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.

Alright George Bloody Harrison, out!'

I came to, sat upright, cross-legged, in that ossuary, the sheet wound around me. The young men, to their great credit, had returned for me and with their aid I tentatively made my way back along the tunnel. The demonic presence, which I later imagined as Saturn and which I had drawn into myself before casting it into the ocean of non-attachment which is our true essence, had apparently vanished from both the tunnels and the house.

It was only much later that I understood some trace was left, smeared within my soul.

Once back in the house, I slept, dreamlessly, upon the sofa.

I was awoken by a frantic hammering. Around, the young me were seeking to tidy up after themselves as quietly as possible.

‘Don’t open the door,’ hissed Aquinas.

‘I see you,’ an elderly lady was shouting through the letter box, ‘the police are on their way.’

‘We’re fitting the Sky,’ Mozzer shouted back.

‘Nonsense, your van has been here for days, besides this is a conservation area, we can’t have one of those hideous plates on the house.’

Realising that the young men sought to disguise their true activities for fear of ridicule, I understood that it was time for us to cast aside the veils of subterfuge.

‘We should tell her the truth,’ I said and making my way to the door shouted, ‘Madam, we’ve faced a significant evil here, our courage and our faith have both been sorely tested; you should be humble enough to recognise the deeds of others.

‘There’s a group of young drunks and an old tramp,’ I head her saying to another.

‘I’m a Hindu sage,’ I returned, adopting a tone contemptuous enough to shock piety into the heart of any deluded, bourgeois, materialist baggage.

It transpired that she had a policeman with her, who was rather anxious that we all vacate the property. Aquinas, Mozzer and I conformed to his adjuncts, the others choose to disappear through the backdoor and over the wall into the churchyard.

This officer of the law – whilst I cannot expect him to perceive my own divinity I at least expect some cordiality and respect from him – ignored my declarations of saint-hood and even had the temerity to say, ‘Alright George bloody Harrison, out!’, as he ushered me from the building.

I don’t know if this was a case of mistaken identity or some joke on his part but I offered no resistance, choosing instead to recite the mantra, or a version of it, which had found me within the cellars below:

(PUNI BANI AINDRII AAVAHU MAATAAADBHUTA SHAKTI DIKHAAVAHU MAATAAJHATAPATA LEHU KHALAHIN SANHAARIMORI MAATU JANI KARAHU ABAARII)

As he turned his attentions to Mozzer and Aquinas, I sat on the flagstones of the driveway, creasing myself into the lotus position.

It appeared that adopting a yogic posture and entering into Samadhi is frowned upon in ‘conservation areas’, such was the fuss that rose around my devotions. By the time I had been placed into a police car, the other two gentlemen managed to abscond.

Once at the police station – an establishment I have since become rather well known at over these past months - it transpired that Aquinas, did not have permission to enter the house at all but had gained entry duplicitously. He had obviously found out about the haunting and learning that the owners of the property were away decided to move ourselves in. As I could not name any of my assistants – I cannot bring myself to call themselves accomplices – and my descriptions of each were vague, it was explained to me that I was likely to face a potential charge of burglary along with an ‘Antisocial order’ of some sort, forbidding me from going into other people’s houses. I was told I might have to also face the ‘victims’ in a ‘reconciliation’ committee, although my enthusiasm for such a meeting seemed to dismay the police officers interrogating me.

Obviously my account of our experiences was deemed nonsense by the officers who kept me in the cells overnight, although when the neighbour who had alerted the police had gone through the house, declaring apparently that there was no obvious signs of damage or theft, I was cautioned and released.

Eventually, it was decided that we were squatters rather than burglars or vandals and no charges were brought against any of us. No official mention was made of my findings although when I met Aquinas at a hostelry some months later, he reported that the bones found by investigators in those tunnels had fallen from the churchyard above due to subsidence.
No doubt those tunnels are by now filled in or bricked up and although what had haunted there had gone, I was to find some trace of it, staining my psyche.