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.