Theurgical Liturgical

Call to Worship

Ah to be baptised in the blood of this Hallows; to walk the cold lanes where the dead freely pour from the night’s split seams; to troop along, singing in a lost tongue every silver blue air of the depths which will save us from Newton’s sleep: Yes, that is a work to be about, amid the drone of the everyday, where so much disappears into overbright white noise; where technologies race at the speed of light toward the black hole we become. A work which only has value in the words, cashiered in worlds not yet spoken. Until now, fresh-dipped in ancient blood ...

The Offering of the Host

Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.

“No, no -- no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will you give me as much blood as will cover this barb?” holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whales barbs were tempered.

“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nom ine diaboli!’ deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.

-- Moby Dick 532


Exegetical Aside

Melvile wrote to Hawthorne in a letter, “This is the book’s motto (the secret one), ‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine’ -- but make the rest out yourself.” “Madness is indefinable” -- and that other half of Ahab’s cry -- ‘sed in nom ine diaboli!’ has its own blood rhetoric: “But in the devil’s name!”

F.O. Matthiessen provides this curious footnote in American Renaissance:

“On the back fly-leaf of the final volume of his Shakespeare, the volume containing Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello, Melville jotted down some notes, apparently designed for a story involving a formal compact with the devil, cast in modern terms, since he was to have been met ‘at the Astor.’ He then added:

‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris et
Fili et Spiritus Sancti--sed in nomine
Diaoli,--Madness is indefinable--
It & right reason extremes of one,
-- not the (black art) Goetic but Theurgic magic--
seeks converse with the Intelligence, Power, the Angel.’

“Charles Olsen, in his essay ‘Lear and Moby Dick, takes these to be ‘rough jottings’ for Moby Dick. ‘Right reason,’ in the coleridgean and Emersonian terminology, is the highest range of the intuitive intelligence, the gateway to divine madness ...
Olsen is particularly interesting in the way he brings out the contrast between ‘Goetic’ and ‘Theurgic,’ the traditional terms for black and white magic, for the demonic and sacred arts.” (American Renaissance, Oxford U. Press paperback ed., 1968, 457)

So: madness and right reason are the extremes of the sacred theurgic magic, both roads to God, counterbalances of psyche. When you think you’ve got it down, Oran’s head pops up from the grave to tell you that the way you think it is is not the way at all. Holy madness, perhaps, but this day sanctions it.





Homily


5:15 a.m. -- thick cool darkness outside, rich in the transformative juices of the fall, welling a black blood from the garden’s seams and a old night’s beams ... Perched atop my iMac, staring back at me is my skull coffee mug with a greyblack stone from Iona set it (a dragonish sharp swirl of quartz in the center of it), those black eyeholes portals into Oran’s sight, he who walks and sees and knows the dark. My dark brother, my familiar into this wilderness which I love and border and further with each newly blooded word.

Weave this vibrant dark into this four-day weekend, saturate in the juices which physic my overworked, ever-lovin’ days. On Sunday my wife and I readied this house for the trickertreaters, harrowing that dark by setting up figures that glow in it out in our yard and porch: two candescent figures on either side of our driveway’s egress to the sidewalk -- a big cat poking out of a pumpkin and a witch; small plastic pumpkins set with votive candles on the steps leading up to the house; a jack-o-lantern waving from the kitchen window; a green paper lantern with a witch on it hung from the beams over our front door; the big pumpkin I carved spooky-wild and set on the birdbath in the garden. I also put in tall stakes around the outside perimeter of the garden and strung masking tape between them, forming a barrier of sorts to keep kids from running up to the house through the garden; a spooky enough perimeter to which we’ll add luminaries tonight.

We packed bags of treats, putting in each little Halloween bag some combination of four Snickers, Milky Ways, Raisinettes, Reeses Pieces, candy corn, SweetTarts, Chick-o-Sticks, and these cool black gumballs that ooze blood and turn your tongue pink; then tying up the bag with bright ribbon. Sat there on the floor filling up and tying 120 bags with the TV on playing a ghastly montage of bloodsuckers ‘n’ monsters and knife-slashers and goons and goblins and haunted houses and unnatural birds and blobs marauding in from the farthest nebulae of outer space -- every cable channel dipping deliriously into the popcultural cistern of blood -- and our cat on the floor behind us, betwitched and enthralled with ribbon my wife wrapped around her, making sounds from the “North By Northwest” and “Halloween” soundtracks. Windows wide to a breezy day, the hurtful, roaring world at rest.

