Month: June 2021

-Privilege-

Privus – Private
Lex/Leg – Law 

Noun – a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

I view that word like I view my own backyard shed.

Useful, a sensible choice for many situations, full of historical meaning and still regularly visited.

Though like my backyard shed, it’s overused, full of shit that shouldn’t be contained within its framework. It’s rickety, rotting and dangerous to even try and unpack. 

Especially while under the gaze of anyone within your community who might have seen you doing some work around it. 

Everyone is gonna have an opinion on that old and loaded shed that you were stupid enough to go into.  

Privilege is a word that in many ways -and without sounding too dramatic- has been hijacked against its potential power. 

PRIVILEGE

A mighty thing. It even sounds like it.

Say it aloud to yourself. Meditate on how it so effortlessly exempts an individual or group from some of the many shit-streams this world pumps out. These streams constantly cum forth like the geysers that erupted long before man had lungs.

These streams and eruptions ascend, and descend from all angles, deep within the metaphysical space we all inhabit; just as much as the physical. 

I picture there -in that realm- a man-made God of complications, agony, jealousy, and all the other horrible qualities we have all convinced one another do not truly represent us as a people, race, or organism.

Observe Kentaro Miura’s ‘idea of evil’ and see your understanding of man’s power deepen with each meditation.

Contemporarily, privilege is a word with a theory about how a collective operates under this metaphysical ‘shield of resistance’. 

This isn’t a resistance felt by the wielder of the magic, it’s not like a sturdy circle of oak where one still must brace against the attack. It’s quite literally a spell wherein the soul/self or group imbued with its magic are quite literally unaffected by streams that hit, and affect all others. 

Before we have even got through a simple explanation of this term we can see why perspective matters so crucially within the meaning of this incantation. 

The physical world is relatively safe for us privileged in the lands of the West. The sons of Troy have made a safe haven against the dangers of many physical harms. We live in a land where even the lowest Walmart servant might put food on their table and drive a cost-effective car to and from their living space (also secure and protected).

We have made it possible to distinguish ourselves from more eastern provinces that refuse to believe that women are anything more than objects, and we have grown through the agonizing pains of several hard-won, but truly won battles of justice and liberation.

All of this did each of our forefathers gift to us, and wished for us. Because life is more than just eating and shitting, life is the blood, and the immortal power of our human ability to choose happiness over misery. To choose selflessness over the self.

Love is a blood-caked, mud-caked Anglo-Saxon clutching a black and white photograph of the woman he loved, and screaming into the mists of no man’s land knowing he would never see her again.

Love is an African woman being viciously beaten for simply trying to ride public transit and have somewhere for her sons and daughters to sit comfortable after her.

Love is the Irish mother who sheltered her starving children as they sailed the coffin ships towards the new world in hopes of a better life.

Love is the power and the glory of all races, and the triumph over death-immortal. The elixir we must drink to let the blood flow as it may, as it transcends through all ages and all struggles. We the vessels, we alone hold this duty to our kin. 

Yet we have truly forgotten the first law of evil.

Evil lives in the shadows, and is unseen by many until it is too late.

Somewhere, some stream spits forth a riddle so evil that we have all fallen for, and it has slipped past the Privilege we all here share in the West.

It has torn from us the most beautiful jewel of the physical realm.

It has whispered lies in our ears and its black forked tongue has whispered 

‘Your people’s struggles were worse, and are still worse now, because of them’.

In a world so obsessed with equality I find the biggest jest of all in this fact.

I am a white man. Born and raised proud of his country, and of those who brought me to where I now sit on the frontline of my household. 

Yet day-in day-out I am bombarded by metaphysical messages and tricks of language that hint that we have no right to be proud -or even- that we have the only right to be proud.

That we have no right to be angry when we are told that all our ancestors did was for malice and wrong. 

Only to aid my scarred psyche by seeing colleagues belligerently post how none should live in these lands if they think it so.

Spells slung at me from an air-conditioned room by another individual who has seen the ambrosia dripping from that black-tongue of evil that tells them their struggles are more relevant.

Worse than this, we are all told that the other is to blame.

And what answer does this Anglo-Saxon give on this subject?

