultured.” It is a matter of the “heart.”

“Adab” is sometimes given as a one-word definition of Sufism. But insincere manners (ta’arof in Persian) and insincere culture alike are shunned by the Sufi. “There is no ta’arof in Tassawuf [Sufism],” as the dervishes say; “Darvishi” is an adjectival synonym for informality, the laid-back quality of the people of the Heart and for spontaneous “adab”, so to speak. The true guest and host never make an obvious effort to fulfill the “rules” of reciprocity they may follow the ritual scrupulously, or they may bend the forms creatively, but in either case, they will give their actions a depth of sincerity that manifests as natural grace. “Adab” is a kind of love.

A complement of this “technique” (or “Zen”) of human relations can be found in the Sufi manner of relating to the world in general. The “mundane” world of social deceit and negativity, of usurious emotions, unauthentic consciousness (“mauvaise conscience”), boorishness, ill-will, inattention, blind reaction, false spectacle, empty discourse, etc. etc. all this no longer holds any interest for the traveling dervish. But those who say that the dervish has abandoned “this world”, “God’s Wide Earth”would be mistaken.

The dervish is not a Gnostic Dualist who hates the biosphere (which certainly includes the imagination and the emotions, as well as “matter” itself). The early Muslim ascetics certainly closed themselves off from everything. When Rabiah, the woman saint of Basra, was urged to come out of her house and “witness the wonders of God’s creation,” she replied, “Come into the house and see them,” i.e., come into the heart of contemplation of the oneness which is above the manyness of reality. “Contraction” and “Expansion” are both terms for spiritual states. Rabiah was manifesting Contraction: a kind of sacred melancholia which has been metaphorized as the “Caravan of Winter,” of return to Mecca (the center, the heart), of interiority, and of ascesis or self-denial. She was not a world-hating Dualist, nor even a moralistic flesh-hating puritan. She was simply manifesting a certain specific kind of grace.

The wandering dervish, however, manifests a state more typical of Islam in its most exuberant energies. He indeed seeks expansion, spiritual joy based on the sheer multiplicity of the divine generosity in material creation. (Ibn Arabi has an amusing “proof” that this world is the best world. For, if it were not, then God would be ungenerous which is absurd. Q.E.D.) In order to appreciate the multiple waymarks of the wide earth precisely as the unfolding of this generosity, the Sufi cultivates what might be called the theophanic gaze: The opening of the “Eye of the Heart” to the experience of certain places, objects, people, events as locations of the “shining-through” of divine light. The dervish travels, so to speak, both in the material world, and in the “World of Imagination” simultaneously. But for the eye of the heart, these worlds interpenetrate at certain points.

One might say that they mutually reveal or “unveil” each other. Ultimately, they are “one” and only our state of tranced inattention, our mundane consciousness, prevents us from experiencing this “deep” identity at every moment. The purpose of intentional travel, with its “adventures” and its uprooting of habits, is to shake loose the dervish from all the trance-effects of ordinariness. Travel, in other words, is meant to induce a certain state of consciousness or “spiritual state” that of Expansion.

For the wanderer, each person one meets might act as an “angel,” each shrine one visits may unlock some initiate dream, each experience of nature may vibrate with the presence of some “spirit of place.” Indeed, even the mundane and ordinary may suddenly be seen as numinous (as in the great travel haiku of the Japanese Zen poet Basho) : a face in the crowd at a railway station, crows on telephone wires, sunlight in a puddle.

Obviously one doesn’t need to travel to experience this state. But travel can be used, that is, an art of travel can be required to maximize the chances for attaining such a state. It is a moving meditation, like the Taoist martial arts.

The Caravan of Summer moved outward, out of Mecca, to the rich trading lands of Syria and Yemen. Likewise, the dervish is “moving out” (it’s always “moving day”), heading forth, taking off, on “perpetual holiday” as one poet expressed it, with an open heart, an attentive eye (and other senses), and a yearning for meaning, a thirst for knowledge. One must remain alert, since anything might suddenly unveil itself as a sign. This sounds like a bit of paranoia although “metanoia” might be a better term and indeed one finds “madmen” amongst the dervishes, “attracted ones,” overpowered by divine influxions, lost in the Light.

In the Orient, the insane are often cared for and admired as helpless saints, because mental illness may sometimes appear as a symptom of too much holiness rather than too little “reason.” Hemp’s popularity amongst the dervishes can be attributed to its power to induce a kind of intuitive attentiveness which constitutes a controllable insanity, herbal metanoia. But travel itself in itself can intoxicate the heart with the beauty of theophanic presence. It’s a question of practice, the polishing of the jewel, removal of moss from the rolling stone.

In the old days (which are still going on in some remote parts of the East), Islam thought of itself as a whole world, a wide world, a space with great latitude within which Islam embraced the whole of society and nature. This latitude appeared on the social level as tolerance. There was room enough, even for such marginal groups as mad wandering dervishes. Sufism itself, or at least its austere orthodox and “sober” aspect occupied a central position in the cultural discourse. “Everyone” understood intentional travel by analogy with the Hajj, everyone understood the dervishes, even if they disapproved.

Nowadays, however, Islam views itself as a partial world, surrounded by unbelief and hostility, and suffering internal raptures of every sort. Since the 19th century Islam has lost its global consciousness and sense of its own wideness and completeness. No longer therefore, can Islam easily find a place for every marginalized individual and group within a pattern of tolerance and social order. The dervishes now appear as an intolerable difference in society. Every Muslim must now be the same, united against all outsiders, and struck from the same prototype.

Of course, Muslims have always “imitated” the Prophet and viewed his image as the norm and this has acted as a powerful unifying force for style and substance within Dar al-Islam. But “nowadays” the puritans and reformers have forgotten that this “imitation” was not directed only at an early medieval Meccan merchant named Mohammad, but also at the insan al-kamil (the “Perfect Man” or “Universal Human”), an ideal of inclusion rather than exclusion, an ideal of integral culture, not an attitude of purity in peril, not xenophobia disguised as piety, not totalitarianism, not reaction.

The dervish is persecuted nowadays in most of the Islamic world. Puritanism always embraces the most atrocious aspects of modernism in its crusade to strip the Faith of “medieval accretions” such as popular Sufism. And surely the way of the wandering dervish cannot thrive in a world of airplanes and oil-wells, of nationalistic/chauvinistic hostilities (and thus of impenetrable borders), and of a Puritanism which suspects all difference as a threat.

The Puritanism has triumphed not only in the East, but rather close to home as well. It is seen in the “time discipline” of modern too-late-Capitalism, and in the porous rigidity of consumerist hyper-conformity, as well as in the bigoted reaction and sex-hysteria of the Christian Right. Where in all this can we find room for the poetic (and parasitic!) life of “Aimless Wandering”, the life of Chuang Tzu (who coined this slogan) and his Taoist progeny, the life of Saint Francis and his shoeless devotees, the life of (for example) Nur Ali Shah Isfahani, a 19th century Sufi poet who was executed in Iran for the awful heresy of meandering-dervishism?

Here is the flip side of the “Problem of Tourism”: The problem with the disappearance of “aimless wandering.” Possibly the two are directly related, so that the more tourism becomes possible, the more dervishism becomes impossible. In fact, we might well ask if this little essay on the delightful life of the dervish possesses the least bit of relevance for the contemporary world. Can this knowledge help us to overcome tourism, even within our own consciousness and life? Or is it merely an exercise in nostalgia for lost possibilities, a futile indulgence in romanticism?

