Christopher Strath-Gordon
“As the Solstice Moon doth progress (sacred the Holly and the Flame) this b’ye month of assignation; let the Magician offer his Most Cunning and Secret Libation under cover of darkness such that no man’s eye shall see. Let the Force and aspiration persevere so that his Circle shall expandeth, if he Wills, until the Other hath visited with Eyes black and mane of incandescent Sun. Thus, the Magician entereth unto most Holy Communion with the solitary Begetter and Font of this the Light Perpetual that Lives again and always under the Sign of the Archer, exalted by Abraxas and the Great Double Flame.”
Christos Voltius Morvaine, El-Fah-Ouel (1614)
I write this not because I have seen into the mystery nor read its secrets by the glow of anointed candle. Nor do I write because I have someway blindly felt my way to knowing. I write because not long after I lit the candles and the storax fumed in the censor and the sacred words were said, the consecrated blade held aloft in the dark, there appeared a field of unbroken snow, blue and gleaming beneath an unassailable canopy of stars. And therein stood a figure, robed in white, whose face it was not given me to see.
This being I understood to be compound of an infinite beauty and emptiness. Between us drifted a crystalline film of ice-filled air, trembling in the wind’s undulant swells. I approached then, yet when I had attained a distance halfway between our initial positions, the white robe vanished among drifts and shadows. In its place there arose a voice, the mere thought of a voice, barely distinguishable from the whisper of ice-crystals skittering across the snow’s sleek crust, a fluent voice softly intoning in a language I had never heard, its timbre that of a sunken bell.
The voice ascended from silence to a sort of runic and nearly tuneless song. Like the memory of a lost day, the unbodied music flickered and lifted, a pale ribbon twisting in a slow cold tide, a white paper lantern guarding a quivering flame. As the strange arc of song rose and echoed, I swayed as if charged with a low vibrating current. The song grew rhythmic, swelled and expanded, told of fox-cry and seed-mantle, stamen and thorn. It soon overmastered and grasped me, hollowed and filled, it sounded in my ears like the sea. Two hands gripped mine and led me into the snow, the earth, and the wind, held me close and still closer as we knelt in the dark, while high and remote the young moon shook and quivered among the rippling stars.
And before me there flared the face of a lion that was not a lion, with limpid eyes, dark as half-glimpsed pools in the deeps of wells, “eyes other than mortal eyes… that neither sleep nor slumber.” And with loving gaze and piercing claws and teeth – ah with what infinite kindness! – how that regal Being rent my throat. With what ease and affection, with what centaur speed and precision, did the clenching jaws penetrate and shred my skin like dry birch bark, throbbing limbs severing white and red sinews from bone. And a music arose too anon that held me and soothed, smoothing all to a softness like sunlight beneath green ocean waves.
Ah! Who can unravel such monstrous enigmas? Who has ever confronted them, and who will ever understand them? How are we to live by “that Great Double fFame”? By what way and means may we finally “ascend to an intellect pure & conjoyned with the powers of the gods,” as Agrippa remarks, “without which we shall never happily advance to the scrutiny of secret things, and to the power of wonderfull workings”?
When shall we not scry into the black mirror of our own secret hearts and not see there a curiously familiar figure, one whose face, nonetheless, we are not permitted to see?
And I thought to understand for the briefest of moments as I retraced my path through the silence of the snowy field, how the Natural Light is the divine spark and also the secret life of things at the heart of the mystery of creation: How only by Nothingness and the Unknown may we glimpse the radiant mother of all form – and only then understand that no man may lift her veil.
