My Version of the Death Posture

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The death posture, as far as I can determine, was invented by Austin Osman Spare as a tool to fire magical sigils into the Great Unknown. I first encountered it in the writings of Pete Carroll, who evokes practices such as staring at a mirror into one’s own gaze until total vacuity and trance ensue: gnosis, the spell is fired, the work is done.

Well I never really jived with any of the versions of the death posture that I encountered. Maybe I am just a difficult person, I don’t know. But the basic concept – of dying a kind of brief psychic death in order to unite a magical, sigilized intent with the currents of causality – was appealing.

Recently I retrofitted some of Carroll’s writings to come up with my own version of the death posture. It requires a minimal level of able-bodiedness but otherwise is pretty broadly applicable. It is fun, too (pretty much a prerequisite for any kind of magic worth the doing).

Here’s what I do. First, I determine my intent, the outcome I wish to achieve. Second, I allow my imagination to furnish me with runes that express the intent in sigil form. I’ve studied the runes so long, in particular from a reconstructionist perspective, that I don’t have to think very hard to get a combination that seems right. Sometimes it is one rune, sometimes several, whatever works.

Then I chant and visualize the runes. When I finish chanting them, I maintain the visualization. Standing upright, I begin to lean straight backward. Lean, lean, lean, as I get more of an angle as my back arches over. Still visualizing the rune sigil. Then suddenly I lean far enough that I fall.

Snap! In a split second the reflexes kick in and I catch myself. At that moment, total vacuity occurs and the sigil is released into the void. It is impossible to do anything else at that moment but catch oneself; there is no room for thinking. It is lightning-quick, but intense. After all, it feels a little scary – I am about to fall over and hit my head!

As soon as I catch myself I declare: does not matter, need not be, that or something better. Then I move on, because the magic is done.

Once you have this down you can set off spells very quickly and easily. I am getting a pretty good hit rate with it. It is a nice controlled way of injecting a brief moment of helpless terror into consciousness, just the ticket for releasing the magic will into motion.

Go ahead, try it! You might like it. Or hate it. Either way, it will probably trigger something interesting.

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The Crossroads and the Gallows

Odin by Jacob Hood 1893Gods upon gods upon gods. Big gods. Little gods. Perverse gods. Strange gods. Gods of mystery, mysterious gods. This cosmos is so full of the things called gods that one cannot walk for treading on one. Is there anything that is not god?

The little god of the toothbrush, no, that is the toothbrush. The little god that is the bathroom door, that is the stair case, that is the kettle, that is the shirt on your back, that is the oxygen molecules you absorb into every cell of your body, drawing over the surfaces of your lungs, into your blood, your heart, to the very limits of your capillaries, into every single cell, that life-giving divinity called Oxygen feeding the divinity called Your Body. Fall down in reverence.

The bad mood, the stained conscience, the mean thought. All divine beings. The good mood, the selfless deed, the languid afternoon in the long sun’s demise, all deities sublime. The familiar, the alien, the comforting, the disturbing. Gods.

They are stacked up together in fractal arrangements, endless recurring icons of magic and power. As above, so below; the structure of the tiniest is the structure of the ALL. Divine, gods all. One and many, both at the same time. Is this illogical? Illogic is the name of god. Is this contradictory? Contradiction is the name of god. (Logic and consistency are also the names of God, coincidentally).

Tragedy is a god, and serendipity is a god. Change is a god, one who facilitates all the others most eagerly. Change is, you might say, the crossroads of the gods, or perhaps the traffic cop of the gods as they comport themselves to and fro along the byways of Mystery, she who may well be the greatest of all the divinities (but who can claim to know such a thing?).

Change, the crossroad of the gods, itself a god. Standing by the crossroad called Change are two wooden pillars. They are joined by two crossed beams, forming an X between the tops of the pillars. A rope is tied to the X. A tattered, black-wrapped figure creaks and groans in the wind. It is the rope’s divine purpose to be the saddle of the figure, who is the rider of the horse called gallows. Gods stacked on gods stacked on gods.

This riding god is a crossroads god, for the crossbars of the gallows are a recursion of the crossroads of change upon which the whole sordid glory of life sings its marvelous and whimsical opera. This riding god, this dead god, hanged by the neck. And is that the broken end of a spear that thrusts from his side, like a phallus cutting through the ribs? I believe it is.