Well, yes and no. Sure, I confess I’m hopelessly romantic about the form of the dervish life, to the extent that for a while I turned my back on the mundane world and followed it myself. Because of course, it hasn’t really disappeared. Decadent, yes, but not gone forever. What little I know about travel I learned in those few years I owe a debt to “Medieval accretions” I can never pay and I’ll never regret my “escapism” for a single moment. But I don’t consider the form of dervishism to be the answer to the “problem of tourism.” The form has lost most of its efficacy. There’s no point in trying to “preserve” it (as if it were a pickle, or a lab specimen) there’s nothing quite so pathetic as mere “survival.”

But beneath the charming outer forms of dervishism lies the conceptual matrix, so to speak, which we’ve called intentional travel. On this point we should suffer no embarrassment about “nostalgia.” We have asked ourselves whether or not we desire a means to discover the art of travel, whether we want and will to overcome “the inner tourist,” the false consciousness which screens us from the experience of the Wide World’s waymarks. The way of the dervish (or of the Taoist, the Franciscan, etc.) interests us, not the key, perhaps but…a key. And of course it does.

Peter Lamborn Wilson is the author of Sacred Drift and several books and studies exploring the role of heresy and mysticism in Islam. Wilson spent ten years wandering in the Middle East. He now wanders the streets of New York City. This paper was read at the annual meeting of The Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society and appeared in White Cloud Press’s Common Era: Best New Writings on Religion (PO Box 3400, Ashland, Oregon (97520, 1-800-380-8286).

October 1999

————-

Poetry- Rumi

Not Intrigued With Evening

What the material world values does

not shine the same in the truth of

the soul. You have been interested

in your shadow. Look instead directly

at the sun. What can we know by just

watching the time-and-space shapes of

each other? Someone half awake in the night sees imaginary dangers; the

morning star rises; the horizon grows

defined; people become friends in a

moving caravan. Night birds may think

daybreak a kind of darkness, because

that’s all they know. It’s a fortunate

bird who’s not intrigued with evening,

who flies in the sun we call Shams.

—-

Light Breeze

As regards feeling pain, like a hand cut in battle,

consider the body a robe

you wear. When you meet someone you love, do you kiss their clothes? Search out

who’s inside. Union with God is sweeter than body comforts.

We have hands and feet

different from these. Sometimes in dream we see them.

That is not

illusion. It’s seeing truly. You do have a spirit body;

don’t dread leaving the

physical one. Sometimes someone feels this truth so strongly

that he or she can live in

mountain solitude totally refreshed. The worried, heroic

doings of men and women seem weary

and futile to dervishes enjoying the light breeze of spirit.

—

Moving Water

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river

moving in you, a joy.

When actions come from another section, the feeling

disappears. Don’t let

others lead you. They may be blind or, worse, vultures.

Reach for the rope

of God. And what is that? Putting aside self-will.

Because of willfulness

people sit in jail, the trapped bird’s wings are tied,

fish sizzle in the skillet.

The anger of police is willfulness. You’ve seen a magistrate

inflict visible punishment. Now

see the invisible. If you could leave your selfishness, you

would see how you’ve

been torturing your soul. We are born and live inside black water in a well.

How could we know what an open field of sunlight is? Don’t

insist on going where

you think you want to go. Ask the way to the spring. Your

living pieces will form

a harmony. There is a moving palace that floats in the air

with balconies and clear

water flowing through, infinity everywhere, yet contained

under a single tent.

In Memory of Tomas’ lovely Anka…

“A finer friend would be near impossible to find”

Just got off the phone with my friend Tomas. We had a nice talk about Anka, and her passing last week. He misses her, as does the community she graced.

PK is graduating today, from Oriental Medical School! Very excited for him, 4 years! Amazing really. More on this later…

An abbreviated form of Turfing…

On The Menu:

The Links

Is this the right office?

The Ballad of Elaine…

Enjoy,

Gwyllm

___________

The Links:

Drought threat to Spain as farmers and developers gulp down precious water

The fight for democracy: The return of the Sandinista

British Ministry Of Truth Wants To Prosecute American Bloggers

Bail granted for journalist Josh Wolf

____________

____________

The Ballad of Elaine – by Sydney Fowler Wright

“What would ye that I did?” said Sir Lancelot.

“I would have you to my husband,” said Elaine.

“Fair damosel, I thank you,” said Sir Lancelot,

“but truly,” said he, “I cast me never to be wedded man.”

“Then, fair knight,” said she, “will ye be my paramour?”

“Jesu defend me,” said Sir Lancelot, “for then I

rewarded your father and your brother full evil

for their great goodness.”

“Alas,” said she, “then must I die for your love.”

Le Morte D’Arthur.

Book XVIII Chap. XIX.

—

PART I

She came when evening came, – her feet

The cool grass comforted, –

Where love through morn and noon-day heat

Her seeking steps had led

To him who had no love for her,

And nigh whose life was dead.

Lone through the lengthened days he lay

Within that hermit’s cave,

Since, on the fatal tourney day,

So deep the lancehead drave

It seemed nor any skill could heal,

Nor any love could save.

Was closed that riven hurt where-through

The restless life had drained.

No more the aching wound he knew,

No more its healing pained.

Quiet in the shadowed cave he lay,

As one whose goal was gained.

Only he would for speech with him

To whom in life he clave,

The good knight Bors, whose lance too well

That wound unweening gave,

That he might ere his parting tell

How well his heart forgave.

“Damsel, my space of days is sped,

I wot God’s night is near,

But could’st thou hold my life,” he said,

“Till that good knight is here,

You might not ask so great a thing

That you should ask in fear.”

“I’ll ask one boon of God’s Mother,

Ere aught I’ll ask of thee.

I’ll ask one gift of God’s Mother,

That she should grant it me,

Though needly at the feet of God

She lay my life in fee.”

She searched that closing wound anew,

Its utter depth she learned.

She dressed it with the skill she knew,

With herbs that waked and burned,

Till where the dying life withdrew

Its aching pain returned.

The changing day was night without,

The changing night was day.

Through the long hours with life in doubt

In ever pain he lay.

Only the weary day was night:

Only the night was day.

And still her constant watch she kept,

And gained nor glance nor word,

And still her constant prayer she wept

Till Mary Virgin heard,

And then in quiet ease he slept,

And then from sleep he stirred.

“Damsel, a lightsome dream was mine:

A dream of truth, I ween.

I saw that good knight’s harness shine

The singing shaws between.

I pray thee look thou forth a space,

He should not pass unseen.”

She said, “The bending shaws above

A goodly knight I view.

His helm it bears no lady’s glove,

No plume is trailed thereto;

His shield hath but a small white dove,

That soareth in the blue;

He rideth as thy kinsmen ride;

He cometh close hereto.”

They heard the stamping hooves anear,

They heard the ringing bit,

They heard his voice the charger cheer

As that good knight alit.

Before the low cave-entrance trod

Sir Bors de Ganis, knight of God,

And stooping entered it.

Beside the lowly couch he knelt

In grief he might not stay,

Whose hand the deathful thrust had dealt

On that sad tourney day,

The chief of his great House to see,

Whom most of mortal men loved he,

How reft of strength he lay.

“Lancelot, there may no grief atone

The woeful chance,” he said,

“That deeming from a knight unknown

Our gathered Table fled,

Late ere the ceasing trump was blown,

The fatal charge I led.

But not thy changed arms had missed

Thy comrades used of yore

Their lord in any guise to wist,

But that red sleeve you bore:

A damsel’s favour down the list,

Thy never wont before.”

“Good friend, for nought you mourn,” he said,

“The day for grief is done.

My life, that sought the silent dead,

This damsel’s care hath won,

And days are mine that had not been,

And other life begun.

Whate’er device of pride I hid,

In fameless guise to shine,

My boast thy better lance fordid.

For that sure thrust of thine

That drave the brittle point unbent,

May rest you in good heart content:

My folly’s price is mine.

