Leviathan Arises

The Professor came to the sea. His car was useless in the lot. His wallet and keys had been stolen by the hooker last night.

“Primordial Leviathan rages as tides, a great dragon of horrific force that makes a chaos of such disorder it can be known only as VOID.”

The Professor awoke in the bleary half-light of a clouded day, grey cold skies overlooking the waters. The Professor stood up against his will and stumbled to lean against the frame of the wide-open sliding door, air washing in over the 3rd story balcony of his hotel room. It wouldn’t close. Wind whipped his face. His head was pounding, deprived of any number of addictions.

“Above and Below were divided carefully to produce the two who walked hand in hand upon the land they formed.”

The Professor walked along the beach and stumbled into the surf, his glasses askew as his cheeks sunk into wet sand. A wave broke onto the slope and washed over his head, matting his grey hair to his pallid skin.

“Hand in hand, they danced upon the barren rocks that formed below and made the Ten Thousand Things. Hand in hand, they bloodlet upon each other’s breast and made the waters that flowed back to their origin.”

The Professor smoked nervously on a cold concrete floor. The Professor saw a flock of birds travel an unknown direction in the grey sky. The Professor saw clouds darkening and felt the end of the world draw near.

“The Ten Thousand Things danced in mutual bloodletting as knives sunk into flesh and blood poured and the sky turned in horror at the wreck of thunder that clapped in great events of knife after knife collected and poised to fall…”

The Professor felt as though he was being edged. He couldn’t cum. The hooker wouldn’t see him anymore. The clouds became darker. The Professor couldn’t stop crying without sobbing. The Professor stopped needing to eat. The Professor sat on the floor of his hotel room and never noticed that night never fell, that his watch stopped telling time, that anything but the wind and darkening skies stopped moving at all.

“I am that I am. I am your us. I am your them. I am their us. I am their them. I am the knives, I am your flesh and your doctor. I am your blood and your dance. I am your interlocked limbs. I am your tension and I am the cry without words as your tension breaks. I am. I am that I am.”

The Professor had served in Vietnam. The Professor had taken a scapular of dried ears upon his rotten flak jacket. The Professor had worn glasses and brushed aside broadleaved ferns and bleached out skulls in the river.

“Fire is universal. The Flood is universal. Both come from Leviathan. Leviathan rises from the sea, the great dragon. Leviathan breathes from our mouthes and strikes with our hands. Leviathan brings us to crash as we once did in the ocean.”

The Professor had seen chariots arise over cloudbanks resting low upon a swamp. The Professor had watched rotten brown water boil as life exploded, Agent Orange’s hypertrophy effect blooming and rioting before napalm would bring life by force, bring virility beyond what any life can withstand, bring the sun to the surface. Darkness had no place in the swamp anymore. The Professor held aloft a burned body, in the light, the light that only is, the desolate absence of the moon and the shadow.

“Lighting killed The Professor and sunk him into the black abyss. He dissolved into brine. He rejoined the dragon.”

Exteriorized Consciousness

Evola writes of the vegetable in the final chapters of the first half of The Hermetic Tradition. Imperfect Gold, separated from the one-ness of the World, is then cast into the black earth, the leaden world of base matter. Consider the mixture, feces, crumbled rock, nitrogen deposits, decomposition products, bacterial output, bug excrement, gore… an orgy of life and motion at its terminus becomes the black fertile soil upon which the gold falls. Gold is then scourged open, the hard outer shell pierced from within by its own potential and its being destroyed for life to sprout. It intakes and grows, blossoming by its precoded pathways in a flower, achieving now a truly perfect Gold.

The process of this decomposition has an posterior position in the herbal and vegetable world of the Garden. Knights appear in medieval marginalia fighting snails, fully armoured, steel blazing in combat. Anyone who’s had escargot will know a deep connection in the posterior of the garden - the uncanny similarity between the taste of snails and mushrooms. This is no accident. Both are symbols of the larger posterior side, that of digestive-functionaries within the garden in order to produce the substrate of the garden. Mushrooms rise from a vast orgasm that can stretch across miles upon miles, as the king’s crown of the soil’s living body of digestive bacteria and rootlife.

