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...
No comments:
Post a Comment