But speak what outer chance hath been

While here my life hath lain,

Withholding nought thine eyes have seen,

For either peace or pain.

For thou hast known the Grail of God,

Where that is false is vain.”

“When wounded from the lists you drew,

And no man marked thy way,

Forthright the ceasing trumpet blew,

The dying strife to stay,

As Arthur charged, alone who knew

Thy questioned name to say.

And spake the King for all that would

To seek thee wide and near.

Eager from noble heart he spake,

Who loves thee for thy glory’s sake,

The while that Guenevere,

Entreated half, and half forbid,

As half in fear her wrath she hid,

And half in wrath her fear.

From those who rode thy fate to trace

Lord Gawain first returned.

At Guildford, from thy biding place,

Thy present need he learned,

But brought he from his halting there

Such word of damsel; worth and fair,

Who gave thee that red sleeve to wear,

That little thank he earned.

For when I spoke my thought aloud

That hither ride would I,

(Her wrath it was a waiting cloud

Where the still thunders lie),

Thy queen in bitter speech aside

Forgiveness of thy fault denied,

Yea, though the race of kind had died,

Until ye twain should die.”

—

PART II

NOT God shall stay the ending day

That closeth dole or good.

With guerdon earned for life returned,

At parting hour they stood.

To right the way the downland lay,

To left the hawthorn wood.

“Damsel there is no gold to give

The price of life shall pay,

But speak you all your heart,” he said,

“And in such things I may,

To serve thee is my part,” he said,

“It is but thine to say.”

“If I have won thy life,” she said,

“I will no gold in fee.

Except our willing hearts were wed,

There were no gain for me.

Men speak me for the fairest maid

From Guildford to the sea, –

I would no sooner flower should fade

If all be nought to thee.”

“Damsel, the bitter boon you would

I may not grant,” said he,

“Since by the heavy doom of God

The Grail I might not see,

I know till all my path be trod

A wrought sin clingeth me,

And I am nothing worth to God,

Nor fitting mate for thee.”

“If word of quick, or word of dead,

Or word of God Most High,

Should speak thee any shame,” she said,

“Or any worth deny,

In this thing were it shown,” she said,

“That very God could lie.”

“I may not change my word,” said he,

“Though well in heart I wot,

My grief before the throne of God

Shall be I loved thee not.”

“But there,” she said, “my boast shall be

That I loved Lancelot.”

“My Benoic lands are large,” he said,

“My sword is strong to friend;

My lands were thine to take,” he said,

“My wealth were thine to spend,

But well I wot such gifts as these

Were nought for love’s amend

The small dust of the balances

God brushes ere the end.”

“I’ll ask no holding bond to share,

“No lengthened price to pay.

My life is thine to take,” she said,

“Is thine to cast away.

The day thy love shall tire,” she said,

“Shall be our parting day,

And I will bless thy name in prayer,

Yea, before God, alway.”

“I will not waste thy life,” he said,

“God put it far from me.

Not any strain of strife,” he said,

“No sin that clingeth me,

Should close me from the courts of God

As this you speak should be,

The clean gift of thy love to take,

Who have no love for thee.

There is no woe of mortal kind

But God may cease,” he said,

“Believe, thy later days shall find

A better knight to wed,

And leave me in thy life behind,

As having loved the dead.”

She had no further hope to plead,

No other word to say.

She turned beneath the hawthorn seed,

Where once had blown the may.

The may was white as innocence,

But dark as blood were they.

The meaning of this thing to rede

There is no man that may.

But slow she clomb the upward way,

And slow she toiled the flat.

Nought saw she where her footsteps lay,

No word her heart forgat.

So won she at the fail of day

The towers of Astolat.

No more to meet the morn she rose,

No more she sought the sun,

But while she lay in wearihed,

And while she walked as one

Whose soul a living corse had shed,

Whose use of days was done.

“Bethink thy gentle birth,” they said,

“Bethink thy virgin name.

A love to seek unsought,” they said,

“There is no greater shame.

Would God that treasoned knight had died,

Ere to these lonely towers aside

To work our grief he came.”

But hotly in his sisters plea

Spake the young knight, Lavaine,

“What use in reasoned speech may be,

In urging customs vain?

For they that noble knight who see,

The nobler that themselves they be,

They love him to the like degree,

And are not whole again.

Myself since that red dusk of day

When here in hall he stood,

I have but thought to seek his way,

Nor other life I would,

Save but to serve his need alway,

For evil days or good.”

She said, “What God hath in me wrought,

That shall not God deny.

The noblest of my kind I sought.

And no way shamed am I,

Though love be given in gain of nought,

And glad of grief I die.

But you shall bear and lay me dead

The river barge within,

And tire it as the bridal bed

Of maid of loftiest kin,

For this way shall I gain,” she said,

“That only death should win.

Shall be one silent hand to steer

Down the still stream and wide,

Until the palace walls appear,

That rise in terraced marble sheer

From the full waterside;

And he shall turn his course anear,

And wait what things betide.”

—

PART III

LOOKED Arthur from a casement high,

O’er the long waterside.

He marked a black barge gliding by,

Down the full stream and wide;

And white as Mary’s lilies lie,

On the dark shrine when night is nigh,

And tired like a bride,

It seemed a sleeping damsel lay,

And while he watched await,

In marvel if some moonland fey

Besought a mortal mate,

The barge with steady lapse and slow

Turned to the watergate.

Then bade he two good knights anigh

That sleeping maid to meet,

And of her grace and courtesy

Her biding days entreat.

In haste of eager steps they sped,

But came they from that damsel dead

With slower-moving feet.

“None there,” they told, “for bridal sleeps,

But timeless tryst with death she keeps,

Nor showeth cause therefor,

Of violence in the wildwood ways,

Nor leaping plague that loathly slays,

Nor the slow feet of wasting days,

Nor wrong of rape or war.

But in the barge its course to steer,

There sits, and pointeth inward here,

A silent servitor.

No mortal maid thine eyes shall see,

Though the sweet life be there,

No damsel of the Southland sea,

Or lands where Freya’s daughters be,

Nor the fey-grace of Nimue,

More fainly formed and fair.”

Then to Brandiles spake the King

And Agravaine to inward bring

That wonder dole and rare.

Brandiles bent and Agravaine

That burden worth to bear,

Watched of the wonder-silenced throng

That leaned those terraced walls along,

And lined the shining stair.

For there, that marvelled sight to see,

Were dame and lord of most degree,

And chiefs of song and minstrelsy,

And knights in steel and cramoisie,

And gay-clad damsels fair.

No snowdrop of the breaking snows,

When the long snows delay;

Nor flower the sweet mid-season knows,

Wood-lilies white as they;

Nor fuller summer’s guelder-rose,

That falleth where the dogwood glows;

Nor the white chalice-flower that grows

In the green heart of May;

At lift of dawn or evenclose,

Unflawed than she or fairer shows,

As there in death she lay.

But Arthur marked a script secure

In the cold hand contained,

And spake he that its word be read.

“For haply shall it prove,” he said,

“That this way from the silent dead

Her living tale be gained,

By those with swords to venge her wrong,

If craft or guile or treason strong,

Or darker powers that night belong,

Her blossomed life have baned.”

Was silence while the scroll was read,

“Lo, that Elaine am I

Whose tourney sleeve Sir Lancelot wore,

Whose rootless hope was high,

And in reverse of heart therefor

Of love rejected die.

For this may ladies all who hear,

And know my passing day,

Even from the high queen Guenevere,

And thou, Sir Lancelot, pray,

Who wast God’s knight without a peer,

And my good lord alway.”

“O Lancelot,” said the King, “is wrought

A seldom tale and sad.