The Garden is a fully enclosed world, with its own Heaven, Hell and Earth, the latter being posterior motions downwards to turn the organic into the fertile and anterior motions of the fertile giving birth to the floral, herbal, and vegetable. The Garden is distinguished from the Forest and the Field in this way. While the Field must be sustained artificially, as any monopurposeful space must be, and the Forest springs a result of processes larger than itself, the Garden alone is a full capsule, of creatures in a carefully cultivate symbiosis, an enclosed world to bring forth the most intimate pleasures, herbs, essences, medicines, pharmakon, intoxication, micronutrients, etc.

Forest-actions are thereby replicated. The same codependence of life, of becomings, that meet at a confluence-point to spring up in the lush is carefully cultivated by hands into a world-unto-itself, much like the forest. The Garden represents the Forest where the hand has been made visible, where intellect is brought down to the human level. Gardens often have an architectural or economic teleology as such, the hand producing them doing so under certain directives and within a specific context of taste or need - much the same as the Forest arises from the confluence of factors into an area of land, the Garden arises from a confluence of factors upon a population.

Gardening is magical, a microcosmic act of Creation done by the hand. This act of creation has to be carefully considered, as one that is the pinnacle of extending ones thoughts outwards. Gardening here means the cultivation of life to create an environment, bringing together strands and tensions of life as one is guided to by the hand beyond their own. Gardening, no matter what specific medium it may take, whether stone or floral or digital, is a magical act of extending the consciousness into three dimensions, to create a macrocosm of one’s interior space, in order to fully inhabit one’s headspace - the ideal environment for practice to occur in.

Ludic Lodges

Through the dark of futures past, the magician longs to see. One cries out between two worlds - Fire! Walk with me!

Dao gives birth to One

One gives birth to Two

Two give birth to Three

Three give birth to ten-thousand things 

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

In the tripartite cosmology, Heaven, Hell, and Earth, the former two are not coherent in their own right, but mediations for the lowest and highest. The world comes to being first as the face of God moves upon the waters - thus dividing the void into two, as the void has had the ocean rent aside as God separated from the ocean, in order to work upon it. Thus, two things emerge - Heaven, the constellations, Platonic templates shining down from Heaven, and the waters of existence without form. Forms without Existence and Existence without Forms - the Stars, Heaven and the Ocean, Hell. Earth only comes into being as the mediation of the two. As Heaven forms the waters into Beings in template of its Forms, then an intermediary world is created between the two, where this process occurs. Thus the enigmatic third, the Earth, that liminal space.

At which point a question has to be asked - from where does three emerge? The easy answer is for the Jews and Platonists, so a different approach has to be taken. Immediately when the ink has been blotted down, there is not two - Absence and Presence, which gives birth to Three as there is then implied a liminal space between the two. From this third, the liminal space, the Ten Thousand Things as a dance between the two. The question can then be posed in reverse - does the third not produce the first and second? After all, isn’t it borders, the abstracted act of delineating what is and what is-not, that forms the shape of the corpus? In this way, neither Heaven or Hell truly exist. Their existence being codependent on each other, with that codependence known as Earth - from which the Magician emerges.

Bosch understood this intimately. Pay close attention to the interaction between the left and right folds of the triptych Garden of Earthly Delights. Form (Being) is shown on the left, with Existence (Becoming) on the right. Actions from Hell, Identities from Heaven. Performances from Hell, scripts from Heaven. Earth is in the middle as mediator between the two, where Bosch shows us the liminal action of the magician. Becoming produces Being, as Being informs Becoming and the mediatory interaction between these two, as the foundation of Earth, of reality, is the source of power for the magician. And of this binary, Heaven and Hell, which is the absent partner? Which is the present partner? To decide is to create motion and thus is the source of power for the magician.