I tell you now,

Of whatever race(s) you are, from wherever your family hailed from there were good choices and bad choices. Times when the highest of heroes fell for the darkest spells. But we who see past these lies must return now to the strongholds of reason within the metaphysical realm.

There is a vile enemy and his name is unknown. He lurks in the shadows and whispers to us all of how different we are, and how superior one is to another. He tells us to fashion new meanings for words, and brings us gifts in the form of technical terms which make us feel more comfortable imposing our opinions on the lives of others, and therefore upon all of those who brought that individual to where they now sit and listen to your drivel.

Privilege is slung at us with pride now like a cow pat at the accused village idiot. It reeks of ignorance and distaste for someone who you have deemed has more chances than you or your people.

I stand proud of all the battles lost and won. I stand proud of my people and my ancestry, and I stand proud not because we have ever been perfect.

I stand proud knowing that -like me- the long line of Indo-Europeans who came before me suffered atrocities, ignorances, wrong-doings and scorn that blinded them at times also.

I stand proud knowing that despite all of the wrongs that they did, and all of the blood that they shed for better or for worse has given me the chance to send this message millions of miles all across the world before going for a walk with my loved one in the beautiful forests of Canada.

It isn’t a privilege the way you spit it so.

Its a fucking honor.

And I’m bloody glad to be here mate.

Eofor out. 

“The one-eyed old man told me that the face that I will see

Has paralysed a thousand brave men sure of victory

I cannot fight blindfolded, and I’d freeze if I should see

So I need to sacrifice my eyes to see all from within“

Lyrics from “The Lake” by Bathory

In the Autumn of last year, I was driving back from Montréal to my then-home in central Ontario, Canada. It’s a route along the highway I’d taken hundreds of times; the weather was ideal, the sun was high in the sky, and there was a rotten, uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I could not shake the urgency and dread such that, completely distracted, I caved and took a random exit shortly after crossing the border and made an excuse to stop for gas. I went inside to pay and use the washroom, topping up my already-full tank barely an hour out of the city.

I got back in my car, relieved to feel the weight lifted from my shoulders, looking forward to the next five hours of smooth sailing, and within a half hour was annoyed to see the lanes in front of me filled with cars slowing down to a crawl, their hazards flashing as the whole highway ground to a halt. Assuming we had hit construction, or a bottleneck caused by one truck slowly passing another on the narrow two lane stretch of the 401, I was shocked to find myself one of the first on the scene of a brutal accident that saw twisted parts of two tractor trailers and several cars strewn across the road in shining pools of oil and fuel. As the whine of the emergency vehicles rose in the distance and we all shuffled off onto the shoulder to let them pass, I began to reflect. If I hadn’t stopped for gas at that unknown rural service station, if I hadn’t trusted the totally irrational impulse of my gut, I would have been just a few minutes earlier than I was, been just a few meters further west, probably underneath a truck, my car totaled around me, badly hurt. Maybe dead.

Did I pick up on some subtle signal early on in my trip, perhaps a car driving erratically up ahead or a trucker moving slower than most, tired and likely to make a bad decision after many days on the road? Perhaps some piece of important data, lost in the background noise of a tedious and familiar drive, was absorbed by my subconscious, which managed to fill in the blanks and project into the future, giving me the sense of dread appropriate for the likely outcome. Maybe it was some sort of magical premonition. I’m not concerned with what exactly happened, nor am I even convinced these two scenarios represent different phenomena. All I can say is that I’m glad for my gut, and even more glad that I chose to follow it. In fact, intuition is a faculty that should be explored and embraced by literally everybody. 

Many are familiar with the motif from Norse mythology wherein the god Odin sacrifices his eye. Casting the organ into the depths of the well of knowledge owned by the being Mímir (roughly “the rememberer”), the gruesome sacrifice represents his willingness to give up the ability to collect data from the material world, and instead rely on a current of knowledge that, quite literally, now resides in his gut – the powerful and occult contents of the well. Odin later decapitates Mímir during a period of conflict among the gods, and takes up the habit of carrying the severed head around with him, consulting it for advice regularly. This is clearly a series of events absolutely loaded with symbolism. But what does this mean? How can we actually apply this, as an actionable metaphor, to our lives?