If every ventured realm ye sought

You might no fairer bride have brought.

For the pure love she had

I would thine heart some grace had thought,

Awhile to make her glad;

For thee no vow to Heaven withheld,

Nor other bond forbad.”

And answered Lancelot, “Sooth ye say,

That treadeth earthly ground,

Or mortal maid or night-land fey,

There were no fairer found.

All else I gaged of gain or good,

But nought but of my love she would,

And love will not be bound.

And grieving o’er this damsel’s death,

And whence its cause should spring,

For her much love that witnesseth,

Appeal to God I bring,

That ne’er in open wrong have I

Distressed her that her life should die,

Or any secret thing.”

Then drew the high queen Guenevere,

(In green and gold was she),

Out from the silent throng more near

That damsels face to see.

She knew not if her heart were glad

That death had loosed her free,

Though well she knew the joy she had

His living love to be.

“Fair lord,” she said, “such grace was here,

That whom she sought to grant her cheer

There were but few to shun.

I would that in thine heart had lain

Such comfort of her longing fain

As had her death foredone.”

“O Queen,” he said, “such love she sought

To take or yield as no man ought,

Save of clean heart and single thought,

And other might I none.”

And Arthur answered, “Yea, perde,

Is none may speak thee nay,

There was no better end to be,

Nor any blame to say.

The High God’s thought is mystery,

It is no mortal’s way.

Yet were it to our worship seen,

This maid of noble heart and clean,

And worth as any here, I ween,

In the like ground to lay.”

—

PART IV

THEY laid her in the holy ground

Where the dead kings are laid.

They wrote her tale her tomb around

That whoso knelt and prayed

Might join her name, who seeking fain

Earth’s best, when showed her seeking vain,

Returned her life to God again,

And was of nought afraid.

But in a privy tower they met,

His queen and Lancelot.

Of that dark place his life had dured,

Of whom unblest his hurt had cured,

Of aught but of his faith assured,

Sufficing, recked she not.

Should she not other’s death forget,

Who when wellnear its sun was set

Had love itself forgot?

“O Lancelot, in thy love,” she said,

“You will not bear it blame,

When wrong that flying sleeve I read,

And tale of whispers round me spread

That joined a lowlier name

To thine, whose faith was hereward plight,

I held thee nevermore my knight,

And scorn to in like scorn requite,

Although with little heart I might,

I spake thee wrath and shame.”

“O Queen,” he said, “my service still,

For any tale untrue,

Is thine for guerdon fair or ill,

Thy given hest to do;

In all who only would thy will,

As ever yet you knew.”

When weaker faith shall pardon need

Shall surer love forgive.

Was here her secret joy to plead,

His larger joy to give;

And yet beyond their ceasing day

A further hope may live

That when shall God his bounty share,

And none her meed shall lack,

Not she, that jealous queen and fair

Who brought his life to wrack,

Nor she, more worth, his babe who bare,

And died at Carbonac.

Allied in that new mystery,

Which none of earth may wot,

Rejoiced shall stand. But then shall He

Her nearer place allot,

Found kindred in the courts of God,

Elaine and Lancelot.

The End

Celbrating 40 years of Personal Psychedelia….

Yep, It has been the long Trip. Today is the 40th anniversary of my 1st LSD experience in Berkeley Ca in 1966. I have not visited with Vitamin L for a long time, after all, it is the rarest of chemicals, and some say when the seeker is ready (again). 80)

I want to thank Uncle Albert, Tim, Allen G, Aldous and a few others whose words of wisdom and hard, hard work brought this gift of life to me.

Thanks to all of you who were there but not visible to me at the time, who I have had the joy to meet and be with over the years… Fat Harry the Buddha, Will Penna, Mike Crowley, Tomas, Linda, my sister Rebecca, Jim P,Polly, and so many others who were venturing forward at that time.

I want to send my love to those voyagers who I began with and who are now in the western Isles… Roberto Apodaca, Roberto Labanst, Laurie, Ergo, and especially to Larry Pulliam. I wish you could of stayed longer. I miss you all.

For those who are younger and are walking down this path; walk in light and love. We love you as those that went before us love(d) us. This is the long trip back home.

All together now.

_____________

_____________

The Links:

Civic Lesson for Rummy…. (Thanks to Morgan!)

Salt Lake City Rally Protests the Bush Administration and Congress

Renee Boje Legal Battle Finally Resolved

Helping The Telemarketer… 80)

_______________

Look Around You

_________________

The Galleons of the Mind… Gwyllm

I had an epiphany yesterday. It was astounding for me, though it may be amusing to you… I was recalling that when Columbus had sailed into his first harbor, the peoples of Turtle Island did not see/recognize the ships sitting at anchor just off the beach. This phenomena was repeated in Mexico, and if memory serves me right, in the Pacific as well when Captain Cook sailed into Hawaii.

When asked later what they saw, the residents of the islands said, “I saw clouds on the water” or some variation on that. This is astounding really, but it points out something that I feel is happening on a constant basis to humans.

Why am I on to this? Yesterday I walked past a ladder for 3 hours without recognizing it. It had been brought into the house where I am working for me, but it didn’t register. In some viewpoints, I was “asleep” to its presence, but wait there is more. It doesn’t look like a regular ladder, it is a ladder and platform hybrid, not at all what I was expecting to be brought in. This one did not fit my expectations. Therefore, to my eyes it was not there.

Now, this is where the epiphany comes in. I am going to throw out a couple of statements about what I understand is common knowledge to those interested in light, and the formation of the universe.

From what I have read and I think understood, humans see only 5% of visible light. The universe is largely composed of something called, “dark matter” which we cannot see or really detect at this point except by devices that measure gravitational effects.

Okay, we are blind as mole rats to the greater part of the universe. We would be denied a drivers’ license for venturing out into “the void”, we would be entitled to a special bus pass, and more than likely, our language is a variation on universal braille.

We are out of touch with one of the basic elements of the universe, only stumbling upon it by accident, when it has been here all the time.

So, using these examples, I posit a few possibilities.

There are Galleons filled with Aliens sailing past us.

We walk past magnicent edifices, buildings, forums, and they are invisible to us being made of dark matter.

There is a vast city stretching to infinity filled with wonders that we are only, only dimly aware of through our dreams, and through our venturing there with meditation, and the use of psychedelics.

All the reports of luminous beings, faeries, spaceships, ufos, cities in the sky are based on something true, when our blinders slipped.

It has been said our blindness is matched by our lack of using our brain. Only 5% seems to used at any one time.

We are submerged and are part of other beings, passing through us, by us. Some of them recognize us, some even take interest in us. Mostly they are benign, some are not. on occasion, they interact with us, using extreme measures to get the blind beings attention. We actually have a fairly wide literature about this, as well as a deep reservoir of atavistic memories across the world… Fairy Tales, Holy Books, Sacred Stories, Ghost Stories, Hauntings all might indeed be the footprints left by voyagers who have come and gone from our dimension.

We are blind, I am blind. There is a raging Universe of Beauty around and within us. There are really no boundaries that delineate us from our world. All these boundaries are artificial. We are consumed by a chimera of conceit, we the “Masters” of our world.

We dimly perceive the distant ships whilst bemushroomed, or in the sea of bliss that we find our selves in whilst trypping… we assure each other that these are only products of our mind, and has no real bearing except in some disjointed, Jungian dream artifice…

So this is what I had come to me, it took but one ladder, and a rainy morning to bring it forth.

____________

Poetry: Psychedelia….