The magician witnesses the birth of the world firsthand in the opening sequences of Dark Souls. Disparity begets they - the four lord souls. The meaning of there being two emerging from the original one-ness is explicated in Evola’s Hermetic Tradition. Impossible to quote in brief, the argument is essentially thus: the original duality, absence and presence, can be summarized as active and passive natures of movement. This then interacts with each as opposites, in order to form a second binary from the first. The passive flows down but is halted by the active, and the active flows up but is halted by the passive. Thus Water and Fire additionally becomes Earth and Air with the addition of a line struck through, signifying the other present - notice the way in which they cross each other in a non-unicursal hexagram. It’s from here that the first Lordsouls emerge. Of the Flame (Evola’s Fire or Sulphur), there is the active-active, present in flame’s burning passion of pyromancy and the swamps and chaos, Izalith’s Lordsoul and then active-passive, the flame flickering out and stilling in the form of magic, the illusions and crystals and lightning of Anor Londo and Seath, Gwyn’s Lordsoul. Of the Dark (Evola’s Water or Mercury), there is passive-passive, the forces of brute physicality and animal chaos in the abyss, humanity, New Londo and Oolacile, the Furtive Pygmy’s Lordsoul, and the passive-active, the physical exalted and raised to a level of religiosity and deification, bones reanimated and arranged as fetishes, light as stillness and healing, miracles and funerals, clerics and skeletons, Nito’s Lordsoul. No wonder then, that the two endings are the synthesis of both of these, where Earth and Water unite in the Dark Lord and Air and Fire unite in Linking the Flame, the former worshipping the passive, the lower, descending into the serpents and blackness, the latter worshipping the bright and active, ascending in a glorious scourging as flames of life take the player upwards.

It’s only the alchemical work being completed by the player that either the Sun or Moon is truly found. It certainly escapes Anor Londo, for their pretending at the celestial is revealed to be nothing but illusion. Comparison to be drawn in the Canaanite pantheon evolving to the supremacy of its thunder-diety taking monotheistic precedence, something only truly realized when a thunder God-the-Father was turned into a Sun-God of One by the Son’s “Igne Natura Renovatur Integra”. The celestial firmament of Anor Londo is that of the magician, the sun as one in a 7-step pantheon inscribed on cosmic pathways and astrological diagrams. 

All of this sets the stage for the Work carried out by the player in the game, that accomplished by the player at the end of Dark Souls. The harvesting of the Lordsouls and then choosing to embark on a path as a pinnacle, a solidification of the actions taken by the player during Dark Souls comes as the conclusion of the player’s journey from the lowest depths (Lead) into the heights of synthesis (Philosopher’s Stone). Dark Souls creates this through the loop of death and resurrection, a continual ritual of destroying the old and recreating as the new, more pure. The player’s skill improves with each death, as each death pushes them through the darkness of snuffing-out and then back again to survive a little longer in the light, the golden estus, the small spotlight shining from the character themselves.

This cycle is shown explicitly in Mario 64, where the Earth sections of the game are doubled over with a journey through the underworld in between. Of the first and second floors of the castle, there’s four stages, visited twice. Of Fire, Tiny-Huge Island and Bob-omb Battlefield show the sparks of life unrestrained, a world growing and shrinking in extremities, life based around its explosive potential. Of Air, Tall Tall Mountain and Whomp’s Fortress, where that same life has been stratified, stilled, to gusts of wind and piles of stone. Of Water, Jolly Rodger Bay and Wet-Dry World, water flooding and overtaking, continual washing and rewashing, the power of water and creatures of it demonstrated as Mario dives and floods again and again. Of Earth, these same forces frozen into Snowman’s Land and Cool-Cool mountain, the same powers inherent in slowed, crystalline form. It’s between these two that Mario must go through the underworld, the base of the castle. Death appears five times to him, as the wisdom of the crypt, of the father’s bones turned to oracles in Upper Egypt (Shifting Sand Land), as passion, as inferno, as violence and unleashing (Lethal Lava Land), as the abyssal darkness of intoxication, the enlightenment in blackness found by the Oracles of Delphi huffing poison gas to see deep into the world (Hazy Maze Cave), of the scourging and mortification of steel and predation, humbling (Dire Dire Docks), and of the spectres of the past, traditions remembered, unresolved tensions, things decaying that must be destroyed or integrated (Big Boo’s Haunt).

Mario completes mastery by the same death-and-rebirth cycle as Dark Souls, mastering the elements by molding himself to them. What for Dark Souls was represented in the work of the end, in achieving all Lords by conquering the elements represented therein, is represented in Mario 64 by the ascension by stars. The pyramid in the courtyard is beheaded and replaced with a golden powerstar, which Mario collects in quantity to unlock various stages of the castle, eventually the Heaven floor. Once Mario is initiated, he’s given access to the two feats of the initiated, the NG+ after becoming part of the elect. The way things are is shown in Tick Tock Clock while the heavenly realms of enlightenment are traversed in Rainbow Ride. All of this is in order to make way for the final act, in which the player is able to be given total freedom (akin to the Lordvessel) to complete the work as an initiated and finally conquer to the end. It’s now that all lessons previously taught come into play and are used freely, by the Magician fully initiated, so that they may then achieve the ending.

