A Chase is Afoot...

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift.

My words are the words of an enlightened man. I gained my liberation after leaving my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once the true, divine nature of us all had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and these deities communed with me, as they communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.

Whist travelling to the south-west of England, I stopped in the ancient city of Chester where I encountered a demonic presence. I confronted this spirit in the riverside Groves. The following morning I was conveyed downstream in a spectral boat, where I found the residual traces of the demon dragging a man into the water. I rescued the man by inviting and absorbing the demon into my own soul before meeting three strange observers...

‘I was feeling rather down, well I won’t bore you with the details...’ Mr Yardley, the man I had plucked from the embrace of the Death Goddess stated before proceeding to bore us with the details.

The casual reader may detect some indifference or callousness on my part to Mr Yardley’s predicament. Such an interpretation could not be further from the truth. My self and, I concede, the three representatives of the Dead, were all deeply concerned with human suffering; I in particular am all too familiar with the despair caused by a devotion to material goods, the pursuit of sensation for its own ends, the obsession with status and power, the need to observe displays of subservience and the attendant vices of pomposity, vanity, pride...

At that moment it was the acute awareness of how these behaviours and urges rain all manner of misery upon humans that allowed us to hold Yardley at arm’s length: we cannot wallow in the minutiae of an individual’s trauma – we were not trying to extract money from the wretch – our aim is to liberate all those who languish in the coils of a despair not of their own making; we strike against the forces of the ego and the id!

Anyhow, it transpired that the man was in the depths of a deep gloom and we concluded that the demonic entity I had cast downstream attuned to his mood and drew him into the water.

‘I was tying to drown myself; I have been battling depression for some years now and this morning I woke to find that I had lost the car keys; we were due to visit our daughter who has left her university course and moved in with a nightclub grime rapper...’ Mr Yardley went on whilst I tried to explain the real reason why he had headed for the water.

‘Silence you, that life has passed and a new life opens before you, a life free from worry over cars and universities and the dirt and debris of everyday life, your concerns will be with the battle between the celestial order and the blank powers of the abyss which seek to leak within it!’ Parkin snapped, his eyes bulging somewhat.

Mr Yardley did not look too enthused by the prospect of exchanging minor irritations for cosmic terrors but Parkin continued regardless, ‘we shall use our lives, our wealth, our power to serve the earth and the souls which inhabit it; the spirits of the dead must exist without interference, they shall not be a backdoor through which the abyss seeps into our world!’

Parkin then looked at me and stated with some satisfaction, ‘it appears that his excellency was, as always, correct; we have found a gifted medium.’

Gereint, the young, bare-chested man had retreated uphill, where he was engaged in some obscure contortions. Lance, the lean, bearded man, glared at me whilst Parkin continued, ‘you conquered the beast within, along with the fear and the rage and violence which it breeds; Gereint there,’ he indicated the youth, ‘has also done that, although he will regress into that state when the situation demands it; you however, have absorbed a demonic entity into yourself and stand before us in control of your faculties, truly, the moon is beneath your feet and you are crowned with the rising sun!’

I am not partial to praise, only to the acknowledgement of the majesty of the divine within us all so when Parkin went on to state that I was a ‘free spirit’ who could ‘walk among the misty mountain winds’ and ‘a moonlit solitary walker’, I began to form the opinion that I was not in the company of charlatans.

When Parkin deigned, eventually, to describe the order to which he and his companions belonged, I listened with growing interest and approval:

‘We are the Dead; we have returned to the state of the unborn; whilst the living are manufactured by social and economic pressures, we, the Dead, are untouchable; the living are manufactured by changing circumstances, even as they are infiltrated by agencies that seep into their deepest, darkest lizard brains. There is a destructive power, from beyond our cosmos that in slipping through the cracks and fissures of time and space and consciousness, feeds on the minds of the populace and in particular upon the energy of spirits that linger after death; the purpose, rather the instinct of this power, is to allow their world, a formless sea of blankness, to spill into our own.’

I have a great respect for formless seas of blankness, although I have never considered a career in the Civil Service or indeed any other branch of government. What I disapprove of is the need for different spheres of existence to colonise others – balance is desirable to enable an appreciation of the transcendent ideal.

‘It is not a coherent organisation that we face, it erupts especially whenever flotsam and jetsam dabble in the occult - it seeks to seep through their invocations. Such dabblers are often not part of a conscious conspiracy, it is their most basic, lizard part of their brains which serves as a portal, they do not understand they are puppets of darkness – note I said darkness not shadow – indeed I should have said blankness again, as dark and shadow are products of, or defined by, light; the advantage we have is that we know our enemy, we have the light of consciousness...and now, as his Excellency predicted, we have you. You shall be our medium walking between the worlds.’

I asked who ‘his Excellency’ but before Parkin could answer, Geraint roused himself from his performance to announce from the hilltop, ‘they are at Eccleston Ferry!’

‘I’ll get the Peugot,’ Lance, cried as his lean frame bound away over the hill.

‘Marvellous, the chase is afoot, let us hope we find our lizards basking in the sun,’ Parkin said, an expectant smile breaking across his face.

We Are The Dead

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift.

My words are the words of an enlightened man. I gained my liberation after leaving my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once the true, divine nature of us all had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and these deities communed with me, as they communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.

Whist travelling to the south-west of England, I stopped in the ancient city of Chester where I encountered a demonic presence. I confronted this spirit in the riverside Groves. The following morning I was conveyed downstream in a spectral boat, where I found the residual traces of the demon dragging a man into the water. I rescued the man by inviting and absorbing the demon into my own soul.

‘I thought you were Death,’ Mr Yardley said, once he had been resuscitated and the water expelled from his lungs.

I explained that in a manner of speaking I was, although it was the death of the ego and a subsequent freedom from all delusions which I offered rather than the cessation of life. I do concede that the image of my sage face, peering from the ghostly boat which bore me, would suggest an encounter of a supernatural kind.

After I had thrown him onto the river bank, I had myself collapsed from both physical and psychic exhaustion. I was aware that my encounters with the supernatural had impressed a stain upon my soul yet at that time I believed that identifying with the emptiness of the self and ridding myself of all ego, would allow the demonic to pass beyond my specific organism into the all-encompassing illumination where it would burn away like a moth in the flame.

When I looked up from my position on the riverbank, I noticed three, watching figures. The first was an unusually tall and slender man, more so even than my self, he was bearded and with his greying hair long at the back of his head and his style of dress, he looked like he was probably a motorcyclist. The second was younger, suspiciously young I later thought when I heard his claims to psychic ability; his fleece jacket hung open revealing his tattoos and chest piercings. The third and foremost member of the group was short and squat with eyes that bulged behind his glasses; clad in a body-warmer and wide-brimmed hat, he possessed a rather toad-like look.

They approached us and once Mr Yardley was resuscitated, and I helped to my feet, introductions were made. It transpired that despite watching Yardley nearly drown, then observing my embrace of the demon before dragging the man to shore, they were not engaged in a new form of perverse spectator sport – after all, it was not televised!

‘You came in answer to our call, or perhaps you were sent,’ the toad-like man, Parkin, said.

I pointed out my boat which had now drifted back into the river and would soon ride the current downstream, perhaps back to its resting place in the shallows beneath the willow, before briefly outlining the events of the previous hours. At one point, Parkin interjected, ‘the stone, you threw the stone!’

‘Yes, I bound the entity and threw it downstream where...’

Rather then heed my words further at this point the three men began a quietly heated conversation, from which I gathered that they were waiting for a demonic presence and one who would battle it.

‘If you were waiting for me and you were watching, why didn’t you pissing well help?’ I found myself demanding. Profanities are not a usual part of my speech, however I had spent much time on Merseyside and I was entitled to feel angry on Mr Yardley’s behalf; I had no doubt that the three of them would have left him to drown.

‘We are engaged in matters of the utmost importance, intervention in any mid-manifestation would seriously jeopardise our ability to combat the malign forces against which we are marshalled,’ Parking stated in a manner I considered to be fairly pompous.

‘Who are you gentlemen?’ I asked.

Parkin replied with no trace of irony or humility, ‘we are the Dead.’

Cradled by the River Bed, Suckled on the Waters of Death

My first battle had not defeated the demon, it had repelled it. Now, as it drowned an innocent man, I was bound to intervene!<p>
Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift.

My words are the words of an enlightened man. I gained my liberation after leaving my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once the true, divine nature of us all had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and these deities communed with me, as they communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.

I had stopped in the ancient city of Chester whilst en route for the South West of England. Encountering a demonic presence in the city, I confronted it in the riverside Groves. The following morning I was conveyed downstream in a spectral boat, where I found the residual traces of the demon dragging a man into the water...

The demonic spirit appeared to me as a sheet of hairy skin billowing through the waves. As it broke the surface, its wrinkled flesh formed into a resemblance of a snarling face and two limbs extended whose tips crystallised into shattered hooves that draped over the drowning man’s shoulders, forcing him under the waves.

It seemed to be invisible to the drowning man but I recognised it as the apparition which I had faced hours previously and with the boat now halted I was duty bound to act. Shrugging my pack and jacket from my shoulders, I slipped off my shoes and leaving them all in the back of the boat, dipped into the waters. The waves received me eagerly, ducking my head below their surface, blurring my sight was and distorting my hearing. I could feel the waters slopping around the man’s weakening limbs and impelled by instinct I threw wide my arms and willed the demon to myself.