A GLASS OF AYAHUASCA – by Allen Ginsberg

in my hotel room overlooking Desamparados’ Clanging Clock,

with the french balcony doors closed, and luminescent fixture out

“my room took on a near eastern aspect” that is I was reminded of Burroughs

with heart beating—and the blue wall of Polynesian Whorehouse, and

mirror framed in black as if in Black Bamboo-and wooden slated floor

and I in my bed, waiting, and slowly drifting away

but still thinking in my body till my body turned to passive wood

and my soul rocked back & forth preparing to slide out on eternal journey

backwards from my head in the dark

An hour, realizing the possible change in consciousness

that the Soul is independent of the body and its death

and that the Soul is not Me, it is the wholly other “whisper of consciousness”

from Above, Beyond, Afuera—

till I realize it existed in all its splendor in the Ideal or Imaginary

Toward which the me will travel when the body goes to the sands of Chancay

And at last, lying in bed covered my body with a splendid robe of

indian manycolors wool,

I gazed up at the grey gate of Heaven with a foreign eye

and yelled in my mind “Open up, for I am the Prince of eternity

come back to myself after a long journey in chaos,

open the Door of Heaven, My Soul, for I have come back to claim

my Ancient House

Let the Servants come forth to Welcome me and let Silent Harp make music

and bring my apparel of Rainbow and Star show me my shoes of Light and

my Pants of the Universe

Spread forth my meal of myriad lives, My Soul, and Show up thy

Face of Welcome

For I am the one who has dwelled in the secret Temple before,

and I have been man too long

And now I want to Hear Music of Joy beyond Death,

and now I am be who has waited to Welcome myself back Home

The great stranger is Home in his House of Joy.”

or words or thoughts or sensations & images to that effect.

Thus for an instant the Sensation of this Eternal House passed thru my hair

tho I couldn’t liberate my body from the bed to float away—

tho did glimpse the foot of the thought of the gate of Heaven—

Then opened my eyes and Saw the blast of light of the real universe

when I opened the window and looked at the clock on the R R Station

with its halfnaked man & woman with clubs, creators of time and chaos,

and down on the street where pastry venders sold their poor sugar

symbolic of Eternity, to Passerby-and great fat clanking beast of Trolley

with its dumb animal look and croaking screech on the tracks

Powered by electric life,, turned a corner of the Presidential Palace

where Bolivar 200 years ago in time planted a secret everlasting Fig-tree

and a fog from another life crept thru its own dimension

Past the cornice of the hotel and travelled downward in the street

To seek the river-had a bridge with little humans crossing, faraway

—and up in the hills the silver gleam of sunlight on the horizon thru thick fog

—and the Cerro San Christobal—with a cross atop and Casbah of poor

consciousness ratted on its hip—

and overall the vast blue flash & blast of open space

the Sky of Time, empty as a big blue dream

and as everlasting as the many eyes that lived to see it

Time is the God, is the Face of the God,

As in the monstrous image of the Ramondi Chavin Sculptured Stone Monument

A cat head many eyed sharp toothed god face long as Time,

with different eyes some upside down and 16 sets of faces

all have fangs—the structure of one consciousness

that waits upstairs to Devour man and all his universes

—turn the picture upside down—the top eyes see more than the human bottom rows

Indifferent, dopey, smiling, horrible, with Snakes & fangs—

The huge gentle creature of the Cosmic joke

that takes whatever form it can to Signify that it is the one that has come to its Home

where all are invited to Enter in Secret eternally

After they have been killed by the illusion of Impossible Death.

Lima, Peru

May 1960

—–

THE TREE ABOVE THE TREE BELOW – Timothy Leary

What is above is below

What is without is within

What is to come is in the past

Tall… deep… tree… green… branching… leaf

Root… above… below… thrusting… coiling

Sky… earth… stem… root

Leaf… green… sap

Soil… air

Seed

Soil… visible

Hidden… breathing… sucking

Bud… ooze… sun… damp

Light.. dark… bright… decay… laugh

Tear.. vein.,. rain… mud branch… root

What is above is below

What is without is within

What is to come is in the past

These wooden carvings displayed in her endless shelves

Await

Within each uncut branch—

The carver’s knife

—-

PREHISTORIC ORIGINS OF DNA – Timothy Leary

Its rising is not bright

nor its setting dark

Unceasing, continuous

Branching out in roots innumerable

Forever sending forth the serpent coil

of living things

Mysterious as the formless existence

to which it returns

Twisting back

Beyond mind

We say only that it is form from the formless

Life from spiral void

—from Psychedelic Prayers

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

Gandhi

Raining in Portland… soon to be replaced with heat from what I hear. Helped pick up and deliver a refrigerator for Jules last night, along with Rowan, his friend Nick, John Gunn and Jules dad, John. Lots of fun seeing her family… I got to visit a bit with her dog Moose, who really is the most charming character. (one of Sophies favourites). I am blessed with great friends. I couldn’t ask for better. The time I spend with them is always a pleasure. John and Jules have known Rowan since he was 2 years old! Time flies. I swear they haven’t aged a day when I see them. On the other hand, I don’t recognize that person in the mirror anymore. 8o)

Just to let you know… we are still testing the radio, so please give it a go!

Here are the addresses to connect with the station. You have to paste them into winamp, itunes or what ever player you use.

High End 128k: (DSL- Cable)

http://87.194.36.124:8000/radio

Low End 56k: (Dial Up)

http://87.194.36.124:8001/radio-low

Some nice stuff in this edition. A big thanks to Jay Kinney on the Hermes article.

More on the way, stay tuned!

Pax,

G

——–

On The Menu:

The Links

On the Trail of the Winged God Hermes and Hermeticism Throughout the Ages

Poetry: Hafiz on Love…

Art: Frederick Arthur Bridgman

_______________

The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same….

______________

The Links:

‘God spot’ researchers see the light in MRI study

Ancient minty painkiller worked, study suggests

Christian zealots destroy ancient Arctic petroglyphs

Somali woman lashed for selling dagga

______________

______________

From Gnosis Magazine…

On the Trail of the Winged God

Hermes and Hermeticism Throughout the Ages

by Stephan A. Hoeller

There are few names to which more diverse persons and disciplines lay claim than the term “Hermetic.” Alchemists ancient and contemporary apply the adjective “Hermetic” to their art, while magicians attach the name to their ceremonies of evocation and invocation. Followers of Meister Eckhart, Raymond Lull, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, and most recently Valentin Tomberg are joined by academic scholars of esoterica, all of whom attach the word “Hermetic” to their activities.

Who, then, was Hermes, and what may be said of the philosophy or religion that is connected with him? The early twentieth-century scholar Walter Scott, in his classic edition of the Hermetic texts, writes of a legend preserved by the Renaissance writer Vergicius:

They say that this Hermes left his own country and traveled all over the world…; and that he tried to teach men to revere and worship one God alone, …the demiurgus and genetor [begetter] of all things; …and that he lived a very wise and pious life, occupied in intellectual contemplation…, and giving no heed to the gross things of the material world…; and that having returned to his own country, he wrote at the time many books of mystical theology and philosophy.1

Until relatively recently, no one had a clear picture of either the authorship or the context of the mysterious writings ascribed to Hermes. Descriptions such as the one above are really no more than a summary of the ideal laid down in the “Hermetic” writings. The early Christian Fathers, in time, mostly held that Hermes was a great sage who lived before Moses and that he was a pious and wise man who received revelations from God that were later fully explained by Christianity. None mentioned that he was a Greek god.

The Greek Hermes

The British scholar R.F. Willetts wrote that “in many ways, Hermes is the most sympathetic, the most baffling, the most confusing, the most complex, and therefore the most Greek of all the Olympian gods.”2 If Hermes is the god of the mind, then these qualities appear in an even more meaningful light. For is the mind not the most baffling, confusing, and at the same time the most beguiling, of all the attributes of life?

