The Light which Awakens the Word from the Dark

Welcome again to my teachings, if this is your first encounter with my work, you should start at the first post and then proceed at your own pace chronologically through the subsequent. Should you reach this point, you will be the first; accepting of course my acolyte who dutifully commits my thoughts to computer.

I am communicating the decades of wisdom I have acquired, through a recount of an investigation of a haunted house in the North of England, during the summer of 2010.

Within that region of stillness, I sat in the lotus position. Around, all was light, a circling radiance that bore a vivid, silvered quality like moonlight. All was silent save for a sound which rolled like a wave throughout both that space and the ethereal form in which my awareness resided. As the resonating tone returned, the syllables of a mantra forming from its depths, a figure emerged as if called from the light by that sacred sound, until I beheld the vision of the young lady once again. The night sky shimmered across her billowing robe, a circlet of roses crowned her head and it was such soft, fluttering petals which she cast toward me.

( It was only later that I would recall the vision of the young girl framed in a jewel of light which came to me on the first day in the house and I now believe that it was the same being who appeared in various forms throughout the entire investigation; I believe this She was the Tara –
Lady Wisdom - who bears all to the isles of blessed non-attachment.)

Amid spinning petals, I rose beyond my spirit body. The figure faded, or perhaps expanded to embrace me in a welcoming blankness. I remained vaguely aware that in that cavernous crypt, the remains of the dead laughed with voices that were not their own as the life was crushed from my body. I was aware of Aquinas and Noz scrambling back to the cellar while slips of shadow twisted upwards from the assembled bones and corners of the place, drawn into the embrace of the stillness in which I rested. I was aware too of the Reverend’s spectre, snarling with a hate born from fear but it were as if I rode atop a mighty ocean of selflessness and the rage with which the presence snarled at my physical shell was as nothing against such vastness; the hate and the fear were diluted, drained into this radiant ocean in which I was suspended, stirred by syllables that moved through me and beyond me, calling me into our true source and inheritance, the light that circles beyond the stars.

Whilst immersed in this blissful peace, regarding my twitching, body, bound within the sheet with the detached disinterest one may devout to faces passed in a crowd (even though the heap of bones had now toppled forward, opening a wide gap onto the deeper caverns plunging below this, and the darkness seeping through now raised those remains, stretching them toward my remains I was unmoved by my fate).

It was the manifestation of the three, spectral figures once again all pointing to the breach in the bone wall behind my body, which drew my attention back to the physical realm. I recognised on this occasion, two females and a male, within those phantoms. All were in the state of ageless adulthood which tends to characterise the physical appearance of spirits and what features I could make out resembled the snatches of the ghosts I had encountered in the house. I had bidden the Reverend’s children into the light and yet something still drew them back to their family home. Remembering my responsibilities to all whose residual shades haunted the place, I reluctantly emerged from that ambrosial cocoon, allowing words to form within my mind:

‘Goddess, I have offered myself willingly to you, take my body if you so wish but free those whose shadows haunt this house and the caverns!’

As I prayed, I a circle of human skulls, surrounding what I took to be a mirror, came into mind. The Goddess in Her dark aspect, the destroyer of mortality appeared within that space, broken, bloodied teeth jutting from Her lolling mouth lolling. Even when that mouth closed across mine, those sagging breasts scraped my torso, the coarse pelt that broke from the folds of Her hide scraped my flesh, I felt no revulsion or dismay and with the abandonment of both the immersing bliss and of my physical form, the sacred syllables arose from within me; no longer external, they rose like the waters of a spring and fountained beyond me and I was borne on them, away from Death, away from mortality, into that mirror which received as if it were a pool of water.
I passed into awareness of cool, silent stillness and I was received into a deeper understanding of the powers with which I was in communion.

I emerged through a film of water across which leaves were adrift in sunlit. Below, a glow like that of the moon rose to fill the pool, whilst above, the sunlight showered down; across the surface, among blooming lilies, there was a molten mingling of the two like and a jewelled web was spun across the waters the air above sparked with globes of light drifting and spinning like honeyed bees, but the heart of the vision was the conjunction of the two lights, where a gossamer thread of silver entwined, serpent-like, around veins of gold.

I had never experienced such a profound vision of the mysteries of the Goddess rendered apprehensible for one still mortal – I understand now this was as an expression of the divinity which glows within nature, which I have been taught is the Shakti or the Kundalini. I frequently now invoke this image in my daily devotions.

