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.