While very few of us have access to physical magic wells, and probably wouldn’t have much success using a disembodied head as a magic 8-ball, we do all possess the ability to rely on the intuition that guided our ancestors along the dark path of survival. This capacity only needs to be let out in order for it to make a meaningful impact on one’s life. In the removal of his eye, Odin entered into a state of “half-wakefulness”: with his remaining eye he continues to monitor the external world, continues to make inferences about his surroundings, and symbolically, with the empty socket he consciously refutes the material, his stomach roiling with the liquid from the cistern. This is a state that, if given half a chance, the human mind will revert to – free from the burdensome obligation to think reasonably or sentimentally, this spark of raw intuition is the catalyst for the hair that stands up on the back of the necks of our earliest forebears, huddling in caves, wary of predators.

Clearly, the aim ought to be to straddle the middle way and, like Odin, leave one eye open to the ways of the world and the other directed inward toward the realm of the unconscious. But how can we quantify this? What does this look like?

Consider the following diagram, and imagine that it represents the proverbial lake referred to by Quorthon in Bathory’s eponymous track from the album Blood on Ice:

Beginning from the centre:

• The bindrune of algiz and naudiz represents the human necessity to transcend the exoteric, the material, and ordinary reality. This bindrune can also be understood graphically as representing a man with hands held skyward, pleading with the heavens as his body is pierced by some earthly implement, recalling Odin in Yggdrasil, or Christ on the cross.

• Surrounding this is a pair of rings, representing the twin prisons of conscious intellectual and emotional thought without room for intuition, preventing the human mind from fully embracing its own subconscious and walling itself off from a more complete and complex picture of reality (represented by the fog that swirls around the rings’ exterior).

• At the bottom left, the rune othala, representative of home, inheritance, and in this case earth, sits chthonically in opposition to sowilo, the rune most associated with victory and the sun, in the upper right hand corner. This outlines the duality of the material and the spiritual, and man’s transfixment between the two extremes.

• At the top left, the rune raidho represents the journey toward a state of greater intuition, while the bottom right is underpinned by the rune ehwaz, the steed, or more metaphorically the journey’s catalyst – perhaps the most important part of the entire image.

What will your catalyst be? How will you exercise your intuition? Into what lake will you cast your eyes?

For many people, myself included, scenarios like the one I experienced on the highway near the Québec border last year are truly few and far between. Many of us may never have the opportunity to see the necessity of intuition spelled out so starkly in what otherwise could not be a more mundane scenario. That being said, it isn’t difficult to find a well of your own out of which the elixir of knowledge might be sampled. Any activity that forces the human mind to function under the haze of free association – rune readings, tarot cards, countless others – offers an opportunity for your own brain to show you what it knows. When we allow ourselves to flit effortlessly between the realm of archetype and the realm of concrete application, when we allow our brain to tell us what it knows without having to ask for it, we unlock this middle way, and we direct one eye firmly outward, while the other “empty socket” becomes a vessel for things-which-we-didn’t-know-we-knew: a particular card in the deck, a particular pair of runes or their relationship to one another – the human mind can divine its own meanings, sometimes alien to our understanding, at a moment’s notice.

When this faculty is exercised, when care is taken to sharpen the associative and the archetypal functions of the brain, one finds them bleeding effortlessly into the realm of the waking day, casting its shadow over the material, and in some way, along that middle path – the “empty socket” is never truly closed.

And so the court swells with power. 

Brimming with energy; ignited by the fires of ancient archetypes. Like a forge of the Gods you will see your kingdom grow ever outward if you heed the words of your council, and understand that it takes more than one man to rule a truly great, and just kingdom. 

The Wolfhead King moves ever closer towards his goals, and sees the horizon expand in front of his holdfast. 

Yet for the time being his duty does not reside on the horizon. His future is his destiny, yet his future relies on the present, and the present must sometimes look to the past for the strength needed to unlock destiny. 

Fate is not a linear beast, and requires much more than a simple PAST>PRESENT>FUTURE equation. These properties double back, contradict, twist and writhe, and continue to hide from the hero until he is scorched and contorted beyond any discernible guess of the imagination. 

“Hooded, and veiled with their night-like tresses, The Fates shall bring what no prophet guesses.”