Indeed, the loving union of active sound and inspiring light nearly drew me entirely into themselves and it was only when I became aware of another who was below me in the waters, that I was recalled to my work. I first perceived it as a speck, a stain expanding to the size of an egg and then larger, until the water exploded around me. Amid much flapping and splashing, the slick, expressionless face of a drowned man broke through the waters and then his leaden arms began slapping frenziedly toward me. His emergence was accompanied by a sudden eruption of terror; my willing acceptance of my mortality and dissolution was sprung apart by a sense that I was snared and was due to be dragged viciously downward; like one recoiling from a cold blast or from an eruption of thunder, I felt myself descend into my physical form.

What aroused my latent attachments, I cannot say. Perhaps it was the recognition of the Reverend in that corpse or perhaps it was the understanding that it was not the Reverend’s ghost which animated it. I like to think that my fear was for the vision of the Shakti – the Goddess within, in the form of the entwined lights and the pool – for certainly this demonic form represented an attack upon or a corruption of Her.

I recall that as the ethereal light dimmed a silhouette formed, like a cliff-face rearing over a sea-farer. This shadow grew into definition, until I had a sense of a hulking presence, bristling with elemental energy. I sweated, prickled by heat and gasped for breath as a titanic force buzzed around me. The pulsing syllables of the mantra were overpowered by a deafening grinding and creaking noise emanating from the thing. A shivering took hold of me, growing in violence until I was jolting and shuddering; this sensation was accompanied by dank, wet hiss smearing my face.
I have a vague bit disturbing impression of the darkness in the cave somehow animated, as if churning with animalistic might. I recall bones upraised upon it, like they were borne upon a tide of oil. I remember trying to wriggle away but I found myself bound tightly in the sheet. My head remained free and by the light of a discarded torch, I witnessed more of the blank mass bulge through the bones from the lower caverns. A deeper darkness than that in the tunnels flapped above me, it smothered the withered tree in its pot and the chair with its skeletal occupant. Skeletal mouths encircled me, gaping open and limbs clawed toward me as the air of the outside world was sucked through their orifices and returned as a whine and a groan.

Although I had envisioned this apparition before I had physically encountered it, I remember it gripping my body. I felt a substance which seemed at one moment to drag like the pull of the tide, the next, to whip and blast as the wind, before it grated with the abrasive strength of stone; all of these sensations were permeated by a cold, a freezing cold without, whilst my body burnt within. The sweat that was forced forth from me congealed under the dank touch of this demonic entity. Something like bone scraped across my slick skin, trailing grains that encrusted a mucus-like substance distilled from my sweat. Lying there, I recall thinking that my own sweat was forming into jellied things which pricked at my skin, as if seeking to break back through the membrane.

Whilst experiencing this entity, my perception of the world of spirit-light had now dimmed almost entirely. I can recall that there was a simultaneous awareness that this monstrous presence which haunted the earthly elements now reached through the spectre of the Reverend, as if uncoiling from the terror which resided still within his soul. Feeling my physical self polluted by a numbing force which gnawed its way back into my body, I understood with certainty that the Reverend’s demon even now corrupted the blissful state of consciousness, as if it would devour it.

Acting upon instinct, I willed it toward me, into me, so as to keep the light pure. I visualised the phantom of the drowned Reverend releasing inky threads that leaked through the water, staining its clarity and releasing further sprouting tufts of darkness that germinated through the pool; they veined the air above reaching through the radiance to blot out all trace of the radiant Kundalini...

‘Goddess, again, I identify you within this force, I imagine your form beyond this fury, I submit willingly unto you!’

The words formed in my mind and the mantra followed, bringing with them the sense that an
ocean of stillness broke around me. Again I willed the darkness, the terror it instilled and the indifference of the elements which nurtured it , all into my own soul.

I found myself imagining that the rot which had already infected me, bore directly through me, draining into the emptiness beyond me; although the wounds were psychic rather than physical, it were as if I were scratched from within, my innards decomposing into fluids which clung at my bones before they too were dragged beyond my shell into the true reality of my soul, which was the Absolute soul of all.

And then there was a flame, dancing across this abyss, a word in silence shooting through the space whilst the elemental traces of the demon streamed down into the depths below. The interplay of light and dark, of resonant sound and swallowing silence became a body that twisted, contorted inward and outward, unfolding on their push and pull, rising and falling over a contoured land where life rioted; vegetation sprouted and blossomed, birds took to the wing through the embracing rays of the sun, whilst the green land and far fields of ripening corn, unfurled into awareness. Unravelling through all of this, sinuously entwined with the still radiance, the sacred sound pulsed; through the deep, root-holding, bone-binding earth it resonated, through the swoop and trill of the lark and the flurried stasis of the hawk, it breathed and stretched like titanic limbs.

