Category: rites

The group met last night for a relaxed session, a break from the ongoing Enochian work.  We opened the temple as usual, meditated together for a while and then Morrigan did an experimental visualisation, less a pathworking  (since it wasn’t located on a path of any specific kind) and more an experiment in magical storytelling, imaginative construction.  This was in part inspired by a book she is reading called ‘The end of Mr Y’.

The meditation of Mr Y

It is dark and it is raining. You are standing under a street lamp looking at the scene in front of you. You can see people, lots of people, milling around, weaving in and out of each other, like snakes. There are queues waiting to go into big tents, children running and shouting excitedly a small dog jumps and catches a ball.

You look down at the ground. Your feet are standing on wet grass. You concentrate on the noise around you. In the distance you can hear an old squeeze-box playing a dirge. You glance in that direction and see a girl with long hair and a ragged dress. She catches your eye and smiles as the music drifts towards you.

She is standing by the entrance to a large tent, the flap of which is open. You watch as she beckons you over and, without thinking, you approach her. She indicates that you should move inside the tent, where it is dark and smells slightly of mothballs. Once under the canvas you can hear the rain beating down. The sound reverberates around the tent. As your eyes readjust to the darkness you realise you are not alone. In front of you is a man.

‘I am Herr Doktor,’ he says. ‘Quickly, you must take off your coat and shoes and lie on this couch, we have work to do.’

The couch looks terribly comfortable, if a little ragged, but that’s it’s charm. It is heavily stuffed and covered in dark red velvets with big, tasselled cushions.

You lie down while the Doktor apparently fiddles in a wooden cabinet behind him. ‘Here, take this,’ he tells you. He hands you a glass vial filled with liquid.

‘What is it?’ you ask.

‘A secret,’ he replies. ‘First you must know the secret before you can know the secret of the secret.’

You swallow the contents of the vial. It’s bitter and stings your tongue. Your mouth goes numb, then your feet, then your hands. You begin to feel slightly fearful, but not an all encompassing fear, more like the fear contained in vertigo.

‘And now you must look at this,’ the Doktor says. He places a large white card in front of your eyes. On the card is a thick black circle. ‘Look at it hard,’ he says, ‘stare at it’.

The circle begins to move and the sense of vertigo becomes overwhelming. At first you just feel sick, then you begin to feel as if you’re moving, like when you’re sitting on a train and the train next to you starts moving. You don’t know whether you’re going forwards or backwards, but you’re definitely moving. Your body becomes lighter, disassociated with the couch. Your hands and feet are no longer numb, instead they are moving, forwards/backwards with your trunk, and then you are upright, in a tunnel, rushing down the tunnel. The tunnel walls are as white and smooth as bone and you are rushing down this bone tunnel, air in your hair and eyes, rushing down the bone tunnel at an impossible speed. The faster you go the noisier it becomes. The wind in your ears is loud.

There are letters and numbers on the walls. First you see the Roman script flash past your eyes, then the Greek alphabet; you can just about make out Alpha and Omega as they whiz past. Then you see hieroglyphs, dramatically coloured, vibrant, but you’re moving so fast that all the colours become one, smearing into Cuneiform’s angular/triangular strokes.

The wind in your ears is unbearably loud, it’s deafening. You are moving at the speed of light and the speed of sound can’t keep up. Everything you have ever heard and will hear is pressing into your skull. Just at the point you think your head will implode from this terrible deafening noise it stops, completely, everything stops completely and you are at the end of the tunnel in silence, total silence, bone like letterless and numberless silence. The world is golden.

In front of you is a bazaar, possibly Egyptian, maybe Persian, somewhere where the earth is made of sand instead of soil. Above you is a bright, yellow sun. You squint through the heat. There is a stall with sacks of spices and herbs, bigger sacks of rice and some substance you can’t quite make out. Next to that stall is one selling cloth, lengths and lengths of the brightest coloured fabric you’ve ever seen, rich purples, blood filled reds and cloud whites. The colours of the fabrics wash over you as you notice the treasure stall, heaped high with gold and jewels. All around you people bustle and traders shout. The air is filled with heady smells of spices and incense and cooking and the sharp tang of sweat.

As you look more closely at the people you begin to notice they smear slightly, as if overlaid with some imaginary pale blue blur. There’s a woman carrying a child and a rough woven bag over her shoulder. She’s blurred. You stare into her slight blurry blueness trying to work out what it is when suddenly you find yourself heavier, in front, at the back, very heavy, suddenly you’re feeling very heavy, then you realise you have the child in your arms and the bag over your shoulder. You are tired. You must get something for dinner. The child will want his sleep soon and if he doesn’t have his sleep soon he will cry. In any event, it is too hot. You must finish in the market. So tired. You look at the child. You know this child, his head, his hair, his small hands curled into little balls. This is your child.

Who are you?

There is a man sitting at a small table in a street café. He has a hookah pipe in his mouth and he is puffing away, until he stops to take a drink from his glass of coffee. He is also blueish and blurry. It’s the first thing you notice about him. He sits like a man out of time, puffing, sipping, puffing, sipping, and then you taste the coffee. It’s bitter. The cardamom catches at the back of your throat and rises into your nose. He’s uncomfortable, too hot, his hands are sweating and he’s waiting, again, waiting for her. She had said she would come, at noon, that she would walk by and give him a signal, but now he’s out of time, again, she is out of time, time has run out for them. He told her it would but she didn’t believe him, or refused to believe him, and now it’s too late, because there he is, waiting for something to happen that will never happen …

Until he sees her carrying their child, a bag over her shoulder, hurrying through the market as if she has somewhere to go that isn’t here. He sees her and his mouth goes dry. The child’s head is bobbing gently against her chest, sleepily. She’s beautiful, even with her hair stuck to her overheated head. He makes to move, to put some coins into the saucer, to get up and leave, but as he watches her he knows he can’t follow, no matter what signal she might give him. He has always known, there’s some places you can’t go, the voice in his head says ‘There’s some places you can’t go’.

The man at the treasure stall grins at you revealing big gold teeth. You don’t want to smile back. You want to suck something down into your guts that will make you forget there’s some places you can’t go, but he keeps grinning, the wrinkles in his face crumpling ever deeper. You hate him. For a moment you hate him. There’s a big black hole inside you and you hate him grinning at you as if he’s determined to share a private joke. You glare at him, shoot him a glance, really wanting to shoot him, to puncture that smile, it’s going right through you and you right through him …

Him … at his stall, surrounded by trinkets and treasures. Some glitter in the sun while others have a quieter internal light. There’s a piece of amber containing a perfect spider. As it sits gently absorbing the sun it’s difficult to believe the spider died thousands of years ago. ‘It is,’ he says, ‘and it did’.

‘You can hear me?’ you ask.

‘Yes,’ he answers simply.

‘How?’ you say.

‘It’s not important,’ he replies, ‘it is the secret of the secret, like the waves on a beach or the wind of a fan.’

‘And this?’ you say, ‘this insideness?’.

‘There is more space than you will ever know,’ he says. ‘We put the edges, we build the walls in all the wrong places.’

‘But the spider in this amber?’ you ask.

‘Was dead before it was entombed, most people dig their own graves,’ he replies, ‘every day is a funeral for them’.

‘And for me?’ you ask …

He smiles, you feel him, the creasing crumpling face, the roughness of his hands as they touch each other, the smooth cotton of his garments against his skin. White cotton, bone white, alabaster white, cool as a statue, liquid as milk, slowly he begins to dissolve, the bazaar begins to dissolve and you feel yourself dissolving into this wash.