On the Difficulties of Complete Integration into a New Culrure
My Froman freinds are mostly conversant only in wurzel gummidge, the Somerset scrumpiod dialect evolving from the agricultural consciousness augmented in thought pattern by the fermented apple juice of local sacramental reverence. Whilst having over two hundred different words describing the varieties of cider ditch tumble and the enormity of drunken drainage channel wallowing possibilities that rural cider man will experience in a normal healthy life of alcoholism, yet, frustratingly for the incomer they have, literally no linguistic expression or even a conceptual framework for love. From paternal, sexual to homeland loyalty, any fond association the Froman wishes to express, he must make do with the metaphorical use of 'cider ', this covers all but the sublime superlative where 'gert lush' is used. The animal passion for the mud of their birth being an intrinsic 'gnosis' shared by all, to verbalise any detail of their sense of oneness with the soil would show a moral idiocy. It is a given. City folk are prone to scoff at what, to their urban mindset, appears yokel simplicity. Yet a vast scrumpoid vocabulary has evolved into a linguistic sub category able to explore a deep poetic and mystical complexity of relationships between man and root vegetable. These subsurface crops are revered, seen as a physical metaphor of the journey from the dark underworld or prebirth silence, upward in to the light. Representative of personal birth and growth but also, in a broader sense, mans journey from our animal ancestor into the light of human reason. Turnip, potato, mangel wurzel and swede, the limited word restrictive stretch urban man is imprisoned by, a poor tool kit of draper and homebase DIY poverty revealing an infantile oblivious ignorance to the immense, emotional, spiritual, aesthetic dimensions the scrumpoid mind has evolved the capacity to conceptualise, digest, invert and contemplate. This refinement of mind is largely made possible by the scrumpoid gruntage dialect, (a secondary linguistic system that comes into play as the lower levels of the cider state are adequately articulable through the basic tongue, deeper submersion into the cider state of mind sees the yokel shift seamlessly in to this additioal communicative system as the primary dialect reaches its limits to articulate this higher level cider consciousness) it is through the secondary language the yokels specialised ability is able to express in eloquent exactitude, the enormous spectrum of transcendence the root vegetable/human connection the yokel intellectual is party to. To the urban ear, tuned to a steel and concrete inorganic modernity, this musical grunted poetics, though cognitively impenetrable, can sound of a similar beauty to birdsong yet augmented by a symphonic labyrinth of vast and diverse complexity. No one born and raised outside the scrumpoid bumpkin culture, where scrumpy is the very breastmilk feeding the developement of the yokel child, could ever learn even a fraction of the most primary gruntage. Together, in cider, the spiritual musicality of dialect paints the air space of the rustic bar in a vibrant rainbow of auditory wonder. Scrumpogrunt, as linguistic academics often refer to this secondary language, is a communicative throw back, the missing link, expressive of all emotional subtleties. Confined to a single language that deals only with the material plane, it can be difficult for our minds to grasp. Yet the logic of this binary system, it's primary dialect able to explore and communicate the material reality, but where we fall dumb, the scrumpoid gumbo has the secondary system that can discuss and communicate the immaterial, the transcendent, the numinous and mystical connect to the earth in tubor from parsnip to beet. Indeed, the expression 'going back to my roots' comes from scrumpoid origins, as, in death, a return both physical in burial and spiritual, the internment of bumpkin sees the return to Mother Earth. The rotting corpse decomposition into compost, feeding the tubor. The physically quantifiable passage of the molecular particles of the yokel flesh, into the swede, spud or carrot. A complex tradition of reincarnation of the spirit into a hierarchy of root vegetables dependant on the conviction and discipline in cider consumption shown in life sees the temperate heretic cursed to a mangel wurzel afterlife. The return as animal feed a fitting punishment for a life wasted in cider less hubris. The piety of the seriously alcoholic may incur earthly suffering, the hangover akin to catholic flagellation, yet only through a pure and drunken life can yokel achieve divine carrot hood.
Full understanding of Scrumpogrunt comes through realising, unlike modern language where a word represents symbolically the object, Scrumpogrunt are sounds of direct animal reaction, no structured translation of the feeling into word, a pure direct vocalisation of emotional yokel spud interplay. A biological instinctive reaction of human/root tubor contact. This dialectical oddity originated from a time when man first stepped beyond the grunt, whimper and moan of animal into the language now common to Homo sapiens. This entire paradigm dimension is not only incommunicable to their towny counterpart, it is far beyond any comparable means of understanding. A dimension we can prove existent by mathematics, yet beyond our brainscope. Much like trying to imagine the echo location sensory world of bats. Or visualise infinity. Outside our sensory equipment. Beyond the conventional scope. The scrumpoid mind is deeply compassionate of our tubor blindness. Indeed, difficult for them to grasp why anyone could live in in such an empty world. In inverted pity, we struggle to envisage a loveless life, we prize love as the saving grace of an otherwise cruel world. Love is to urban man what swede is to scrumpoid. So, scoff as the urban shoe polisher may, the scrumpoid mind takes a melancholy pity at this spiritual wonder the towny can never enjoy. Though, the sons of the soil share my company and we politely down a jar or two together, one can't help but feel a gap, an unbridgeable distance, locked in different worlds. I see the sympathetic glances they give me, as though reluctantly dragged to the zoo, confronted with a captured ape, sadly behind glass, recognising that, from their lofty agricultural mind perch , my thought is mere bovine slurry. Cursed to miss the leaf above, and tubor below, the mud veil where the scrumpoid consciousness connects through lumpen root, in to the earth, Gaia, my soul unconnected to the host planet. A motherless, confused child. A lost uni lingual tourist, without correct currency, guidebook or sunscreen.
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Monday 28 December 2015
Wednesday 23 December 2015
Monday 21 December 2015
Peter - Chapter 8
Peter - Chapter 8
Titus Brock had arrived at Avebury in the dead of night. Having performed private rituals interacting with the stones and finally walking their circumference. Stopping at each one to lay on his hands and chant words he had learned from the elder Druids as a boy, feeling what was afoot, reading the situation, studying the vibe, humbly asking of the stones the path he should take, he then walked out the long extended line of stones suggested to him throughout his ceremony, pointing out which way he must walk. He could feel it already. 'Get away!' the stones warned him. "Waste no time, Titus. Evil is afoot. Be cautious." Like schizoid voices in his head screaming out to him to make haste. Indeed the very earth on which he stood was drawing him north and west. Through the stones he could feel the evil that had soaked in to the south east, it's spread on this land like a spilled flagon of ale on a tavern table top. His mind flooded with fungal connection with the earth. Twenty years of Druidic training had connected him so powerfully to the land his consciousness had long ago ceased to feel tightly attached to his body. Closing his eyes to engage with the spirits, his being flooded into the matter around, fusing with the immediate environment, blending into the soil as each moist dark particle stretched out its history, some from rock eroded by wind and rain over countless generations of Man, other fragments of long dead trees, their history from acorn through acrospire, to shoot and leaf, to twig and branch and trunk, drawing moisture through the tree form, transporting nutrients through the cambium layer, leaves kissed by the sun god, folding and forming, hydrating from the earth, time measured in centuries, witness to many lifetimes of people flitting past in their brief, violent lives, dying and buried, the roots feeding from the decomposition, extracting the meat rot nutrients, embracing their human spirits and holding them up through the branches, molecules within the sap, Brocks great grandfather, a mighty Druid was buried here before Brock was spunk in his fathers bollocks, but he could feel him, speaking to him down the time trails fluid within the oak sap, translated to the broader, expansive timescale of the tree, his force steering Titus, filling his heart with purpose, delivering direction beyond word or reason. In full flow, his Druidic perspective drawing on all the moist matter of life, growth, death and decay, feeding new birth, this cyclic resonance. Brock was an expression of the land around him. His, The last generation of English Man still one with the earth. The last British culture before losing touch with its planetary host. A people yet to take the hubristic Christian step away, rejecting the support of oneness that other animals still retain. The Druidic ways, the pagan perspective accepted the wonder of being of the cycle, inseparably intertwined with the universe, an aspect of the greater earth consciousness, born of its sumptuous primordial life force, thrown out in to existence, an expression of the beauty and sheer rapture of being, entrusted with a gift to bare witness, his life a particle of gaias self reflection.
But he could feel the confusion of the land around him. Winds tore up, looking fearfully around. The earth that is purity beyond deceit, beyond trickery, beyond grasping the poverty of mans arrogance. The land knew man had begun to rip free. The ground shuddered in the awareness the species were going astray. Chancing it alone. Proud in their consciousness. Mindlessly unaware of the doomed journey they were beginning. The Christian God created and shaped by man in utter disregard of Christs teaching. Jesus had stood up against the authority of pompous priests. Scoffed at their blind pride. God saw no hierarchy. Before his glory all men and women were equal. No church or priesthood held ownership or privileged access to the divine. But Christ never wrote down his teachings. Following his death, those of his followers who understood his message spread his word. But within days the squabbling of the apostles who had always jostled for Christs attention, were jealous that Mary Magdalen, a woman, a sex worker indeed, was first to be visited by the resurrected one. Gnostics were subject to spiritual insights, touched by mystical experience and knew the light of God could happen upon meek more readily than the rich. For them it was the private, first hand religious experience that was all important. Mary Magdalene, Christs favoured follower and lover saw the light. Gnostic Christians had no hierarchy and respected any who felt gods power from within. Meeting in secret they held their services, taking it in turns to lead proceedings, or by drawing of lots. Women equal to men, weak to strong, all were one, and the knowledge, gods love was for everyone.
The earliest written record of Christ comes from Paul who never met Christ. Gospels were written by the descendants of the apostles two centuries after Christs execution. Most of the many gospels were rejected as they presented a spiritual, not a physical resurrection. Some would be found close to two millennia later by which time the approved versions of Christs biography were beyond reproach. The lost gnostic gospels of minor interest to mainstream Christianity. Many of the miracles were not magical at all, just demonstrations of how by sharing food, all could get a meal. The four most dynamic gospels were selected, full of magic tricks to excite the gullible and spiritually desperate. In gossip, tales of his acts had been embellished. Not only did he return in spirit but he survived death. Born of a virgin. His miracles were exaggerated by the Orthodox Church as it developed, finally around 600ad, gaining acceptance from the Roman emperor who converted to the new orthodox Christian Faith, combining to form a dictatorial control. The Gnostics held a real perspective of the great political philosopher who liberated spiritual authority from the Jewish priesthood and returned it to the people. They took nourishment from first hand religious experiences. The mystical had no respect of Man made authority but could touch an atheist drunk as likely as a devout priest. The Orthodox Church took its authority from connections to the apostles, arguing their superior familial association to the long dead followers of Jesus provided their legitimacy. The catholic church's pope to this day takes unique and unquestionable status directly from the line of Peter, this connection to a renowned disciple was used to explain how the passing from man to man ranked higher than having experienced mystical States, dismissing the very touch of the god they claimed to worship to favour a human elites control of religion. Many of the apostles never experienced the mystical. Less than half. This usurping of the power through the establishment of the one church whose claim for legitimacy was built on descendents from Christs followers. Unemployed homeless men who rejected work in the hope Jesus grace would rub off on them, all ready to grass him up to the Romans or deny they even knew him when the shit hit the fan. The Orthodox Church denied the validity of individuals who had truly seen the light, rejecting the random uncontrollable touch of the divine, calling their rivals heretics. The elevation of faith despite the silent emptiness of an apparently god free world, became the benchmark of orthodox Christianity. Life was to be suffered and salvation could only come from retaining belief despite gods absence, a test. This faith would be rewarded after death. The hierarchy of the priesthood Christ had tried so hard to destroy reformed anew, this time under his name. Growing stricter and more exclusive as the Christian hierarchy, a pyramid of power and wealth denied the purity of the poor, denied that women could be priests or have souls. All Christ stood for was inverted and used to support the powerful rich elite. Christs death had been in vain. Gnostic sects who preserved the true spirit of Jesus message were driven underground. Through the years that followed the evil of orthodox Christianity would grow. Hatred of women and homosexuals continued to be supported by the church until the late twentieth century. Only when an increasingly secular society could no longer tolerate their prejudices did the church, reluctantly accept women and gays. Of all its extensive intolerance and butchery, the church reached its most out and out murderous zenith during the Spanish inquisition that brought torture and murder to heretics, the mentally ill, any of pagan beliefs and pretty much anyone they didn't like. Any cruelty, any horror could now be inflicted on those deemed heretical as these murderers claimed to be carrying out gods work. Mystical enlightenment through gods hand could mark a person as in league with the devil. Such was the churches jealousy of any touched by transcendence, trial by burning, drowning or any manner of saddistic cruelty would be meted out on the unfortunate by the priesthood. Any conscience was absolved by belief in mans divine right. Strict suppression of natural sexual urges found Christian priesthood riddled with paedophilia. The systematic rape of children on an unimaginable scale has established itself as a Christian priesthood tradition that still lies at the heart of the hidden culture of the men of the cloth. Protected by bishops any paedophiles unable to terrify their victims into silence are whisked away to safety in new parishes where they begin there systematic buggery once more. These holy men need only repent in their final breathe to ensure their safe passage into heaven. Steeped in creationist superstition, man was no longer entwined with the environment, no longer shared the pagan respect for animals. Through Christianity and the transcendent soul, man came to believe he was more than animal, more than woman, other creatures were on gods earth for man to use as they wanted. Being spiritual beings, able to transcend death, man became closer to God than animals. Christian perspective has survived the age of reason and the event of science and despite Darwins observations our unique divine right has continued into atheist humanism. So deep has been the cultural imprint of Christianity on the human mind that our belief in being beyond the laws of nature continues in modern post religious Britain. The destruction of the planet through a belief that the environment is ours to do with as we please is the result of orthodox Christian thought. A genuine belief in our infallibility continues as the earth expires. Scientific hubris held on post Christian supposition of our seperation continues to not see the most simple of truths. All animals are expressions of the environment. Natural evolution by default delivered an infinitely complex interaction of biodiversity. We are animals, and as such we are subject to the same laws of nature. Gaia will self level. Any species that becomes over populated will find famine, disease or other factors swiftly return numbers to a manageable level.
All this was ahead. This Promethean project, the journey we took began in Britain with the Roman invasion. Titus Brock could feel the earth below him in discomfort. Tied through consciousness to the land as all native Britons of Druidic tutelage were the barbaric crudity of the linear Roman mind and its hubristic seperation from the earth that delivered love and every nourishment appeared both stupid and doomed. As a Druid, Titus was connected through consciousness and spirit to his surroundings inextricably. It was often he felt a sharp psychic cut as a woodsman axed a tree, felt the relief of rehydration as rain fell, felt the pain as a hunters arrow flew through the air like fingers through his hair before the sting as a rabbit or deer throat was punctured. So steeped into the land was Brock that small actions as these grazed his perception for a good mile an all directions from wherever he stood. This sensitivity is lost now to all but some few isolated Amazonian shamans. But in Brock and Blacks time, an adult Druid knew the detail and disturbances around them just as dogs can hear howling miles away, smell every other dog that is within a mile, how healthy they are, even have a fair idea of their different moods through the differing scents of adrenaline and other neurotransmitters dispensed intermittently as piss message markers. A vibrant and complex sensory environment we walk through oblivious as the dogs enjoy a world beyond our sensory perception. A parallel dimension. Worlds within worlds. So too the Druids consciousness embraced perceptions of activity and disturbances through wood, field and valley, his psychic feelers stretching a good mile in any direction. It was through this hypersensitivity that Titus Brock found himself distracted from his mission to meet fellow Druid Jack Black at Cley Hill.
He could feel the fear of his own people as heat up his spine. He could smell the despair. As a Druid his duty was to protect. More medicine man than police man but Druids were brought up to dismiss any personal discomfort in the service of the communities under their jurisdiction. He was far from his home and knew few of the locals round here. Technically this wasn't his responsibility. But he could feel their was female pain. And Brocks rage spread. ' I'm going to spike some Roman cunts tonight and take them to meet the darkest skull raping demons summon able within these isles.' The thought of Romans in despair, on a treble dose of mushrooms appealed to his Druidic sense of justice, bringing a smile to his lips.
The megaliths had drawn the Romans to build there straight roads up to both Avebury and Stonehenge. These places, even to the deadened senses of a Christian Roman, inspired awe. There uses Brock knew full well but in recent times, since the invasion, rites of the old religion seldom took place. You could hardly concentrate the mind on planetary alignments with drunken Italians who believed they could survive death through clasped hands and muttering to the ground in the hope their massive yet utterly silent and invisible God could hear, whilst wearing skirts and sandals, shouting insults and hurling stones your way. Besides, to be honest Brock felt disappointed by his people. As soon as the Romans were stomping about in orderly formations, flashing off their suntans, over half of the native britains thought they were cool. Girls flirted with them. Fucked them on sacred sites. Moaned 'Jesus Christ' at orgasm even. And the men weren't much better. Some stopped drinking ale and affected a worldly European outlook. Claiming to prefer the vinegar like grape juice that invariably left you with a bad head in the morning and never inspired the laughter, the tribal singing, the pissing contests ale did. Euro puffs, Brock thought. He'd heard that some of the young lads were refusing to take their mushrooms in the autumn. Because the Romans couldn't handle more than thirty Liberty caps, most dare not even touch the sacramental fungi knowing its capacity to strip a man of all self delusion, exposing him to his true, frightened self. Some juvenile trendies seemed to think they could reach manhood still blind folded. Give the self examination of the shrooms the slip. By thirteen a young lad should be relishing the autumn. As a lad Brock had done mushrooms at least twice a week throughout the season. Never less than a hundred. The Italian mind must be weak, Brock pondered. Two moons at the early fall, during the moist period before the winters first frost, in good years three moons of fresh mushrooms revealed the true reality, hidden till mushrooms strip the veil. The ritual hurdle a boy must take to discover the man he is to become. Then he'd always dry a few thousand so he'd have some all year, just for special occasions, weekends and that, birthdays. And then, if you weren't grounded in their use, how the hell were you supposed to control their power when you needed to? It was like not losing your virginity. Worse, in a way. Fucking kids today, Brock sighed in disgust at the changing times. Besides, it was the Druidic key to the mystical.