Personal awareness returned with a recognition that I was once again in the pool; the spectre of the Reverend had vanished along with the shadows which had leaked from it. All was still, save for a lengthening of the silver threads, which rose upward, into the sunlit radiance. Around this ascent, red flowers blossomed into air that sparked with gold; sweet bird song descended like a gift from God and with a flash like lightening or the gold of dawn breaking over a hill, the image of the Tara-Sophia, the loving Goddess who draws us from the ephemeral world to the eternity of our true soul, She who unlocks the divinity within, shone forth.

Every cloud-draped moon, every ray of light in summer leaves or across gentle waters emanated from the figure. Her ageless face looked down from the stars, Her plain mantle swept through the sky and from Her fell a light so profound that it pierced the centre of all awakening from the darkness words that wove creation around Her radiance. Time was slain, all was still, all silent save for the utterance that pulsed through the light, awakening it into form and dissolving it back again.

Even when the vision faded and I was back in the crypt, the sheet ghosting in the air above me before falling, draping itself over my stiff frame, even when I saw the shattered remains scattered around, I sat, not in a dishevelled sheet amongst the dead, but in the radiance of eternity and at one with the Goddess who once awoken within us, unites us with our true selves in Her own being.

Beyond the Wall of the Dead

Welcome again to my teachings, if this is your first encounter with my work,you should start at the first post and then proceed at your own pace chronologically through the subsequent. Should you reach this point, you will be the first; accepting of course my acolyte who dutifully commits my thoughts to computer.

I am communicating the decades of wisdom I have acquired, through a recount of an investigation of a haunted house in the North of England, during the summer of 2010.

From the greater space beyond that mound of bones, I heard on the exhaled air the sound of swamping waters; the noise shifted subtly until the blast and harry of invasive winds grew from the original sound and this in turn, changed, slowing into the sucking collapse of sodden earth and each noise seemed to convey meaning, as if inhabited by a malicious awareness. The drowned remains of the vicar gaped its mouth, as if its dreaded demon were to burst through the bones and I knew at that moment, that the empty graves above us, the crude desecration of the dead, the wall of bones, were the cleric’s crude attempts at binding the thing which terrified him into the depths of the hill.

I found myself wondering whether he had he succeeded in trapping it with such offerings or if, as he had pulled recent burials from their graves to slice away at their flesh and as he offered his own blood to the darkness, whether he had actually fed it, or if such actions may have been driven by that unseen presence which now massed against us beyond the remains.

‘He cut things up, bodies, some form of sacrifice,’ Aquinas called out but I ignored him, for I found myself half-imagining, half –remembering a drowned body I had witnessed in a river in India. I could almost see it, bobbing in shallow water and yet I felt that somehow it could now be clambering beyond the wall of bones, seeking me, even though the hungry waters had long since gorged on the mouth and lungs and gut of the man.

Aquinas seemed to sense that we were in the presence of something awful, even though he had, at that point, perceived only the shadows emerging from the bones. As he spoke, sweating and anxious and disrupting my concentration, I might have lashed out at him, I could even have hurled him into the bone shield, into the mercy of the elemental force that seethed beyond it.

Indeed, animated by an impulse beyond my control I found myself standing and walking toward the table, my eye upon one of the blades deposited there.

‘Blood, living blood...’

The voice of the dead Reverend scratched inside my skull and I picked one of the tarnished blades from the table. As I examined it, finding some bite to the blade, despite the years down here with the dark and the damp, I became conscious of three spectres stood against the mound of boulders. I could see little that distinguished the spirits save for the transparent silhouettes luminous against the stark stones. I was aware that they looked beyond me and I imagined from what little of their features I could perceive, their expressions were grave. As one, they appeared to beckon me back and then pointed toward the bones opposite.

‘I shall save your father...I will unyoke his soul from this cavern, from the demon he dreads,’ I cried out.

My voice prompted Aquinas to spin, his torch-light banishing all trace of the ghostly beings.
‘I should have struck but I could not strike my pretty ones, my chicks, I should have, yet I am repulsed by the very notion; they fled me, they fled the nest...’ the voice groaned through me, setting my limbs shivering and my skin crawling.

‘They came back, your young came back and they remain still; they warn me of what lurks beyond the bones. It was not weakness, it was mercy that stayed your hand and you gave yourself instead...’ I called out, wishing desperately that my imagined narrative were correct and with these words I teased the blackened blade across the back of my hand. Its scratch drew a weal of blood which I squeezed onto the floor.