I had no need to weigh up my chances of survival or of success. I simply offered myself in his place. I was aware of a slit gaping hungrily in the sheet as it slipped from Mr Yardley and writhed toward me like one of the membranes from the sea’s depths.

I did not see it envelop my torso but I became acutely conscious of a cold, damp cord wrapping around me. This sensation quickly passed through my skin, becoming a twist of cold that wracked my gut. A ravenous hunger followed and the urge to feed possessed me. I felt myself thrashing through the water, my mouth gnawing the air when an indistinct mass loomed over me. I became conscious of the cord expanding until the cold, slick flesh cradled me. I was dimly aware that my body was on the bed of the river, whilst my visionary self relaxed, surrendering to the huge body which tightly held me.

I recall how my kneading lips seemed to clamp around a cold, fleshy protuberance which injected spurts of grainy liquid into my mouth. I fed eagerly, gulping down the rank fluid whilst looking up to the huge female silhouette that held me to her breast. I could see the swell of the bosom, see the curve of her arm but the moment as I realised she was headless, I was suddenly outside myself, observing how I suckled from a female body, whose neck ended in a nest of torn flesh and a protruding vertebrae.

The vision passed and I was looking upon a roughly heaped nest in which several lumps squawked and groaned. There was a creature, resembling a cockerel that walked on thin, clawed legs, dragging bloodied human remains by a rope snared around one claw toward this nest. As it neared the entrance, the squawking intensified and I beheld a brood of human faces, each stretched from a puddle of flesh. As the corpse was shoved into them, the eyes of each face widened frenziedly and the mouths emitted long, bristled tongues which first probed and then penetrated the carrion.

Reflecting upon these visions, I know that I was willing to be that corpse, to be sucked dry by mindless, groaning flesh; I would freely offer to be the bloodied milk carried in the dugs of the Death Goddess! However this disregard for my own life achieved nothing. I was eager to be a victim of life, a sacrifice to nature; I was unwilling to identify with the half-formed creatures mindlessly squawking from their nest.

It was residual ego which made me resist the idea that it was my face gnawed into a corpse; once I found the detachment to accept that creature, my awareness submerged into its mindless, unquestioning feeding.

Gradually an awareness of my body returned. A wracking agony swelled within the gut until a heave expelled matter from me. I followed vomit the trails of vomit dragging through the waters and saw a light appeared. Drawn toward that radiance, I broke into the air and sunlight was spilling across the river; each wave rose into its embrace, forming steps of light that climbed across the water.

I projected myself across each wave, ascending a ladder of light, until I entered into a sphere of light. All sense of self fled as I immersed myself into the eternal ocean of light from which all descends and unto which it returns; the face of the deity I had identified with Minerva formed within the light, to look down upon me. As She regarded me, the knowledge that I was with the One, beyond all force, before all form, released me into a warm peace; the waters speared the radiance into ribbons that briefly burnished their waves and I knew that She had dissolved Herself into the air, the water and the earth, into the trees and the wind that stirred them, into the serpentine sliding of the holy waters and over all, into the sun.

These visionary experiences can only have lasted moment. As I became aware of the waters rising and falling around my face, I reached out, catching hold of the man’s hand. He pulled away and I lurched forward, until my arms were around his head. Thankfully his struggle stopped and he sank into me, his head against my chest and I half-floated, half-dragged him to the shore.

The flow of the river was strong but thankfully the boat had drifted toward us, diverting the current around us and when I was able to lean a left arm over its side, I was able to make for the shallows. Into the reeds we went, the prow pushing aside the lush fronds, setting the iris nodding, scattering water birds into the air and then the ground sloped gently upward and I was able to roll the man down, so that he lay sideways, his torso out of the water and gasping, I leaned onto the rotting timbers of the boat.

When I finally looked up, I saw them, three figures, silhouetted on the bank above us.

On Singing Waves, through Sighing Winds...

Sunlight touched the crest of each wave snaking alongside the boat which, until recently, had lain, half-buried and rotting, among the mud of the Dee....<p>

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift.

My words are the words of an enlightened man. I gained my liberation after leaving my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once the true, divine nature of us all had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and these deities communed with me, as they communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.

Mr Adam Yardley floundered, half-willing each muddy wave that flooded his eyes and swamped his nose, to suck him under, into the untroubled depths. As each wave broke around his face, a fleeting, gasped glimpse of the sky and the fragile trees was allowed before the watery circumference closed over once again.

Gulping air and water, Yardley was torn between a desire for the slop and slap of the buffeting waves and a yearning to rise into the clear heavens beyond the sighing breeze; that is until a shadow fell over him and the waters were plunged aside under the prow of a rowing boat. What appeared a dishevelled apparition sat within that craft, formed into an old man, gazing down upon him with eyes that exuded a pity for and an understanding of the human condition; this vision was fleeting and the waters closed, eager for Mr Yardley’s company.

Or so I imagine Mr Yardley’s experiences to be.

I have immersed myself in numerous rivers, most recently the Dee within sight of the shrine to the Goddess. As public nakedness is not encouraged in Chester or its environs I waited until the hour was late before I slipped through the willows and immersed myself under the watching moon. Of course all such immersions attune me to the alma mater of rivers, the Ganges. I cautiously paddled into those fast-flowing waters and lowered myself into waves that bare sacred offerings and ashes of the dead and once emerged, I found a figure stood among the crowds on the ghat, looking upon me...

So I appeared to Mr Yardley. My account of his final moments on the water is not just constructed from memory or empathy; I forged a mental union with the man, entering into his awareness even as he sought to take his own life.

I had been enjoying a leisurely morning on the banks of the Dee after defeating, or deflecting, a demonic assault, (see previous posts, ed. / acolyte) when I was interrupted by the appearance of a semi-ruined boat drifting atop the waves.

I had observed this craft bedded in the mud at a lopsided angle just below the wall of the field where I had spent such as eventful night. I did not realise however that the wrench and grinding noises that had arisen from the riverbank were the ancient timbers freeing themselves from the sodden earth. I thought that a large animal, possibly a deer, were tearing at the sycamores below the wall but as I stood to look, I witnessed the boat lurch free and in defiance of the river, pitch and judder before me.

One should never ignore such a call from the Otherworld and after sweeping my effects into the my pack and paying a final respect to the shrine of the Goddess, I cautiously lowered myself down the wall and found my way through the undergrowth to the muddy shore. The Gods accommodated me, sending the boat into the shallows and I was able to pick my way across the mud and lower myself into the wooden shell. I sat uneasily, clinging onto the slimed sides as the craft slipped easily away and turning began to drift upstream. The murky waters slipped an inch away from my right foot, forcing me to lean back into the boat as it passed under the bridge and then swept swiftly and evenly up the weir. I have no idea whether any saw me as I sailed against the flow of the Dee, away from the city and out toward the fields. The prow forged a crest that briefly cupped the sun before cascading golden snakes around us; insects flitted before our passage rising wisps that were swallowed in the rising light. Whispering trees reached overhead, their reflections shivering through the waves and I felt the immanence of the Goddess, shining through the water, the light, the fragrance and the earth’s subtle song.

The peace of the journey was ended when we rounded a bend and the figure of a middle-aged man, floundering in the middle of the river came into view. The boat glided still, indicating the end of my journey and I looked for the first time upon Mr Yardley. I saw too, that which had ensnared him. He did not see it, but I knew that he felt it, burrowed within him, clamped throughout him, driving him into the waves, dragging him into the gulping depths, down through the yearning reeds, toward the touch of the eager mud...

I was thrown by the sight.

It was not just the man balanced precariously between life and self-willed death. The past was peeled back and I saw another who floated flaccid, lifeless ...I was again that youth who could not act. I might have drifted by and allowed Mr Yardley to drown whilst wallowing in memory, had not the power which held him, reasserted itself and I looked again upon the demon which had attacked hours previously...

Under the Morning Sun, Minerva Awakens the Vessel that Shall Bear Me Beyond...

Parents do not always take kindly to the prophets of pagan shrines entering ecstatic states in the playgrounds where their youngsters slide and spin and gambol...<p>

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift.

My words are the words of an enlightened man. I gained my liberation after leaving my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once the true, divine nature of us all had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and these deities communed with me, as they communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.

Happy Solstice to all of my students! I apologise that my teachings have not reached you for some time. At the time of writing, most of the devotees of these teachings have yet to encounter them or indeed be born as the incarnation which will find illumination through them. I should say however, that the summer solstice is a particularly important time of year, symbolising not only the radiance of enlightenment but the time when the severing of one’s illusions is most easily achieved. The old feast of John the Baptist, who lost his head, remembers this.

The sun rising, called by the flurry of birdsong from the dense greenery, brought definition to the field, the river and the city walls beyond.

(Last summer I encountered a demonic force in the city of Chester. I confronted the apparitions on the banks of the River Dee, in Edgar’s Field where a shrine to Minerva yet stands.)

Whether the demon I had faced was a projection from my former life or from depths yet hidden within myself, or if it had an external existence to me, I could not say, however I enjoyed the dawn, even finding time to sleep on the sheeting laid on the outcrop.