What really disturbed him was the cunts who would grass up their own. Normal folk were generally safe from overt persecution but he'd had a dozen Druid brothers killed already. Boys he'd grown up with. Grassed up and sold to the invading authorities for a goatskin of wine. The Roman fear of the Druid was deeper than words can tell. The Druid could undermine their reality. Destroy the fragile superstitious Roman mind. One on one no Roman dare challenge a Druid. But, together, in military units and the security of outnumbering the Druid five to one, at least, in any attack, the Roman thugs hunted down the Druid Mystics. Crucifixions and other inhuman exhibitions to display the broken captive men of the woods, displaying the corpses to the locals to discourage any underground resistance. Brock had come across many of these aftermath displays of murderous power. Taking the broken bodies of his Druid brethren down from such humiliating displays, Brock had grown toughened to the horror. He'd managed to eat most of their brains, mind. Their learning and powers hadn't gone to waste. But he'd rather stand with them, alive than feel their minds inside his own. Recently, with Jack he'd learned that he needn't consume the whole brain. If it was a single corpse, fair play, a meals a meal, but six dead Druids, six brains was a right belly full. No, on studying the brains, by splitting the hemispheres they had located the pineal gland. The third eye. Also the brain zone where the natural DMT was located. Dimethyltriptamine. The most powerfully psychedelic compound on the planet. The key to dimensions more real than our normal one. Found in many plants, toad skin, and in the human brain. Today scientists believe that at the point of death, the pineal gland dispenses its DMT, the white light of heaven frequently described by individuals that survive near death experiences. Black and Brock had found this gland heald all they required. If there was time, a proper respectful meal could be enjoyed, the two Druids often sharing them, a hemisphere each. Reminiscing over times spent with their now dead freinds. But if it was a quick night rade on a Roman execution site, with Italian bastards sleeping off their vinegar, Black and Brock would work with stealth. Swiftly cracking the skulls, splitting the brain, then surgically removing the pineal gland. If time was short, they'd pocket the glands and make off into the night. Romans couldn't follow their twisted paths, sculpted by natural footfall responding to the grounds contour, they chased in straight lines, never alone. Once away Brock and Black would carefully divide the sacred pineal gland along its length, ensuring halves were equal, then together take in to them the spirit of the dead Druid. As digestion took place, the thoughts and memories of their lost brothers mingled with their own. Each brain increased their power. Their were far less Druids now due to the Roman spiritual genocide, but Brock and Black each had the powers of nigh on ten Druids each. Making them, in all likelihood, the most bad assed, dark artist mother fuckers these islands had ever known.
Checking his travel bag was tightened, Brock felt its weight. "Heavy as three mans heads," Brock cursed. In a recent encounter with some dark browned sea faring traders he had bought twelve pints of a South American sacrament. The traders called themselves shamans, medicine men, spiritual guides. Brock recognised in their eyes a warmth, a knowledge, an ease they had with themselves as though nothing could worry them. Introducing himself to these like minded visitors from overseas, Brock welcomed them, courted their company, "Sit, my freinds. Take a drink with me."
The shamans sat recognising Brock as a Druid, a man not so different from them. "No ale, just water for us. Let us talk."
There discussion revealed a similar belief system. Details, words differed but in essence the shamans were operating within the same reality framework as Brock and his brother Druids. Both were elected by their communities for their natural aptitude to study the plants, oils, roots, leaves and natural fluid extracts that formed the basis of their medicine. Spiritual aptitude recognised in a young boy would see him taken under the wing of an elder shaman where he would learn the many diverse secrets of the rain forest plants and the mystical uses for the abundant flora. Britains cooler, damp climate meant the spectrum of medicinal plants available to the Druids was less diverse and often more subtle meaning the use of seaweeds and fish derivatives played a greater role. Rare lichens and fungi that fruited in short seasons of delicate conditions, many available for but a day or two a year. The shamans, however enjoyed an abundance of natural remedies. They discussed treatments for conditions Brock had always considered way beyond any treatment. In awe of the medicinal reach of these wise visitors he listened humble and attentive. The tumourous lumps, for example, that grew within the unfortunate if visible, on occasion could be cut out but he had never heard of remedies to destroy the growths. As the night wore on Brock came to accept these shamans were of a class every bit the equal of British druidry. "Any reason you do not take the fermented barley water? I find it delivers deep joy and enables the observant to accept the absurdity of existence." The shamans explained. There primary plant had a serious reverence attached, as though it were a god. Something not to offend. They informed Brock of the strict dietary restrictions and fasting a shaman must undergo to take the powerful vine and its leaf partner. Baanisteria Caapi must be brewed for many hours. Alone it had a powerful effect and delivers great health benefits, but when taken in combination with psychotria viridis leaf, boiled together, the doors to other dimensions were revealed to the experienced shaman. They had ritual work planned in the coming days, otherwise they'd have loved to down a few bevvies. Indeed, they too enjoyed the absurd existential truth beer could reveal.
From what Brock could gather from the two travellers, the ayuashka experience compared to the native British sacrament, the Liberty cap. The night being young and exhilarated by this meeting that must have deep importance in the Druids desperate situation. The Roman Christian slaughter had all but destroyed British druidry. As far as Brock knew less than three score Druids of significance still lived. Driven to remote corners where Roman metabolisms were incapable of functioning, less than sixty Druids split into hidden communities in the Orkneys, Cornwall, Ireland, Welsh English border valleys and others in deeper Wales, preserved the knowledge. Keeping no inter community contact, the Druids hoped if one group were rooted out, even under the inevitable torture they would be unable to give up the other villages, ensuring the greatest possibility of preserving the knowledge. Native Britons would suffer with no medicine men left to treat their ailments. Disease would spread. Women would die in childbirth. Life expectancy would reduce. But the crucial connection between the human and the earth could be preserved, ready to restore this vitality once the accursed Roman occupation was over.
Brock had witnessed the ignorance of Roman doctors. When their superstitious rituals failed he had seen them pray. Looking to the ground, to the skies, to the horizon Titus had not once seen a prayer answered. He discussed this Roman invisible and utterly silent singular, all powerful but highly unhelpful God with his new freinds. The shamans were as dumbfounded as Brock. Both Druids and shamans had no time for superstition. The concept of faith appeared, to all their minds, utterly stupid. All Druidic and shamanic techniques were clear and practical. Why believe when all evidence suggests the other? The shamanic medicines were far more varied due to the abundant Amazonian biodiversity but a treatments worth was simply measured by results. Medicine either worked or did not. To mess with sick people's heads by trying to get them to wish themselves better struck both Druid and shaman as the actions not worthy of any self respecting man. Any Druid would be likely killed for soiling the name of the craft. Any shaman shunned, forced to live out the remainder of his days in isolation. Both Druidism and shamanism are fully functional. The skilled practitioner of either craft can guarantee through the use of their sacraments, full mystical experience. They did not need faith, they knew. The access to the differing multiple dimensions which one must enter to find the knowledge required for any specific spiritual problem is a trained skill but once the years of study under an elder in either craft is completed, the enlightened one is able to apply their skill as definitively as a brick layer. To the Druidic/shamanic mind the concept of 'faith', the wishing on a prayer, is delusional.
The shamans had been allowed passage by the Romans who gave them the odd look but lacked any curiosity. Brock described the genocide his people had endured. The two shamans looked concerned and spoke in serious tones to each other in a tongue beyond the ear of Titus. "Take us to your home. We wish to help you. Ayuashka will explain what you must do. Trust our sacrament. If there is anything to be done to hinder this cull, ayuashka will steer you to the path you must take."
Titus Brock looked inter the depths of their eyes. He saw a deep concern for his predicament and a deeper wisdom. Nodding slowly Titus agreed to take the shamans back to where he had camped up. "And gentlemen, have you partaken of the sacrament of Albion? The Liberty Cap?" Both looked curious. Their cultural differences were trivial, their psychedelic spiritual prowess a shared bond, transcending the language barrier.
Just as in evolution of any environment, by the very existence of interactive biodiversity and food chains, an animal, a human will find the food stuffs necessary to survive as his ancestors evolved in parallel to other flora and fauna. The nutrients particular to survival in a specific climate will always be found in the surrounding area. Today we see inappropriate, out of season foods, flown over to entertain our pallets yet the plants and animals that come to fruition at specific times of the year provide the most appropriate sustenance. So too the mystical sacraments occurring in all country's of the world provide the most accurate relevance to the mystical topography of the differing local multi dimensions. A spiritual harmony follows from ingesting the liberty cap in England and Wales. On my first trip I understood the fairy tales and hedgerow mysticism of this land. My mind opened to the logic of the history of the use of colour in the history of British painting, its relevance to the light. The sensibility and auditory reason to the music peculiar to the Arcadian consciousness. The lifting of the veil through the natural sacramental psychoactive plants of any country deliver revelatory understanding of the mystical, spiritual, mythological and cultural idiosyncratic beauties and aesthetic logics that have developed there. By no other means is any land so fully understood. Indeed, without psychedelics, the individual is doomed to a life lived within a culture never fully understood. The chaotic malaise of a miriad confusion of natural, mythological, artistic and cultural symbolism the nonmysticised mind could never hope to make proper sense of. Cursed to schizoid confusion in a world never fully intelligible.
Brock knew this and felt a pride in initiating these psychedelic masters to his humble native mysticism. He knew also from tales of older Druids that ayuashka is a serious, life changing journey that requires a knowledgable shaman guide. The potency of mushrooms delivers deep spiritual enlightenment, often as the trip rides past its peak and the chaos becomes coherent. But the tryptamine, psylocibin, induces mainly pseudo hallucinations. The tripper sees things that aren't there but is aware they are fabrications of his mind. The dimethyltyptamine in ayuashka induces full hallucinations. The subject is placed in a different reality wholly as convincing as his regular state. Common shamanic illusions involve the tripper to become other animals. Each have different spiritual significance but the two most frequently experienced physical transformations are that of becoming a panther and becoming an eagle. This is not an experience of feeling like or imagining what it might be like to be a panther, the subject 'is' a panther. Because of the totality of the new reality entered it is essential to have an experienced shaman guide. There are an entire catalogue of different specific demons, all known and recognised by the shaman, all having differing powers and motivations. Through drumming and chanting ritual songs, through the wafting of tobacco smoke, the skilled shaman is able to encourage benevolent spirits and cast out the nastier demons that, on occasion can enter reality from otherwise sealed dimensions. A full working knowledge of demonology specific to ayuashka is essential to the shaman.
Regarding britains own sacrament, Brock had an equally deep knowledge of the wide variety of transdimensional beings native to his homeland. Albion, the mystical parallel Britain, exists and is accessible through liberty caps. To have been born in a country with such a significant naturally occurring psychedelic had, throughout Brocks life, felt a spiritual honour. Once tasted, everything falls into place. The peculiar inventiveness and eccentricity of the people of these isles is a direct result of the unrecorded history of the higher consciousness the liberty cap has delivered throughout our history to the minority of shamanic ally inclined of all eras stretching back into prehistory that coloured the collective subconscious of the British. There is little written history of magic mushroom use in Britain but a single dose illuminates the subject to Albions mystical, aesthetic and mythological landscape. Whilst only a small percentage of each generation are drawn toward the mystical experiences of magic mushrooms, the effect on our character and all aspects of British self understanding is reflective of the underlying spiritual consciousness that defines our national character. Only through the lens of psylocibin is a true understanding of British culture possible.
Titus Brock considered the chances of meeting two men of such deep mystical knowledge and carrying ayuaska, the shamanic sacrament, the most powerful hallucinogen known to man, was no fluke. Druidism needed intervention of powers beyond their common access. What drew these Peruvians to travel here, Brock knew not. But he knew deep magic was afoot as he drank deeply of the foul tasting concoction.
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Titus Brock had arrived at Avebury in the dead of night. Having performed private rituals interacting with the stones and finally walking their circumference. Stopping at each one to lay on his hands and chant words he had learned from the elder Druids as a boy, feeling what was afoot, reading the situation, studying the vibe, humbly asking of the stones the path he should take, he then walked out the long extended line of stones suggested to him throughout his ceremony, pointing out which way he must walk. He could feel it already. 'Get away!' the stones warned him. "Waste no time, Titus. Evil is afoot. Be cautious." Like schizoid voices in his head screaming out to him to make haste. Indeed the very earth on which he stood was drawing him north and west. Through the stones he could feel the evil that had soaked in to the south east, it's spread on this land like a spilled flagon of ale on a tavern table top. His mind flooded with fungal connection with the earth. Twenty years of Druidic training had connected him so powerfully to the land his consciousness had long ago ceased to feel tightly attached to his body. Closing his eyes to engage with the spirits, his being flooded into the matter around, fusing with the immediate environment, blending into the soil as each moist dark particle stretched out its history, some from rock eroded by wind and rain over countless generations of Man, other fragments of long dead trees, their history from acorn through acrospire, to shoot and leaf, to twig and branch and trunk, drawing moisture through the tree form, transporting nutrients through the cambium layer, leaves kissed by the sun god, folding and forming, hydrating from the earth, time measured in centuries, witness to many lifetimes of people flitting past in their brief, violent lives, dying and buried, the roots feeding from the decomposition, extracting the meat rot nutrients, embracing their human spirits and holding them up through the branches, molecules within the sap, Brocks great grandfather, a mighty Druid was buried here before Brock was spunk in his fathers bollocks, but he could feel him, speaking to him down the time trails fluid within the oak sap, translated to the broader, expansive timescale of the tree, his force steering Titus, filling his heart with purpose, delivering direction beyond word or reason. In full flow, his Druidic perspective drawing on all the moist matter of life, growth, death and decay, feeding new birth, this cyclic resonance. Brock was an expression of the land around him. His, The last generation of English Man still one with the earth. The last British culture before losing touch with its planetary host. A people yet to take the hubristic Christian step away, rejecting the support of oneness that other animals still retain. The Druidic ways, the pagan perspective accepted the wonder of being of the cycle, inseparably intertwined with the universe, an aspect of the greater earth consciousness, born of its sumptuous primordial life force, thrown out in to existence, an expression of the beauty and sheer rapture of being, entrusted with a gift to bare witness, his life a particle of gaias self reflection.
But he could feel the confusion of the land around him. Winds tore up, looking fearfully around. The earth that is purity beyond deceit, beyond trickery, beyond grasping the poverty of mans arrogance. The land knew man had begun to rip free. The ground shuddered in the awareness the species were going astray. Chancing it alone. Proud in their consciousness. Mindlessly unaware of the doomed journey they were beginning. The Christian God created and shaped by man in utter disregard of Christs teaching. Jesus had stood up against the authority of pompous priests. Scoffed at their blind pride. God saw no hierarchy. Before his glory all men and women were equal. No church or priesthood held ownership or privileged access to the divine. But Christ never wrote down his teachings. Following his death, those of his followers who understood his message spread his word. But within days the squabbling of the apostles who had always jostled for Christs attention, were jealous that Mary Magdalen, a woman, a sex worker indeed, was first to be visited by the resurrected one. Gnostics were subject to spiritual insights, touched by mystical experience and knew the light of God could happen upon meek more readily than the rich. For them it was the private, first hand religious experience that was all important. Mary Magdalene, Christs favoured follower and lover saw the light. Gnostic Christians had no hierarchy and respected any who felt gods power from within. Meeting in secret they held their services, taking it in turns to lead proceedings, or by drawing of lots. Women equal to men, weak to strong, all were one, and the knowledge, gods love was for everyone.
The earliest written record of Christ comes from Paul who never met Christ. Gospels were written by the descendants of the apostles two centuries after Christs execution. Most of the many gospels were rejected as they presented a spiritual, not a physical resurrection. Some would be found close to two millennia later by which time the approved versions of Christs biography were beyond reproach. The lost gnostic gospels of minor interest to mainstream Christianity. Many of the miracles were not magical at all, just demonstrations of how by sharing food, all could get a meal. The four most dynamic gospels were selected, full of magic tricks to excite the gullible and spiritually desperate. In gossip, tales of his acts had been embellished. Not only did he return in spirit but he survived death. Born of a virgin. His miracles were exaggerated by the Orthodox Church as it developed, finally around 600ad, gaining acceptance from the Roman emperor who converted to the new orthodox Christian Faith, combining to form a dictatorial control. The Gnostics held a real perspective of the great political philosopher who liberated spiritual authority from the Jewish priesthood and returned it to the people. They took nourishment from first hand religious experiences. The mystical had no respect of Man made authority but could touch an atheist drunk as likely as a devout priest. The Orthodox Church took its authority from connections to the apostles, arguing their superior familial association to the long dead followers of Jesus provided their legitimacy. The catholic church's pope to this day takes unique and unquestionable status directly from the line of Peter, this connection to a renowned disciple was used to explain how the passing from man to man ranked higher than having experienced mystical States, dismissing the very touch of the god they claimed to worship to favour a human elites control of religion. Many of the apostles never experienced the mystical. Less than half. This usurping of the power through the establishment of the one church whose claim for legitimacy was built on descendents from Christs followers. Unemployed homeless men who rejected work in the hope Jesus grace would rub off on them, all ready to grass him up to the Romans or deny they even knew him when the shit hit the fan. The Orthodox Church denied the validity of individuals who had truly seen the light, rejecting the random uncontrollable touch of the divine, calling their rivals heretics. The elevation of faith despite the silent emptiness of an apparently god free world, became the benchmark of orthodox Christianity. Life was to be suffered and salvation could only come from retaining belief despite gods absence, a test. This faith would be rewarded after death. The hierarchy of the priesthood Christ had tried so hard to destroy reformed anew, this time under his name. Growing stricter and more exclusive as the Christian hierarchy, a pyramid of power and wealth denied the purity of the poor, denied that women could be priests or have souls. All Christ stood for was inverted and used to support the powerful rich elite. Christs death had been in vain. Gnostic sects who preserved the true spirit of Jesus message were driven underground. Through the years that followed the evil of orthodox Christianity would grow. Hatred of women and homosexuals continued to be supported by the church until the late twentieth century. Only when an increasingly secular society could no longer tolerate their prejudices did the church, reluctantly accept women and gays. Of all its extensive intolerance and butchery, the church reached its most out and out murderous zenith during the Spanish inquisition that brought torture and murder to heretics, the mentally ill, any of pagan beliefs and pretty much anyone they didn't like. Any cruelty, any horror could now be inflicted on those deemed heretical as these murderers claimed to be carrying out gods work. Mystical enlightenment through gods hand could mark a person as in league with the devil. Such was the churches jealousy of any touched by transcendence, trial by burning, drowning or any manner of saddistic cruelty would be meted out on the unfortunate by the priesthood. Any conscience was absolved by belief in mans divine right. Strict suppression of natural sexual urges found Christian priesthood riddled with paedophilia. The systematic rape of children on an unimaginable scale has established itself as a Christian priesthood tradition that still lies at the heart of the hidden culture of the men of the cloth. Protected by bishops any paedophiles unable to terrify their victims into silence are whisked away to safety in new parishes where they begin there systematic buggery once more. These holy men need only repent in their final breathe to ensure their safe passage into heaven. Steeped in creationist superstition, man was no longer entwined with the environment, no longer shared the pagan respect for animals. Through Christianity and the transcendent soul, man came to believe he was more than animal, more than woman, other creatures were on gods earth for man to use as they wanted. Being spiritual beings, able to transcend death, man became closer to God than animals. Christian perspective has survived the age of reason and the event of science and despite Darwins observations our unique divine right has continued into atheist humanism. So deep has been the cultural imprint of Christianity on the human mind that our belief in being beyond the laws of nature continues in modern post religious Britain. The destruction of the planet through a belief that the environment is ours to do with as we please is the result of orthodox Christian thought. A genuine belief in our infallibility continues as the earth expires. Scientific hubris held on post Christian supposition of our seperation continues to not see the most simple of truths. All animals are expressions of the environment. Natural evolution by default delivered an infinitely complex interaction of biodiversity. We are animals, and as such we are subject to the same laws of nature. Gaia will self level. Any species that becomes over populated will find famine, disease or other factors swiftly return numbers to a manageable level.