‘I follow you sir, in spilling my blood, but I offer it to the Dark Goddess, for Kali, the raw energy of Eternal Nature; for all the vileness of nature, it remains an expression, frequently a wonderful, beautiful expression, of a subtler reality; it is Light made flesh, woven into existence by a loving word; I face willingly the Mother of Darkness and Devouring Death, I prostrate myself before Her and She ushers me into a world of unending light!’

The words flooded from me and I witnessed a vision of the power which released them in the form of a sudden flowering - a rose of light - growing in the air above me. The stone ceiling vanished beneath it and within, I perceived the youthful female face which had smiled from the jewel of light on the staircase; whilst that vision had been indistinct, this one radiated a vivid, unrelenting light as if the jewel had opened, freeing the presence within. Around me, the pulsing sounds returned, rising into a sacred mantra and all was unlocked, returning an unyielding radiance back to that rose and the Goddess within. A sudden glee filled me and I indicated to the spirits that they should seek a passage from their darkness into that light.

‘Leave this place, whatever bound you here, your terror, your revulsion, the presence of the demon that haunts the hidden caverns below, you are freed of it all! Feel the loving word within you, feel the light wound around it, rise on that radiance, draw back to the source, reunite with that light!’

Around the cavern, the stone that enclosed us, the human forms, living and dead, the mildewed items, all flickered, as if they were reflections upon water, or painted on walls enclosing dancing flames. From the depths of the gaping skulls, from the corners between the stone, slips and shreds of shadow drifted like dust into that light, where they flamed and then vanished. Buoyed by this apparent success I turned to my companion.

‘Let us see what manner of foe draws near,’ I said, dragging at the corner of the sheet and handing one edge to Aquinas, indicated that it should be held vertically before the heap of bones. All became a palimpsest, pencilled across that light and with the pulse still flowering into distinct, sacred words whose sound thundered through me, it seemed that nothing could harm us.

For a period we both stood calmly, the sheet held taut before it too succumbed to the disorientating effects of the light and the sound. For my part, I became unaware of that sheet until my arm was dragged violently and the fabric was sucked into a concave shape.

The pain yanked my awareness back toward the cavern, where the bones were toppling outward toward thus. They feel, shattering around our feet as the sheet hung thus for several seconds or longer before a force pressed violently back through it toward us. I was cocooned within the rapture of my true self -I cannot say what state Aquinas was in - although I think his scream was not one of joy as the sheet contorted around some unseen thing composed of ridged contours pitted with cavities that inhaled and then exhaled, releasing bulging, wriggling protuberances.

This vision persisted only briefly before the sheet was snatched away from us, leaving Aquinas babbling incoherently until I pushed at him, ‘back to the others.’

I heard him scramble through the stones and as I turned, the sheet clamped around me, crunching against me, with a violent animation. I heard a snapped growl at the back of my head and then I was ripped back and forth by a mighty force whilst fabric was pushed against my eyes, twisted into my nose and down my throat.

My body was wound within the sheet and flung from side-to-side, although I was spared the horror in its entirety as both the radiance and word of enlightenment shielded my mind and awareness, casting me adrift on their ancient immensity and I plunged into them, finding myself in a sudden place of stillness away from that ghostly ossuary.

A Child of the En-Witching Moon

Welcome again to my teachings, if this is your first encounter with my work,you should start at the first post and then proceed at your own pace chronologically through the subsequent. Should you reach this point, you will be the first; accepting of course my acolyte who dutifully commits my thoughts to computer.

I am communicating the decades of wisdom I have acquired, through a recount of an investigation of a haunted house in the North of England, during the summer of 2010.

Before I resume my instructional recount I must first wish my disciples a belated happy Yule. I have had access to a computer but not to my acolyte, who generously allowed me to stay at his home whilst he and his young family guested with relatives. I could not alas, manage to work the internet on his computer, preventing communication with all save those attuned to the realms psychic. However, the wheel of the year turns once again, my acolyte is back home and I am once again resting under assorted local roofs. I shall continue my narration of the events of last summer starting with some direct spirit communication I experienced in the cavern below the graveyard adjoining the house:

‘Feel it sir! Apprehend the freezing touch, it saps your still-respiring matter; this demonic touch, it ascends my sir, from the sucking marsh, the bloated bog whose mud and carrion-brood feast upon the dead, whose swollen forms flop into its grasp...’