Dreams took me into the presence of a bull that swallowed a small figure, fed into its mouth by an old man smeared in ashes; as the beast’s lower jaw dislocated itself to accommodate the parcel of flesh, I started awake.

Traffic noise from the bridge skimmed across the bridge and somewhere a dog barked but sitting up, I realised the sun was still low and the cities’ day was yet to start. The dreams remained in mind and I positioned myself upright and entered meditation where assorted figures rose unbidden like waves until the inner light was uncovered and I was received into its embrace.

My journeys last summer were preceded by an encounter with a power that was bound, or housed, beneath a western facing hill. Since that moment I felt myself coming to terms with the stain it had impressed upon my psyche and increasingly, there was a particular episode from my past which lingered in my mind; it had been drifting into comprehension for some time how until it hung there with a disturbing clarity.

Whilst the content and significance of such memoires shall not be divulged at this moment, the acolyte should appreciate that both profound meditation along with further obeisance before the altar of the death Goddess were required before I comprehended their meaning. I was tempted to spend longer at the altar of Minerva, whose form, the Absolute had adopted so recently. Shorn of her temporal and cultural attachments, this particular Goddess came to embody both the universal power of egoless wisdom and the might which can conquer the selfish urges of the lower personality; I know now, that Minerva is one personification of this greatest of powers operating within these isles. However there is a children’s playground built onto the field. Of this I thoroughly approve. There should be more pagan shrines located akin to the playgrounds of the young (although not vice versa). Alas, the parents of the gambolling young do not always take kindly to the prophets of such shrines entering ecstatic states whilst their offspring slide and spin and fall over; I know this from personal experience.

I was debating whether to continue my journey south that day – following the sun in pursuit of my maternal uncle’s old haunts – when an event occurred which decided my course of action for me.

There was a half-submerged rowing boat bedded into the mud which had served as a perch for the heron. It was located close to the grass bank, where it had gradually sunk over the years. Indeed, I had not given it a second thought until I became aware that it was now afloat on the wide, still flow of the Dee. I stood in amazement as the vessel, smeared with mud and its boards half-rotted, danced across the waters as if newly crafted. There was a manner in which its prow glided to face me, nodding with the wavelets that caused me to gather my things. My transportation, if not my destination, was apparent...

Under Hoof, Above Horn, Below Root Beyond Branch (to release the inner light...)

A flaccid sheet of flesh, once the hide of a large, hoofed animal, had risen from the water and supporting a mass of twigs and rushes and other river debris that had taken on a vaguely human form, shuddered toward me.

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift.

My words are the words of an enlightened man. I gained my liberation after leaving my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once the true, divine nature of us all had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and these deities communed with me, as they communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.<p>


(Meditating at the Cathedral in the Roman city of Chester, I awoke a latent demonic presence. At the time I did not know if this was a projection from my own psyche or if it was an external presence. Taking the form of one of the gargoyles carved onto the Cathedral wall, it pursued me across the river to the Groves, where a shrine to Minerva stands.)

Sitting within a circle of woven willow boughs, and with a mind stilled by meditation, I was compelled to take a pebble and inscribe upon it a leering face surrounded by a rough circle. Clutching the pebble in my hand, I repeated the devotions to Nature’s dark face. Again, I let my body go unto that Goddess, the Mighty Mother who will hungrily receive my flesh, twisting and grinding it beneath Her mighty hand; who will wrench and break the skin, and scoop hungrily the moisture leaking from the body’s dark crannies. Willingly I gave myself to Her, returning the body which I had borrowed from the earth, picturing as I did so, the Goddess as the headless torso which issues blood from Her gaping neck.

I felt the heat and stink of her presence and sweat broke across my skin. I smelt incense offered in adoration and I imagined milk pouring into a bowl before Her.

I saw then a flood of water, its waves laced with the light of the moon; so vivid was this image that the river may have swollen up around my circle. Surfacing from these waters, I witnessed the rise of a smooth, mushroom-like dome which emerged as a human skull. I knew that She, the Mother of life and death looked from that apparition even before a fleshy, female body, rose beneath it.

There was no fear within me as I willed myself to that figure. I was islanded in silence and stillness as She regarded me from the skull and beckoned me to her slick bosom. I accepted the heavy hand that gripped my head and crushed it under the waves. The experience of water bursting up my nose, of feeling my face dragging in mud, of reeds trailing and clasping me in their slick hold did not set fear coursing through me; rather, I regained a sense that I sat still atop the rise, surrounded by water across which a glistening web of blood had gathered into a circle.

There was a moment of stillness, surrounded by water threaded with blood before the apparition broke into the vision, its hide sagging and swaying as the splintered hooves trod the waves; the rider had taken on the form of a slender, ashen-fleshed figure which leaned down into my view. Despite emerging from the waters of the river, the apparition seemed completely dry and exuded a piercing cold. I recall still the detachment with which I registered the dried eyes in the rider’s skull and the hole gnawed into its forehead. I recall the excitement which shivered through the being as the mount stepped across the circle of blood and also the instinctive certainty which seized me, prompting me to stand and as the shrivelled, ashen face drew toward me, I thrust the pebble onto the hole in its skull.

At that moment, my apprehension of the tangible world returned. I saw still the circle of blood, woven through the boughs of willow. I saw the visionary waters pass like shadows over the outcrop and the lime trees beyond. I was aware of birdsong breaking out in anticipation of the dawn. I felt waves streaming around my legs, felt my fingers scoop slopping mud and pull against the clinging sedge.

And with an utter detachment, I saw that I confronted a phantom of myself; that the rider and the mount were embodying my own pride, the animalistic lust for self-aggrandisement. A welter of images flashed before my eyes in which I saw myself, helping others and unaware of a residual desire for attention and power that lingered behind my actions. Willingly, I threw myself beneath this being and a triangle of fire, glowing like the morning sun, opened in my mind.

At the moment the hooves would have trampled my head I felt the hide fall around me, smothering me in its dry, cold folds and a large bird swooped through my awareness, passing into the triangle of sunlight. I saw myself follow in the creature’s wake and radiance received me, gathering me into its infinite expanse. I was divided between that state of total stillness and consciousness of my physical form which enclosed in the hide, tightened into a know of hard, horn-like flesh that began kneading at the earth, pushing down into the soil, to fan into a slow web of roots that spread and thickened. Around me, the hide swelled, as if muscle, spasming, tensing muscle, burst anew under the flesh to stretch upward, until I was enclosed in a sheath of bark, my interior jewelled by a rich damp awoken by the hot clasp of the sun.

I felt boughs rearing like horns over the ground and laden with a greenery that whispered back to the buried roots of the moon’s journey around the sky, of the promise of the fading stars and of the daybreak’s coming blaze. I heard a song, felt its thrill pass through the leaves until all was silent and still again against the world’s flood. Thus, horned and hooved, rooted and wind-stirred, star-crowned and earth-clasped, I stood among a host of beings that momentarily danced and leapt like flame until they shrivelled, dying into a darkness, from which a single figure grew: the Goddess as Nature. Exuding a pale sun-light, the Goddess who bears all, revealed Herself. She wore the sky was a robe, the greenery was woven into a mantle and waters spilled from Her upraised hand.

A profound peace came over me, along with awe and wonder at Her beauty and as my mind readjusted to the tangible world, I beheld Her still. I stood on the outcrop, among a circle of willow and other debris and she reared far above the other where the stone shrine was set. A garland of boughs and summer flowers appeared around Her and as She turned to the east, the vision faded, leaving only a light which radiated from the land and the water. With a heart made glad by the light which streamed from it, I crossed to that shrine. As the waters flooded and stretched into silence behind me, I raised an inward song of praise to the Goddess as Minerva, an expression of the wisdom of nature that frees us from our separate selves, awakening the primordial, ‘Mother Light’ within. Feeling a song well from the sky and earth around me, I felt was borne again across those rays into radiant eternity.

When my consciousness returned to my body, I perceived a heron rise and beat a passage downstream over water that received and smoothed the dawn light; and it was toward that mesh of light and dark that I flung the pebble, inscribed with the circle and the leering face, that I found still in my hand.

Amid a circle of willow, witnessing the rise of the drowned

The pool and spill of the river passes into a silent, sweeping flow and on the bank, amid a circle of willow boughs, I am woven into the ocean of light that sighs within the heart of nature.

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift. These are the words of an enlightened man. I gained my liberation after leaving my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once the true, divine nature of us all had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and these deities communed with me, as they once communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.

The Dee is a holy river. Named after Deva, meaning of course Goddess, it is said that the river never keeps a body, a truth I can confirm although I found that it might keep the souls of those who had fallen asleep within its waters. There are considerably worse fates than to pass eternity within the court of a river Goddess!

Even as I proclaim such words, I am returned to my ‘birth in spirit’ in India, returned back to the shores of the sacred river where the Blessed Powers awoke the celestial fire within me even as they fired life back into dead matter.

The details of my enlightenment must wait for a future lesson.