The name Hermes appears to have originated in the word for “stone heap.” Probably since prehistoric times there existed in Crete and in other Greek regions a custom or erecting a herma or hermaion consisting of an upright stone surrounded at its base by a heap of smaller stones. Such monuments were used to serve as boundaries or as landmarks for wayfarers.

A mythological connection existed between these simple monuments and the deity named Hermes. When Hermes killed the many-eyed monster Argus, he was brought to trial by the gods. They voted for Hermes’ innocence, each casting a vote by throwing a small stone at his feet so that a heap of stones grew up around him.

Hermes became best known as the swift messenger of the gods. Euripides, in his prologue to the play Ion, has Hermes introduce himself as follows:

Atlas, who wears on back of bronze the ancient

Abode of the gods in heaven, had a daughter

Whose name was Maia, born of a goddess:

She lay with Zeus, and bore me, Hermes,

Servant of the immortals.

Hermes is thus of a double origin. His grandfather is Atlas, the demigod who holds up heaven, but Maia, his mother, already has a goddess as her mother, while Hermes’ father, Zeus, is of course the highest of the gods. It is tempting to interpret this as saying that from worldly toil (Atlas), with a heavy infusion of divine inspiration, comes forth consciousness, as symbolized by Hermes.

Versatility and mutability are Hermes’ most prominent characteristics. His specialties are eloquence and invention (he invented the lyre). He is the god of travel and the protector of sacrifices; he is also god of commerce and good luck. The common quality in all of these is again consciousness, the agile movement of mind that goes to and fro, joining humans and gods, assisting the exchange of ideas and commercial goods. Consciousness has a shadow side, however: Hermes is also noted for cunning and for fraud, perjury, and theft.

The association of Hermes with theft become evident in the pseudo-Homeric Hymn to Hermes, which tells in great detail how the young god, barely risen from his cradle, carries off some of Apollo’s prize oxen. The enraged Apollo denounces Hermes to Zeus but is mollified by the gift of the lyre, which the young Hermes has just invented by placing strings across the shell of a tortoise. That the larcenous trickster god is the one who bestows the instrument of poetry upon Apollo may be a point of some significance. Art is bestowed not by prosaic rectitude, but by the freedom of intuition, a function not bound by earthly rules.

While Hermes is regarded as one of the earliest and most primitive gods of the Greeks, he enjoys so much subsequent prominence that he must be recognized as an archetype devoted to mediating between, and unifying, the opposites. This foreshadows his later role as master magician and alchemist, as he was regarded both in Egypt and in Renaissance Europe.

Mediterranean Hermes

One admirable quality of the ancient Greeks was the universality of their theological vision. Unlike their Semitic counterparts, the Greeks claimed no uniqueness for their deities but freely acknowledged that the Olympians often had exact analogues in the gods of other nations.

This was particularly true of Egypt, whose gods the Greeks revered as the prototypes of their own. It was a truth frequently recognized by the cultured elite of Greek society that some of the Egyptian gods, such as Isis, were of such great stature that they united within themselves a host of Greek deities.

The Romans, who were fully aware of the fact that their gods were but rebaptized Greek deities, followed the example of their mentors. As the Roman Empire extended itself to occupy the various Mediterranean lands, including Egypt, the ascendancy of the archetypes of some of the more prominent Egyptian gods became evident. Here we are faced with the controversial phenomenon of syncretism, which plays a vital role in the new manifestation of Hermes in the last centuries before Christ and in the early centuries of the Christian era.

During this period, the Mediterranean world was undergoing a remarkable religious development. The old state religions had lost their hold on many people. In their stead a large number of often-interrelated religions, philosophies, and rites had arisen, facilitated by the political unity imposed by the Roman Empire.

This new ecumenism of the spirit was one that we might justly admire. Though often derided as mere syncretism by later writers, it possessed many features to which various ecumenicists aspire even today. It is by no means impossible that the Mediterranean region of the late Hellenistic period was in fact on its way toward a certain kind of religious unity. The world religion that might conceivably have emerged would have been much more sophisticated than the accusation of syncretism would have us believe. Far from being a patchwork of incompatible elements, this emerging Mediterranean spirituality bore the hallmarks of a profound mysticism, possessing a psychological wisdom still admired in our own day by such figures as C.G. Jung and Mircea Eliade.

An important feature of this era was the rise of a new worship of Hermes. Proceeding from the three principal Egyptian archetypes of divinity, we find three great forms of initiatory religion spreading along the shores of the Mediterranean: the cults of the Mother Goddess Isis, the Victim God Osiris, and the Wisdom God Hermes, all of which appeared under various guises.

Of these three we shall concern ourselves here with Hermes. It was during this period that the swift god of consciousness took his legendary winged sandals and crossed the sea to Egypt in order to become the Greco-Egyptian Thrice-Greatest Hermes.

Hermes of Egypt

The Egyptian god Thoth, or Tehuti, in the form of an ibis. With him is his associate, the ape, proferring the Eye of Horus. From E.A. Wallis Budge’s Gods of the Egyptians.

The Greek Hermes found his analogue in Egypt as the ancient Wisdom God Thoth (sometimes spelled Thouth or Tahuti). This god was worshiped in his principal cult location, Chmun, known also as the “City of the Eight,” called Greek Hermopolis. There is evidence that this location was a center for the worship of this deity at least as early as 3000 B.C.

Thoth played a part in many of the myths of Pharaonic Egypt: he played a role in the creation myth, he was recorder of the gods, and he was the principal pleader for the soul at the judgment of the dead. It was he who invented writing. He wrote all the ancient texts, including the most esoteric ones, including The Book of Breathings, which taught humans how to become gods. He was connected with the moon and thus was considered ruler of the night. Thoth was also the teacher and helper of the ancient Egyptian trinity of Isis, Osiris, and Horus; it was under his instructions that Isis worked her sacred love magic whereby she brought the slain Osiris back to life.

Most importantly, perhaps, for our purposes, Thoth acted as an emissary between the contending armies of Horus and Seth and eventually came to negotiate the peace treaty between these two gods. His role as a mediator between the opposites is thus made evident, perhaps prefiguring the role of the alchemical Mercury as the “medium of the conjunction.”

Thoth’s animal form is that of the ibis, with its long, slightly curved beak: statues of Thoth often portray a majestic human wearing the mask of head of this bird; others simply display the ibis itself.

It was to this powerful god that the Egyptian Hermeticists of the second and third centuries A.D. joined the image and especially the name of the Greek Hermes. From this time onward the name “Hermes” came to denote neither Thoth nor Hermes proper, but a new archetypal figure, Hermes Trismegistus, who combined the features of both.

By the time his Egyptian followers came to establish their highly secretive communities, this Hermes underwent yet another modification, this time from the Jewish tradition. The presence of large numbers of Jews in Egypt in this period, many of whom were oriented toward Hellenistic thought, accounts for this additional element. In many of the Hermetic writings, Hermes appears less as an Egyptian or Greek god and more as a mysterious prophet of the kind one finds in Jewish prophetic literature, notably the Apocalypse of Baruch, 4 Esdras, and 2 Enoch. Still, when all is said and done, the Jewish element in the Hermetic writings is not very pronounced. The Hermes that concerns us is primarily Egyptian, to a lesser degree Greek, and to a very slight extent Jewish in character.

Hermetic Communities

A Renaissance portraite of Hermes Trismegistus, from the floor of the cathedral at Siena, 1488; attributed to Giovanni di Maestro Stefano. The legend beneath the central figure reads “Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, the contemporary of Moses.”

