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...