Whilst visiting Deva (the city of Chester in the North of England)I had entered into deep meditation whilst at the Cathedral. In this state of Samadhi, I envisioned the animation of the demonic gargoyles carved around the building. This experience passed, although I was consciousness that I carried a stain impressed upon my psyche by my previous experiences that summer. (Wind you way through the previous ‘teachings’ for further details, ed./ acolyte)

It was whilst I slept rough on the city streets that I was woken by demonic apparitions approaching me. Fleeing out of the city, I crossed the river at the Handbridge, unsure of whether my own psyche enflamed residual traces of its past attachments, or if I was pursued by genuine spiritual entities and took refuge in the Groves where the Roman shrine to Minerva stands in situ.

It was as I crossed the bridge, that I became keenly aware of the water on the left hand side spilling over the weir to pool around the supports of the structure before sliding silently beyond. The rush on one side and the silence on the other became the refrain of the riverbank and once over the bridge, that hurtling plunge into apparent stillness, allowed me to regain something of my detachment from all phenomena. The Handbridge (as the single-lane, rather monumental bridge was named) hosted four antique lamps which provided the only light, other than the stars and waning crescent moon. The road and houses beyond the field were largely dark and the ancient funerary monuments which had once lined the roads out of Deva, the most ornate resembling houses devoted to the dead, may have stood still, spreading up the hill away from the city.

Now I had crossed the river, onto Edgar’s field (named after the medieval king who once camped there) it seemed that I had entered a place of stillness and silence and I felt ready to stop fleeing and confront the apparitions that pursued me. This space houses twin outcrops of sandstone, the one furthest away from the river hosting the shrine to the Goddess and I strode to that monument to pay my respects to the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare!

(The attribute of wisdom is derived from Her presidency over practical crafts – to devote oneself to a task takes one away from the worldy self and thus from the miserable prison of narcissism; as Goddess of warfare – she was the warriors’ Goddess - we can see Her speared and armoured form as an embodiment of the war against selfish indulgence, it is She who strikes the spark of the divine free from its clay casement.)

Once I had called inwardly upon the Goddess, I turned to the outcrop nearer to the river. This was thick with vegetation, particularly hawthorn, holly and nettles and once I had climbed it I stamped the nettles down and threw my plastic sheet over them.

A line of lime trees stood, rather like a shield, between the field and the river where willow and sycamore grow from the muddy bank. The leaves gently shivered and I heard in them the voice of the Goddess breathing reassurance through her sacred trees.

Before I sat and entered into meditation however, an inclination prompted me to gather assorted materials from across the outcrop and place them into a circle across the plastic. When I finally sat, it was among a circle of willow boughs, adorned with a shattered egg shell, gossamer threads and feathers. I had entered into a state of profound peace since crossing the river and the residual traces of my former self and its craven obsession with its personal existence had fallen away from me. As I sat in the lotus position, my composure was disturbed by an irritation with the cold in the night air and a rumble of hunger in my stomach.

These uncomfortable sensations presaged a resumption of the haunting.

On the bridge a light shimmered and I turned to see a slick web glistening through the air. It stretched and quivered like jellied, protean life swelling under the sun. I thought that it erupted, scattering pellets but a sudden disgust caused me to look away.

When I looked back, dark shreds of matter floated from the bridge, like shreds of rubbish and wisps of ashen paper cast on a breeze and their approach suggested that writhing shapes thrust themselves over the edge of the bridge before collapsing back into the night air.

‘My mind is expunging its debris, or perhaps I am assailed by the underworld,’ I recall saying to my self as water spilled on over the weir, pooled around the supports of the bridge and slid silently beyond.

Taking my cue from the ceaseless flow of the element and seated in the circle, I called upon the darker aspect of Mother Nature. I called upon the underworld Goddess, She who rends and tears, who takes Her young into Herself, who melts their fibres and hollows their bones and who, gorged on the mess, bears fresh life.

I offered my little life to Her and in my imagination I beheld the Goddess. She had impressed Herself upon me in my recent adventures and it was something approaching love that rose in me as She appeared within the circle as a headless torso. Her naked form swayed and staggered before me, blood splattering from Her severed stump, spraying from the arms that swung and thumped at Her sides. With the scattered spray veiling my face, I prostrated myself before this vision.

I saw jewels of blood fall across the plastic and alight upon the foliage and over them a blue mist gathered. I followed it ascending into a paler radiance overhead. The illumination intensified and on unseen wings, I rose from the realm of death, passing into the light that lies in the heart of Nature, away from the transient blooming and withering of the world to bewoven into a sighing, radiant ocean.

Within this abode of stillness, there was yet an awareness of the physical self sat amid the circle of willow, holly and stones and of the spill of the water over the weir and its silent glide beyond the pools at the supports.

I was drawn back from the silent detachment, when an impression grew of a grinding, creaking noise. I had not yet returned fully to my body when I became conscious of a break in the flow of the water at the lip of the weir. Water flooded around an object bobbing there until the gathered volume heaved it over. I grew aware that my body had stood and I looked through its eyes at a flaccid sheet that drifted under the bridge and was snagged on an islet close to the shore. It appeared to be a hide that was held, the waves winging beneath it, until with a volition of its own, it expanded and rose, dripping and glistening under the lamplight, to walk through the shallows to the shore.

There was no sign now of the apparitions on the bridge or ghosting across the air but I knew that the power which had lain behind them now propelled this drowned residue of a cow or horse. I lost sight of it when it ascended the steep bank, but it soon flopped over the wall before the lime trees and righted itself before stretching a hairless, veined leg forward and proceeded toward me. As the remnants of its hind hooves cleared the wall into the field, the air above it was disturbed by shreds of blackened matter that descended and anchored themselves across the apparition.

By the time it had crossed the path and passed under the trees, the shreds of matter had solidified into a humanoid figure of skeletal twigs whose arms flailed and writhed atop the sodden hide. And as the night broke into a host of figures that crept and leered in its wake, I recognised in that spectre, something of the proud centaur which had reached from the wall of the Cathedral...

Facing the phantoms In the groves of Minerva

In the groves of Minerva, I determined to face the pursuing phantoms. Whether they were projections from my own psyche that rose against me or entities personifying the pride and sin of mankind, under the aegis of the Goddess, I would make a stand.

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift. These are the words of an enlightened man. I gained liberation after I left my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once my true, divine nature had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and they communed with me, as they had once communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.

I had embarked upon a journey to the south-west of England, intent upon researching my uncle’s adventures and I had stopped off at the city of Chester. Whilst meditating at that cities’ cathedral, I had envisioned the demonic gargoyles animating and detaching themselves from the stone.

I attributed this vision at the cathedral to residual, egotistical attachments that I had yet to completely discard and I left the church, spending the remainder of the day exploring other sites of interest, notably the shrine to Minerva left by Roman craftsmen in their quarry. Today it occupies a field on the banks of the river opposite the city.

If one should find oneself in a city dedicated to the Goddess of craftsmanship, one should never spurn the craft of the brewer. That would be tantamount to impiety. The hostelries of that city are very fine, many of them being of considerable age and harbouring a host of ghostly atmospheres. I had intended to leave the city during the late afternoon but such was the quality of the brewer’s wares that I found myself leaving one inn at ‘kicking out time.’ Unable to secure any form of reasonable lift at that hour, I opted to seek rest.

I took refuge under one of the rows – roofed timber walkways raised above the streets running between the cathedral and the river. The oldest of these features date from the Middle Ages and there are still sections of centuries-old stone or timber housing assorted shops, businesses and apartments. The rows are constructed so that there is a broad section of wood panelling sloping from the walkway up to the rail that overlooks the street and it was on one such platform, under a particularly ancient arch, whose massive timbers afforded the most protection from any disadvantages of the elements, that I laid down a roll of plastic for the night. Although several people did walk by, including a police patrol and although there was even a late night encounter in the street below which veered between the familiar and the threatening, it is possible to make one self unseen and by turning away from public view, breathing slowly and thinking myself out of existence, I was able to escape detection and enjoy some rest.

I was woken by the sound of something flapping against the wood below me. It sounded like paper flustered across a breeze. I allowed my mind to drift a little and the sound persisted until it became a distinct slapping and dragging sound; at that moment I sat up, suddenly convinced that something was clambering up toward me from the street below. My movement coincided with a scratching rattle, like a can hurried across stone. This was followed by the idea that wet footsteps padded up the stairs from the street not far from my resting place.

I stood and hastily rolled my sheet up, animated by an uncharacteristic feeling of fear and a sudden desire for home, and the comforts of pubs I knew and for the park where I could pitch my tent and for my dear acolyte’s house where I was permitted to stay and forced to bathe once a week.

Such sentiments brought feelings of guilt and I decided it was time to move to a place where I could meditate and rid myself of these volatile feelings; I told myself I was haunted by remnants of the days when I was languished within the waves of the ego and throwing my pack over my shoulder, I hurried away from the sounds, determined to leave the city and cross the river. As I went, refusing to glance back, I heard a moist, flapping sound that kept pace with me and I thought of my vision at the cathedral when the gargoyles had appeared to writhe free of the stone.

I told myself that such a building embodied the cosmos – its exterior a leering, grimacing parade of the instincts, alleviated by visions of selflessness, whilst within, the emptiness of all save devotion to a selfless, compassion rose to the heavens. I told myself that any apparition descending from the images of sin, would be powerless against a mind anchored upon a selfless compassion but as I crossed a small bridge over an alleyway, my imagination was assailed by the image of a particular carving; it was a representation of a snout-faced, bearded figure, whose body split into great wings and a hoofed body. Of all the bodies, grasped in the stone, it was this which glared out with an imperious pride, the pride that sets one’s individual urges and needs against all else, the pride the Christians would attribute to Lucifer.