This riding, hanging, rib-fucked god is my god, god of the crossroads of change upon which vast epics and homely familiarities alike unfold. They gamble, these infinite stories, these tangled up threads. Gamble at the feet of the hanged god, at the crossroads of change. The horizon of mystery (which we call The Present) looms but never arrives. All of existence, every last bit of it, playing out in ever-more complex Mandelbrot sets below the swaying dead feet of the swaying dead god who rides the gallows.

My god, this rib-fucked god, dressed in his tatters. At his feet all of existence unfolds, stretching forth from the rim of the goddess Mystery to the rim of the goddess Mystery (id est Runa). Thus is he sometimes called All Father.

Not as though he is some patriarch, some dominator, some well-spring. No. He is weathered, weakened, withered. He is desiccated, drained, death incarnate. There is no romance in what this god is. It is a gallows-riding, wind-whipped, spear-fucked god. It is my god, or least the god that occupies my attention the most of the many gods that occupy my attention.

It is my beloved god, this god at who’s feet all the other gods unfold their hour upon the crossroads called Change as they dance from Mystery Past to Mystery Promised. I love him without varnish, without the dressings of human fear, power, or control. I do not need to make him into a pompous patriarch, would not thus deign to slander he who swings from the gallows, the blood drained from his veins. Mandrake takes root at his feet, where blood mixes with semen and seeps into earth. My beloved god, who gives life even in death.

He watches, accepts all that he sees as it is, sans alteration, sans erasure. Yet always remains unscarred, for he is not ruled by the waters that run across the river bed of his undead senses. Without judgment. Death affirms life.

See how the endless multitude of gods which comprise God pulse and throb and ebb and flow back and forth on the crossroads called Change in their voyage from Mystery to Mystery (id est Runa). See how the hanging, rib-ergi god watches. Is that the ghost of a smile that haunts his lips, curved as they are? Perhaps just the faintest hint of his love for all that he surveys? Who knows what molten life lies below that cold corpse shell? “Only death is real.”

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Loki is the Body

Gosforth_Cross_Loki_and_Sigyn

What if Loki is the god of the irrepressible body? The body that speaks, sings, sways, shudders, grows, fades, pulses, aches, dies, rebirths. What if his threat to consciousness is the threat of body to dissociated mind? Oh, well, we have to suppress this body thing – thus speaks dissociated mind. And so the drama begins, culminating in Ragnarok.

Loki, then, is the enemy of denial. Yet he did not start the war. Denial started the war. We cannot accept the body as it is and so we begin to dictate terms. We begin to try to consciously manipulate the body, the sensations of the body, the pleasure and the pain. And once we begin meddling in this way we become irrevocably attached to the very sensations we are trying to regulate, dominate, do away with.

Irony of ironies! The more we fight Loki, the more his serpent coils tighten around us, make us gasp and splutter and choke. We resist the body, we refuse to know it as it is, and it comes to rule us. We armor up. We escalate the combat. The body responds in kind.

Consider the opponent process that occurs in addiction. At first the drug we use to control and dissolve the body and its sensations, to regulate and efface it, works wonderfully. Yet soon the central nervous system begins to compensate, and more drug is needed. And more. Until eventually, we need the drug not to feel “good,” not to impose our denial on the body…but rather just to avoid feeling “bad.”

At either end of the continuum we are running from our embodied experience, the serpent god Loki (is he not a serpent god? Consider his underworldly ordeal…). At either end of the continuum, our denial, our dissociation, has taken us into a conflict with the body and its spontaneous truth of flowing experience. It need not be a drug; any kind of attachment will do. Our aversions and our lusts in all their polymorphous perversities (to retrofit one of Freud’s more poetic turns of phrase).

So who makes Loki the villain? The body is not evil and the body is not good. The body just is. “It will chew you up and it will spit you out/Behold the flesh and the power it holds” (Chuck Schuldiner/Death). Perhaps the body will destroy itself, as it did in Schuldiner’s case. Yet it is our judgment that determines the meaning of even this sort of tragedy.

So who makes Loki the villain? Judgment makes Loki the villain. Denial makes Loki the villain. Ignorance of self makes Loki the villain. For we are Loki. We are the body. Only ignorance of ourselves could make ourselves a villain. Yet we are so wonderful at not even noticing that we make ourselves the enemy. The more dissociated we become in our quest for denial and control, the more self-destructive we become. As Loki is persecuted, so we persecute ourselves.