Who, then, actually wrote the “books of Hermes,” which, since their rediscovery in the fifteenth century, have played such a significant role in our culture? The writings are all anonymous: their mythic author is considered to be Hermes himself. The reasoning behind this pseudonymous approach is simple. Hermes is Wisdom, and thus anything written through the inspiration of true wisdom is in actuality written by Hermes. The human scribe does not matter; certainly his name is of no significance.

Customs of this sort have not been uncommon in mystical literature. The Kabbalistic text known as the Zohar, currently believed to have been written in the medieval period, claims to be the work of Shimon bar Yohai, a rabbi of the second century A.D. Two of the best-known Christian mystical classics, The Cloud of Unknowing and Theologia Germanica, were written anonymously.

The members of the Hermetic communities were people who, brought up in the immemorial Egyptian religious tradition, offered their own version of the religion of gnosis, which others propounded in a manner more appropriate to the psyches of other national backgrounds, notably Hebrew, Syrian, or Mesopotamian. Sir W.M.F. Petrie3 presents us with a study of such Pagan monks and hermits who gathered together in the deserts of Egypt and other lands. He tells us of the monks’ attention to cleanliness, their silence during meals, their seclusion and meditative piety. It would seem that the Hermeticists were recluses of this kind. Unlike the Gnostics, who were mostly living secular lives in cities, the Hermeticists followed a lifestyle similar to the kind Josephus attributes to the Essenes.

When it came to beliefs, it is likely that the Hermeticists and Gnostics were close spiritual relatives. The two schools had a great deal in common, their principal difference being that the Hermeticists looked to the archetypal figure of Hermes as the embodiment of salvific teaching and initiation, while the Gnostics revered the more recent savior figure known as Jesus in a similar manner. Both groups were singularly devoted to gnosis, which they understood to be the experience of liberating interior knowledge; both looked upon embodiment as a limitation that led to unconsciousness, from which only gnosis can liberate the human spirit. Most of the Hermetic teachings closely correspond to fundamental ideas of the Gnostics. There were also some, mostly minor, divergences between the two, to which we shall refer later.

Judging by their writings and by the repute they enjoyed among their contemporaries, the members of the Hermetic communities were inspired persons who firmly believed that they were in touch with the Source of all truth, the very embodiment of divine Wisdom himself.

Indeed there are many passages in the Hermetic writings in which we can still perceive the vibrant inspiration, the exaltation of spirit, in the words whereby they attempt to describe the wonders disclosed to their mystic vision. Like the Gnostics, of whom Jung said that they worked with original, compelling images of the deep unconscious, the Hermeticists experienced powerful and extraordinary insights to which they tried to give expression in their writings. Intense feeling generated by personal spiritual experience pervades most of the Hermetic documents.

The Hermetic Curriculum

Until comparatively recently there was very little information available concerning the method of spiritual progress that the Hermeticists may have followed. The Nag Hammadi Library, discovered in 1945, contains at least one scripture whose content is unmistakably Hermetic. This is Tractate 6 of Codex VI, whose title is usually translated as The Discourse on the Eight and the Ninth. On the basis of this discourse, one of its early translators suggested a scheme of progress that was followed by some of the schools of Hermeticists.4

A Hermetic catechumen would begin with a process of conversion, induced by such activities as reading some of the less technical Hermetic literature or listening to a public discourse. A period of probation, including instruction received in a public setting, was required before progressing to the next stage.

This phase would be characterized by a period of philosophical and catechetical studies based on certain Hermetic works. (The Asclepius and the Kore Kosmou may be examples of such study material.) This instruction was imparted to small groups.

The next step entailed a progress through the Seven Spheres or Hebdomad, conducted in a tutorial format, one student at a time. This seems to have been a process of an experiential nature, aided by inspiring topical discourses. In this progression, the candidate is envisioned as beginning his journey from earth and ascending through the planets to a region of freedom from immediate cosmic influences. (The planets were regarded mostly as influences of restriction, which the ascending spirit must overcome.) One may note a close resemblance of this gradual ascent to similar ascensions outlined in various Gnostic sources, as well as to the later Kabbalistic patchwork on the Tree of Life.

The final step was what may be called the Mystery Liturgy of Hermes Trismegistus, of which The Discourse of the Eighth and the Ninth is often regarded as a good example. Here the Hermeticist is spiritually reborn in a transcendental region beyond the seven planets. His status is now that of a pneumatic, or man of the spirit. (Note once again the similarity with Gnosticism.) This level entails an experience of a very profound, initiatory change of consciousness wherein the initiate becomes one with the deeper self resident in his soul, which is a portion of the essence of God. This experience takes place in a totally private setting. The only persons present are the initiate and the initiator (called “son” and “father” in this text). The liturgy takes the form of a dialogue between these two.

The Hermeticists had their own sacraments as well. These appear to have consisted primarily of a form of baptism with water and an anointing resembling “a baptism and a chrism” as mentioned in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip. The Corpus Hermeticum mentions an anointing with “ambrosial water” and a self-administered baptism in a sacred vessel, the krater, sent down by Hermes from the heavenly realms.

The Hermetic Writings

The original number of Hermetic writings must have been considerable. A good many of these were lost during the systematic destruction of non-Christian literature that took place between the fourth and sixth centuries A.D. Ancient writers often indicate the existence of such works: in the first century A.D., Plutarch refers to Hermes the Thrice-Greatest; the third-century Church Father Clement of Alexandria says that the books of Hermes treat of Egyptian religion;5 and Tertullian, Iamblichus, and Porphyry all seem to be acquainted with Hermetic literature. Scott shows how the ancient Middle Eastern city of Harran harbored both Hermeticists and Hermetic books into the Muslim period.6

A thousand years later, in 1460, the ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici, acquired several previously lost Hermetic texts that had been found in the Byzantine Empire. These works were thought to be the work of a historical figure named Hermes Trismegistus who was considered to be a contemporary of Moses. Translated by the learned and enthusiastic Marsilio Ficino and others, the Hermetic books soon gained the attention of an intelligentsia that was starved for a more creative approach to spirituality than had been hitherto available.

The most extensive collection of Hermetic writings is the Corpus Hermeticum, a set of about seventeen short Greek texts. Another collection as made by a scholar named John Stobaeus in the firth century A.D. Two other, longer texts stand alone. The first is the Asclepius, preserved in a Latin translation dating probably from the third century A.D. The second takes the form of a dialogue between Isis and Horus and has the unusual title of Kore Kosmou, which means “daughter of the world.”

The reaction of the Christian establishment to these writings was ambivalent. It is true that they were never condemned and were even revered by many prominent ecclesiastics. An authoritative volume of the Hermetic books was printed in Ferrara in 1593, for example. It was edited by one Cardinal Patrizzi, who recommended that these works should replace Aristotle as the basis for Christian philosophy and should be diligently studied in schools and monasteries. The mind boggles at the turn Western culture might have taken had Hermetic teachings replaced Aristotelian theology of Thomas Aquinas as the normative doctrine of the Catholic Church!

Such, however, was not to be. One of the chief propagandists of Hermeticism, the brilliant friar Giordano Bruno, was burnt at the stake as a heretic in 1600, and although others continued with their enthusiasm for the fascinating teachings of the books of Hermes, the suspicions and doubts of the narrow-minded continued to dampen any general ardor.

By the seventeenth century, the Hermetic books had enjoyed intermittent popularity in Europe for some 150 years. The coming of the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing religious strife, however, stimulated a tendency toward rationalistic orthodoxy in all quarter. Another factor was the work of the scholar Isaac Casaubon, who used internal evidence in the texts to prove that they had been written, not by a contemporary of Moses, but early in the Christian era.7

By the eighteenth century, the Hermetic teachings were totally eclipsed, and the new scholarship, which prided itself on its opposition to everything it called “superstition,” took a dim view of this ancient fountainhead of mystical and occult lore. There wasn’t even a critical, academically respectable edition of the Corpus Hermeticum until Walter Scott’s Hermetica appeared in 1924.