It was great relief that I made the end of the rows and still the sound of some thing or several things, heaving and sliding after me, assailed my consciousness. I only looked back after I had descended to street level and hurried into the empty road. The broad, pedestrianised street, lined with shops was empty. The gloomy timber rows were blank but as I turned to face downhill, I caught from the corner of my eye, a suddenly, expansive gleam. I was left with the idea that several people were suddenly illuminated in a flash of light and they all were craning toward me.

I looked back, my heart apace and walking downhill as I went, but the street and the rows were dark and nothing appeared in pursuit.

I hurried down hill, passing under the ornate bridge set in the city walls and looked behind. Up the street, the air was streaked with strands of light; they sparked, glistening, rather like light reflected on waves and from this viscous, glistening weave, matted shreds of shadows slipped out that were ghosted to and fro on an unfelt wind. In my mind’s eye such shadows became the figures that crawled from the cathedral. Terror resurrected itself within me and I turned intent on running when I crashed immediately into the slick torso of a shrouded figure. I felt it give and collapse under me as something gushed from its headless collar. I threw myself onto the road before I realised that I had fallen over or run into a bin bag that was suspended from the railings bordering the bridge.

Fearing that my mind was collapsing, I strode across the ‘Hand-bridge’ into the groves of the Goddess, Minerva, determined to gather my resolve and confront whatever dogged my psyche.

Among the ancient stones, under the sun-lit trees, the Underworld Gods Stir

Along with traces of human spectres, there are greater powers haunting the city of Deva; the Underworld Gods, the Gods of darkness and of death can be sensed among the ancient stones, under the sun-lit trees.

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift. These are the words of an enlightened man. I gained liberation after I left my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Many years later, once my true, divine nature had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and they communed with me, as they once communed with my uncle before me. They revealed a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth this path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.

I did not realise at the time the greater purpose on which I had embarked. I believed I had returned to Albion to more effectively commit the adventures of my maternal uncle to paper; it was the tales of his experiences which had made awoken the spiritual instinct within me. His tales of séances, of exploring haunted downs, of laying spectres in ancient ruins that directed the course of my life. I wished to preserve such tales for posterity; I did not realise that I was fated to effectively re-live them.

Whilst I had made significant progress on the draft of such a book, there were areas of shadow over the sequence of events recounted by my ancestor. Also, whenever discoursing on the narrative with others, there was much contempt directed at my insistence upon its veracity. As a result, I decided to visit the West Country setting of his greatest adventure and find the Sunset Downs and their antique hill carving for myself. (See previous posts or find ‘Binder of Bone, Keeper of Corn’ on Amazon, ed.)

You will not find the name ‘the Sunset Downs’, or indeed any of the other locations from my uncle’s narrative on a map. The names of such places have either changed or equally likely, my uncle used poetic names that conveyed something of a place’s symbolic meaning whenever he discussed them. Last summer therefore, trusting to the Blessed Powers to guide me, I bade farewell to what acquaintances I had not yet alienated and as the moon of July waned, set off for the South-West of England.

Being deprived of any form of physical transportation, I decided to call upon the generosity of fellow road users. This alas, proved to be rather optimistic as the majority of cars sweeping along Bayswater road toward the motorway either ignored me or beeped derisively. I have since learnt that if one seeks to hitch around England, avoid the motorway (it draws the wrong sort) focus instead upon the A roads. One finds oneself in the company of a better class of person and even if one does not arrive where one intended, the destinations are more varied and interesting.

I was picked up eventually by a lorry driver. He was Eastern European, very Catholic and decidedly garrulous, despite his poor grasp of English. Never one to permit others to remain trapped under their delusions, I sought to converse as best I could. Some of my meaning must have become clear as my challenge to his orthodox religious views angered him greatly. I fear we would have come to blows, or I received a beating if he had not bee required to keep his hands upon the wheel and we had not been trailed by a police car. However, my lift was curtailed when he dropped me at the bottom of a slip-road close to the city of Chester.

A heavy rain descended whilst I was on a bus into the city itself and I alighted as the sun happily broke through the clouds once more, gilding the slate roofs, tarmac roads and gutters and the sandstone walls rearing before me, Chester, or Deva as it was known, girdled by sandstone walls and with a vein of flowing water at its side, is soaked with spirits.

Whilst I would never wish to be too technical, it would appear that spiritual residues might linger around water and where it seeps into stone, these ghostly traces may linger. I was to find in this city, that along with traces of human spectres, greater powers, those of the Underworld Gods, the Gods of darkness and of death lingered too.

My first hint that such powers might be at work came whilst I was at the cities’ cathedral. This compact church may not inspire the awe that the larger structures of York, Durham or Liverpool might awaken, however the surrounding lime trees appear to cup its gloomy base in leaves that flutter in and out of the sun’s piercing gold. The exterior carvings around the shadowed base reward inspection. Shut out from the holy interior of the church, facing the world, the hunched figures, leaning and leering out toward the viewer depict the pain and suffering of corporeal life as well as its vices. The demonic curving horns, the perched hooves, wrinkled snouts, the manes billowing in a wind, all seem at home in the lower reaches of the Cathedral, where, like the lower reaches of the human soul, they writhing in their own pool of gloom. Above the ethereal weave of the sun-rich trees, the ornate spires and tower transcend this lower world, reaching toward the sun. Even a ‘heathen’ such as I can appreciate the symbolic power of this imagery. The inner sanctuary of the church signifies the enlightened consciousness, selflessly immune to the pride and folly of the world, towering toward the inner sun of Absolute Reality of the Gods, the Empyrean itself.

I did not go into the church – the charge levied I found prohibitive – instead, I sat in the lotus position in a quiet corner beneath an image of a demonic centaur. I passed into deep meditation, picturing my former vices and delusions. They appeared as external and alien to me as the gargoyles on the walls, whilst it seemed I was cupped within a sphere of light. The peace of none-attachment filled me. My mind was still, consciousness only that I elevated until the cathedral was below me. A being of light, ascended beyond the world, I focused my awareness, willing that this radiance should descend and touch those people who passed below.

Whilst drawing on the light of the inner sun, there came into my awareness a disturbance at the base of the building. Below the fluttering lime trees, there was a wave-like ripple across the stone. It seemed the lower part of the building shivered and dissolved. There was a definite movement within the walls like the contraction and spring of muscle below thick hide. There were several sounds, including a sudden clatter and a heavy thud followed by a fleshy dragging.

At this point my mind drew back to waking consciousness and I returned to my body in the shade as a breeze flurried rubbish across the lawns of the churchyard.

The Path to the Ancient Gods of Albion

Ghosts are a national treasure and they should be honoured and preserved as such, to explore the ghost-lore of Albion is to embark on the path toward its ancient Gods.

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift. These are the words of an enlightened man. I gained liberation after I left my native Albion to follow in the footsteps of my maternal Uncle to India. Once my true, divine nature had been realised, the Blessed Powers guided me back to the land of my birth. My awakened spirit was now sensitive to the ancient Gods of this land and they communed with me, as they communed with my uncle before me. They revealed to me, a path to enlightenment that can be trod on these shores. In these teachings I set forth the path to spiritual awakening as revealed to me by the Gods of ancient Britain.

My previous posts recounted my work on the haunting at the Magazines hotel. Unseen and none- human forces acting upon the hostelry, awoke a visionary world within my imagination. In confronting the darkness and in invoking the aid of protective deities (whom I shall discuss below), I employed instinctively the subtle energy centres known to Eastern thought as the chakras. Indeed the symbolism of a chakra – that of Svadisthana - was actually projected into my consciousness as I struggled against the blank pull of the darkness.

If any reader is unfamiliar with the term Chakra: they are subtle or spiritual centres vibrating within and beyond the human frame. They rise from the base of the spine to the crown of one’s head. The powerful, spiritual energy known as the Kundalini, or the Shakti – the divine presence of Mother Nature within the living – rises up the chakras, its ascent liberating our true, divine self from the clutches of the ego.

Should any seek to awaken their chakras and one should always approach any such exercises with care, ‘shutting down’ or reversing any powers that one has conjured, one should imagine a light ascending up one’s spine or down into one’s skull. One could, for example, meditate upon a star in the night sky and then imagine its light beaming into one’s head and slowly moving down through one’s body; alternatively one could visualise a ‘serpent of light’ uncoiling among the roots and rising up a tree in full leaf, until it passes into the sky above.

Your teacher, dear student, prefers to imagine a robed lady, embodying the spiritual nature of Mother Nature, the Celestial Mother Herself, also known as Lady Wisdom, stood over a bowl on a stone plinth, holding a staff that is speared with light. The light from the staff passes down through one’s body and as it rises again, the bowl emits a growing radiance, which draws one’s consciousness up into a communion with the vast, egoless, ‘none-self’.

