“The throngs that crowd the desoil causeway care not that the road has grown barren and has been paved at incalculable cost to Nature and to their own souls. They are too mesmerized by the lustre and convenience of its ever-proliferating technologies, too glutted by the swelling egoism that places human beings at the summit of a fabricated ladder…” – Richard Gavin, ‘The Benighted Path’.
To experience the world as it is – daemonic, primal, erotic – is to let go, and now in this age, this is more difficult to return to, for long has the Spirit been in a position of jarring and interposition, wedging, between the daemonic and the body ensouled. Mechanical carcasses. Nature has been steamrollered, and the gradual steps back throughout the lockdowns are evidence of the healing that needs to be done, and how things can change without constant, pressuring, imposition. But it is more than just a biome tending to that is needed – a step, only one on the pathway that wends into the depths.
Admitting to insignificance in the scheme of things, within placement in relation to forces of Nature that are unceasing, creative and destructive both, is a difficult pill to swallow but one that is in dire need of being taken. A medicine blackening and corroding away at the I’s arrogance, alchemically transformative.
While there are spots to be found amidst steel and iron where the rare sacred makes itself known, be it by natural configuration by way of layered and repeated desolation resulting in landscapes of shadow-steeped Dread or the locations made by sorcerous wound to the Spirit’s hold, places where workings of the daemonic can be engaged in are desperately in need of tending to.
“No longer was man able to experience the qualities of the world through holistic engagements with their forces, but now operated in the All as an exile, determining his place in the world by what he can rationally understand through analysis and detachment. The spirit expresses itself through the self-conscious ‘I’, creating an individual that fights against the flow of time and struggles to maintain its identity against the dark, daemonic forces which attempt to compromise or obliterate his rational self-awareness.” – David Beth, ‘Clavis Saturni: A Kosmic Heresy’ in The Cult of the Black Cube.
To engage with the world daemonic is to surrender, to yield, to understand oneself as part of something, rather than to strive to triumph over and be superior to. To detach oneself from this decentralised living to instead affix into a human-centric model of rationalisation is to remove oneself from the primal innateness of the All, to be bound in fetter, blinkers and all. It is isolating, disempowering, and alienating, imposing confines and fetters, further confining thoughts – inclinations encouraged to race, to pick apart, to struggle as the Soul struggles, yearning and clawing at the insides. Rationalising taken to the extents encouraged removes the poetry from one’s surroundings, making entangling within the beauty and rawness of the world and what it offers freely to coexist alongside in a balanced delicate web all the more difficult. Time for the claws to find purchase and rip open that which constrains.
Recognising the imposition of spirit against the Soul is to become aware of a loneliness within the gulf, recognising further still the deep-seated drawing to the daemonic, for connection Kosmic. This stirs beneath the cinching layers of spiritual decay, century by century, act by act, fighting alongside the raw and primal creative and natural forces surrounding that refuse to be harnessed – witnessing yearned for.
“The reductionism and deconstruction of the living Kosmos led to an inability of humanity to connect meaningfully to the enthusing forces, and the sacrality of the maternal daemonic Kosmos was degraded in favor of a world of abstract ideas and deities mirroring this idealism and transcendence.” – ibid
The Kosmos is not something to study. It is not something to try and force under a microscope, to analyse, to pick apart as though unweaving what is already a rich and beautiful tapestry (that and more, words are but an interface, and limited). It is not to be quantified or measured. It defies such attempts, and is instead Experienced, holistically and authentically, through the erotic mating of Body-Soul to the daemonic, through vulnerability and a level of nakedness that is beyond the exposure of flesh. It is exposing down to the bone, to the Soul. Trying to rationalise the Kosmos is to try and grasp something that is beyond the scope of comprehension, fluidly resisting the stranglehold, a defiant beautifully dark ichor. The ceaseless tide wearing away at stone and rusting metal, and so does the forces of the Chaos find ways to break through that which seeks to act as barrier and blinker. The ever-seductive call of the Night Consciousness.