All this was ahead. This Promethean project, the journey we took began in Britain with the Roman invasion. Titus Brock could feel the earth below him in discomfort. Tied through consciousness to the land as all native Britons of Druidic tutelage were the barbaric crudity of the linear Roman mind and its hubristic seperation from the earth that delivered love and every nourishment appeared both stupid and doomed. As a Druid, Titus was connected through consciousness and spirit to his surroundings inextricably. It was often he felt a sharp psychic cut as a woodsman axed a tree, felt the relief of rehydration as rain fell, felt the pain as a hunters arrow flew through the air like fingers through his hair before the sting as a rabbit or deer throat was punctured. So steeped into the land was Brock that small actions as these grazed his perception for a good mile an all directions from wherever he stood. This sensitivity is lost now to all but some few isolated Amazonian shamans. But in Brock and Blacks time, an adult Druid knew the detail and disturbances around them just as dogs can hear howling miles away, smell every other dog that is within a mile, how healthy they are, even have a fair idea of their different moods through the differing scents of adrenaline and other neurotransmitters dispensed intermittently as piss message markers. A vibrant and complex sensory environment we walk through oblivious as the dogs enjoy a world beyond our sensory perception. A parallel dimension. Worlds within worlds. So too the Druids consciousness embraced perceptions of activity and disturbances through wood, field and valley, his psychic feelers stretching a good mile in any direction. It was through this hypersensitivity that Titus Brock found himself distracted from his mission to meet fellow Druid Jack Black at Cley Hill.
He could feel the fear of his own people as heat up his spine. He could smell the despair. As a Druid his duty was to protect. More medicine man than police man but Druids were brought up to dismiss any personal discomfort in the service of the communities under their jurisdiction. He was far from his home and knew few of the locals round here. Technically this wasn't his responsibility. But he could feel their was female pain. And Brocks rage spread. ' I'm going to spike some Roman cunts tonight and take them to meet the darkest skull raping demons summon able within these isles.' The thought of Romans in despair, on a treble dose of mushrooms appealed to his Druidic sense of justice, bringing a smile to his lips.
The megaliths had drawn the Romans to build there straight roads up to both Avebury and Stonehenge. These places, even to the deadened senses of a Christian Roman, inspired awe. There uses Brock knew full well but in recent times, since the invasion, rites of the old religion seldom took place. You could hardly concentrate the mind on planetary alignments with drunken Italians who believed they could survive death through clasped hands and muttering to the ground in the hope their massive yet utterly silent and invisible God could hear, whilst wearing skirts and sandals, shouting insults and hurling stones your way. Besides, to be honest Brock felt disappointed by his people. As soon as the Romans were stomping about in orderly formations, flashing off their suntans, over half of the native britains thought they were cool. Girls flirted with them. Fucked them on sacred sites. Moaned 'Jesus Christ' at orgasm even. And the men weren't much better. Some stopped drinking ale and affected a worldly European outlook. Claiming to prefer the vinegar like grape juice that invariably left you with a bad head in the morning and never inspired the laughter, the tribal singing, the pissing contests ale did. Euro puffs, Brock thought. He'd heard that some of the young lads were refusing to take their mushrooms in the autumn. Because the Romans couldn't handle more than thirty Liberty caps, most dare not even touch the sacramental fungi knowing its capacity to strip a man of all self delusion, exposing him to his true, frightened self. Some juvenile trendies seemed to think they could reach manhood still blind folded. Give the self examination of the shrooms the slip. By thirteen a young lad should be relishing the autumn. As a lad Brock had done mushrooms at least twice a week throughout the season. Never less than a hundred. The Italian mind must be weak, Brock pondered. Two moons at the early fall, during the moist period before the winters first frost, in good years three moons of fresh mushrooms revealed the true reality, hidden till mushrooms strip the veil. The ritual hurdle a boy must take to discover the man he is to become. Then he'd always dry a few thousand so he'd have some all year, just for special occasions, weekends and that, birthdays. And then, if you weren't grounded in their use, how the hell were you supposed to control their power when you needed to? It was like not losing your virginity. Worse, in a way. Fucking kids today, Brock sighed in disgust at the changing times. Besides, it was the Druidic key to the mystical.
What really disturbed him was the cunts who would grass up their own. Normal folk were generally safe from overt persecution but he'd had a dozen Druid brothers killed already. Boys he'd grown up with. Grassed up and sold to the invading authorities for a goatskin of wine. The Roman fear of the Druid was deeper than words can tell. The Druid could undermine their reality. Destroy the fragile superstitious Roman mind. One on one no Roman dare challenge a Druid. But, together, in military units and the security of outnumbering the Druid five to one, at least, in any attack, the Roman thugs hunted down the Druid Mystics. Crucifixions and other inhuman exhibitions to display the broken captive men of the woods, displaying the corpses to the locals to discourage any underground resistance. Brock had come across many of these aftermath displays of murderous power. Taking the broken bodies of his Druid brethren down from such humiliating displays, Brock had grown toughened to the horror. He'd managed to eat most of their brains, mind. Their learning and powers hadn't gone to waste. But he'd rather stand with them, alive than feel their minds inside his own. Recently, with Jack he'd learned that he needn't consume the whole brain. If it was a single corpse, fair play, a meals a meal, but six dead Druids, six brains was a right belly full. No, on studying the brains, by splitting the hemispheres they had located the pineal gland. The third eye. Also the brain zone where the natural DMT was located. Dimethyltriptamine. The most powerfully psychedelic compound on the planet. The key to dimensions more real than our normal one. Found in many plants, toad skin, and in the human brain. Today scientists believe that at the point of death, the pineal gland dispenses its DMT, the white light of heaven frequently described by individuals that survive near death experiences. Black and Brock had found this gland heald all they required. If there was time, a proper respectful meal could be enjoyed, the two Druids often sharing them, a hemisphere each. Reminiscing over times spent with their now dead freinds. But if it was a quick night rade on a Roman execution site, with Italian bastards sleeping off their vinegar, Black and Brock would work with stealth. Swiftly cracking the skulls, splitting the brain, then surgically removing the pineal gland. If time was short, they'd pocket the glands and make off into the night. Romans couldn't follow their twisted paths, sculpted by natural footfall responding to the grounds contour, they chased in straight lines, never alone. Once away Brock and Black would carefully divide the sacred pineal gland along its length, ensuring halves were equal, then together take in to them the spirit of the dead Druid. As digestion took place, the thoughts and memories of their lost brothers mingled with their own. Each brain increased their power. Their were far less Druids now due to the Roman spiritual genocide, but Brock and Black each had the powers of nigh on ten Druids each. Making them, in all likelihood, the most bad assed, dark artist mother fuckers these islands had ever known.
Checking his travel bag was tightened, Brock felt its weight. "Heavy as three mans heads," Brock cursed. In a recent encounter with some dark browned sea faring traders he had bought twelve pints of a South American sacrament. The traders called themselves shamans, medicine men, spiritual guides. Brock recognised in their eyes a warmth, a knowledge, an ease they had with themselves as though nothing could worry them. Introducing himself to these like minded visitors from overseas, Brock welcomed them, courted their company, "Sit, my freinds. Take a drink with me."
The shamans sat recognising Brock as a Druid, a man not so different from them. "No ale, just water for us. Let us talk."
There discussion revealed a similar belief system. Details, words differed but in essence the shamans were operating within the same reality framework as Brock and his brother Druids. Both were elected by their communities for their natural aptitude to study the plants, oils, roots, leaves and natural fluid extracts that formed the basis of their medicine. Spiritual aptitude recognised in a young boy would see him taken under the wing of an elder shaman where he would learn the many diverse secrets of the rain forest plants and the mystical uses for the abundant flora. Britains cooler, damp climate meant the spectrum of medicinal plants available to the Druids was less diverse and often more subtle meaning the use of seaweeds and fish derivatives played a greater role. Rare lichens and fungi that fruited in short seasons of delicate conditions, many available for but a day or two a year. The shamans, however enjoyed an abundance of natural remedies. They discussed treatments for conditions Brock had always considered way beyond any treatment. In awe of the medicinal reach of these wise visitors he listened humble and attentive. The tumourous lumps, for example, that grew within the unfortunate if visible, on occasion could be cut out but he had never heard of remedies to destroy the growths. As the night wore on Brock came to accept these shamans were of a class every bit the equal of British druidry. "Any reason you do not take the fermented barley water? I find it delivers deep joy and enables the observant to accept the absurdity of existence." The shamans explained. There primary plant had a serious reverence attached, as though it were a god. Something not to offend. They informed Brock of the strict dietary restrictions and fasting a shaman must undergo to take the powerful vine and its leaf partner. Baanisteria Caapi must be brewed for many hours. Alone it had a powerful effect and delivers great health benefits, but when taken in combination with psychotria viridis leaf, boiled together, the doors to other dimensions were revealed to the experienced shaman. They had ritual work planned in the coming days, otherwise they'd have loved to down a few bevvies. Indeed, they too enjoyed the absurd existential truth beer could reveal.
From what Brock could gather from the two travellers, the ayuashka experience compared to the native British sacrament, the Liberty cap. The night being young and exhilarated by this meeting that must have deep importance in the Druids desperate situation. The Roman Christian slaughter had all but destroyed British druidry. As far as Brock knew less than three score Druids of significance still lived. Driven to remote corners where Roman metabolisms were incapable of functioning, less than sixty Druids split into hidden communities in the Orkneys, Cornwall, Ireland, Welsh English border valleys and others in deeper Wales, preserved the knowledge. Keeping no inter community contact, the Druids hoped if one group were rooted out, even under the inevitable torture they would be unable to give up the other villages, ensuring the greatest possibility of preserving the knowledge. Native Britons would suffer with no medicine men left to treat their ailments. Disease would spread. Women would die in childbirth. Life expectancy would reduce. But the crucial connection between the human and the earth could be preserved, ready to restore this vitality once the accursed Roman occupation was over.
Brock had witnessed the ignorance of Roman doctors. When their superstitious rituals failed he had seen them pray. Looking to the ground, to the skies, to the horizon Titus had not once seen a prayer answered. He discussed this Roman invisible and utterly silent singular, all powerful but highly unhelpful God with his new freinds. The shamans were as dumbfounded as Brock. Both Druids and shamans had no time for superstition. The concept of faith appeared, to all their minds, utterly stupid. All Druidic and shamanic techniques were clear and practical. Why believe when all evidence suggests the other? The shamanic medicines were far more varied due to the abundant Amazonian biodiversity but a treatments worth was simply measured by results. Medicine either worked or did not. To mess with sick people's heads by trying to get them to wish themselves better struck both Druid and shaman as the actions not worthy of any self respecting man. Any Druid would be likely killed for soiling the name of the craft. Any shaman shunned, forced to live out the remainder of his days in isolation. Both Druidism and shamanism are fully functional. The skilled practitioner of either craft can guarantee through the use of their sacraments, full mystical experience. They did not need faith, they knew. The access to the differing multiple dimensions which one must enter to find the knowledge required for any specific spiritual problem is a trained skill but once the years of study under an elder in either craft is completed, the enlightened one is able to apply their skill as definitively as a brick layer. To the Druidic/shamanic mind the concept of 'faith', the wishing on a prayer, is delusional.
The shamans had been allowed passage by the Romans who gave them the odd look but lacked any curiosity. Brock described the genocide his people had endured. The two shamans looked concerned and spoke in serious tones to each other in a tongue beyond the ear of Titus. "Take us to your home. We wish to help you. Ayuashka will explain what you must do. Trust our sacrament. If there is anything to be done to hinder this cull, ayuashka will steer you to the path you must take."
Titus Brock looked inter the depths of their eyes. He saw a deep concern for his predicament and a deeper wisdom. Nodding slowly Titus agreed to take the shamans back to where he had camped up. "And gentlemen, have you partaken of the sacrament of Albion? The Liberty Cap?" Both looked curious. Their cultural differences were trivial, their psychedelic spiritual prowess a shared bond, transcending the language barrier.
Just as in evolution of any environment, by the very existence of interactive biodiversity and food chains, an animal, a human will find the food stuffs necessary to survive as his ancestors evolved in parallel to other flora and fauna. The nutrients particular to survival in a specific climate will always be found in the surrounding area. Today we see inappropriate, out of season foods, flown over to entertain our pallets yet the plants and animals that come to fruition at specific times of the year provide the most appropriate sustenance. So too the mystical sacraments occurring in all country's of the world provide the most accurate relevance to the mystical topography of the differing local multi dimensions. A spiritual harmony follows from ingesting the liberty cap in England and Wales. On my first trip I understood the fairy tales and hedgerow mysticism of this land. My mind opened to the logic of the history of the use of colour in the history of British painting, its relevance to the light. The sensibility and auditory reason to the music peculiar to the Arcadian consciousness. The lifting of the veil through the natural sacramental psychoactive plants of any country deliver revelatory understanding of the mystical, spiritual, mythological and cultural idiosyncratic beauties and aesthetic logics that have developed there. By no other means is any land so fully understood. Indeed, without psychedelics, the individual is doomed to a life lived within a culture never fully understood. The chaotic malaise of a miriad confusion of natural, mythological, artistic and cultural symbolism the nonmysticised mind could never hope to make proper sense of. Cursed to schizoid confusion in a world never fully intelligible.
Brock knew this and felt a pride in initiating these psychedelic masters to his humble native mysticism. He knew also from tales of older Druids that ayuashka is a serious, life changing journey that requires a knowledgable shaman guide. The potency of mushrooms delivers deep spiritual enlightenment, often as the trip rides past its peak and the chaos becomes coherent. But the tryptamine, psylocibin, induces mainly pseudo hallucinations. The tripper sees things that aren't there but is aware they are fabrications of his mind. The dimethyltyptamine in ayuashka induces full hallucinations. The subject is placed in a different reality wholly as convincing as his regular state. Common shamanic illusions involve the tripper to become other animals. Each have different spiritual significance but the two most frequently experienced physical transformations are that of becoming a panther and becoming an eagle. This is not an experience of feeling like or imagining what it might be like to be a panther, the subject 'is' a panther. Because of the totality of the new reality entered it is essential to have an experienced shaman guide. There are an entire catalogue of different specific demons, all known and recognised by the shaman, all having differing powers and motivations. Through drumming and chanting ritual songs, through the wafting of tobacco smoke, the skilled shaman is able to encourage benevolent spirits and cast out the nastier demons that, on occasion can enter reality from otherwise sealed dimensions. A full working knowledge of demonology specific to ayuashka is essential to the shaman.
Regarding britains own sacrament, Brock had an equally deep knowledge of the wide variety of transdimensional beings native to his homeland. Albion, the mystical parallel Britain, exists and is accessible through liberty caps. To have been born in a country with such a significant naturally occurring psychedelic had, throughout Brocks life, felt a spiritual honour. Once tasted, everything falls into place. The peculiar inventiveness and eccentricity of the people of these isles is a direct result of the unrecorded history of the higher consciousness the liberty cap has delivered throughout our history to the minority of shamanic ally inclined of all eras stretching back into prehistory that coloured the collective subconscious of the British. There is little written history of magic mushroom use in Britain but a single dose illuminates the subject to Albions mystical, aesthetic and mythological landscape. Whilst only a small percentage of each generation are drawn toward the mystical experiences of magic mushrooms, the effect on our character and all aspects of British self understanding is reflective of the underlying spiritual consciousness that defines our national character. Only through the lens of psylocibin is a true understanding of British culture possible.
Titus Brock considered the chances of meeting two men of such deep mystical knowledge and carrying ayuaska, the shamanic sacrament, the most powerful hallucinogen known to man, was no fluke. Druidism needed intervention of powers beyond their common access. What drew these Peruvians to travel here, Brock knew not. But he knew deep magic was afoot as he drank deeply of the foul tasting concoction.
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Saturday 19 December 2015
Friday 18 December 2015
Skreeworld - A New Paradigm 3
Skreeworld - A New Paradigm 3
The cosmological estrangement of modern consciousness initiated by Corpernicus and the ontological estrangement initiated by Descartes were completed by the epistemological estrangement initiated by Kant: a threefold mutually enforced prison of modern alienation.