And after dark we turned everything on -- including the big witch-surrounding moon the upper window of our house--lit the votives, and stood outside to survey our work. Shine a light in the darkness, but gently, to make the darkness shine! The kids will have fun, fer sure -- there’s not much of this in our town, with all of the absentee owners and seniors and hard-line Christians -- We don’t think we’ll have much candy left by the end of the night. We hugged and went in, talking to Violet where she strained against the screen of one of the front windows, wanting so to be out in the dark with us, or just out in the dark.

I present all this lavishly here, because there is a harder darkness too to the time, my wife facing surgery for sure now (laproscopic removal of her ovaries) and she’s convinced something is going to go wrong, our money getting shorter and shorter in supply, our parents spluttering on in the fading embers of age, Blue and Red mauling the corpse of a squirrel all day, glutting themselves insensate on real blood. And the world, our sad frightening terrible world, so ripe in its cruelty and idiocy, the gluttings of a materialist culture which SuperSizes the infantile impulse, the continued evaporation of literacy, the flight to fundamentalist camps of mass belief -- All of that just sucks, but if you can hold a flickering candle of divine darkness to it, how quickly it all fades from view ....




Gospel(s)

To peruse some of the voices which have rabbled in my skull this weekend from the readings: they tenor and weave, like dark crickets or a surf, the motions of my own. First this, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (Penguin Arkana, 1989)

“The ordinary materialist usually fails to recognize that only spiritual affairs count for anything, even in the grossest concerns of life. The facts of murder are nothing in themselves; they are only adduced in order to prove felonious intent. Material welfare is only important as assisting men toward a consciousness of satisfaction.

“From the nature of things, therefore, life is a sacrament; in other words, all our acts are magical acts. Our spiritual consciousness acts through the will and its instruments upon material objects, in order to produce changes which will result in the establishment of the new conditions of consciousness which we wish. That is the definition of Magick.” (124-5)

***

Loren Eisely, from The Firmament of Time (Athenium Publ., 1962), quoted in Campbell’s Creative Mythology:

“The group ethic as distinct from personal ethic is faceless and obscure. It is whatever its leaders choose it to mean; it destroys the innocent and justifies the act in terms of the future”

Campbell: “But the future, as he then points out ... is not the place to seek realization.”

Eisley: “Progress secularized, progress which pursues only the next innovation, which pulls thought out of the mind and replaces it with idle slogans, is not progress at all. It is a beckoning mirage in a desert over which stagger generations of men. Because man, each individual man among us, possesses his own soul ... and by that light must live or perish, there is no way by which Utopias -- or the Lost Garden itself -- can be brought forward to such a destiny. Since in the world of time every man lives but one life, it is in himself that he must search for the secret of the the Garden” (Campbell, 624)

***

And reading elsewhere in Campbell’s Creative Mythology:


A great portrait is, then, a revelation, through the “empirical,” of the “intelligible” character of a being whose ground is beyond our comprehension. The work is an icon, so to say, of a spirituality true to this earth and to its life, where it is in the creatures of this world that the Delectable Mountains of our Pilgrim’s Progress are discovered, and where the radiance of the City of God is recognized as Man. The arts of Shakespeare and Cervantes are revelations, texts and chapters, in this way, of the actual living mythology of our present developing humanity. And since the object of contemplation here is man -- not man as a species, or as representing some social class, typical situation, passion, or idea (as in the Indian literature and art) -- but as that specific individual which he is, or was, and no other, it would appear that the pantheon, the gods, of this mythology must be its variously realized individuals, not as they may know or not know themselves, but as the canvas of art reveals them: each in himself (as in Shopenhauer’s phrase) “the entire World-as-Will in his own way.” The French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929) used to say to the pupils in his studio: L’art fait ressoirtir les grandes lignes de lat nature. James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man writes of “the whatness of a thing” as that “supreme quality of beauty” which is recognized when “you see that it is that thing which is no other thing.” And we have also, again, Shakespeare’s figure of “the mirror.”