A kindred spirit, I mused, as the voice splattered around me. A fleeting impression of slick, white flesh loomed at the corner of my eye and then swirled away again. I knew instinctively that an image of the presence whose despair lingered here, underground and the house above, was forming.

The wind now rattled the bones blocking the far side of the cavern with greater vigour and moaned into the unseen, dripping space beyond.

‘That which howls on the storm, which claws from the winds, that which clogs the flooding waters prior to their drainage into the bowels of the earth, that I heard sir, even whist it lingered at my very shoulder; when in the house of God, I heard the dead below us, speaking of the demon which haunted the wastes and the waters and I knew they spoke of that which now haunted me!’

The moan of the wind beyond the bones took on the quality of a discordant choir and the pulse formed from the passage of my blood and of the dripping in the cavern beyond the bones, became the time struck by a solitary, solemn drummer.

It appeared Aquinas sensed something as he inclined his head, listening and then edged toward the seated skeleton. Noz was also moving behind the stones but neither seemed to apprehend the voice of the spirit.

‘Yet I prepared myself, I endeavoured to protect myself and my family; faith alas, was a fortitude that would not prove impervious; although my will was strengthened by repugnance at the horror which hurled itself on the western winds to hang from the eaves and scratch at the masonry of our home, I had not the power of the Saints of Old; Hilary banished a demon but I could only repel it, binding it into the emptiness on the margins of our world. It lingers there still, adjacent to the world but not within it, this child of the en-witching moon and the frowning skies, growling and pawing to be readmitted to the world which bore it...’

The voice now creaked at my ear, whilst the wind from the deeper caverns grew into a shriek until its passage through the bones became a multitude of voices crying in anguish. Again, I saw the pallid shape, its slick, flaccid face gaping in frenzied animation.

‘It was a son of begrudging, vengeful nature, like any son made flesh it was subject to the vile drives of physical existence...’

The spirit was circling toward me, dishevelled hair and moustaches furring the looming face from which unblinking eyes bulged. I was then aware of Aquinas exclaiming and angling toward the heap of bones, where several small shadows seemed to emerge and rise slowly, as if on fragile, tottering legs.

‘Any son made flesh...’ I repeated to myself. The anxiety, dread and pangs of despair which had dogged me since entering this place where now divorced from my awareness and I could commune freely with this entity.

‘Flesh is sin, dead flesh will keep it bound, dead flesh, best that of the near-living, fresh blood that leaks yet...’ the voice spat at my ears.

The shadows took on a withered, featureless quality, as if sacks of dried skin lurched toward us, although they occupied only the periphery of my awareness for the pulse within and without me now thundered, seemingly echoing through the spaces behind us and below.

‘It comes; the dead have never been enough, blood will be required...’

Again the pallid speaker was glimpsed although this time Aquinas’ sweating torso lurched toward me as he filmed. Irritation flared within me and the voice spat again, ‘blood!’
The rhythm of my own blood echoed from the space beyond the bones and I focused upon its leap and descent. In answer, the image of the Goddess appeared again before me and I thanked Her for her return to my consciousness. I bowed before her, offering my blood to spill and congeal across the folds of leathery flesh with their thick, matted hairs.

The bloated body of the spirit now emerged fully into view, replacing the skeleton in the chair. Fully realised, held in the expansion and retraction of the pulse, I saw slick folds of skin mapped by blue veins and gorged by raw trenches; its dead face did not move as the voice whispered through my consciousness, ‘I could not...kill my own...I lacked resolve...I gave myself, let loose my hot blood to sate its driving hunger...’

‘There is some form of manifestation – small shadows, like children or old people, ’ Aquinas’ voice roared through the space. He was stood over the table, shouting back to Noz whilst filming. Echoes of his noise thundered through the bones and he cried again in tones nearly hysterical, ‘the shadows have now vanished but I have got them on film. There is a skeleton here, I think our Reverend sacrificed himself after he robbed the graves of the recent dead...’

My impression of the spirit’s face wavered under the noise of the other and for a moment I yearned to crush Aquinas into the stone, to open him up and let his life spill out after those echoes that throbbed through unseen spaces under the hill. It was with some effort that I vanquished such regressive urges, concentrating on the pulse which united my inner self with the deep cavern. The throb took me again and I gave myself to darkness and death. Again the bloated, slick form of the Reverend appeared, his softer tissues now appeared to have been gnawed away and as the lipless mouth of the corpse lolled open as if laughing joylessly, silently and as the wind returned through the bones, it bore the cry of the presence I had felt leaking into the house and which its former inhabitant, the Reverend had dreaded, even after death.