There is a striking resemblance between this state of affairs and the condition that Gregory Bateson famously described as the "double bind"; the impossibly problematic situation in which mutually contradictory demands eventually lead a person to become schizophrenic. In Batesons formulation, there were four basic premises necessary to constitute a double bind situation between a child and a "schizophrenogenic" mother:
1: the child's relationship to the mother is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the child to assess communications from the mother accurately.
2: The child receives contradictory or incompatible information from the mother at different levels, whereby, for example, her explicit verbal communication is fundamentally denied by the "meta communication", the none verbal context in which the explicit message is conveyed (thus the mother who says to her child with hostile eyes and a rigid body, "Darling, you know I love you so much"). The two sets of signals cannot be understood as coherent.
3: The child is not given any opportunity to ask questions of the mother that would clarify the communication or resolve the contradiction.
4: The child cannot leave the field, i.e, the relationship. In such circumstances, Bateson found, the child is forced to distort his or her perception of both outer and inner realities, with serious psychopathological consequences.
Now if we substitute in these four premises 'world' for mother, and 'human being' for child, we have the modern double bind in a nutshell:
1: The human beings relationship to the world is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the human being to assess the nature of that world accurately.
2: The human mind receives contradictory or incompatible information about its situation with respect to the world, whereby its inner psychological and spiritual sense of things is incoherent with the scientific metacommunication
3: Epistemologically, the human mind cannot achieve direct communication with the world.
4: Existentially, the human being cannot leave the field.
The differences between Batesons psychiatric double bind and the modern existential condition are more in degree than in kind: the modern condition is an extraordinarily encompassing and fundamental double bind, made less immediately conspicuous simply because it is so universal. We have the post Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post Cartesian dilemma of being a conscious, purposeful and personal subject confronting an unconscious, purposeless and impersonal universe, with these compounded by by the post Kantian dilemma of there being no possible means by which the human subject can know the universe in its essence. We are evolved from, embedded in and defined by a reality that is radically alien to our own, and moreover can never be directly contacted in cognition.
This double bind of modern consciousness has been recognised in one form or another since at least Pascal: "I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces." Our psychological and spiritual predispositions are absurdly at variance with the world revealed by our scientific method. We seem to receive two messages from our existential situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for meaning and spiritual fulfilment; but on the other hand, know that the universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely different to that quest, soulless in character and nullifying in its effects. We are at once aroused and crushed. For inexplicably, absurdly, the cosmos is inhuman, yet we are not. The situation is profoundly unintelligible.
If we follow Batesons diagnosis and apply it to the larger modern condition, it should not be surprising what kinds of response the modern psyche has made to this situation as it attempts to escape the double binds contradictions. Either inner or outer realities tend to be distorted: inner feelings are repressed and denied, as in apathy and psychic numbing, or they are inflated in compensation, as in narcissism and egocentrism; or the outer world is slavishly submitted to as the only reality, or it is aggressively objectified and exploited. There is also the strategy of flight, through various forms of escapism: compulsive economic consumption, absorption in the mass media, faddish, cults, ideologies, nationalistic fervour, alcoholism, drug addiction. When avoidance mechanisms cannot be sustained there is anxiety, paranoia, chronic hostility, a feeling of helpless victimisation, a tendency to suspect all meanings, an impulse toward self negation, a sense of purposelessness and absurdity, a feeling of irresolvable inner contradiction, a fragmenting of consciousness. And at the extreme, there are the full blown psychopathological reactions of the schizophrenic: self destructive violence, delusional States, massive amnesia, catatonia, automatism, mania, nihilism. The modern world knows each of these reactions in various combinations and compromise formations, and it's social and political life is notoriously so determined.
Nor should it be surprising that modern philosophy finds itself in the condition we now see. Of course modern philosophy has brought forth some courageous intellectual responses to the post Copernican situation, but by and large the philosophy that dominated last century and the early years of this resembles nothing so much as a severe obsessive compulsive sitting on his bed repeatedly tying and untying his shoes because he never quite gets it right - while in the meantime Socrates, Hegel and Aquinas are already high up the mountain on their hike, breathing the bracing alpine air, seeing new and unexpected vistas.
But there is one crucial way in which the modern situation is not identical to the psychiatric double bind, and this is the fact that the modern human being has not simply been a helpless child, but has actively engaged the world and pursued a specific strategy and mode of activity - a Promethean project of freeing itself from and controlling nature. The modern mind has demanded a specific type of interpretation of the world: it's scientific method has required explanations of phenomena that are concretely predictive, and therefore impersonal, mechanistic, structural. To fulfil their purposes, these explanations of the universe have been systematically "cleansed" of all spiritual and human qualities. Of course we cannot be certain that the world is in fact what these explanations suggest. We can be certain only that the world is to an indeterminate extent susceptible to this way of interpretation. Kants insight is a sword that cuts two ways. Although on the one hand it appears to place the world beyond the grasp of the human mind, on the other hand it recognises that the soulless and impersonal world of modern scientific cognition is not necessarily the whole story. Rather, that world is the only kind of story that for the past three centuries the Western mind has considered justifiable in Ernest Gellners words, "It was Kants merit to see that this compulsion (for mechanistic impersonal explanation) is in us, not in things." And, "it was Webers to see that it is historically a specific kind of mind, not human mind as such, that it is subject to this compulsion."
Hence one crucial part of the modern double bind is not airtight. In the case of Batesons schizophrenogenic mother and child, the mother more or less holds all the cards, for she unilaterally controls the communication. But the lesson of Kant is that the locus of the communication problem - i.e., the problem of human knowledge of the world - must be viewed as centring in the human mind, not in the world as such. Therefore it is theoretically possible that the human has more cards than it is playing. The pivot of the modern predicament is epistemological, and it is here that we should look for an opening.
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The cosmological estrangement of modern consciousness initiated by Corpernicus and the ontological estrangement initiated by Descartes were completed by the epistemological estrangement initiated by Kant: a threefold mutually enforced prison of modern alienation.
There is a striking resemblance between this state of affairs and the condition that Gregory Bateson famously described as the "double bind"; the impossibly problematic situation in which mutually contradictory demands eventually lead a person to become schizophrenic. In Batesons formulation, there were four basic premises necessary to constitute a double bind situation between a child and a "schizophrenogenic" mother:
1: the child's relationship to the mother is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the child to assess communications from the mother accurately.
2: The child receives contradictory or incompatible information from the mother at different levels, whereby, for example, her explicit verbal communication is fundamentally denied by the "meta communication", the none verbal context in which the explicit message is conveyed (thus the mother who says to her child with hostile eyes and a rigid body, "Darling, you know I love you so much"). The two sets of signals cannot be understood as coherent.
3: The child is not given any opportunity to ask questions of the mother that would clarify the communication or resolve the contradiction.
4: The child cannot leave the field, i.e, the relationship. In such circumstances, Bateson found, the child is forced to distort his or her perception of both outer and inner realities, with serious psychopathological consequences.
Now if we substitute in these four premises 'world' for mother, and 'human being' for child, we have the modern double bind in a nutshell:
1: The human beings relationship to the world is one of vital dependency, thereby making it critical for the human being to assess the nature of that world accurately.
2: The human mind receives contradictory or incompatible information about its situation with respect to the world, whereby its inner psychological and spiritual sense of things is incoherent with the scientific metacommunication
3: Epistemologically, the human mind cannot achieve direct communication with the world.
4: Existentially, the human being cannot leave the field.
The differences between Batesons psychiatric double bind and the modern existential condition are more in degree than in kind: the modern condition is an extraordinarily encompassing and fundamental double bind, made less immediately conspicuous simply because it is so universal. We have the post Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post Cartesian dilemma of being a conscious, purposeful and personal subject confronting an unconscious, purposeless and impersonal universe, with these compounded by by the post Kantian dilemma of there being no possible means by which the human subject can know the universe in its essence. We are evolved from, embedded in and defined by a reality that is radically alien to our own, and moreover can never be directly contacted in cognition.
This double bind of modern consciousness has been recognised in one form or another since at least Pascal: "I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces." Our psychological and spiritual predispositions are absurdly at variance with the world revealed by our scientific method. We seem to receive two messages from our existential situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for meaning and spiritual fulfilment; but on the other hand, know that the universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely different to that quest, soulless in character and nullifying in its effects. We are at once aroused and crushed. For inexplicably, absurdly, the cosmos is inhuman, yet we are not. The situation is profoundly unintelligible.
If we follow Batesons diagnosis and apply it to the larger modern condition, it should not be surprising what kinds of response the modern psyche has made to this situation as it attempts to escape the double binds contradictions. Either inner or outer realities tend to be distorted: inner feelings are repressed and denied, as in apathy and psychic numbing, or they are inflated in compensation, as in narcissism and egocentrism; or the outer world is slavishly submitted to as the only reality, or it is aggressively objectified and exploited. There is also the strategy of flight, through various forms of escapism: compulsive economic consumption, absorption in the mass media, faddish, cults, ideologies, nationalistic fervour, alcoholism, drug addiction. When avoidance mechanisms cannot be sustained there is anxiety, paranoia, chronic hostility, a feeling of helpless victimisation, a tendency to suspect all meanings, an impulse toward self negation, a sense of purposelessness and absurdity, a feeling of irresolvable inner contradiction, a fragmenting of consciousness. And at the extreme, there are the full blown psychopathological reactions of the schizophrenic: self destructive violence, delusional States, massive amnesia, catatonia, automatism, mania, nihilism. The modern world knows each of these reactions in various combinations and compromise formations, and it's social and political life is notoriously so determined.
Nor should it be surprising that modern philosophy finds itself in the condition we now see. Of course modern philosophy has brought forth some courageous intellectual responses to the post Copernican situation, but by and large the philosophy that dominated last century and the early years of this resembles nothing so much as a severe obsessive compulsive sitting on his bed repeatedly tying and untying his shoes because he never quite gets it right - while in the meantime Socrates, Hegel and Aquinas are already high up the mountain on their hike, breathing the bracing alpine air, seeing new and unexpected vistas.
But there is one crucial way in which the modern situation is not identical to the psychiatric double bind, and this is the fact that the modern human being has not simply been a helpless child, but has actively engaged the world and pursued a specific strategy and mode of activity - a Promethean project of freeing itself from and controlling nature. The modern mind has demanded a specific type of interpretation of the world: it's scientific method has required explanations of phenomena that are concretely predictive, and therefore impersonal, mechanistic, structural. To fulfil their purposes, these explanations of the universe have been systematically "cleansed" of all spiritual and human qualities. Of course we cannot be certain that the world is in fact what these explanations suggest. We can be certain only that the world is to an indeterminate extent susceptible to this way of interpretation. Kants insight is a sword that cuts two ways. Although on the one hand it appears to place the world beyond the grasp of the human mind, on the other hand it recognises that the soulless and impersonal world of modern scientific cognition is not necessarily the whole story. Rather, that world is the only kind of story that for the past three centuries the Western mind has considered justifiable in Ernest Gellners words, "It was Kants merit to see that this compulsion (for mechanistic impersonal explanation) is in us, not in things." And, "it was Webers to see that it is historically a specific kind of mind, not human mind as such, that it is subject to this compulsion."
Hence one crucial part of the modern double bind is not airtight. In the case of Batesons schizophrenogenic mother and child, the mother more or less holds all the cards, for she unilaterally controls the communication. But the lesson of Kant is that the locus of the communication problem - i.e., the problem of human knowledge of the world - must be viewed as centring in the human mind, not in the world as such. Therefore it is theoretically possible that the human has more cards than it is playing. The pivot of the modern predicament is epistemological, and it is here that we should look for an opening.
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Wednesday 16 December 2015
Sunday 13 December 2015
Peter - Chapter Seven
Peter - Chapter Seven
Drips fell on Peters face rousing him to consciousness. Beside him the three dogs and Lipton slept on. Their makeshift shelter had done its job bar the odd leak. Outside the rain had stopped though the green hillside was sodden. The fire smouldered still but no flames or dry kindling was nearby to re spark it into life. Sleep had been deep and he recalled no dreams but the faces of dead freinds were still fresh in his mind. Those who died young from heroin had been reanimated by the archangels. They had returned to dismiss any remaining hunger for opiates the shamans still had.
Like many relationships, addiction seldom ends in a single decisive moment, like a rock hurled out in to the pond, crashing through the waters surface, never to be seen again. Think more of the flat pebble, scimmed across the surface, touching periodically into periods of relapse of reducing length to the final slide of confusion before sinking slowly away. The two ex addicts never spoke of it again nor touched again the brown powder that had killed so many of their friends and blighted large chunks of their lives. Too many broken resolutions. Too many words spoken in hope more than faith had rendered vocalising their decisions pointless. Both quietly knew they had been released. Psychedelics have this power. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, exposed to the brutal truth, profound enough to induce a quantum shift, their private shame forced into deep, unavoidable focus. Not to pretend their would be no grieving. As profoundly as divorce from a partner once deeply loved, echoes would be heard for years. Darkness and horrific dreams. Tears and sorrow as the chemistry of their brains and bodies restabalised and receptors, desensitised by years of powerful opiates retuned to the finer reading of the bodies own subtle but natural endorphins.
As the brothers packed their rucksacks, pissed on the campfires final embers and fed the dogs a clearer perspective descended. Both brutally cleansed, their recuperating systems, stripped of protective endorphins were opened up once more to pain and, in a broader sense to a more inclusive reality.
L, "any reason you saw the three hill forts line to Clun as appropriate for our return? I mean, we've both been bang at the gear. We both had to knock it on the head. Jesse or no Jesse. We'd be dead in a year or two. I see that. Getting out of our comfort zone makes sense, but why here? Why Shropshire?"
P, "I've been meaning to come back here since I moved down Stroud, all three hill forts I've been up but I'd just done them as hikes. Never checked out any mystical power. Never figured out their connection. I needed to see if Skree and Notpil were what we thought. Jesse promised archangel status but Jesus said fuck all about it. Somehow I assumed the druggy cunt would have taken an interest, if not got involved himself. Isn't Christ part of all that angel shit? Besides, I've unfinished business here. I left this area due to a mental breakdown. Psychiatrists called it that. I was too broken to figure it then. But there was a smell. Something I smelt when I was in the Orkneys. Stench of the craft. Dark craft. I had to get you sorted too."
L, "I had JC down as part of the holy trinity shite myself, angels to boot. But to be fair, I'm bang with you on his philosophy but he barely gives a fuck about changing the world no more. He's still on site down Glastonbury. Hammering the drink. Not that I blame the cunt. He did his bit and you can't ask more. I'd had half a mind to say bollocks to it all myself. But I just couldn't get a link on Notpil. Being archangel sounds well cool but it's fuck all like being shamans. I know your more clued up on the mystical shite. I had to test him out. Sorry if the hanging business freaked you out. How else could I test if Notpil would intervene? What is the point of being archangel if it floats about outside your control?"
P, " I get where you're coming from. I loved being shamans. In a way I wish that's all we were still. I loved tripping out, travelling through different dimensions. But it's just you. Just me, diving in and out of differing realities. Sure we could learn shit, bring cures back, big medicine for the struggling. But archangel, mate. Fuck me! That's awesome. Scares me , mind. Really fucking scares me."
L, " with great power comes great responsibility, as peter Parker knows. I still can't get a proper grip on it. So through the sacraments we can link up to some displaced consciousness that otherwise floats about. Floats off if we don't use it too, as far as I can see."
P, "well, I can't see that. It's like owt. I used to be good at ice skating. Had advanced certificates. I stopped going for a couple of years and, yes, it was still there. But I was totally out of practice. Took a good while to re attain my previous skill, truth be known I never got as good as I was. But I reckon I could have, had I put the work in. Fuck, Lipton, most people don't realise they have mystical abilities. They ignore every thing that don't fit their dull view. Every weird occurance that they can find no bracket for they ignore. Call it a dream, hallucination. But they all have the potential. Archangel, mind. We're honoured. All this shit, out of body experiences, astral planing, precognition, shamans, witches, voodoo, Christian Mystics; as far as I can see it's all the same thing. Different cultures use different words, but in essence they're the same human potentials."
L, "still, it's going to take some practice."
P, "fuck yes it is! Mind the time we first summoned up Gabriel? We thought we were meeting the old Genesis singer!"
L, "and what a soft cunt he turned out to be! Still haven't forgiven him about the trains in Box tunnel. Nearly killed us, the cunt. And, when I challenged him to a square go what does the shiteing cunt do? Fucking bottles it!"
P, "are you still banging on about that? Fucks sake! He stopped the ghosts for us. You're. Fucking archangel now and can you change the train time tables?"
L, "I haven't had any time to practice. There's no comparison."
P, "next time we go looking for subterranean rock and roll empires you can summon up Phil Collins then, see where that gets you."
L, "if I'm summoning up any drummers for assistance it'll be Phil Taylor, not Phil fucking Collins."
P, "aye, fair do's, Philthy Animal RIP. Last thing you need when your in the underworld is some bald short arse coming in the air tonight!"
L, "I'm still scoobied, Pete. When we were on the Jesse quest it was clear cut all the way. I'm still not sure what we're doing here in Shropshire."
P, " that right? I saw you reading that Shropshire Star. Are you trying to tell me you haven't been drawn to this? When the teenage suicides started I thought it was some goth craze. Flash in the pan. I've read about it before. You do get suicide epidemics amongst youths. Every now and again it happens. Virtually always hangings too. One lost kiddy goes for it, perhaps their bird next, then others follow suit. As though once the idea has been set in motion the doors of possibility somehow open for others to top themselves. Perhaps they see the kudos that follows. Teenagers are always on about being 'for real'. Being called a fake is the ultimate insult. Everybody loves you when you're dead. Psychologists reckon most suicides don't really want to die. They'll do the washing up. Tidy their clothes. Stuff like that. As though a part of them thinks death isn't terminal."
L, "silly fuckers. Teenagers haven't even developed fully formed personalities."
P, "the human brain doesn't finish growing till we reach twenty five. Since I read that I've thought back myself and I don't reckon I was fully'me' till I reached my mid twenties. I struggle to remember how I thought in my teens."
L, "too much dope smoking in your case, Pete."
P, "for sure. I'd steer kids away till their twenties, if I had any. Still, those early mushroom trips were what rendered us shamans."
L, "reluctant shamans. I thought it was just a laugh, like glue sniffing back when I started."