An enlightened practicinor such as myself can instinctively awaken the chakras, as happened in the haunted inn. There were two levels of haunting at the ‘Mags’: residual traces of people who had dwelt at the inn or in the surrounding area and a presence that lurked on a deeper, pre-human level. It was this latter presence, like a deep stratum of rock beneath the soil and on which later accumulations rested, that I overcame. It was this presence which attuned me to the mythic, archetypal nature of my experiences.

In short, in exploring the ghost world, I encountered that of Albion’s Gods.

After investigating the inn I understood that whilst there (and in the house before it – see my previous teachings) I had communed with three distinct, divine or daemonic presences in the subtle realms. The first was female, whom I identified with both the Goddess Kali and the Shakti; She was an expression of the Goddess of death and destruction, the maw which crushes and rends, splinters and swallows, yet who will spark new life, energising the land without, releasing the spiritual energies within. It was the dark aspect of this being which allowed me to face the monstrosity that was the second of the Gods, while the energising aspect of the Goddess allowed me to transcend and conquer this second force. In both the house and the inn there was a presence in the darkness that grasped and bound the spirits of the living. It could be perceived by the sensitive as a debilitating, depressive force and I identified this as an aspect of Saturn, the overthrown God of the Latin peoples. Whilst seeking to grasp and merge the spirit into its own presence, there was also a dual aspect of this deity; just as Saturn was the lord of the Golden Age, the father of Jupiter, grand-sire to Apollo, so this presence was equally dual-natured. For once accepted, this ‘Saturn’ freed the true self, the soul within from the snares of the ego and in the following selfless abandon, the third deity could be apprehended. Once the urge to grasp at one’s mortal existence has been overcome, the enlightened mind perceives a profound, primordial light underlying all that is. My imagination personified this power as a moon goddess and I have called upon Her using the names of Sophia and also Minerva (of which I will reveal more in a future lesson). Indeed, the first Goddess I sketched can be thought of as aspects of the waning and the waxing moon respectively, the other, the full moon. What is key however, is that once free of the ego, the acolyte can encounter a profound blankness which feels like the cosmos is a veil behind and through which a rich luminesence radiates.

Raised, apparently in a rational age, any of you could be forgiven for asking if these Gods ‘real’. If so, are they derived from a particular pantheon. I offer no pantheon in these teachings, I simply document my own experiences on these shores, experiences which retuned and enriched my enlightenment. The gods are as real as they need to be and I aim to offer guidance and techniques which will assist the reader in attuning to the powers woven into the stones and hills, the woods and waters of the scared isle.

I should also add that whilst I have employed my own Hindu frame of reference in these posts, I have encountered specifically British faces of the Absolute and as a result I wish to employ epithets that are native, or at least European. This is not because I wish to denigrate the beliefs of the East, far from it, Hinduism was my teacher and I would recommend Hinduism for all. Many however, will not be comfortable with the deities of a different culture and the Gods themselves should be allowed a diverse range of habitats in which they can dwell, thus I will hence forth refer to the Gods using general epithets.

Before I conclude this teaching, I should address the ghostly traces of humans at the inn. As with the house before, I liberated the celestial fire of each which remained. I did not exorcise them or banish them or anything like that. Ghosts are a national treasure and they should be honoured and preserved as such. Having since returned to the ‘Mags’, I can confirm that there remains a residue of these spirits. Those with the gift may be able to sense them, however that which was of the Divine has returned to its true home.

Adrift on the Silent, Ethereal Waters of the Seas Beyond

I carry darkness within me. It is the shadow of my former sins and cravings, a shadow magnified by the presence of something other...

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift, I am a man who found enlightenment in India and returned to share this blissful liberation with Albion’s children. Any who are new to these teachings should consult my previous posts which form an account of an investigation into a haunted house, carried out by this author and some assistants in a Northern English town during the summer 2010.

The night following the haunting in the cellar (and my subsequent banishment from the pub) I was sat on a piece of grass adjoining the promenade just below the Magazines. The waning moon was in the sky and all was quiet, even across the river where the scrap-yards can often be heard. I was deep in Sabikalpa Samadhi (an egoless trance where the divine within is realised) when the radiance of this egoless state was shadowed as if by a cloud. I envisioned the walls of the inn above me parting and a hunched, old man emerge from them. He was clad in an apron, a plain shirt and breeches of a bygone age and he manifested before me, holding a lit candle. I recognised something in his features as ‘Ciaran’, the spectre who had looked from the sunlight windows of the inn, although there was no trace of anxiety in the features of this apparition.

He introduced himself as the ‘Keeper of the Casks’ and beckoned me inward. Before his little light, the hillside opened and I passed through a dank passage into the cellar of the inn again. The cave-like space with its metallic casks in rows opened before me and the Keeper of the Casks muttered a barely audible line, which I think was, ‘darkness drawn down, light passed back up.’

As he spoke a stream of ideas flowed through my mind; initially I was conscious of the traces of yeast fermenting in the casks – it was like I heard the soft pop and fizz of fecund waters. This impression was blanketed under a sudden sense that the dark presence I had encountered was manifesting around me. I could feel the ghostly presences trapped within it, like a hand feels the water within a sponge.

At that moment, bodies resting and rotting slowly in caskets rose into apprehension followed by the image of a boat where many bagged bodies rested in the hold around which the waves slapped and sighed. Then, like a dial switched on a radio, I conceived of a wooden cask, from which all was released; at once a sudden flood cascaded into the bright air, its exultant passage bubbling across the ocean’s swell, catching shards of sun until the bustle of the westerly breeze cast it up and chased it inland through wood, over field, tearing at fences, streaming through the moaning hedge, to the high hills and the stars beyond where it spilled and settled still into the celestial bowl.

Thankfully I was released from this bewildering flood of ideas by an illumination which ascended around me. I was aware of the cellar, but it was as if I were propelled beyond it on motes of light shed from a molten sphere below me.

Borne on such wings, I rose until I beheld the estuary and the bay spreading beyond. The tangible world no longer chained my senses and the inner world was aligned with it. I beheld the crescent moon under which the sea had drawn back unveiling a titanic shape that heaved its bulbous folds onto the sand. The vestiges of the sun (though long departed in the physical realm) cast a molten bronze across the shallow waves and dead men surfaced the gilded waters to clamber about the quivering, flopping mass. And the idea that sodden flesh and moist scales reflected back the upper radiance tripped me beyond the visionary form that encountered such visions.

Again, there was a pair of crossed bones, above which, She danced; Her movement was as the passage of moonlight through scudding clouds and I departed myself completely for Her, the Goddess that sits among the skulls, the Goddess who garlands Herself with death, even as she unfolds new life through sinuous contortions. Every skull about Her sang, even the crossed bones whined, exuding the divine harmony of the Ohm, the Logos. I understood with perfect clarity how Her light inspired this sound and as it resonated through Her radiance, the universe arose, woven from light and words of love.

To behold all, my self included, as a fleeting flicker of light glowing around a note resonating from the divine harmony, was to pass into the Goddess Herself and commune with the Absolute, with Brahma beyond brahma, the Empyrean itself...

Emerging from this state of blissful self-abandon, I was stood upon the promenade and yet also hovered above it within a burnished sphere hung between the worlds. I was aware of the dank cellar, the dark inn and the sea lapping at the rocks on the shore of the tactile world. Whilst in the world of spirits, the Shakti still shone like a Queen of Heaven and Her consort, no longer a blank force that would drag all into its taut clasp, now uttered the song of creation. From the cellar, glistening shreds slipped from the darkness, out toward a large, single-sailed vessel where the sea monster had been; a shadow crew on this ship summoned the shades aboard and with the moon lowering into the west, they set sail on silent, ethereal waters out to the seas beyond.

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Whilst the minutiae of my day-to-day life are of little concern to my students, I should announce that alongside the funds raised from my ‘donation-only’ spiritualist evenings in a local hostelry, I have also begun to sell second-hand books! I sold two today, a copy of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and a guide to ‘Kiddie’ walks in Cheshire.

From a vine of skulls and unearthly blooms, I ascend on wings aflame

I carry darkness within me. It is the shadow of my former sins and cravings, a shadow magnified by the presence of something other...

Welcome to the teachings of Sir Swithin Swift, I am a man who found enlightenment in India and returned to share this blissful liberation with Albion’s children.

Any who are new to these teachings should consult my previous posts which form an account of an investigation into a haunted house, carried out by this author and some assistants in a Northern English town during the summer 2010.

The cellar was the focal point of the haunting at the Magazine’s Hotel, an eighteenth century inn on the Wirral coast. Accompanying a nervous bar-maid down into that space, I found that my presence and the trace of the haunting from St Hilary’s, magnified the intensity of the haunting.

‘Normally it’s just a creepy feeling, or the sound of something moving, like its been knocked over,’ the bar maid said once we had emerged from that space, ‘it’s never been that bad, I’ll never go down there again.’

I am not prepared to go into detail on the particular manifestations which we experienced, however the girl was not in anyway harmed and the damage committed was minimal. I can confirm that there are several spirits residing at the hotel however there was something that had never been human which also lurked there.

What is significant is the means by which I overcame this apparition, initially in the cellar and then finally one night whilst on the promenade when it reappeared to me.
It was not only through intense meditation and invocation of the gods, but also through the instinctive projection of the chakras outward (chakras are the sacred centres within the subtle body through which the Kundalini – the divinity within – rises and falls).