So often does the hero, or his predecessor become plagued by the past. “Why do you fear the past? You are Isildur’s heir, not Isildur himself. You are not bound to his fate.” says Arwen to Aragorn. “That same blood flows through my veins” he retorts back in a concerned and defeated tone. 

Even Gods fear what the future might hold, and so Odin All-father frantically searches for the answers, and understands that fate is not a fixed entity, but a river that flows dependent on the contour of its surroundings. 

Do not fear the past nor the ghosts that lurk in the dark corners of your realm.

It is within the swarth of the Wolfhead’s keep that he will find these crypts. Step by step he must move towards the unlight of the silent realm of yesteryears. 

The crypt of the self houses many effigies still dimly lit. They stand guard over memory, and those that brought you to where you now stand.

Who were you once? Within one great man is the spirit and memories of many men he once was or wished to become. 

Those that once were -gone now they might be- deserve the King’s respect. They built what he now has.

:I am the Spear that guides the way:

:The Edge of GAR that does not sway:

Not only are you the sharpened point of all your ancestors, but you are the spearhead of the staff that has been honed by every version of yourself since birth. 

Who amongst us can say they are the same man they once were. Who amongst us is so bold to persuade other men that they have never learned from the death of some part of themselves?

Still, this is not enough. We must embrace the spirits that once were. We must look to the stone effigies within the crypt of the self. We must look into their cold lifeless eyes as the candles shudder and the halls exhale a cold wind from the outer realm. It is here we must bow our heads and remember what was.

For it is because of what was that all now is. For better or for worse, we owe those ghosts our time, and company. This is the truest council. This is the shadow court, where no archetypes but you might find the purest of refuge. 

No laws are made down there. No new ties to powerful allies can be found in the crypt of the self. Its truest bounty is the lesson of death and the promise of progression. The flowering cycle that all things are bound to. 

In order for a Hero King to exist there must be the fallen. The road to the throne is cobbled by corpses and failures that span out for miles across the desolation. We must honor them for what they achieved before we rose from their ashes tenfold. We are who they meant to become. And become they did.

Crypts have always been a temple to memory. But there is no need for us to differentiate the stone effigies of those sullen temples to the dead from those of the bountiful altars we erect in honor of the Gods.

So often the temples that man has made to house Gods become synonymous with hope for a future outcome, as crypts assume the mantle of memory. But this is the problem of lesser men.

Here in the grove of the S.C.M.M we assume all our peers to have a more refined understanding of these holy places. We do not delve into the crypts in search of anything. We do not prostrate ourselves at the knees of the Thunderer in hope he takes pity.

We go to those hallowed areas to be away from all others, and we do so to honor those parts of us that deserve honor. And those things that are still perhaps beyond us. 

The Thaumaturge’s threads amalgamate. A paradigm is born. 

Magicks of the world permeate all. They exist within our psyche, and outside its bounds. The raw energy refined by the spinning wheel of ourselves. Arcane golden threads, weaving with luminous ferocity. Threads laying down the patch work of…

The Divine Tapestry

The Banner of :I:

Spiritus Ad Monumentum

The Thaumaturge Archetype has roots within a concept which many of us understand well. Mind, Body, Spirit. The weaving of the roots of the sacred trees which encompass the all. Within all Archetypes, composed by various great minds, we see places where the roots twist and gather. 

But the Archetype is composed of pieces which make the whole. A Sub-Archetype. Small, but no less significant fragments to the greater whole. The magicks and mythos of this world are vast and many. One could fathom them over a thousandfold. Today I shall discuss the :TRINE: of the Thaumaturge. A trio of Sub-Archetypes. Embodiments of the physical, the intellectual and the mystic. The cosmic alchemy which births the Miracle-worker. 

:SORCERER:

:HAG:

:ONEIRONAUT: 

SORCERER IN THE TOWER

Clairvoyance, practice, transfiguration.

We may imagine the Wizard within the Old Tower. An image most of us have no trouble imagining. He sits atop a grand pillar of stone. The spire of his monolithic structure cleaves the clouds and touches the stars. What a majestic site it is, paralleling the untamed potential of the human mind. 