P, "me too. But given what I know now, I wouldn't have done half so many trips. Looking back, for every time we opened dimensions or learned cosmic truths, there were another ten trips where we just enjoyed the lights.."
L, "who knows. I see it like learning guitar. You have to get all the bum notes out before the tunes come. It's like any other learning process. Martin Gladwell and all that, 10,000 hours to become skilled at anything. There's many think they can bypass the years of meditation Buddhists and that put in, some even then never experience the mystical. But same goes for psychedelics. It takes hard work and discipline to really learn how to use it. Some Mystics frown on it, think it's a trivial short cut. I don't see it that way at all. It takes many trips to become skilled. Few have the strength. I'd say it's easier the Buddhist routes. Safer anyway. And rarely do they get to our level. I remember us trying to list them and we couldn't name more than twenty in Britain who have true access to the mystical. No doubt there's a few we've not come across, but we've met most, in one dimension or another."
P, "you're probably right. There were many who dabbled. Tripped a few times, found it too much and never got over that initial shock. In fact, when I think of it most just saw the chaos. Lacked the discipline or commitment. It took a good ten trips before I really got over that sudden shift in consciousness. I did something like a thousand trips, both acid and mushrooms before I hit eighteen. Of them all, from that period of my life, perhaps just a dozen took me through. It's that anxiety that spoils it for most. They spend the whole time trying to hang on to normal reality, whatever that is, it's only once you let go, abandon yourself, let it take you where it will, that the real, significant learning begins. These days, I trip far less often but when I do I'm no longer scared. Some of it is knowing when not to do it. Knowing no straight heads are going to disturb you. But some of its age. I reckon any road."
L, "we didn't know what we'd found. There were no road maps, just sixties knobheads who'd written a script they thought was right. I mean their idea of set and setting, your headstate at the time and a safe environment, that was right. But the other stuff? We just did it anywhere. Gigs, parties, festivals, golf courses at night. Parks, woods, lakes. I remember walking through the city many times, avoiding beer monsters where we could, doing battle with the fuckers where we couldn't."
P, "I give it up once I turned twenty. Thought my head was too mashed. Slipped into other drugs. That's where the real problems began. It was thirty years before I realised. It was the other drugs that killed so many freinds. Sent others mad. Once I dipped my toes back in the waters I knew I had to get clean of all other drugs. Just stick to what I began with. The odd well placed psychedelic. I read about shamanism and understood what it had all been. Thirty years, lost at sea, till my shamanic emergence."
L, "same thing. But we pulled it round. We're here now. Though what the fuck were doing you still haven't let on."
P, "I lived round here before. Twenty odd years back. During my lost years. I'd abandoned faith in the other. You know, the mystical shit. Proper materialist. Took the straight route. Had a straight middle class girlfriend. She bought a derelict cottage. I renovated it. I'd arrived from college having graduated. I gave up travelling before and saw a life as a craftsman. Teacher. Once the cottage was done I assumed my girlfriend would come back and we'd live there, so I got some lecturing positions. I'd seen some of the local remnants of pagan rituals. Green man stuff. I'd read somewhere about Clun being the centre of the dark side of British witchcraft. I couldn't see what was happening back then. It was like all the shamanic learning from my youth was just a fad. I couldn't see the attacks for what they were. I had what I thought to be a mental breakdown. Never saw the connections. The Fred West trial was on. I did mushrooms, it let the witches in. They saw the media fed me a steady flow of the Wests crimes. The horror filled my head. Couldn't see a way to fight it. Psychiatrists numbed me with pills. I drank. First got a taste for opiates. Nearly took my own life. I ran. Moved to Stroud. Looking back, mind, they knew what I was, or what I could be. There's other darker shit that I'll tell you some other time. They drove me out. That madness near killed me. Then, some ten months back I began to see the suicides in the press. Saw how it was developing. I know what they're up to Lipton. I've seen it before on Shapinsay in the Orkneys. They're harvesting them. I can't see anyone else bar us that can stop them. And I want fucking revenge. Those fuckers near killed me. There's more. Much more. If you want to fuck off back to site I completely understand. But I have to do this. They took fifteen years of my life. Psychiatrists, mental hospitals. If you can't hack it ok. But I've no choice. Kids are dying. They're bringing on the dark. You want more details? Of course you do. I'm sorry."
Peter stood looking off towards the hill fort by Aston on Clun. Lipton could see him shivering in anger, rage or fear. Maybe just the cold chill of withdrawal. He knew not exactly what. Peter had stuck by him through thick and thin. Fuck, he'd just saved his life, even if he had been some kind of archangels avatar. Peter knew he was asking a lot. He thought he saw figures but from this distance he could not be sure. Climbing his hill fort. His sole sanctuary during his solitary years of psychosis in Shropshire. This dark period had been the pivotal point in his life. Where his wild ferocity for life had hit a wall. Four of his freinds had died during his brief two year window in Shropshire. Doctors, science had dug him deeper into a pit.
L, "I don't know what sort of shite you're getting me into but if they fucked you up by barely trying then you'll need some help. Two days back I was swinging from a tree. I honestly thought that was me done. Now I'm not exactly happy you turned up and saved me. From what you say you have looked death square in the face too. From that point on what does it matter. I care not if I die. If you are entering this with equal lack of personal concern, I say yes! Let's fucking do the cunts. If we die? So fucking what. There's no one else going to do this. I'm with you Peter, it's just you and me, it's always been just you and me. If we go down let's take some of them evil fuckers with us."
Peter smiled back at Lipton, his eyes aflame with life.
P, "these fuckers are as bad as it gets. They eat babies. I've seen it, Lipton. Shapinsay, 1988. Nearly got me there too. This time we have the power. We can bury their twisted faces. Let's do the fuckers."
And with that they were committed, death or glory. As it had always been.
The three witches of Clun had begun the implementation of their plot a dozen moons back. Twenty skulls of youths taken by their own hand within their prime, harvested before their bodies were soiled by sexual congress yet abundant with hormones, brains intact, was the prime and potent target required for their scheme. A ritual stipulation. A hex of ancient border provenance, only once in history performed.
The witches bloodline had been preserved by the inter breeding of four families. Genetic weaknesses incurred by such inbreeding were a consequence of the eugenic purification necessary for the compounding of power though any significant mutations were minimised by strict arrangement of marriages. The heritage stretched back much further but the merging of the descendants of Titus Brock, Aston Gable, Jack Black and Arbor Clun forged the Clun Coven. Albions most powerful. Witchcraft had other focal points. Isolated communities in the Orkney Islands, Cornwall, Deep Wales and Ireland but the Clun Coven could rightly claim dominance. They heald, still hold the purest connection, the ancestral lineage.
There is no written history of Druidism. Not from within, only the Roman descriptions of a culture beyond their understanding. Toward the latter years of Roman occupation a systematic genocide of the old religion took place. In simple practical terms, native religion, just like gnostic Christianity, drew on first hand religious or mystical experience. This was personal and no one within their cultures saw need to question anyone, man, woman or child who was fortunate enough to experience the numinous or the divine. All were equal beneath powers much greater than theirs. Orthodox Christianity held its unique access to the divine came from a priesthood who took authority only from the apostles. Though many of the apostles never had visions and were jealous of Mary Magdalene who Jesus loved the most as she had many mystical experiences. These apostles were also now long dead and impossible to ask anyway. Further, the priests of the Orthodox Church had no mystical experiences, no first hand experience of the one. Instead they claimed God only bestowed the mystical on long dead apostles, calling the transcendence in the common people mental illness. For them, faith, despite a great silence was valued more over the trance fugue of people they thought skanks. A great jealousy of the gnostic and pagan mystic visionaries grew. Through torture and murder justified by their rigid claims to be the one true church, a concept anathema to the gnostic and pagan mind, they sought to destroy those that threatened their power. A war that echoes down the ages to this day; the Orthodox Church justifying all its brutality through Faith, against the Mystics of all creeds who need no faith for they see the other as clearly as any reality.
Since the advent of farming and the specialisation of labour the native British developed a complex and powerful elite body of people. Living outside normal society these were a breed apart. Where perception of what we would call other dimensions was evident in a child, male or female they would be given over to the Druids, usually before puberty where they entered an environment where their aptitude could by nurtured. By segregation those with mystical bent gathered and bred together forming a class that operated separate from the regular folk. The apprenticeship was a full twenty years before a Druid was deemed qualified to advise and help a community. Living separately in a culture without written language the skills were what we would deem a tacit knowledge. A craft. Druidism was a practiced skill, not a referral to written text but the combination of something from within aligned to a structured ritualisation. Their qualification came from first hand mystical experiences. It's broad sweep accepted the authority of those of sight. No quibbling over rightful interpretation of second hand stories but the direct communion with the other. Through the rigorous interbreeding of those with the genetic predisposition to see beyond the vail, the potency of the Druids knowledge intensified to a great power. In times of need where problems arose that were beyond the auspices of tribal leaders, a Druid would be invited in from their isolated and strictly private encampments. Failing crops, demonic possession, anything beyond the reality framework of normal folk could initiate the call for a Druid. Already an acceptance of the material over the spiritual had seen British culture progress to a condition where the two had diverged. An early form of scientific reason got people through their day to day endeavour but a realisation that there was far more remained. Rather than stoop to superstition the Druids were recognised as experts in a field beyond normal scope. Much like today where we must take the word of advanced scientists on quantum matters, not understanding but accepting their learned authority, so too the Druids occupied a space of trust.
As Roman culture shifted from the persecution of gnostic Christians. Those who had experienced the mystical on the freedom Christ had delivered, the truth, that knowledge came from within, not from the priests who hijacked the teachings of previous visionaries, Gnostics were ostracised by the Orthodox Church. Christs teaching, the idea of a free universality of gods word, more often delivered to the poor and meek than the religious hierarchies, lasted barely two hundred years before being usurped and privatised. Gnosticism continued, but as a secretive, underground sect of private meetings. The true revelation that we are all equal in the eyes of God. That the mystical could touch anyone from beggar to thief, from fisherman to shopkeeper undermined the political authorities. God, the universal consciousness was evident in all things, all places. No church, no temple or man made structure had any greater value than a field, a woodland clearing or a cheap room where Gnostics could meet. Through the drawing of straws the services were randomly led by any member of the group, male or female. The touch of the divine could find anyone. No priest or self important or elected individual had any greater authority or unique contact to God. Such hubris ran against Christs teaching and gnostic belief. Only through the governing overclass of Roman invaders and native collaborators irrefutable and unique control of the religious impulse could power over the common people be maintained. Hence an Orthodox Church, claiming its authority from connections to now dead apostles held the writings of dead men delivered their unique connection to the divine. The Orthodox Church and its unqualified monopoly of the spiritual through its lot in with the Roman Empire. The empire abandoned its multiplicity of gods and twixt the two a fresh dictatorial over class justified its material greed through the lie of divine authority. Not only gnostic Christians but other shamans, pagans and Druids were a threat to the spiritual allegiance of those within the reign of the military Italian rulers. In tests of faith, those outside the Orthodox Church were burned, tortured to death. The truths they had witnessed could not be denied no matter the cruelty. No extended execution unto death would see them renounce their beliefs. Sure, they could lie, but this was like saying they were horses, not men. Torture could make anyone say anything, but it couldn't alter fact.
As Roman Christianity spread through Britain the occupation was enforced by the destruction of pagan sites and the rebuilding of Christian churches on this sacred ground. Druids and their belief was driven deeper into the wilds as Christian Romans drove home their dominance through the ritual execution of those still practicing the old religion. The remnants of Druidism was driven to Albions darkest corners. Some took to the Scottish islands and hid there. Cornwall hid others. Ireland, always that step further became sanctuary for some. But the main body of Druid culture made its last stand in the Welsh border counties.
The Druidic connection to the other and its supervision of the spiritual needs of the area now known as the Home Counties was provided by the sects led by Jack Black and Titus Brock. As the Roman genocide spread from the south east, these two Druids were driven north west. Each ritual slaughter of a Druid saw the mutilated bodies exposed on crosses, their heads on pikes for villagers to witness the Roman Christians new gods dominance over the old religion. At night, while others slept, the families and friends of these two active Druids would reclaim the skulls returning them to Black and Brock who through the eating of the dead Druids brains infused the powers of the deceased with their own before moving on, keeping one step ahead as the Roman genocide progressed. With the decimation of the lower practicioners of the old religion the intensity of the powers of Black and Brock grew. Each brain eaten meant one less Druid but for Brock and Black, though on retreat deeper in to the countryside, one more Druidic souls power.
Driven first into Wilshire, the two esteemed Druids found sanctuary in safe houses. Few native Britons remained strong enough, others through pragmatism converted to orthodox Christianity to avoid Roman persecution but a bold minority, steeped in paganism from birth provided a hidden room for the night, a meal for the hunted, or spread misinformation, helping the two most powerful wizards in these isles in their race to survive.
Rarely staying longer than a night in any one place, often sleeping rough to leave a cold trail, the two parted. Arranging to meet up in twelve moons time at Cley Hill close to the Warmonster settlement, Brock made north of the county for Avebury, Black to Stonehenge, hereby doubling the chance of preserving the connection to the divine wisdom and power of druidry. What faced Titus Brock at Avebury and Jack Black at Stonehenge was to affect the course of British magic. A pagan spiritual connection to the female earth consciousness and also to the male divine universal consciousness, had been at the heart of Druidic practice. Through the connectivity to sacred trees, rocks and waters, the Druid mind could join with the consciousness within. This unity of human Druidic mind with tree, stone or water consciousness formed a seperate awareness, a blurring of the particles of perception connecting directly through root, soil and moisture to the earth force. A unity of Man and Gaia. Living as animals in cyclic harmony with the planets seasons, Druids worked with the grain of life. Roman Christianity had no connection to the divine. Christs gnostic followers carried on his word that lay closer to Druidic thought and sentiment but through hijacked validity the Roman Christian spread of destruction ran counter clockwise, against the grain, in opposition to Mother Earth. In their arrogance the greater body of western civilisation came to believe only humans had souls. That the mystical, even consciousness, was the preserve of Man. Unlike other animals that were tied to the cycles of the earth, expressions of their environment, aspects of something far greater, Christian man believed they were above the laws of nature. Through their gift of reason and their unique possession of souls they argued the environment, other animals were all there for them to use as they saw fit. This line of thinking continued after Galileo and Darwin into scientific humanism. A secular Christianity. But where Darwin stalled hubris through the realisation we were just animals, incapable of transcending our animal nature, and where Christianity had the built in brake to human hubris in the concept of original sin, scientific humanism genuinely thought mans reason could transcend the laws of nature. We could destroy our environment, use all resources safe in the knowledge our unique gift of reason would think of a way to save us. This arrogance and stupidity looks like leading to the greatest extinction in the planets history. But back to our fleeing Druids.
Having passed word he was making for Stonehenge only to trusted initiates of the old religion, Jack Black felt quietly confident that all would be well once he reached the stones. Roman patrols regularly passed by on their rigid roads but amongst the many locals who too used this ancient landmark for meetings and trade despite its religious functions now banned, he could surely slip unnoticed. Dressed as a hooded traveller, only those on the know would recognise him. As he slipped by the outlieing burial mounds he wondered how Titus was fairing at the equally busy Avebury. The wind whipped across Salisbury plane stinging his face so he stooped in his progress, not scanning far ahead, eyes surveying the more immediate. From a thicket of trees a small boy appeared, waving him over whilst furtively glancing first ahead where Blacks path led, then back as though to check for pursuers. Following the child's eyes Black too checked he wasn't being followed before stepping off track to see what the lad was about.
Boy, "Druid, sir! Please heed my warning. Today Romans came to our village, looking for your kind. They battered my father. Asked him where Druids might be hidden. Two the soldiers named. Two they sought. Black and Brock. They aim to burn out their powers. My father told them to go fuck their kin, for indeed they were a proper set of cunts. When he was broken and able to resist no more they forced open his mouth. Locked his jaws apart with a short oak spar, the thickness of your mid finger, sir. Then all four relieved their bladders in to his mouth. They had been hearty at the mead, I smelt it on their piss, sir. They told my father, 'drink our holy water so that you may gain forgiveness from our Lord, Jesus Christ.' My father stayed strong, sir. Spoke nothing but now he lies in need of medicine."
Black, "and your mother, was she hurt? Others? Brothers, sisters? Did the soldiers hurt anyone else?"
Boy, "not the women folk, sir. We had warning Romans were coming so my father sent them off to hide in Pittock Wood. Only the men remained. Ned, Obon and me. It is to Pittock Wood I go now. To bring my mother and sisters home to aid my father. He lies, limbs snapped as branches and drenched in the soldiers mead waters. The stink is unholy, sir. Unholy!"
Black, "then you must hurry. Here. This black tar must be broken off into lumps the size of a yew berry. Melt it in hot water and mix with strong ale. Your father must drink this. It will help him with the pain."
Black broke off a healthy chunk off his lump of opium. Bound it in a tight woven cloth and handed it to the boy. Rummaging in his bag he found the coca leaves, reserved for emergencies.
Black, "and you, boy. Chew these. They will give your legs strength and your brain will not tire whilst you chew. But these Romans, to where were they bound?"
Boy, "onward to the stones. They were but four in the gang that knocked my father to the ground but their number on the road to the stones is legion. Their camp is made at the Henge. Their gangs have been to all surrounding hamlets and villages. You must run and hide for they aim to try all heretics. To execute any who won't bow to their God and emperor. Proper dogs cunts, sir. I fib you not"
Black, "now run, boy. Find your womenfolk and return them to your father. If Romans ask, you ain't seen me, right? And be sure to save the opium for your father. A demons curse on you, boy, should you nibble off the chunk for a selfish gouch!"
The boy ran off, emboldened by the coca leaves as a stark, cold determination descended on him. The plant leaves of Mother Earth guiding him on his mission.
Jack Black sat. Took a long restorative draught from his hide flask of mushroom concentrate. The Liberty cap would free his mind to clarify his route. The spirit in which they stewed would assuage any fear. He knew what 'heretic' meant to the Roman Christians. Any who was touched by the mystical. Such was their jealousy at the fickle hand of their own god. Why were peasants party to the glory of the divine whilst they must make do with a silence and faith? Any who would or could not hand over their spiritual autonomy over to their Orthodox Church was a heretic in Roman eyes.