Whilst investigating the house at St Hilary’s, I had thought little about the chakra imagery which arose during my trance state. I assumed the chakra was merely being employed. What I now understand was that I wasn’t just working with the chakras but I was entering them...

At the time I believed, not unreasonably, that it was my personal chakras into which I was passing. Now, I know differently.

As the manifestations raged in the cellar, I invoked the Celestial Goddess whose presence rests within us as the Kundalini.

She announced Her presence with a rumble that set the tangible world shivering like it was a reflection in a pool; the surrounding stone and wood became shadows under sunlight, and soon they were lost under the pool and its delicate gold (emblematic of the Muladhara chakra, in which the Goddess resides before she has been invited into full realisation).

A white illumination spilled around until I passed unto it. Whilst in this trance state, two human bones became evident. I have no doubt now that they remain under the stones of the cellar floor and what I perceived was a subtle impression of them – a haunting if you like. As the psychic eruption burst tangibly around the cellar, within my moon-wrought body, I raised the bones – one of the thigh the other of the upper arm – and formed a cross parallel to the ceiling.

The visionary pool was below me and I might have stood within it, as wisps of mists rose from the water’s shifting gold.

This vapour gathered around the bones and then billowed up into swaying clouds in which I witnessed the bare feet of one who moved above me. I saw the contours of a body, pushing through the contours of the cloud and delineated by scored brands of light. In an instant it was as if I were alongside this being, holding a skull which hung, among many, on a vine of unearthly blooms around Her neck.

Looking upward, into the source of this glow, was to look into the face of the Goddess, the Shakti unbound and unveiled and I departed from my self as if on wings of flame...

... in the house I had channelled the spirit through the brahma within, into the universal Brahma...

...here, I willed the darkness from the physical cellar upward and I rose upon it, riding its swelling crest; the necklace of the Goddess slipped below me and the burning contours of Her face formed in my mind, until I were level with Her gaze and the apparition which had migrated into my trance, settled into the blank spaces between the shining contours of her celestial self.

In this visionary state the disturbances in the physical world were ‘laid’ and the barmaid and I were able to exit the cellar. The young lady was nearly hysterical and it was fortunate that the other gentlemen who had been present had descended, drawn by the noise, to witness myself in trance and the young lady assailed by an unseen force.

I reassured all that the presence was now ‘laid’ within the pub and that there should be nothing more than an eerie atmosphere about the place.

Once the bar manager had been informed of the events, he was alas, less than grateful and I decided to find another lodging.

(Not entirely true, he was barred. I was there when the manager exploded at him, screaming, ‘you wind the regulars up, you buy a half and fall asleep, when you are awake you rant away...piss off and take your bloody ghosts with yer!’ All of which was true, ed., sorry, ‘typist’ - see previous posts for this to make sense, as if anything does on this blog!)

The Leaden Pull of the Sea

I carry a darkness within me. It is the shadow of my former sins and cravings, a shadow magnified by the presence of something other...

To any who are new to these teachings, please consult my previous posts which form an account of an investigation into a haunted house, carried out by this author and some assistants in a Northern English town during the summer 2010.

In this next lesson, I wish to instruct my readers on how a spiritual experience in one location can leave an impression which draws spectral presences in another.

Last summer, I had spent hours alone in New Brighton's Magazine's Hotel. It is often quiet during the weekdays when I passed most of my time there, either deep in thought or committing memories of my Uncle’s adventures to paper. There is an atmosphere about the place. The face reflected in the upraised glass is not one’s own. A shadow crosses the gleam of a brass hanging when none has moved in the pub. A scent is detected – a hint of a floral fragrance, an odour of roasting pig. Faint sounds emanate from unoccupied corners; I have even noticed a distinct taste of rum appearing in the back of my throat, a drink which I have not attempted in years. It would appear our very senses are haunted by this building.

I was once alerted to a spectral face peering from a tiny, second floor window, by a group of middle-aged male drinkers sat at the next table in the beer garden. It appeared they were all aware of stories of a ghostly presence peering out from time to time light and when one of them called out that old ‘Kieran’ was looking out at us and began waving up at the window, they all turned and waved jovially. It appeared later that only one of the group had seen the image as a discussion followed about sunlight on glass etcetera; however I can confirm that a face, not entirely substantial, peered from that window, looking seaward. It was a tired, pinched face, that of an old man which stared so wistfully from behind the glass for several seconds, before a cloud snuffed out the window’s gleam.

I asked the gentlemen who had spotted the apparition who ‘Kieran’ was and he replied pleasantly enough, stating it was the name of the ghost which various people had claimed to spot looking from the window. Unable to provide any more information on this spectre he advised I talk to the bar staff who often complained of an uneasy atmosphere about the building, before discoursing on the superstitions around the stuffed witches hung in the bar area.

Built two and a half centuries ago, the Mags served the ‘powder village’, the community who grew around the powder store whose remnants survive in the form of turreted walls and gates opposite a row of fisherman’s cottages. Several rooms, including a space barely larger than an alcove, open off the central bar and despite its size, this layout together with the dark beams and panelling render the place a dark, snug pub. The mind that is adrift in the ebb and flow of the material realm finds something deeply reassuring about such places; something womb-like even; ale washes through the body, numbing anxiety, unyoking us from that which anchors us into gloom; pumped froth heaves into bright glasses, its swirling clouds settle into an earthen glow whose richness sets the heart singing, awakening laughter, luring us back again and again into its embrace.

If I were not an enlightened man, I would devote every waking hour to the celebration of ale; as a spiritual leader, I have cast my bond to the temporal world asunder. When I sip on ale I am not immersed in pleasure but I surrender to the life brewed into the drink itself.
What a remarkable life ale has, even in the pub alone. Kept amid the sandstone, until it is summoned forth and fleet-footed, it wings its passage up from the dark cellars to impart the produce of fertile soils and sun-nurtured hops into the shining vessel. Golden life summoned from the rock, bearing the drinker on its wing, even as it binds him to the rock.

Acting on the fore-mentioned gentleman’s suggestion I did talk to one of the chattier barmaids who expressed a general dislike of the ‘creepy’ cellar. It was a quiet afternoon when we spoke and I offered to accompany her down there when she had to change a barrel. She was glad of the company and together we descended into that dank space.

Two things struck me about the cellars. Firstly they reminded me of the catacombs below the house at St Hilary’s and they did indeed draw out the stain those dark depths impressed upon my psyche; secondly, they reminded me of a dank, cramped cell I had dwelled in when I was studying in India, a place that I do not happily recall.

Standing on the steps with dank air wafting up, accompanied by the smell of ale and stagnant water, the briney tang that laced the air with a fresher tinge, suggested we were in the hull of a boat ready to set sail out across the estuary.

I recall the self-satisfied laughter of a couple of gentlemen and the ticking of the clock in the bar drifting down but these were drowned under a flood of impressions that welled upward, poured from the rock itself: I was conscious of the porous stone which enclosed us along with the drag of tides beyond; I felt, as if they were within me, cargos hauled from the swell and then a corpse bobbing like a cork, until turning tides dragged it back across rocks, smearing fleshy residue across the matted weeds; I was the slapping, slopping tides as they retreated and as they turned, rising again, I was pounding into crevices, exploding over humps of rock, collpassing into bubbles skating across the film, skittering across the sweep of sand, until the inexorable, leaden drag of the currents gathered me. It was an impression of moonlight breaking into my senses that roused me, for as the radiance broke through me, I soared beyond the dead pull of the sea...

It was this transcendent state, that saved both of us. Aligned with the sense of the deep currents of the sea, some unseen thing burst through the cellar and dragged itself taut around us...

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My acolyte referred to himself as ‘ed.’ in the last post.

He is not an editor, he is a devoted student of my teachings which he commits to computer.

He is a typist.

He is gaining enlightenment through this service to mankind. Any adoption of titles, or hubristic meddling with my words are manifestations of egoism and they shall be replied to with a sermonising that will scatter as dust, the most impertinent of personalities.

He was correct however, to say that those few who will comprehend its guidance may acquire the history of my maternal uncle’s adventures via ‘Amazon’ on the ‘internet’; it cannot be bought in shops, even those reservoirs, nay, kingdoms of culture - second-hand bookshops!
I must not appear ungrateful of course, I have tolerated the attentions of my hosts recently. My acolyte’s good lady wife permits one evening a week when i may take advantage of their hospitality although i am forced to bathe before I may join the family for dinner. Last week, this was a necessity as I had, on this occasion, been handling the dead – all for the most noble of reasons of course which I shall divulge when you, my loyal readership, is fully prepared.

Sweet Albion, My Land of the Dead

I carry a darkness within me. It is the shadow of my former sins and cravings, a shadow magnified by the presence of another...

To any who are new to these teachings, please consult my previous posts which form an account of an investigation into a haunted house, carried out by this author and some assistants in a Northern English town during the summer 2010.

Like any spot that is long-settled, yet also lightly-populated, even lonely, the Downs and the Vale had their share of hauntings. Shadows cast by the accidents and tragedies of rural life had, through the long ebb and flow of the seasons, blended into the rustling woods and mossy rocks that bordered the flowing waters. Perhaps a lonely traveler, passing late over the moors, picking their cautious way back through the steep, wooded hillsides to the comfort of the village inn, might catch a glimpse of a pale, grief-stricken figure looking from across an abandoned mill pond; they might hear faint voices, their strands of song splitting faintly from the wind, or perhaps they may catch a whisper from the creaking bows of an oak, but to an inhabitant of the vale, these shades were as much part of the landscape as the stones and trees that they had known all their lives.