The corollary of these musings is that one’s spiritual well-being can be indexed by one’s relationship to Loki. Why do so many accept Odin, the god of strife, murder, ergi, and betrayal, yet they cannot accept Loki, their own embodied selves? Dissociation. After all, Odin and Loki are brothers in blood.

Who fears Ragnarok? It is a transformation and a healing event. It entails terrible loss, yet the loss is caused by the debt of dissociation. Without the resistance to what is, there is no need for a terrible catastrophe. Thus we are called to embrace the real as it is, to observe it without reacting, so that the bad blood can be allowed to flow free and clear, and the festering wounds can heal.

This is a remarkable and terrible discipline, this embracing and observing of what it is as it is. Loki is a remarkable and terrible god. We like to think that healing and growth are happy, safe, joyous processes, but this is dissociation again. Loki teaches us that healing is a bloody, strange, tortuous affair. We have to observe our experience, and our experience hurts. Worse, sometimes it feels good, and then when it ends, we’re addicted. Back to the opponent process, unless we’re very disciplined.

Mastery in the sense that Loki embodies is not the mastery of total obliterative domination. That notion, that idea of absolute control, is an illusion. Where in history may it be found? Only in wishful thinking and propaganda. So no, mastery is not domination. We do not gain domination through the embrace of the body. Or, for that matter, through any other means either. Domination is an illusory artifact of bifurcated consciousness.

What we gain is the willingness to be. As we are. What, does this not mean acquiescence, stagnation? This question is born from the untrusting attitude of dissociated mind. Have we so little trust in the divine materials from which the gods have woven us? Who could dare say that this remarkable thing, this body, is anything but a well-spring of divine possibility? Let us not slander it, as we have been trained to do all our lives, with accusations of fault.

If we deny the body we deny the divine. The divine as Runa – mystery. The divine and her consort, Loki. Let us heed the call to embrace the divine that is Loki. Let us embrace the body, the sensations of the body. Without resistance. Without judgement.

We will, of course, fail. There is no end to our capacity for resistance and judgment. So we must accept this failure before we begin. Ahh…and there lies the magic of Loki. For in accepting defeat, he is liberated to become more than he, or we, could know.

To become what one is. A task that defies our dissociated mind and its projections of power and control. As Nietzsche would have it, we must go under to go up. And love and accept all that we revile, lest we discard the alchemical gold of the body in our haste to shed the dross of our loss and our fear.

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I am the Greatest Rebel that Ever Lived

I am the greatest rebel that ever lived. There is no glory in it. Only misery and shame, since I rebel against even my own rebelliousness. Wherever the underdog cries, there I stand, ready to brim over with molten righteousness. Wherever there is injustice, I am ready to fume and steam until I boil my own hair away. Wherever there is evil, you’ll find me, outraged in the most symbolic and useless way I can imagine, in order to undermine even my own self.

You might think that Marx or Guevara or Gandhi are greater rebels than I. But you would be wrong. All of these individuals actually acted on their convictions in a meaningful way, after all. They did not rebel against their own beliefs and world views. I would rather dissolve into a muddle of benighted nothingness than actually make my convictions manifest. Yes! The greatest rebel ever.

I hate being here, I hate having to make an effort. The bloody-mindedness of inhale-exhale-inhale galls me. The stench of human flesh that radiates, fetid, from my bones! What a tiresome bore. Can not these inconveniences be dissolved, yesterday? What a bother and trouble to have to exist, to be present, to make choices – worse, to see them through. No, I would rather rebel against all of that. Why not?

Oh, there are so many good reasons to be even less rebellious. If I could just be a little less rebellious I would make a wonderful egomaniac. But if egomania is a rebellion against the not-self, then I’ve already outsmarted myself! My kind of egomania is undermining. It makes me tiresome to be around, careworn by triviality. Somehow this is the ultimate port of call for my rebelliousness: giving the middle finger to everything that I value, might enjoy, and most especially, towards any person or thing I love.

Wouldn’t want to relax now, would we? Give me a helpful suggestion and I’ll find my way to resisting it before you’ve even contemplated blinking. I can build towering edifices of self-justification and excuses and drama like a master. If Erik von Daniken met me, he’d think I was made by aliens.