What the ending is, is sublime and doesn’t matter. Enlightenment is not a target in and of itself but a sublime anti-goal, a forever-elusive end to a teleology with no end. What matters for Magical work is practice, forever motion higher and higher towards it - the endless NG+ cycle, an eternal return to the beginning for further purification and refinement. It’s lives upon lives of this perpetual practice that will guarantee… 

Werwolf

They brandished steel to shine in the dim light of the forest, sun poking through the shrouds of branches and foliage reflecting where blades and barrels poked through, icy against the heat of the day. The men who wielded them were warmer than any of the rest, holding their ice aloft, a distance far enough to be removed instruments and never clutched close to the self, lest that temperature should fall back upon them and bring them down to the same fate they were meeting out, a coldness, of tiny little barbs of winter predating the whole domain of death in snow to fall upon the land when its life has been extinguished beyond their doing.

The men of autumn, the season of metal. When cold comes, after the peak of the parabolic arc of the year, leaves falling as trees wither, as ferns sink into the ground, those first little hints of cold, the cawcaw of a crow, the birds chirping as in flight, orange over green, darkening days, skies turning to clouds, streams becoming too cold to bathe in, winter ominous over the whole of the land. Summer had risen for them, same as it did for the rest of the world, flowers poking through corpses rotted to fertile soil, jungles springing up to shelter them. They drank, they danced, as the rest of the them, only returning to their gleaming teeth as the cold began to set in, as they saw it, in a way no one else could, when the year had peaked and it began the other end of its arc, that day of the 22nd when the days became longer, the first morning to come later, the first sunset to come earlier, a sigh of relief as they slinked away from the orgies of the sun to return to moonlit caves and castles where they were born and belong, to emerge with the early cold winds of August as the agents of that cultivated interior darkness.

A songbird was found dead on a fencepost, sacrificed at the altar of a smooth riverstone bloodied and spattered along the slowly quickening winds of the sheer mountainside, briefly granted a fast-passing grace of being bereft of its usual climate, grey skies with whipping winds over the deep mossgrass and stony rubbleslopes. No more songs were heard after the knife pierced it in the cold silence of the expanding morning, that deep blue of the moon and the cold staying longer and longer each day. The villagers began to hear crows and soon, formations of birds flying off to not return.

Some remained in denial, still clinging to the season’s assurances of staying. Not in direct lying or denial, but in fetishization, in hopes of sublimating the oncoming violence. They took its symbols and adopted them as if they were summer, joking and pretending the cold never touched them, pretending it was only a change in fashion sense, pretending the leaves were only cosmetic. Their population dwindled, though the cost they inflicted upon their comrades is immeasurable, wide holes of ignorance making the village a spongious membrane easily sliced through as more went missing, as autumn came mercilessly by black hands clawed in red from tangled brambles of ferns hardened into thorns, witch’s hats on the other side of the river, their cold feet crossing without any pricks of cold on their ghostpale skin.

When winter finally came, the men dispersed. When the season of death cloaked the land, countless froze, uncaring for the allyship of Autumn with the sweeping pains of frost. There was no reward, except one of allegiance. They brought forth the end, the one inevitable, and did so in a hardened acceptance of the inevitable. They brought force the end, without hope of recompense or sparing from its evil. They became death, accepting they were already gone from the world on that solstice night, when the first shroud snuck a little bit longer over the fleeting light of the morning.

Beyond the Political (Into the Spiritual)

“Right wing discourse seeks to create hierarchy” as the opening phrase of 0HP’s directory-thread states. Not entirely a lie, though it belies the nature of any politics which can be summarized under “wings”. The very invention of this model, that of the parliament was the defeat of the right, and the enthronement of the left as the dominant mode of politics. Once debate was ratified, rationality was made the law of the land under which the state was subsumed.