His magicks are calculated. The crystal ball’s image means little without the means to understand. His esoteric workings can get “messy”.  We see this parallel within our own minds. We make mistakes. We lick our wounds, we improve our methods in the future. 

Precious metals litter his study. Precious minerals, once coal and soot, now enough to satisfy the greediest of harlots. Perhaps even to please a queen. His magic won him Rapunzel, his passionate spell now burns within her heart, her endless locks twirling around her wedding ring. 

The wizard is focus and mental fortitude. Directed intellectual energy for the purpose of something divine. His tower is the psyche and his being the spark which illuminates it. 

Magicks of the mind serve us in this corporeal world. They teach us to filter the jargon and sharpen an adamantine focus. Carve and shape your mind as the wizard carves the philosopher’s stone.

HAG IN THE WOODS

Alchemy, Physicality, Improvement

Take a walk through the dark wood, where most fear to tread. If you make it far enough you’ll come across a house of stone and moss. A Hag lives within. Hansel and Gretel would fear to tread here but you press onward. 

In her abode you will not find death and evil, but of simple devotion to the alchemical. Her cauldron bubbles, salted meat and garlic hang from the ceiling. Here she devotes her work to magicks of the body. A plethora of potions litter her shelves each promising various effects. The effects of some are known, others not. 

She invites you to feast and imbibe, and you curiously agree. You may undergo a transformation of your own. This may not be quick, this may not be painless but by the time you leave this cabin, you won’t be the same. 

She has a husband, did you know that?

Alas, he is no demon, nor wilted homunculus of which many fairy tales may speak. In fact he is a glowing monument to her work. A colossus of a man, fists of hardened iron, limbs of the strongest and tallest of trees.

Hansel and Gretel would have been wise to take her up on her invitation. By the time they left, Gretel would have been the fittest of young women. Legions of fawning men lining up to court her. Hansel would have become a hero the most gallant of knights would respect, and the finest of women lust after. He could definitely deadlift at least 3 times his bodyweight, I’m sure. 

The Hag is the physical creator. Her methods may not be comfortable, or quick, but they will forge you into something worth singing about. Tap into her essence next time to feel like skipping the gym. Tap into her practice when that weight is “too heavy”. Embody her ideal on your quest for physical glory, her wares are potent.

You are too.

MAD ONEIRONAUT 

Exploration, Chaos, Enlightenment

Alas, the most colourful among the lot. The pioneer within the psyche. He who traverses the realms of the unwoken world. He is the dream scout, the nomad of the spirit. We don the boots and equip the eldritch compass of the Oneironaut.

Madman, I would say. What is to be found in the order of natural laws where there are none? When control is relinquished to the subconscious mind within our heads. He roams in restful sleep, where lucid dreams take hold. He traverses the kaleidoscope of ideals and fragments, his head full of psychedelics. 

The Sorcerer has learned control over the magicks of the corporeal. The Oneironaut romps in a mad euphoria amidst the incorporeal. He sails through chaos and divinity within the dreaming realm. He drinks the finest of wine with the voice of the cosmos. He passionately fucks Aphrodite herself. He howls through his drunken haze. He spits lightning into the howling abyss of creation. 

His romp through this unwaking realm seems foolhardy, chaotic. Let us not forget the importance of chaos, however. Chaos within the self. Where we let go within a place that inherently makes little sense to begin with. Here is where we start to uncover that which we cannot find in our day to day state. Here is where we read scriptures we were otherwise not meant to find. Here we uncover relics meant to lay buried. Here, in the dreamworld, in the higher spirit we discover ourselves. Here, we uncover our secrets which slip in front of our very eyes. 

This is the path laid by the Oneironaut. He is the unhinged explorer, bottle in hand weaving the rainbow cable around the magicks laid by Sorcerer and Hag. 

We are him. He is we. 

The Trine of the Thaumaturge archetype. The corners of the triangle which make up the whole. Learn to know each one. You could certainly learn something from your own personal sorcerer. Marvel in awe of your own self the Hag helped you to create. Revel in the discovery of the Oneironaut, and the wisdom he can point you towards. These three lead you inwards toward the heart of this Trine. 

Towards the Thaumaturge. To the stronghold of the heroic Spell-weaver.

I hope you find him, my friends. He’s in you, and he’s waiting.