As a Druid, Black had served his twenty year apprenticeship. Negotiated a thousand dimensions. Seen the light each time he took the sacramental Liberty cap, just as Gnostics saw the light through Syrian rue and mimosa hostilits root bark, just as shamans saw the light through ayuashka. Those who experienced the mystical first hand were but branches of the same tree, tributaries of the same river. Those who never experienced the mystical grew bitter. Only vindicated through the authority of other, now dead apostles.
He knew well the many hidden paths from the outer burial mounds to the stones through which he could sneak by but curiosity got his subconscious hungry. He had not witnessed first hand the cruelty of a Roman trial. And who could they have caught? The Druids were being ethnically cleansed from the country, from the very soil from which they grew. Brock and Black knew their sanctuary could only lie beyond Roman occupation. Beyond Offas Dyke. Above Hadrians Wall. Or on the islands to the north. It was his duty to observe the heathen practices of the Roman dullards and report what he learned so others could be prepared. So they could hide the subtle give away signs the rigid Roman mind could perceive. For their religion was at stake. Their species under threat.
As the mushroom concentrate took hold, Black checked his attire for any conspicuous detail he may have overlooked then, taking the lower lie of the land as pathway, walked cautiously the remaining two miles to Stonehenge as night gradually fell.
He could hear the drunken shouting of the Roman soldiers as the stones came into sight. Near on a thousand people were focused there including the straggling groups that strayed off in all directions. The Roman soldiers were but a tenth of the gathering but it was they who orchestrated the rituals taking place. They who formed the heart of the cluster of humanity, or inhumanity, one might argue. Like the growth rings of a felled oak the darkness spread outward. After the Roman pith of the tree the heartwood was built of collaborators first. The next ring sycophants, foolish in their assumption that through dobbing in their own to the invaders they might avoid their ire. Next the agnostic, open to opportunities these disciplined Italians might bring. Then the curious that formed the greatest number and finally those like Brock who sought to witness this cancerous tainting of their homeland. And through an opening in the crowd, smaller Roman gangs returned, bringing in the accused for trial. The boy had been right, thought Brock. These Romans were a proper bunch of cunts.
Jostling his way through the crowd Jack pushed and shoved the drunken locals aside in his quest for an anonymous place from which to view proceedings. Positioning himself a layer or two from the clearing and using a stone from the outer circle to obscure himself, Black poised, seeking out faces that he may know. The furtive sycophancy could easily rowse a grass, hungry for Roman approval. Six Braziers of beaten iron holding roaring blazes of burning branches cast light on to the scene before the public. Stonehenge degraded to an arena of humiliation and ritual torment. To one side lower ranking soldiers surrounded six or seven terrified looking locals. Two women wept and wailed, three, no four men shrieked out accusations. Spitting out the names of Druids, denying any truck with them or the old creed. Only one of the prisoners looked calm and reserved. Fatalistic, perhaps, resigned to his face. Titus Brock, his face bruised and streaming blood from a deep looking gash above his right eye stood with straightened back and folded arms.
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Drips fell on Peters face rousing him to consciousness. Beside him the three dogs and Lipton slept on. Their makeshift shelter had done its job bar the odd leak. Outside the rain had stopped though the green hillside was sodden. The fire smouldered still but no flames or dry kindling was nearby to re spark it into life. Sleep had been deep and he recalled no dreams but the faces of dead freinds were still fresh in his mind. Those who died young from heroin had been reanimated by the archangels. They had returned to dismiss any remaining hunger for opiates the shamans still had.
Like many relationships, addiction seldom ends in a single decisive moment, like a rock hurled out in to the pond, crashing through the waters surface, never to be seen again. Think more of the flat pebble, scimmed across the surface, touching periodically into periods of relapse of reducing length to the final slide of confusion before sinking slowly away. The two ex addicts never spoke of it again nor touched again the brown powder that had killed so many of their friends and blighted large chunks of their lives. Too many broken resolutions. Too many words spoken in hope more than faith had rendered vocalising their decisions pointless. Both quietly knew they had been released. Psychedelics have this power. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, exposed to the brutal truth, profound enough to induce a quantum shift, their private shame forced into deep, unavoidable focus. Not to pretend their would be no grieving. As profoundly as divorce from a partner once deeply loved, echoes would be heard for years. Darkness and horrific dreams. Tears and sorrow as the chemistry of their brains and bodies restabalised and receptors, desensitised by years of powerful opiates retuned to the finer reading of the bodies own subtle but natural endorphins.
As the brothers packed their rucksacks, pissed on the campfires final embers and fed the dogs a clearer perspective descended. Both brutally cleansed, their recuperating systems, stripped of protective endorphins were opened up once more to pain and, in a broader sense to a more inclusive reality.
L, "any reason you saw the three hill forts line to Clun as appropriate for our return? I mean, we've both been bang at the gear. We both had to knock it on the head. Jesse or no Jesse. We'd be dead in a year or two. I see that. Getting out of our comfort zone makes sense, but why here? Why Shropshire?"
P, "I've been meaning to come back here since I moved down Stroud, all three hill forts I've been up but I'd just done them as hikes. Never checked out any mystical power. Never figured out their connection. I needed to see if Skree and Notpil were what we thought. Jesse promised archangel status but Jesus said fuck all about it. Somehow I assumed the druggy cunt would have taken an interest, if not got involved himself. Isn't Christ part of all that angel shit? Besides, I've unfinished business here. I left this area due to a mental breakdown. Psychiatrists called it that. I was too broken to figure it then. But there was a smell. Something I smelt when I was in the Orkneys. Stench of the craft. Dark craft. I had to get you sorted too."
L, "I had JC down as part of the holy trinity shite myself, angels to boot. But to be fair, I'm bang with you on his philosophy but he barely gives a fuck about changing the world no more. He's still on site down Glastonbury. Hammering the drink. Not that I blame the cunt. He did his bit and you can't ask more. I'd had half a mind to say bollocks to it all myself. But I just couldn't get a link on Notpil. Being archangel sounds well cool but it's fuck all like being shamans. I know your more clued up on the mystical shite. I had to test him out. Sorry if the hanging business freaked you out. How else could I test if Notpil would intervene? What is the point of being archangel if it floats about outside your control?"
P, " I get where you're coming from. I loved being shamans. In a way I wish that's all we were still. I loved tripping out, travelling through different dimensions. But it's just you. Just me, diving in and out of differing realities. Sure we could learn shit, bring cures back, big medicine for the struggling. But archangel, mate. Fuck me! That's awesome. Scares me , mind. Really fucking scares me."
L, " with great power comes great responsibility, as peter Parker knows. I still can't get a proper grip on it. So through the sacraments we can link up to some displaced consciousness that otherwise floats about. Floats off if we don't use it too, as far as I can see."
P, "well, I can't see that. It's like owt. I used to be good at ice skating. Had advanced certificates. I stopped going for a couple of years and, yes, it was still there. But I was totally out of practice. Took a good while to re attain my previous skill, truth be known I never got as good as I was. But I reckon I could have, had I put the work in. Fuck, Lipton, most people don't realise they have mystical abilities. They ignore every thing that don't fit their dull view. Every weird occurance that they can find no bracket for they ignore. Call it a dream, hallucination. But they all have the potential. Archangel, mind. We're honoured. All this shit, out of body experiences, astral planing, precognition, shamans, witches, voodoo, Christian Mystics; as far as I can see it's all the same thing. Different cultures use different words, but in essence they're the same human potentials."
L, "still, it's going to take some practice."
P, "fuck yes it is! Mind the time we first summoned up Gabriel? We thought we were meeting the old Genesis singer!"
L, "and what a soft cunt he turned out to be! Still haven't forgiven him about the trains in Box tunnel. Nearly killed us, the cunt. And, when I challenged him to a square go what does the shiteing cunt do? Fucking bottles it!"
P, "are you still banging on about that? Fucks sake! He stopped the ghosts for us. You're. Fucking archangel now and can you change the train time tables?"
L, "I haven't had any time to practice. There's no comparison."
P, "next time we go looking for subterranean rock and roll empires you can summon up Phil Collins then, see where that gets you."
L, "if I'm summoning up any drummers for assistance it'll be Phil Taylor, not Phil fucking Collins."
P, "aye, fair do's, Philthy Animal RIP. Last thing you need when your in the underworld is some bald short arse coming in the air tonight!"
L, "I'm still scoobied, Pete. When we were on the Jesse quest it was clear cut all the way. I'm still not sure what we're doing here in Shropshire."
P, " that right? I saw you reading that Shropshire Star. Are you trying to tell me you haven't been drawn to this? When the teenage suicides started I thought it was some goth craze. Flash in the pan. I've read about it before. You do get suicide epidemics amongst youths. Every now and again it happens. Virtually always hangings too. One lost kiddy goes for it, perhaps their bird next, then others follow suit. As though once the idea has been set in motion the doors of possibility somehow open for others to top themselves. Perhaps they see the kudos that follows. Teenagers are always on about being 'for real'. Being called a fake is the ultimate insult. Everybody loves you when you're dead. Psychologists reckon most suicides don't really want to die. They'll do the washing up. Tidy their clothes. Stuff like that. As though a part of them thinks death isn't terminal."
L, "silly fuckers. Teenagers haven't even developed fully formed personalities."
P, "the human brain doesn't finish growing till we reach twenty five. Since I read that I've thought back myself and I don't reckon I was fully'me' till I reached my mid twenties. I struggle to remember how I thought in my teens."
L, "too much dope smoking in your case, Pete."
P, "for sure. I'd steer kids away till their twenties, if I had any. Still, those early mushroom trips were what rendered us shamans."
L, "reluctant shamans. I thought it was just a laugh, like glue sniffing back when I started."
P, "me too. But given what I know now, I wouldn't have done half so many trips. Looking back, for every time we opened dimensions or learned cosmic truths, there were another ten trips where we just enjoyed the lights.."
L, "who knows. I see it like learning guitar. You have to get all the bum notes out before the tunes come. It's like any other learning process. Martin Gladwell and all that, 10,000 hours to become skilled at anything. There's many think they can bypass the years of meditation Buddhists and that put in, some even then never experience the mystical. But same goes for psychedelics. It takes hard work and discipline to really learn how to use it. Some Mystics frown on it, think it's a trivial short cut. I don't see it that way at all. It takes many trips to become skilled. Few have the strength. I'd say it's easier the Buddhist routes. Safer anyway. And rarely do they get to our level. I remember us trying to list them and we couldn't name more than twenty in Britain who have true access to the mystical. No doubt there's a few we've not come across, but we've met most, in one dimension or another."
P, "you're probably right. There were many who dabbled. Tripped a few times, found it too much and never got over that initial shock. In fact, when I think of it most just saw the chaos. Lacked the discipline or commitment. It took a good ten trips before I really got over that sudden shift in consciousness. I did something like a thousand trips, both acid and mushrooms before I hit eighteen. Of them all, from that period of my life, perhaps just a dozen took me through. It's that anxiety that spoils it for most. They spend the whole time trying to hang on to normal reality, whatever that is, it's only once you let go, abandon yourself, let it take you where it will, that the real, significant learning begins. These days, I trip far less often but when I do I'm no longer scared. Some of it is knowing when not to do it. Knowing no straight heads are going to disturb you. But some of its age. I reckon any road."
L, "we didn't know what we'd found. There were no road maps, just sixties knobheads who'd written a script they thought was right. I mean their idea of set and setting, your headstate at the time and a safe environment, that was right. But the other stuff? We just did it anywhere. Gigs, parties, festivals, golf courses at night. Parks, woods, lakes. I remember walking through the city many times, avoiding beer monsters where we could, doing battle with the fuckers where we couldn't."
P, "I give it up once I turned twenty. Thought my head was too mashed. Slipped into other drugs. That's where the real problems began. It was thirty years before I realised. It was the other drugs that killed so many freinds. Sent others mad. Once I dipped my toes back in the waters I knew I had to get clean of all other drugs. Just stick to what I began with. The odd well placed psychedelic. I read about shamanism and understood what it had all been. Thirty years, lost at sea, till my shamanic emergence."
L, "same thing. But we pulled it round. We're here now. Though what the fuck were doing you still haven't let on."
P, "I lived round here before. Twenty odd years back. During my lost years. I'd abandoned faith in the other. You know, the mystical shit. Proper materialist. Took the straight route. Had a straight middle class girlfriend. She bought a derelict cottage. I renovated it. I'd arrived from college having graduated. I gave up travelling before and saw a life as a craftsman. Teacher. Once the cottage was done I assumed my girlfriend would come back and we'd live there, so I got some lecturing positions. I'd seen some of the local remnants of pagan rituals. Green man stuff. I'd read somewhere about Clun being the centre of the dark side of British witchcraft. I couldn't see what was happening back then. It was like all the shamanic learning from my youth was just a fad. I couldn't see the attacks for what they were. I had what I thought to be a mental breakdown. Never saw the connections. The Fred West trial was on. I did mushrooms, it let the witches in. They saw the media fed me a steady flow of the Wests crimes. The horror filled my head. Couldn't see a way to fight it. Psychiatrists numbed me with pills. I drank. First got a taste for opiates. Nearly took my own life. I ran. Moved to Stroud. Looking back, mind, they knew what I was, or what I could be. There's other darker shit that I'll tell you some other time. They drove me out. That madness near killed me. Then, some ten months back I began to see the suicides in the press. Saw how it was developing. I know what they're up to Lipton. I've seen it before on Shapinsay in the Orkneys. They're harvesting them. I can't see anyone else bar us that can stop them. And I want fucking revenge. Those fuckers near killed me. There's more. Much more. If you want to fuck off back to site I completely understand. But I have to do this. They took fifteen years of my life. Psychiatrists, mental hospitals. If you can't hack it ok. But I've no choice. Kids are dying. They're bringing on the dark. You want more details? Of course you do. I'm sorry."
Peter stood looking off towards the hill fort by Aston on Clun. Lipton could see him shivering in anger, rage or fear. Maybe just the cold chill of withdrawal. He knew not exactly what. Peter had stuck by him through thick and thin. Fuck, he'd just saved his life, even if he had been some kind of archangels avatar. Peter knew he was asking a lot. He thought he saw figures but from this distance he could not be sure. Climbing his hill fort. His sole sanctuary during his solitary years of psychosis in Shropshire. This dark period had been the pivotal point in his life. Where his wild ferocity for life had hit a wall. Four of his freinds had died during his brief two year window in Shropshire. Doctors, science had dug him deeper into a pit.
L, "I don't know what sort of shite you're getting me into but if they fucked you up by barely trying then you'll need some help. Two days back I was swinging from a tree. I honestly thought that was me done. Now I'm not exactly happy you turned up and saved me. From what you say you have looked death square in the face too. From that point on what does it matter. I care not if I die. If you are entering this with equal lack of personal concern, I say yes! Let's fucking do the cunts. If we die? So fucking what. There's no one else going to do this. I'm with you Peter, it's just you and me, it's always been just you and me. If we go down let's take some of them evil fuckers with us."
Peter smiled back at Lipton, his eyes aflame with life.
P, "these fuckers are as bad as it gets. They eat babies. I've seen it, Lipton. Shapinsay, 1988. Nearly got me there too. This time we have the power. We can bury their twisted faces. Let's do the fuckers."
And with that they were committed, death or glory. As it had always been.
The three witches of Clun had begun the implementation of their plot a dozen moons back. Twenty skulls of youths taken by their own hand within their prime, harvested before their bodies were soiled by sexual congress yet abundant with hormones, brains intact, was the prime and potent target required for their scheme. A ritual stipulation. A hex of ancient border provenance, only once in history performed.
The witches bloodline had been preserved by the inter breeding of four families. Genetic weaknesses incurred by such inbreeding were a consequence of the eugenic purification necessary for the compounding of power though any significant mutations were minimised by strict arrangement of marriages. The heritage stretched back much further but the merging of the descendants of Titus Brock, Aston Gable, Jack Black and Arbor Clun forged the Clun Coven. Albions most powerful. Witchcraft had other focal points. Isolated communities in the Orkney Islands, Cornwall, Deep Wales and Ireland but the Clun Coven could rightly claim dominance. They heald, still hold the purest connection, the ancestral lineage.
There is no written history of Druidism. Not from within, only the Roman descriptions of a culture beyond their understanding. Toward the latter years of Roman occupation a systematic genocide of the old religion took place. In simple practical terms, native religion, just like gnostic Christianity, drew on first hand religious or mystical experience. This was personal and no one within their cultures saw need to question anyone, man, woman or child who was fortunate enough to experience the numinous or the divine. All were equal beneath powers much greater than theirs. Orthodox Christianity held its unique access to the divine came from a priesthood who took authority only from the apostles. Though many of the apostles never had visions and were jealous of Mary Magdalene who Jesus loved the most as she had many mystical experiences. These apostles were also now long dead and impossible to ask anyway. Further, the priests of the Orthodox Church had no mystical experiences, no first hand experience of the one. Instead they claimed God only bestowed the mystical on long dead apostles, calling the transcendence in the common people mental illness. For them, faith, despite a great silence was valued more over the trance fugue of people they thought skanks. A great jealousy of the gnostic and pagan mystic visionaries grew. Through torture and murder justified by their rigid claims to be the one true church, a concept anathema to the gnostic and pagan mind, they sought to destroy those that threatened their power. A war that echoes down the ages to this day; the Orthodox Church justifying all its brutality through Faith, against the Mystics of all creeds who need no faith for they see the other as clearly as any reality.