The Kosmos’s stirring and inspiring potency has become hidden but ever-present, found where humanity’s hold is at its weakest, striking through in moments where the Resisting come to the fore. This is not a transcendence; it is chthonic and sorcerous; it is bodily and present, it is Within and it is unfettering, welcoming and embracing within every moment, from the present to the after-living, in the shift to the Present-Dead, to the never departed and transformed. Those who pass are not elevated but held sacred within the same world in which every one of our moments is lived.
“To us every credo, every doctrine of salvation seemed stillborn and useless. And there was only one thing we conceived as our duty and destiny: for each of us to become so completely himself, so completely in harmony with the creative germ of Nature within himself, living in accordance with its commands, that the uncertain future would find us ready for any eventuality, whatever it might bring.” – Herman Hesse, ‘Demian’.
But the walls, the barriers, that the Spirit have constructed are not without attempts at scaling. Whether it is a ladder made from the words of a poetry drawn by an emotion that wildly seizes or the intentional ritual wounding by way of sorcery and ensouled rite, whether it is a moment of shuddering, consuming and ravenous eroticism that cleaves all fettering from the Soul within the moment or an experience that shatters the shackles at least for a moment, loosening the Spirit’s hold, there is a sacred resistance to every dreaming, Night-beloved action and act, and exploration that is to the tune of the bone-flute, of the drum and of an enlivened heartbeat.
“The central aim of our esoteric work is to weaken the powers of the spirit while at the same time re-empowering the soul to enable ourselves to re-enter the lost Kosmos and commune with the myriad enthusing daemonic images.” – ibid
Two sides to the same coin. The defensive, to better guard and protect the Soul against encroachment, to re-empower, to strengthen. To strike out at that which seeks to throttle the daemonic, the Kosmos. The offensive, to weaken that which seeks to cleave Body from Soul, that seeks to further force apart from that which was once innately interwoven, an existence of experiencing, meaning-living, and erotic.
“Thrown into a world of separation from life and a dictatorship of the rational, we free the instinctual and primordial beasts within through the rush of cosmogonic ecstasy.” – David Beth, Voudon Gnosis
To focus on the imagination, on the image, on living in the present without striving for false constructed ‘higher’ is scorned, the Spirit seeking to strangle through imposed time, through clocks that run counter to innate rhythms, through the begging to hustle, to engage, to profit, to bespoil, at a pace that is damaging and draining, a brutal task that is without respite, leaving husks and cleaved wounds in its wake when left uncountered.
“To peel back the heavy membrane from the eyes of the Soul, one must adopt a stance that is contrary to all that is acceptably human. In the bog of idle chatter and industrious din, one must be Silent, like the funerary statues that hush all but the elements and the wild beasts. Within the machine of activity, one must be Still, as a corpse in its rigid and eternal meditation. And one must close one’s eyes against the ever-growing hordes of dense forms. One goes within, and in so doing one undertakes the downward path.” – Richard Gavin, ‘The Benighted Path’.
To authentically feel without reservation and to live in shamelessness is to primally feel to the beat of a drum made of discarded tool-bones and humanity’s tanned flesh, stripped from the dedicant in sorcerous act and poetic sacrifice, as each genuine peeling away of part of the ‘I’ rips away part of that destroying and Soul-throttling Self that hinders ensoulment and forces the wedge in further. Dreaming sacred and all that follows are snapping jaws fighting back, silver teeth. With this shameless truth, there is the Quiet of reservation, of refusing the pleading to give, to give, to give without truly feeding in return, of savouring that which truly sates without obligation to let the cups run dry from slaking the thirst of greedy intake.
Path-treading that which is littered with loose rocks, gnarled roots, and a canopy hung with lights housed within lanterns of the Dead, lighting the way but complementing the fog of the undiscovered as the journey to the Chasm’s edge is readily taken. The path of ease, linear and offered without hesitation and with no need for warning, is shunned for the adventure. But the Path down and within is taken because, really, there is no other choice to be made in the hearts of those truly drawn to it, to whom the yearning for the macabre and spine-shivering is more welcomed than Day’s illumination.
Obscurite 