And just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this modern world -- where the application of science to the fields of practical life has not dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate civilization can ever develop again -- each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, “Know thyself,” is the motto. And not Rome, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every “thou” on earth is the center of the world, in the sense of that formula just quoted from the twelfth-century Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, of God as “an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere.”

In the marvelous thirteenth-century legend called La Queste del Saint Graal, it is told that when the knights of the Round Table set forth, each on his own steed, in quest of the Holy Grail, they departed separately from the castle of King Arthur. “And now each one,” we are told, “went the way upon which he had decided, and they set out into the forest at one point and another, there where they saw it to be the thickest” (la ou il la voient plus expesse); so that each, entering of his own volition, leaving behind the known good company and table of Arthur’s towered court, would experience the unknown pathless forest of his own heroic way.

Today the walls and towers of the culture-world that then were in the building are dissolving; and whereas heroes then could set forth of their own will from the known to the unknown, we today, willy-nilly, must enter the forest la ou il la voient plus expesse; and, like it or not, the pathless way is the only way now before us.

But of course, on the other hand, for those who can still contrive to live within the fold of a traditional mythology of some kind, protection is still afforded against the dangers of an individual life; and for many the possibility of adhering in this way to established formulas is a birthright they rightly cherish, since it will contribute meanings and nobility to their unadventured lives, from birth to marriage and its duties and, with the gradual failure of powers, a peaceful passage of the last gate. For, as the psalmist sings, “Steadfast love surrounds him who trust in the Lord” (Psalm 32:10); and to those for whom such protection seems a prospect worthy of all sacrifice, an orthodox mythology will afford both the patterns and the sentiments of a lifetime of good repute.

However, by those to whom such living would be not life, but anticipated death, the circumvallating mountains that to others appear to be of stone are recognized as the mist of dream, and precisely between their God and Devil, heaven and hell, white and black, the man of heart walks through. Out beyond those walls, in the uncharted forest night, where the terrible wind of God blows directly on the questing undefended soul, tangled ways may lead to madness. They may also lead, however, as one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages tells, to “all those things that go to make heaven and earth.” (35-37)


Recessional and Benediction


TALES OF THE MAD MONKS

2002


Ireland’s mad monks
of the 7th Century
dipped their quills
in black blood &
wrote down old tales
in wild calligraphy.

What they purported
to be true (or amended
to new faith) was
fantastical and strange,
oral gods and heroes
flattened into
florid scribbles down
the page.

By then it had
been 900
years since the last
man of action dueled
the sea three days:
Since the heroes
lived in voice balloons
over the cooking fire,
a map of mind
framed in a distant song.

The archaeologists
who now dig Irish peat
and walk off radar
soundings at Mag Ruath
and Tara tell us
that we know little
of such stories’ actual
bones: The current
task is to map
a backwards land
old, older, older still,
reconstructing thrones
from bent brooch-pins
and sonograms of
ancient, soft mounds.

Yet for all they
can now describe
of how the royal
sacred stones aligned,
their mouths are
silent round the
ineffable sound
of why
The bones suggest
a frame but not
the bloody heart
which moved
‘em so. A science
must turn to
the dusty graves
of tales, for the
rubbing of arterial
flush, for gleams
in bleak gloamings.

And so a mind
apt for this task
must cobble a
conjectured pair
of fitting enough shoes,
then conjure up
delighted feet
to leap the
the flaming hues.


spleen
2001

God help the, old man,
thy thoughts have created
a creature in thee; and he
whose intense thinking
thus makes him a Prometheus;
a vulture feeds upon that heart
forever; that vulture
the very creature he creates.
-- Melville Moby Dick

Guitar, woman,
bottle, boat-shaped mind:
That of which there
never can be enough
rises and crashes
like a surf in me,
restless, impure,
furious in a spleen
of hot oil. Who but an
Ahab rides the white
whale, plunging each feral
barbs into his
own bottomless heart?

And yet, o rebel will,
bloody in unsounded
agitaition, how is it
that the very life
you mock rounds
here to these sure reins,
this dry surrender?

Harrow the depths
first, last, and well.
Nothing that surges
can without dark swell.
My story’s my name
and this day my father,
hard oaring between dry salvage
and the old, historic slaughter.