Since the advent of farming and the specialisation of labour the native British developed a complex and powerful elite body of people. Living outside normal society these were a breed apart. Where perception of what we would call other dimensions was evident in a child, male or female they would be given over to the Druids, usually before puberty where they entered an environment where their aptitude could by nurtured. By segregation those with mystical bent gathered and bred together forming a class that operated separate from the regular folk. The apprenticeship was a full twenty years before a Druid was deemed qualified to advise and help a community. Living separately in a culture without written language the skills were what we would deem a tacit knowledge. A craft. Druidism was a practiced skill, not a referral to written text but the combination of something from within aligned to a structured ritualisation. Their qualification came from first hand mystical experiences. It's broad sweep accepted the authority of those of sight. No quibbling over rightful interpretation of second hand stories but the direct communion with the other. Through the rigorous interbreeding of those with the genetic predisposition to see beyond the vail, the potency of the Druids knowledge intensified to a great power. In times of need where problems arose that were beyond the auspices of tribal leaders, a Druid would be invited in from their isolated and strictly private encampments. Failing crops, demonic possession, anything beyond the reality framework of normal folk could initiate the call for a Druid. Already an acceptance of the material over the spiritual had seen British culture progress to a condition where the two had diverged. An early form of scientific reason got people through their day to day endeavour but a realisation that there was far more remained. Rather than stoop to superstition the Druids were recognised as experts in a field beyond normal scope. Much like today where we must take the word of advanced scientists on quantum matters, not understanding but accepting their learned authority, so too the Druids occupied a space of trust.
As Roman culture shifted from the persecution of gnostic Christians. Those who had experienced the mystical on the freedom Christ had delivered, the truth, that knowledge came from within, not from the priests who hijacked the teachings of previous visionaries, Gnostics were ostracised by the Orthodox Church. Christs teaching, the idea of a free universality of gods word, more often delivered to the poor and meek than the religious hierarchies, lasted barely two hundred years before being usurped and privatised. Gnosticism continued, but as a secretive, underground sect of private meetings. The true revelation that we are all equal in the eyes of God. That the mystical could touch anyone from beggar to thief, from fisherman to shopkeeper undermined the political authorities. God, the universal consciousness was evident in all things, all places. No church, no temple or man made structure had any greater value than a field, a woodland clearing or a cheap room where Gnostics could meet. Through the drawing of straws the services were randomly led by any member of the group, male or female. The touch of the divine could find anyone. No priest or self important or elected individual had any greater authority or unique contact to God. Such hubris ran against Christs teaching and gnostic belief. Only through the governing overclass of Roman invaders and native collaborators irrefutable and unique control of the religious impulse could power over the common people be maintained. Hence an Orthodox Church, claiming its authority from connections to now dead apostles held the writings of dead men delivered their unique connection to the divine. The Orthodox Church and its unqualified monopoly of the spiritual through its lot in with the Roman Empire. The empire abandoned its multiplicity of gods and twixt the two a fresh dictatorial over class justified its material greed through the lie of divine authority. Not only gnostic Christians but other shamans, pagans and Druids were a threat to the spiritual allegiance of those within the reign of the military Italian rulers. In tests of faith, those outside the Orthodox Church were burned, tortured to death. The truths they had witnessed could not be denied no matter the cruelty. No extended execution unto death would see them renounce their beliefs. Sure, they could lie, but this was like saying they were horses, not men. Torture could make anyone say anything, but it couldn't alter fact.
As Roman Christianity spread through Britain the occupation was enforced by the destruction of pagan sites and the rebuilding of Christian churches on this sacred ground. Druids and their belief was driven deeper into the wilds as Christian Romans drove home their dominance through the ritual execution of those still practicing the old religion. The remnants of Druidism was driven to Albions darkest corners. Some took to the Scottish islands and hid there. Cornwall hid others. Ireland, always that step further became sanctuary for some. But the main body of Druid culture made its last stand in the Welsh border counties.
The Druidic connection to the other and its supervision of the spiritual needs of the area now known as the Home Counties was provided by the sects led by Jack Black and Titus Brock. As the Roman genocide spread from the south east, these two Druids were driven north west. Each ritual slaughter of a Druid saw the mutilated bodies exposed on crosses, their heads on pikes for villagers to witness the Roman Christians new gods dominance over the old religion. At night, while others slept, the families and friends of these two active Druids would reclaim the skulls returning them to Black and Brock who through the eating of the dead Druids brains infused the powers of the deceased with their own before moving on, keeping one step ahead as the Roman genocide progressed. With the decimation of the lower practicioners of the old religion the intensity of the powers of Black and Brock grew. Each brain eaten meant one less Druid but for Brock and Black, though on retreat deeper in to the countryside, one more Druidic souls power.
Driven first into Wilshire, the two esteemed Druids found sanctuary in safe houses. Few native Britons remained strong enough, others through pragmatism converted to orthodox Christianity to avoid Roman persecution but a bold minority, steeped in paganism from birth provided a hidden room for the night, a meal for the hunted, or spread misinformation, helping the two most powerful wizards in these isles in their race to survive.
Rarely staying longer than a night in any one place, often sleeping rough to leave a cold trail, the two parted. Arranging to meet up in twelve moons time at Cley Hill close to the Warmonster settlement, Brock made north of the county for Avebury, Black to Stonehenge, hereby doubling the chance of preserving the connection to the divine wisdom and power of druidry. What faced Titus Brock at Avebury and Jack Black at Stonehenge was to affect the course of British magic. A pagan spiritual connection to the female earth consciousness and also to the male divine universal consciousness, had been at the heart of Druidic practice. Through the connectivity to sacred trees, rocks and waters, the Druid mind could join with the consciousness within. This unity of human Druidic mind with tree, stone or water consciousness formed a seperate awareness, a blurring of the particles of perception connecting directly through root, soil and moisture to the earth force. A unity of Man and Gaia. Living as animals in cyclic harmony with the planets seasons, Druids worked with the grain of life. Roman Christianity had no connection to the divine. Christs gnostic followers carried on his word that lay closer to Druidic thought and sentiment but through hijacked validity the Roman Christian spread of destruction ran counter clockwise, against the grain, in opposition to Mother Earth. In their arrogance the greater body of western civilisation came to believe only humans had souls. That the mystical, even consciousness, was the preserve of Man. Unlike other animals that were tied to the cycles of the earth, expressions of their environment, aspects of something far greater, Christian man believed they were above the laws of nature. Through their gift of reason and their unique possession of souls they argued the environment, other animals were all there for them to use as they saw fit. This line of thinking continued after Galileo and Darwin into scientific humanism. A secular Christianity. But where Darwin stalled hubris through the realisation we were just animals, incapable of transcending our animal nature, and where Christianity had the built in brake to human hubris in the concept of original sin, scientific humanism genuinely thought mans reason could transcend the laws of nature. We could destroy our environment, use all resources safe in the knowledge our unique gift of reason would think of a way to save us. This arrogance and stupidity looks like leading to the greatest extinction in the planets history. But back to our fleeing Druids.
Having passed word he was making for Stonehenge only to trusted initiates of the old religion, Jack Black felt quietly confident that all would be well once he reached the stones. Roman patrols regularly passed by on their rigid roads but amongst the many locals who too used this ancient landmark for meetings and trade despite its religious functions now banned, he could surely slip unnoticed. Dressed as a hooded traveller, only those on the know would recognise him. As he slipped by the outlieing burial mounds he wondered how Titus was fairing at the equally busy Avebury. The wind whipped across Salisbury plane stinging his face so he stooped in his progress, not scanning far ahead, eyes surveying the more immediate. From a thicket of trees a small boy appeared, waving him over whilst furtively glancing first ahead where Blacks path led, then back as though to check for pursuers. Following the child's eyes Black too checked he wasn't being followed before stepping off track to see what the lad was about.
Boy, "Druid, sir! Please heed my warning. Today Romans came to our village, looking for your kind. They battered my father. Asked him where Druids might be hidden. Two the soldiers named. Two they sought. Black and Brock. They aim to burn out their powers. My father told them to go fuck their kin, for indeed they were a proper set of cunts. When he was broken and able to resist no more they forced open his mouth. Locked his jaws apart with a short oak spar, the thickness of your mid finger, sir. Then all four relieved their bladders in to his mouth. They had been hearty at the mead, I smelt it on their piss, sir. They told my father, 'drink our holy water so that you may gain forgiveness from our Lord, Jesus Christ.' My father stayed strong, sir. Spoke nothing but now he lies in need of medicine."
Black, "and your mother, was she hurt? Others? Brothers, sisters? Did the soldiers hurt anyone else?"
Boy, "not the women folk, sir. We had warning Romans were coming so my father sent them off to hide in Pittock Wood. Only the men remained. Ned, Obon and me. It is to Pittock Wood I go now. To bring my mother and sisters home to aid my father. He lies, limbs snapped as branches and drenched in the soldiers mead waters. The stink is unholy, sir. Unholy!"
Black, "then you must hurry. Here. This black tar must be broken off into lumps the size of a yew berry. Melt it in hot water and mix with strong ale. Your father must drink this. It will help him with the pain."
Black broke off a healthy chunk off his lump of opium. Bound it in a tight woven cloth and handed it to the boy. Rummaging in his bag he found the coca leaves, reserved for emergencies.
Black, "and you, boy. Chew these. They will give your legs strength and your brain will not tire whilst you chew. But these Romans, to where were they bound?"
Boy, "onward to the stones. They were but four in the gang that knocked my father to the ground but their number on the road to the stones is legion. Their camp is made at the Henge. Their gangs have been to all surrounding hamlets and villages. You must run and hide for they aim to try all heretics. To execute any who won't bow to their God and emperor. Proper dogs cunts, sir. I fib you not"
Black, "now run, boy. Find your womenfolk and return them to your father. If Romans ask, you ain't seen me, right? And be sure to save the opium for your father. A demons curse on you, boy, should you nibble off the chunk for a selfish gouch!"
The boy ran off, emboldened by the coca leaves as a stark, cold determination descended on him. The plant leaves of Mother Earth guiding him on his mission.
Jack Black sat. Took a long restorative draught from his hide flask of mushroom concentrate. The Liberty cap would free his mind to clarify his route. The spirit in which they stewed would assuage any fear. He knew what 'heretic' meant to the Roman Christians. Any who was touched by the mystical. Such was their jealousy at the fickle hand of their own god. Why were peasants party to the glory of the divine whilst they must make do with a silence and faith? Any who would or could not hand over their spiritual autonomy over to their Orthodox Church was a heretic in Roman eyes.
As a Druid, Black had served his twenty year apprenticeship. Negotiated a thousand dimensions. Seen the light each time he took the sacramental Liberty cap, just as Gnostics saw the light through Syrian rue and mimosa hostilits root bark, just as shamans saw the light through ayuashka. Those who experienced the mystical first hand were but branches of the same tree, tributaries of the same river. Those who never experienced the mystical grew bitter. Only vindicated through the authority of other, now dead apostles.
He knew well the many hidden paths from the outer burial mounds to the stones through which he could sneak by but curiosity got his subconscious hungry. He had not witnessed first hand the cruelty of a Roman trial. And who could they have caught? The Druids were being ethnically cleansed from the country, from the very soil from which they grew. Brock and Black knew their sanctuary could only lie beyond Roman occupation. Beyond Offas Dyke. Above Hadrians Wall. Or on the islands to the north. It was his duty to observe the heathen practices of the Roman dullards and report what he learned so others could be prepared. So they could hide the subtle give away signs the rigid Roman mind could perceive. For their religion was at stake. Their species under threat.
As the mushroom concentrate took hold, Black checked his attire for any conspicuous detail he may have overlooked then, taking the lower lie of the land as pathway, walked cautiously the remaining two miles to Stonehenge as night gradually fell.
He could hear the drunken shouting of the Roman soldiers as the stones came into sight. Near on a thousand people were focused there including the straggling groups that strayed off in all directions. The Roman soldiers were but a tenth of the gathering but it was they who orchestrated the rituals taking place. They who formed the heart of the cluster of humanity, or inhumanity, one might argue. Like the growth rings of a felled oak the darkness spread outward. After the Roman pith of the tree the heartwood was built of collaborators first. The next ring sycophants, foolish in their assumption that through dobbing in their own to the invaders they might avoid their ire. Next the agnostic, open to opportunities these disciplined Italians might bring. Then the curious that formed the greatest number and finally those like Brock who sought to witness this cancerous tainting of their homeland. And through an opening in the crowd, smaller Roman gangs returned, bringing in the accused for trial. The boy had been right, thought Brock. These Romans were a proper bunch of cunts.
Jostling his way through the crowd Jack pushed and shoved the drunken locals aside in his quest for an anonymous place from which to view proceedings. Positioning himself a layer or two from the clearing and using a stone from the outer circle to obscure himself, Black poised, seeking out faces that he may know. The furtive sycophancy could easily rowse a grass, hungry for Roman approval. Six Braziers of beaten iron holding roaring blazes of burning branches cast light on to the scene before the public. Stonehenge degraded to an arena of humiliation and ritual torment. To one side lower ranking soldiers surrounded six or seven terrified looking locals. Two women wept and wailed, three, no four men shrieked out accusations. Spitting out the names of Druids, denying any truck with them or the old creed. Only one of the prisoners looked calm and reserved. Fatalistic, perhaps, resigned to his face. Titus Brock, his face bruised and streaming blood from a deep looking gash above his right eye stood with straightened back and folded arms.
Sent from my iPad
Thursday 10 December 2015
Kevin Sinfield - BBC Sports Personality of the Yea
Kevin Sinfield - BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2015?
BBC Sports Personality of the Year has traditionally focused on this country's highest achievements in upper class sports. Rugby League and boxing seldom feature. Second places and silver medals have earned tennis players and Rugby Union players the title yet a boxer such as Joe Chalzhage who was champion of the world for an entire decade, retired undefeated, failed to have this accolade bestowed upon him. Rugby League, in my memory, hasn't had so much as a short listed contender. This year boxing is represented by Tyson Fury who despite finding all pundits and bookies alike dispensing short odds on his claiming the world heavy weight title by defeating Vladimir Klitschko, succeeded in a dour bout reflective of the lack of talent in the heavy weight division. Following the sports last great era where Mike Tyson unified the various belts of different governing bodies to return credibility to the sport, returning the ethos of the man who beat the man to be the genuine world champion. Sadly his talents were flawed and by the combination of sudden wealth bestowed on a poor boy and unscrupulous advisors and sycophantic entourage lost his way once his mentor died. Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis preserved the sports credibility for a while until the dull tactics of the Ukrainian Klitschko brothers ushered in a decade of dominance that failed to spark the publics imagination. Fury should be praised for bringing to an end this dull era though sadly but perhaps understandably his entourage and advisors are close family members of traveller stock who hold and promote values modern Europe has abandoned in shame. Since victory he has used his platform to advance sexist and homophobic opinions that only serve to embed the prejudices of the liberal classes. Kevin Sinfield has maintained composure and dignity throughout his career on and off the field garnering respect from everyone within the game and beyond.
Rugby League history is one of overt class bigotry. Whilst governments from Thatcher through Blair have sought to dismiss the existence of class prejudice through linguistic trickery, the division between rich and poor has drastically grown. Football in its basic form evolved from inter village rivalries where the entire communities man folk would battle together to claim victory in a lawless game, the objective being to take the ball by whatever means, to their home. Shrovetide football is still played but Victorian Britain saw public schools claiming the people's game by writing the rules and stipulations by which it is played. The core value being that what was now known as Rugby be played for fun, not money. The Rugby Union game remained under establishment control until the late 1800s. For a decade, northern teams comprised of dockers and miners had dominated all competitions. At the time these working class athletes worked six day weeks. The northern businessmen who owned and financed the dominant northern teams asked if their players could be reimbursed for lost earnings for taking Saturday afternoon off to play rugby. By now large crowds of supporters followed their teams and enjoyed tribal rivalries, sang songs and cheered in a different manner to the polite clapping of the lesser supported but more highly financed southern teams. These southern players were public school educated professionals; doctors, lawyers etc who could afford to play for fun. The rugby union refused the requests of the northern teams inflicting strict penalties for any player taking coin for appearing. In 1895 following a meeting of northern club owners the Northern Rugby Union, later the Rugby League was born. Creating their own competition, a more organised league system to test who was the real top team as opposed to the previous knock out cup competitions, Rugby League blossomed. Attracting vast crowds comparable in number to modern soccer the rule changes that have been a constant feature of rugby league began. Union being a game to play preserved its high numbers on the field with its idiosyncratic scrum sand line outs that provided positions for all to enjoy, from fat to thin, tall to short, union evolved as a game to be played. Having none of the private financial backing league began with innovative changes, less players on the field to encourage open play. Smaller scrums, no line outs, simpler rules to encourage a finer spectacle. Union was a game to play but League was a game to watch.
The impudence of the northerners offended the public schooled establishment to a degree hard to comprehend today. Dickie Lockwood was the David Beckham of his day. A northern hero who opted for league. Having captained club and country to many victories he was written out of union history. For a century any union player who so much as had a trial or was even spotted at a League ground was banned from playing rugby union for life. The bitterness of this bigotry echoes to this day.
The two games continued, growing further apart throughout the next century. The odd star player tempted by money left union to play the faster northern game. Usually coming from the Welsh teams who had a parallel working class origin to the northern league teams. Rugby developed a popularity over seas. With Australia embracing both codes, league ultimately becoming their national game. Less divisive class systems saw union and league blossom in New Zealand. Under apartheid rugby union was exclusively white but black league teams formed. Prior to the nazi invasion of France league was played down south amongst Catalans, union up north. The invaders banned league where players joined the resistance. Union approved of by the nazis was riddled with collaborators.
Throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s and early 60s Rugby League through its constant experimentation with rule changes and a necessary need to provide an attractive visual product drew in vast crowds. By the sixties, perhaps through televisions provision of a clearer national perspective football became the most fashionable sport. Leeds could travel to London to beat the capitals finest in Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and arsenal. The excitement of a cross pennine clash between Wigan and Bradford Northern had grown to be seen as perocial by modern northern man. Billy Liar. Saturday night, Sunday Morning. The Beatles. The sixties saw the northerner reconnected to his nation. Outsmarting, more creative, more savage in hooligan battles. Football may have been a boring low scoring game but Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, Leeds could all find glory in the defeat of the effete southern public schooled puff.
As League crowds dwindled so too did Union crowds. League players, bar the elite dozen or so worked still as bricklayers, policemen, window cleaners, supplementing meagre incomes by turning out for League teams. Meanwhile a system that came to be known as 'shamateurism' evolved where Union players were rewarded with houses, cars, boardroom chairs they were never required to fill, under the table payment was rife. By the eighties through public school and family connections Will Carling was mixing with royalty, fucking Dianna Spencer whilst Northern stars still struggled.