If one needs an example of how egregiously academic scholarship can err and then persist in its errors, one need only contemplate the “official” scholarly views of the Hermetic books over the 150-year period up to the middle of the twentieth century. The general view was that these writings were Neoplatonic or anti-Christian forgeries, of no value to the study of religion. By the middle of the nineteenth century, such scholars as Gustave Parthey8 and Louis Menard9 began to raise objections to the forgery theory, but it took another 50 years for their views to gain a hearing.

The Occult Connection and the Hermetic Renaissance

Hermes Trismegistus and the creative fire that unite the polarities. D. Stolcius vn Stolcenbeerg, Viridarium chymicum, Frankfurt, 1624

Although the Hermetic system has undeniably influenced much of the best of Christian thought, the most abiding impact of Hermeticism on Western culture came about by way of the heterodox mystical, or occult, tradition. Renaissance occultism, with its alchemy, astrology, ceremonial magic, and occult medicine, became saturated with the teachings of the Hermetic books. This content has remained a permanent part of the occult transmissions of the West, and, along with Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, represents the foundation of all the major Western occult currents. Hermetic elements are demonstrably present in the school of Jacob Boehme and in the Rosicrucian and Masonic movements, for example.

It was not long before this tradition, wedded to secret orders of initiates and their arcane truths, gave way to a more public transmission of their teachings. This occurred initially by way of the work of H.P. Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth century.

G.R.S. Mead, a young, educated English Theosophist who became a close associate of Mme. Blavatsky in the last years of her life, was the main agent of the revival of Gnostic and Hermetic wisdom among the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century occultists. Mead first became known for his translation of the great Gnostic work Pistis Sophia, which appeared in 1890-91. In 1906 he published the three volumes of Thrice Greatest Hermes, in which he collected all the then-available Hermetic documents while adding insightful commentaries of his own.10 This volume was followed by other, smaller works of a similar order. Mead’s impact on the renewal of interest in Hermeticism and Gnosticism in our century should not be underestimated.

A half-century later, we find another seminal figure who effectively bridged the gap between the occult and the academic. The British scholar Dame Frances A. Yates may be considered the true inaugurator of the modern Hermetic renaissance. Beginning with a work on Giordano Bruno and continuing with a number of others, Yates not only proved the immense influence of Hermeticism on the medieval Renaissance but showed the connections between Hermetic currents and later developments, including the Rosicrucian Enlightenment – itself the title of one of her books.

While some decades ago it might have appeared that the line of transmission extending from Greco-Egyptian wisdom might come to an end, today the picture appears more hopeful. The discovery and translation of the Nag Hammadi Library generated a great interest in matters Gnostic that does not seem to have abated with the passage of time. Because of the close affinity of the Hermetic writings to the Gnostic ones, the present interest in Gnosticism extends to Hermeticism as well. Most collections of Gnostic scriptures published today include some Hermetic material.

Gnosticism and Hermeticism flourished in the same period; they are equally concerned with personal knowledge of God and the soul, and equally emphatic that the soul can only escape from its bondage to material existence if it attains to true ecstatic understanding (gnosis). It was once fashionable to characterize Hermeticism as “optimistic” in contract to Gnostic “pessimism,” but such differences are currently being stressed less than they had been. The Nag Hammadi scriptures have brought to light a side of Gnosticism that joins it more closely to Hermeticism than many would have thought possible.

There are apparent contradictions, not only between Hermetic and Gnostic writings, but within the Hermetic materials themselves. Such contradictions loom large when one contemplates these systems from the outside, but they can be much more easily reconciled by one who steps inside the systems and views them from within. One possible key to such paradoxes is the likelihood that the words in these scriptures were the results of transcendental states of consciousness experienced by their writers. Such words were never meant to define supernatural matters, but only to intimate their impact upon experience.

From a contemporary view, the figure of Hermes, both in its Greek and its Egyptian manifestations, stands as an archetype of transformation through reconciliation of the opposites. (Certainly Jung and other archetypally oriented psychologists viewed Hermes in this light.) If we are inclined to this view, we should rejoice over the renewed interest in Hermes and his timeless gnosis. If we conjure up the famed image of the swift god, replete with winged helmet, sandals, and caduceus, we might still be able to ask him to reconcile the divisions and contradictions of this lower realm in the embrace of enlightened consciousness. And since, like all gods, he is immortal, he might be able to fulfill our request as he did for his devotees of old!

The article first appeared in Gnosis: A Journal of Western Inner Traditions (Vol. 40, Summer 1996).

Notes

1. Walter Scott, ed., Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which Contain Religious and Philosophical Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus (Boston: Shambhala, 1985 [1924]), vol. 1, p. 33. The demiurgus mentioned here is clearly of the Platonic rather than the Gnostic kind.

2. R.F. Willetts, “Hermes,” entry in Richard Cavendish, ed., Man, Myth and Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural (New York: Marshall Cavendish Corp., 1970), p. 1289.

3. Sir W.M. Flinders Petrie, Personal Religion in Egypt before Christianity (London: Rider & Co., 1900) pp. 50-65.

4. L.S. Keizer, ed. And trans., The Eighth Reveals the Ninth: A New Hermetic Initiation Discourse (Seaside, Calif.: Academy of Arts & Humanities, 1974), pp. 54-63.

5. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 6:14.

6. Scott, vol. 1, p. 97.

7. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 42.

8. Gustav Parthey, Hermetis Trismegisti Poemander (Berlin, 1854).

9. Louis Menard, Étude sur l’origine des livres hermetiques et translations d’Hermès Trismegistus (Paris, 1866).

10. G.R.S. Mead, Thrice Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1992 [1906]).

___________

Poetry: Hafiz on Love…

From the Large Jug, Drink

From the large jug, drink the wine of Unity,

So that from your heart you can wash away the futility of life’s grief.

But like this large jug, still keep the heart expansive.

Why would you want to keep the heart captive, like an unopened bottle

of wine?

With your mouth full of wine, you are selfless

And will never boast of your own abilities again.

Be like the humble stone at your feet rather than striving to be like a

Sublime cloud: the more you mix colors of deceit, the more colorless

your ragged wet coat will get.

Connect the heart to the wine, so that it has body,

Then cut off the neck of hypocrisy and piety of this new man.

Be like Hafiz: Get up and make an effort. Don’t lie around like a bum.

He who throws himself at the Beloved’s feet is like a workhorse and will

be rewarded with boundless pastures and eternal rest.

—

No More Leaving

At

Some point

Your relationship

With God

Will

Become like this:

Next time you meet Him in the forest

Or on a crowded city street

There won’t be anymore

“Leaving.”

That is,

God will climb into

Your pocket.

You will simply just take

Yourself

Along!

—

I Know The Way You Can Get

I know the way you can get

When you have not had a drink of Love:

Your face hardens,

Your sweet muscles cramp.

Children become concerned

About a strange look that appears in your eyes

Which even begins to worry your own mirror

And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness

And call an important conference in a tall tree.

They decide which secret code to chant

To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness

That arrays itself against the world

And throws sharp stones and spears into

The innocent

And into one’s self.

O I know the way you can get

If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart

Every sentence your friends and teachers say,

Looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale

Like a dead fish.

You might pull out a ruler to measure

From every angle in your darkness

The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once

Trusted.

I know the way you can get

If you have not had a drink from Love’s

Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of

The vital need

To keep remembering God,

So you will come to know and see Him

As being so Playful

And Wanting,

Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:

Bring your cup near me.

For all I care about

Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about

Is giving Love!

—