So I wrote about the haunted Wessex that my maternal Uncle, Sir Parnassus Mang, explored at the end of the last century but one. I composed these lines shortly after my experience in the house at St Hilary’s in my hometown of Wallasey on the Wirral peninsula.

I was in India, a country from which I had never thought to return and which I still miss – how I pine for thee, Mother of my Sadhana (spiritual path), Mother of Samadhi (an experience of enlightenment) - when I received a vision in which I was instructed to commit Mang’s experiences to paper. I began composing what I could recall of his deeds although as I progressed I found new memories and insights surfaced into awareness.

Several drafts were started, one even completed, before I finally heeded the growing urge to return to the land in which my ancestor found his true Self.

(These ‘adventures’ are now available as ‘Binder of Bone, Keeper of Corn’, in down-load form from Amazon, ed.)

It was hard returning home from a land where amid the frenzied commercialism, the desperate poverty and self-absorbed wealth, there were poverty-stricken saints, whose chants billowed forth on palls of incense from shrines; where the endless, arid plains and crammed, squalid cities were relieved by sacred hills and holy rivers that swept the devote beyond the glare and the stink and the choking dust into luminous contemplation of the Absolute resting within and beyond the world of sense.

It seemed appropriate that, as Sir Parnassus oft reminded me, the Romans had conceived of our Albion as an Island of the Dead. Here, at the edge of the world, fallen Saturn was bound. It was to this island that boatmen would ferry the souls of the deceased and the voice of Dis Pater could be heard, calling all to their beyond .

It was after the investigation of that house by the church and after the experiences which unfolded from it, that I began to think anew of this island. It was certainly that of the dead but not in a faded, hopeless fashion, but as a treasure trove of haunted sites where the temporal world slows and we glimpse something of the lives, deaths, passions, hopes, frustrations, injustices of other times.

Within such cracking of the prison of space and time implied by Ghost-lore, there can be found the understanding, the enlightenment even, that the self is only a shadow of the true Self; that our spirit’s true home is with the collective storehouse of all spirits, Prakriti, or Brahma, the a divine self beyond our earthly self.

The blanking out of the ego brings a peace so profound and deep that one can never leave it and so initiation is offered into the spheres beyond, where the consciousness of the incarnate dissolves in communion with the eternal stream of the ancestors circling Absolute Reality.
Although I did not realise it at first, over last summer I understood what Sir Parnassus had tried to teach me: communing with the phantoms on this mist-haunted island is to commune with the Shakti within and without – the Goddess of this land and with her counterpart, the Father of the dead and Lord of the sun-bathed fields...

Before that understanding and communion could occur, there were many adventures that I engaged in. I did not seek these experiences out. All I required was a place where I could scribe the history of my Uncle’s enlightenment. Initially I found this in the ‘Magazines Hotel’ where I passed hours in one of the back rooms engaged in work; there were many distractions, notably in the form of the other clients. One such individual, who had goaded me with the label ‘homeless’ (I see this as a mark of esteem rather than a source of amusement or contempt) even reacted to my claim that I was resident there, by arguing that the establishment no longer accepts overnight guests. I am at a loss to explain why my domestic arrangements may be of interest to anyone – the devil is certainly not in these details! It is true that I am not an overnight guest at the Mags. I chose to spend my night hours engaged in deep meditation whilst communing with nature. The frailty of the human form demands alas, periods of ‘dis-engagence’, which may occur whilst I sit, composing my thoughts in a quiet corner of the pub when not committing them to paper.

As I indicated in my last post, it was not just the living patrons of the hostelry that conspired to draw me from my literary labours; there were other presences in that building, soaked into the wood, seeped into the stone. I could sense them as I wrote and even when as I was forced to converse. Although I sought to leave them be, it was the power that bound them to the hotel which was drawn to be, magnifying the stain the otherworld had left within me as it did so.

The First Gods of Old Albion

I carry a darkness within me. It is the shadow of my former sins and cravings, a shadow magnified by the presence of another...

To any who are new to these teachings, please consult my previous posts which form an account of an investigation into a haunted house, carried out by this author and some assistants in a Northern English town during the summer 2010.

There are some who have questioned my apparent inactivity over the past moons. I am never inactive, the weather is inclement and my action is directed inward. The demands and the allures of the external world render us oblivious to the true source of all joy, the inner life. I don’t mean the narcissistic bleating for attention and status that seems to have replaced spiritual feelings in many of Albion’s children but rather the invocation of a visionary world in which the temporal self is transcended.

An example of this is when I was held overnight in a police cell after laying the spirits in the St Hilary house. I discovered a trace of the haunting lingered within me as I was sat on the bench in the cell in meditation. I had passed rapidly into a trance in which the inner radiance of the Goddess manifested as the full moon. It was as I abandoned myself to this light that I became conscious of something stirring beyond it, like a wriggling motion glimpsed in the corner of one’s eye, or a distant sound that disturbs silence. Consciously repeating a mantra was enough to lay this disruptive force but each subsequent time I entered into meditation or even when I was at rest, I was conscious that it was there on the margins of my apprehension. It did not seem threatening, indeed it was something that could be banished from mind but it always returned, intensifying a little each time. Over the days that followed, I began to assume that it would, if allowed, claw its way through the peace and stillness emanating from the radiance within.

This experience prompted me to reflect upon what it was that had constituted the haunting in the house. It could be explained away a collective hysteria brought about by a gas leak, or alcohol poisoning. Maybe it was the shadow from my own unconscious mind, into whose depths I collapsed. Perhaps it was the spectral presence of the Reverend, whose fear had grown into something monstrous; perhaps it was indeed an elemental, daemonical being, animated by fear, magnified by the force of the winds and the water seeping through porous stone, rich with the remains of the dead. Perhaps it was a manifestation of Brahma, the Absolute, seeking to destroy the sense of earthly self.

Whatever it was, it was.

I was an enlightened man before I set foot in that house and I remain an enlightened man albeit one who has experienced a renewed revelation of the divine essence which resides in man. There is a forgivable tendency to see enlightenment as a state of permanent, unyielding bliss. That view is only partially correct, for the enlightened mind experiences fresh perspectives on the nature of the Divine Self within; rather one arrived on an island explores different features over time.

It was in that house, in a land which has forgotten its true self under the glare of commerce’s siren gleam, that I experienced divine powers which I had the blood-drinking Kali, who issues those who bow willingly before her unto the true self, beyond death; in that house I experienced the ecstatic plunge into the wisdom of none-self – of Atman or Brahma or Sabikalpa Samadhi. I beheld the fragile, silver thread coiled around a pillar of sunlight, which can be thought of as the Kundalini*, the Shakti, which, upon release can draw our consciousness beyond time and space toward the infinite...

These experiences were woven already into my psyche. What occurred in the house was a reawakening of my apprehension of the Divine; the Shakti manifested as a lunar deity – as both an Artemis which drew my soul into darkness and as a Celestial deity throned beyond the stars.
The Goddess of the Moon and the demonic, Cthonian power, bound like old Saturn yet seeking to burst free, were figures through which Absolute Reality communicated with me for the first time. They were not of the subcontinent, they were of Europe. They were the first Gods of old Albion that I encountered that summer and they were not to be the last.

On my release from the cell, I was instinctively led back to the Magazine’s Hotel. Although there are some therein who find my presence intolerable, it was in that public house that the darkness within me, or as I came to call it, the stain, grew until it burst from me; this trace of the apparition did not emerge as an explosion of rage during an encounter with some lout (such as the fellow who was expounding the dominant materialist ideology of the age as if it were a personal insight. His contempt for any view beyond his own would be irksome to a lesser man. I pointed out that were he born a thousand years previous, he would be expounding the merits of the feudal system and of the system of vassalage and he agreed with me, countering that alignment with power is the duty of all. I went on to merely suggest that if his self were conditioned by society one thousand years hence, he might well be expounding the merits of a property-less, genderless society overseen by philosopher sages such as myself. This suggestion did not go down too well, I at least managed to maintain my composure); it appeared as I investigated a second haunting, a haunting at the public house itself.

*Whilst in India, I came across the notion of the Kundalini – the Shakti or Goddess sleeping with; the dynamism of her waking and her rise through our consciousness, causes us to flame with the syllables of creation and ushers us into the radiance of eternity.

Shakti is a general term for the power of the Goddess, she is a dynamic and transformative agent, often symbolised as a serpent. By awakening her, she will grant admittance into communion with the voice and presence of God, where she rests as the unchanging, ageless radiance I term the Empyrean.

Rada, the consort of Krishna was my first experience of this Shakti. The Deva is the supreme being and all other deities are masks of her. She is the dynamic force, whilst Krishna, more commonly referred to as his brother in the Hindu triumvirate, Shiva, when the term Shakti is employed, is the transcendent state which she can raise us to. She is the source, embodiment and animating principle of all. Shiva can only create when united with Shakti. Together, they embody Brahma, a static state of none-attachment that is both immanent and transcendent.