Finally, no longer to hide the underhand payments nor justify the prejudices heald against rugby league, union went professional. In a seminal event, Bath, the dominant union team of the day agreed to a two game showdown with Wigan, rugby leagues strongest team. The first match, played to league rules saw Wigan defeat Bath 82 points to 6. The return game played to union rules saw Bath win though not by much. It was clear. League was leagues ahead in all but what the players were being paid.
With the advent of a dehooliganisation of football following the Hiesel disaster, the Bradford fire disaster and the battle of Birmingham where Leeds fans ran riot, the premier league was formed. Games now attracted wealthier fans as prices went up, the concept, created by Rupert Murdochs Sky satellite TV company grabbed the middle class imagination. following Italia 90 where the greatest England team since Alf Ramseys World Cup winners of 1966 came closest to winning a major competition football really took off. Paul Gascoigne inspired a team of other greats, Chris Waddle, Glenn Hoddle, Gary Linekar to heights not seen for years.
Years of establishment prejudice had seen little respect from the BBC. Negotiations to show league through the BBC were met with derisory offers. Sky offered to buy the sport under certain stipulations. Teams must take on Australian commercial sounding names. 96 million sounds a trifle for a foreigner to ride roughshod over tradition. Super league was born. Live matches shown exclusively to sky but money to enable a twelve team league of full time professionals and a shift from winter to a summer season . With union adopting league promotional techniques. The employment of league coaches to usher in a fitter professional era. League had little choice. Though many feared this could be the end for the sport they loved most involved knew it was the only offer on the table.
The club names sounded American at first, something that still sticks in the craw of older fans but moving to summer rugby with a full division of full time players alongside a club salary cap meaning proved genius. The sport has gone from strength to strength. Regular fears over financing the game and the sad fact of top clubs with proud reputations stretching back over a century going in to administration continue but the product on the field has grown to become far and away the most exciting British team sport.
Union maintained its support from the media. The public school roots of the sport ensured a disproportionate coverage in papers owned by the wealthier classes. Journalism from ex public school boys sees to this day regular snipes at league. But it's clear to any impartial observer that union knows it may have the money it still lags behind league in many ways. Each new innovation in league will soon be adopted by union. Video replays for refereeing decisions, cross field kicks, the off load, even the change to summer rugby seems to be brewing in the minds of union chiefs. Though employing ex league players as coaching staff in an attempt to engender some of the onfield spark of league has seen Mike Ford at Bath, Andy Farrell at Saracens and England and Shaun Edwards at Wales amongst many others.
This year union held its World Cup on English soil. Having seen the league World Cup the year before, Sam Burgess, the league centre was signed in a high profile move by bath and England with a view to his fast tracking in to the England team. His performances for South Sydney in winning their first NRL grand final and playing for England RL who went out of the RL World Cup after a scintillating semi, lost in the last minute to New Zealand, had shown he was a great of rugby league but learning the complexities of union in a year is damn near impossible. Union should be ashamed for piling hopes on a new comer to their game.
England failed to pass the group stages. Rather than accept failure to greater Southern Hemisphere teams, ironically playing a more open league influenced expansive game, union following pundits heaped responsibility on a young man who through no fault of his own was thrown in too early. He hardly put a foot wrong if not inspiring in his performances yet union bigotry once again should it's ugly face. The pompous upper class arrogance sort to blame League for unions failings. Seldom in sport has such supreme arrogance, blindness and class bigotry been witnessed. Sam Burgess, having been treated appallingly returned to the code of his youth. Four years before union establishment figures blamed England's failings on league coaches. This time not the 99.9% union responsibility but the sole short comings of a single league player provided the scape goat for unions egos.
The dour 2015 season of union was the polar opposite of the stellar season of rugby league. Captained by Kevin Sinfield Leeds won all three competitions. Challenge Cup final against Hull KR saw Leeds put in a flawless performance to win 50 points to nil. The league leaders shield came next after a slump had seen Leeds table dominance bring the decides down to the last games of the normal season. In the final minute Ryan Hall scored from a Danny Mc Guire chip. Such excitement seldom before witnessed on a rugby field. Finally the treble was sealed in what many described as the greatest grand final of all time as Leeds narrowly beat a magnificent Wigan side. Over the past dozen years Sinfield had captained Leeds to seven Grand Final victories, three challenge cups and three world club challenges. In becoming Leeds and perhaps the sports greatest ever captain he became the clubs all time highest point scorer and in 2012 was awarded the golden boot as the sports greatest player of the season. Only the fourth Englishman to win this prestigious award.
His career capped by an unprecedented treble Sinfield watched on as the England league team defeated New Zealand in a three test series. 2015 was a moral victory for league over union bigotry. Sinfield, always speaking with respect and dignity of the other code now takes the semi retirement from the harder code as he tries his luck next season for Leeds Tykes, the union club.
If ever a sportsperson deserved the BBC sports personality of the year it is Kevin Sinfield. Seldom does the game receive the column inches it deserves. As dour union fixtures at club level often poorly attended garner an unwarranted amount of press, league seldom receives attention. Popular in the pennine corridor, far from the news papers London offices staffed by southern journalists working often under public schooled bosses, Rugby League is seldom praised. This years England RU shame, from team to pundits, ex playing commentators to journalists, has been mind boggling. On the surface cultural changes regarding most people's views on gender, sexuality and race may have moved forward. For several years sociologists fell in line with politicians from thatcher to Blair who declared society non existent, class a thing of the past. But Rugby Union remains a bastion of class bigotry. On the field League has grown more expansive, more creative, more beautiful. Spearheaded campaigns against homophobia. Highlighted problems of mental health stigma through their State of Mind campaign. Whilst union has descended to its worst excesses that historically bedevilled the sport. Its roots in class hierarchy and supremacy of the fortunate of birth. Through nazi collaboration in occupied France. In overt racism in apartheid South Africa. As New Zealand and Australia where the two codes aren't affected by class history the game of union has grown to be creative. Yet in England, the only victories over Southern Hemisphere sides have come from a style of play designed to kill the expansive flamboyant attempts to score tries. By embroiling the game in messy rucks and mauls, line outs and scrums, not attempting to score tries but to engineer penalties or drop goals as teams developed a style where players need not get near the oppositions line, scoring instead from kicks from out field. A dour and cynical tactic to mirror the deep, dark prejudices of the English establishment. Sinfields nomination marks a possible acceptance of leagues moral superiority, skill set superiority, fitness and aesthetic superiority, and deeper than all of this, a victory of good over evil. The people over the establishment.
Sent from my iPad
BBC Sports Personality of the Year has traditionally focused on this country's highest achievements in upper class sports. Rugby League and boxing seldom feature. Second places and silver medals have earned tennis players and Rugby Union players the title yet a boxer such as Joe Chalzhage who was champion of the world for an entire decade, retired undefeated, failed to have this accolade bestowed upon him. Rugby League, in my memory, hasn't had so much as a short listed contender. This year boxing is represented by Tyson Fury who despite finding all pundits and bookies alike dispensing short odds on his claiming the world heavy weight title by defeating Vladimir Klitschko, succeeded in a dour bout reflective of the lack of talent in the heavy weight division. Following the sports last great era where Mike Tyson unified the various belts of different governing bodies to return credibility to the sport, returning the ethos of the man who beat the man to be the genuine world champion. Sadly his talents were flawed and by the combination of sudden wealth bestowed on a poor boy and unscrupulous advisors and sycophantic entourage lost his way once his mentor died. Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis preserved the sports credibility for a while until the dull tactics of the Ukrainian Klitschko brothers ushered in a decade of dominance that failed to spark the publics imagination. Fury should be praised for bringing to an end this dull era though sadly but perhaps understandably his entourage and advisors are close family members of traveller stock who hold and promote values modern Europe has abandoned in shame. Since victory he has used his platform to advance sexist and homophobic opinions that only serve to embed the prejudices of the liberal classes. Kevin Sinfield has maintained composure and dignity throughout his career on and off the field garnering respect from everyone within the game and beyond.
Rugby League history is one of overt class bigotry. Whilst governments from Thatcher through Blair have sought to dismiss the existence of class prejudice through linguistic trickery, the division between rich and poor has drastically grown. Football in its basic form evolved from inter village rivalries where the entire communities man folk would battle together to claim victory in a lawless game, the objective being to take the ball by whatever means, to their home. Shrovetide football is still played but Victorian Britain saw public schools claiming the people's game by writing the rules and stipulations by which it is played. The core value being that what was now known as Rugby be played for fun, not money. The Rugby Union game remained under establishment control until the late 1800s. For a decade, northern teams comprised of dockers and miners had dominated all competitions. At the time these working class athletes worked six day weeks. The northern businessmen who owned and financed the dominant northern teams asked if their players could be reimbursed for lost earnings for taking Saturday afternoon off to play rugby. By now large crowds of supporters followed their teams and enjoyed tribal rivalries, sang songs and cheered in a different manner to the polite clapping of the lesser supported but more highly financed southern teams. These southern players were public school educated professionals; doctors, lawyers etc who could afford to play for fun. The rugby union refused the requests of the northern teams inflicting strict penalties for any player taking coin for appearing. In 1895 following a meeting of northern club owners the Northern Rugby Union, later the Rugby League was born. Creating their own competition, a more organised league system to test who was the real top team as opposed to the previous knock out cup competitions, Rugby League blossomed. Attracting vast crowds comparable in number to modern soccer the rule changes that have been a constant feature of rugby league began. Union being a game to play preserved its high numbers on the field with its idiosyncratic scrum sand line outs that provided positions for all to enjoy, from fat to thin, tall to short, union evolved as a game to be played. Having none of the private financial backing league began with innovative changes, less players on the field to encourage open play. Smaller scrums, no line outs, simpler rules to encourage a finer spectacle. Union was a game to play but League was a game to watch.
The impudence of the northerners offended the public schooled establishment to a degree hard to comprehend today. Dickie Lockwood was the David Beckham of his day. A northern hero who opted for league. Having captained club and country to many victories he was written out of union history. For a century any union player who so much as had a trial or was even spotted at a League ground was banned from playing rugby union for life. The bitterness of this bigotry echoes to this day.
The two games continued, growing further apart throughout the next century. The odd star player tempted by money left union to play the faster northern game. Usually coming from the Welsh teams who had a parallel working class origin to the northern league teams. Rugby developed a popularity over seas. With Australia embracing both codes, league ultimately becoming their national game. Less divisive class systems saw union and league blossom in New Zealand. Under apartheid rugby union was exclusively white but black league teams formed. Prior to the nazi invasion of France league was played down south amongst Catalans, union up north. The invaders banned league where players joined the resistance. Union approved of by the nazis was riddled with collaborators.
Throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s and early 60s Rugby League through its constant experimentation with rule changes and a necessary need to provide an attractive visual product drew in vast crowds. By the sixties, perhaps through televisions provision of a clearer national perspective football became the most fashionable sport. Leeds could travel to London to beat the capitals finest in Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and arsenal. The excitement of a cross pennine clash between Wigan and Bradford Northern had grown to be seen as perocial by modern northern man. Billy Liar. Saturday night, Sunday Morning. The Beatles. The sixties saw the northerner reconnected to his nation. Outsmarting, more creative, more savage in hooligan battles. Football may have been a boring low scoring game but Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, Leeds could all find glory in the defeat of the effete southern public schooled puff.
As League crowds dwindled so too did Union crowds. League players, bar the elite dozen or so worked still as bricklayers, policemen, window cleaners, supplementing meagre incomes by turning out for League teams. Meanwhile a system that came to be known as 'shamateurism' evolved where Union players were rewarded with houses, cars, boardroom chairs they were never required to fill, under the table payment was rife. By the eighties through public school and family connections Will Carling was mixing with royalty, fucking Dianna Spencer whilst Northern stars still struggled.
Finally, no longer to hide the underhand payments nor justify the prejudices heald against rugby league, union went professional. In a seminal event, Bath, the dominant union team of the day agreed to a two game showdown with Wigan, rugby leagues strongest team. The first match, played to league rules saw Wigan defeat Bath 82 points to 6. The return game played to union rules saw Bath win though not by much. It was clear. League was leagues ahead in all but what the players were being paid.
With the advent of a dehooliganisation of football following the Hiesel disaster, the Bradford fire disaster and the battle of Birmingham where Leeds fans ran riot, the premier league was formed. Games now attracted wealthier fans as prices went up, the concept, created by Rupert Murdochs Sky satellite TV company grabbed the middle class imagination. following Italia 90 where the greatest England team since Alf Ramseys World Cup winners of 1966 came closest to winning a major competition football really took off. Paul Gascoigne inspired a team of other greats, Chris Waddle, Glenn Hoddle, Gary Linekar to heights not seen for years.
Years of establishment prejudice had seen little respect from the BBC. Negotiations to show league through the BBC were met with derisory offers. Sky offered to buy the sport under certain stipulations. Teams must take on Australian commercial sounding names. 96 million sounds a trifle for a foreigner to ride roughshod over tradition. Super league was born. Live matches shown exclusively to sky but money to enable a twelve team league of full time professionals and a shift from winter to a summer season . With union adopting league promotional techniques. The employment of league coaches to usher in a fitter professional era. League had little choice. Though many feared this could be the end for the sport they loved most involved knew it was the only offer on the table.
The club names sounded American at first, something that still sticks in the craw of older fans but moving to summer rugby with a full division of full time players alongside a club salary cap meaning proved genius. The sport has gone from strength to strength. Regular fears over financing the game and the sad fact of top clubs with proud reputations stretching back over a century going in to administration continue but the product on the field has grown to become far and away the most exciting British team sport.
Union maintained its support from the media. The public school roots of the sport ensured a disproportionate coverage in papers owned by the wealthier classes. Journalism from ex public school boys sees to this day regular snipes at league. But it's clear to any impartial observer that union knows it may have the money it still lags behind league in many ways. Each new innovation in league will soon be adopted by union. Video replays for refereeing decisions, cross field kicks, the off load, even the change to summer rugby seems to be brewing in the minds of union chiefs. Though employing ex league players as coaching staff in an attempt to engender some of the onfield spark of league has seen Mike Ford at Bath, Andy Farrell at Saracens and England and Shaun Edwards at Wales amongst many others.
This year union held its World Cup on English soil. Having seen the league World Cup the year before, Sam Burgess, the league centre was signed in a high profile move by bath and England with a view to his fast tracking in to the England team. His performances for South Sydney in winning their first NRL grand final and playing for England RL who went out of the RL World Cup after a scintillating semi, lost in the last minute to New Zealand, had shown he was a great of rugby league but learning the complexities of union in a year is damn near impossible. Union should be ashamed for piling hopes on a new comer to their game.
England failed to pass the group stages. Rather than accept failure to greater Southern Hemisphere teams, ironically playing a more open league influenced expansive game, union following pundits heaped responsibility on a young man who through no fault of his own was thrown in too early. He hardly put a foot wrong if not inspiring in his performances yet union bigotry once again should it's ugly face. The pompous upper class arrogance sort to blame League for unions failings. Seldom in sport has such supreme arrogance, blindness and class bigotry been witnessed. Sam Burgess, having been treated appallingly returned to the code of his youth. Four years before union establishment figures blamed England's failings on league coaches. This time not the 99.9% union responsibility but the sole short comings of a single league player provided the scape goat for unions egos.
The dour 2015 season of union was the polar opposite of the stellar season of rugby league. Captained by Kevin Sinfield Leeds won all three competitions. Challenge Cup final against Hull KR saw Leeds put in a flawless performance to win 50 points to nil. The league leaders shield came next after a slump had seen Leeds table dominance bring the decides down to the last games of the normal season. In the final minute Ryan Hall scored from a Danny Mc Guire chip. Such excitement seldom before witnessed on a rugby field. Finally the treble was sealed in what many described as the greatest grand final of all time as Leeds narrowly beat a magnificent Wigan side. Over the past dozen years Sinfield had captained Leeds to seven Grand Final victories, three challenge cups and three world club challenges. In becoming Leeds and perhaps the sports greatest ever captain he became the clubs all time highest point scorer and in 2012 was awarded the golden boot as the sports greatest player of the season. Only the fourth Englishman to win this prestigious award.
His career capped by an unprecedented treble Sinfield watched on as the England league team defeated New Zealand in a three test series. 2015 was a moral victory for league over union bigotry. Sinfield, always speaking with respect and dignity of the other code now takes the semi retirement from the harder code as he tries his luck next season for Leeds Tykes, the union club.
If ever a sportsperson deserved the BBC sports personality of the year it is Kevin Sinfield. Seldom does the game receive the column inches it deserves. As dour union fixtures at club level often poorly attended garner an unwarranted amount of press, league seldom receives attention. Popular in the pennine corridor, far from the news papers London offices staffed by southern journalists working often under public schooled bosses, Rugby League is seldom praised. This years England RU shame, from team to pundits, ex playing commentators to journalists, has been mind boggling. On the surface cultural changes regarding most people's views on gender, sexuality and race may have moved forward. For several years sociologists fell in line with politicians from thatcher to Blair who declared society non existent, class a thing of the past. But Rugby Union remains a bastion of class bigotry. On the field League has grown more expansive, more creative, more beautiful. Spearheaded campaigns against homophobia. Highlighted problems of mental health stigma through their State of Mind campaign. Whilst union has descended to its worst excesses that historically bedevilled the sport. Its roots in class hierarchy and supremacy of the fortunate of birth. Through nazi collaboration in occupied France. In overt racism in apartheid South Africa. As New Zealand and Australia where the two codes aren't affected by class history the game of union has grown to be creative. Yet in England, the only victories over Southern Hemisphere sides have come from a style of play designed to kill the expansive flamboyant attempts to score tries. By embroiling the game in messy rucks and mauls, line outs and scrums, not attempting to score tries but to engineer penalties or drop goals as teams developed a style where players need not get near the oppositions line, scoring instead from kicks from out field. A dour and cynical tactic to mirror the deep, dark prejudices of the English establishment. Sinfields nomination marks a possible acceptance of leagues moral superiority, skill set superiority, fitness and aesthetic superiority, and deeper than all of this, a victory of good over evil. The people over the establishment.
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