The domain of the political has since then, been wholly liberal, as the very conception of there being a “political” is in itself, a foundation of liberalism. The left and right both often rail that power is against their interests, to which they’re only half-right. The lines of flight drawn from liberalism on the far left and right are the cause of both of their oppositions to the power in which they exist. Ultimately, being in-reference-to liberalism, they find themselves again and again at a crossroads with their own agendas and the philosophical tendencies built into their politics by virtue of being underneath the discourse of Politics.

On the right, this tendency is expressed in the Reddit Right, as shown by that phrase of 0HP’s. “To create hierarchy” as shown in taxonomizing, as shown in imperializing, the instinct of the liberal and the rational to construct the objective atop the existing, such was the work that required the ideological religion of liberalism to occur in the first place. It’s this creation of hierarchy that is the business of rational thought, to construct the floating-world of the objective atop the actual, the platonic ideal to which all things are in-reference-to - the disciplinary power Foucault was so fixated on.

Politics is in all this, the very way that liberalism reaffirms itself, where all forces that my contest it after forever subsumed into it, by its encompassing of the terrain in which they are often forced to attain their goals. To be Political is to be liberal - such is the way in which, time and time again, movements are captured and nullified. The promise of power-within seduces the movements in organizations, into parties, into voting, and in time, they are wholly inducted into the apparatus of power. Their ability to contest has vanished, as the very thing which once posed the threat of being breakaway is no longer such.

To escape from Politics, to escape from movements, from ideologies, from compass tests, is the only true form of praxis that the right can take, the first step, in exiting the liberal order. Politics is a mind-virus, a circular maze of endless games which only refer to itself, a constructed view from the outside, certainly, one that must be taken into ones worldview in order to exit it. Politics is a trap of liberalism, where liberalism may never be escaped as long as one is within it. The praxis of ideological detoxing is one of removal from all memberships, from joining things, from participating at all except in reference to power, to wield and not to discipline, to read fiction and use money, not to construct utopias and secure votes, to leave the enclosed center for the infinite Outside of Spirituality.

Witchbeing

In the village between wood, they would part curtains of their own mind to deshroud the forest and enter it. The gradient reached a point for all where it no longer was tenable to pass through, where trimmed-back fields turned to the logging wood and then to the thinner hunting pastures, until it finally descended, into that which only road offered salvation from, a swamp, a mountain range, the empty desert, rocks and caves and water and trees without solace to the hungry and wandering. It was only after this point, where they were forced to begin to see. The din of the village silenced and the sounds began to open up in an orchestral symphony that mellowed with time and comprehension as they would sit alone in contemplation.

To The End, Snake is almost incidental. Ingratiated into the forest, The End asked for Snake to terminate his body, one last duel of the skills The End had been used for, in order to allow his acension to who he was more than prepared to become. Able to spread his senses across the entire living body of the forest, The End engaged his life in self-expansion, in dissolving the coherence of his own “self” into the wider body created by the network consciousness of the forest. Insects crawl over him as his soul flies away in a flock of birds. Trees rustle to his name, the bird is to him as a third limb.

There was in time removed from our own, a boy who failed at every metric of success set out before him by the culture and ways of his people. Unable to make himself a home within what was prescribed for him, he was exiled in failure. The forest shrouded him in deeper shadows as he walked, mud splashing up to his legs, the swamp welcoming him. Spiders crawled into his hair, oil trickled down his arms. Vines were brushed aside, a centipede crawled up his spine, a snake, a crow. He walked through corpses and soil. The Witch met him at the darkest, lowest point of it, a hollow of dark green light, where she saw in him - that black rot he couldn’t escape. She molested him in an exorcism, until he came - black rotten oil, the masculinity never meant to be, washed down to the abyss. He couldn’t return. He saw them again, unrecognizable. His legs were snakes. He breathed moonlight. He made illusions they traveled the sacred paths to see.

Solve et coagula - The snake crawls over cracked brick, moss covered stones, dissolving and crumbling castles past their time. The snake winds its way up the bloodied limb of the victim, dissolving into flesh, becoming a poultice over the injury. Sit outside and watch the sky. Do you truly believe they want you? Will you ever be a part of anything? If you were to be accepted, you would have been already. Don’t go home. Stay here. Walk deeper into the forest. Your foremothers are waiting for you.