Even my disgust at my rebelliousness serves the same. This vast and sprawling ego force within me, so dominated by petty fears and thin-skinned hypocrisy. I carry it like a gilded chain around my heart; the more it aches, the more firm its grip becomes. At some level I probably even enjoy this misery that I relentless seek out and impose upon myself. Why not? That way I can feel guilty about causing my own problems, too.

What a pain I must be to be around! Always convinced of the impossibility of everything. Always looking for the “no,” for the “fail,” for the “not good enough.” The problem is not that I haven’t been given a reasonable share of talent, but rather my systematic determination to squander it. Ah the ecstasy of being one’s own executioner.

Best of all is the pointing of the cursing bone at anything in which I recognize my own reflection. Greed, laziness, hate, pettiness, paranoia, pessimism, resentment, cowardice, hypocrisy – so valorized and celebrated in myself, so vilified and decried when in another. I am the quickest draw in town when it comes to self-righteous stupidity. A flicker in my eye, a blur at my side, and my six-shooter out-paces the fastest draw in the West (who is probably the Devil).

If there is God – which is the great, luvverly, beautiful, interconnected whole – and the Devil – which is whatever of that whole decides to be a jerk – then I say death to them both! I’m too busy feeling sorry for myself and my overblown sensibility for drama to pick a side, or even to care about such tensions. Even to be so honestly nihilistic offers no relief. Dark tides close over my head, and the tentacles of the deep black sea swallow me whole…

…only to regurgitate me in due course. Even the Great Old Ones can only stomach so much of my curmugeonry.

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Death and Dagaz

I recently declared that I wanted to embrace the idea of memento mori. The universe obliged. An old ring from childhood reappeared, a skull that I can carry on my hand, a silent and implacable reminder of mortality and perhaps the freedom that comes when one is released from the illusion of eternal existence.

It is important not to trivialise mortality in the name of spiritual or philosophical reflection of course. There are others far more qualified to write about the subject than I. Nevertheless, mortality has been a leit-motif throughout my life and it is a theme that figures importantly for me. Thus I am moved to write.

Death provokes fear. Fear provokes the desire to escape the threat of death. Since we are unavoidably mortal, fear therefore resorts to the deployment of belief as a bulwark against our inevitable demise. This is the essence of what in psychology is known as Terror Management Theory. In order to manage our terror in the face of the awful dark horizon we construct beliefs which simplify the world for our brains, reduce it to digestible symbols that paper over the screaming horror of our infinitesimal powerlessness before the frightful majesty of creation.

Hence, when we make the commitment to live a spiritual life and embrace the horizon of the unknown, we offer ourselves up to a state of tremendous vulnerability. It is here that the double nature of mythology, on one hand door, on the other refuge, is revealed.

Myth is a door. What is a door? A door is an opening in a wall through which we may pass. The door is an invitation into a larger world beyond the limits of the walls we immediately perceive. Even when closed, it is a constant reminder to us of a bigger picture: there is more to be experienced than just our immediate existence.

What lies through the door? It could be anything. A larger world, a different perspective. It could be dark or light, joyous or miserable. It could be a cul de sac or a road that ever ends. Likely enough all of these things await those that step through the door that is called myth.

For where the myth itself is done, safe, secure in its form, recognisable in its character, shaped and regulated by convention, the world that awaits us on its other side is wild, unpredictable, untameable. It is one thing to read about the fury and ecstasy that Odin inspires; another to be swept into a tide of poetic frenzy. It is one thing to praise Jord’s bounty; another to sink your hands into the soil, to plant a tree, to be lost in wild country, to be tossed by storm or tremor.

How does myth open itself? How do we step through? It opens itself when we slow down, when we listen to our heart beating, when we give space for its secrets to give themselves. When we open ourselves to uncertainty, when we put aside our fear of death and the need for control and faith that this fear impels.

Myth is by itself mere words. It can be justified only by the worlds into which it opens. Myth is not property, cultural, intellectual, or otherwise. Myth is a seduction, a lover, an agent provocateur set on unsettling our settled, death denying articles of faith. Myth is always in motion. It is a verb, an action carried out endlessly by the horizon of mystery – Runa – herself.

And so those that want to control myth, to make it dead, predictable, to make it into property, to make it into a rigid template for the construction of stale identity – these we accuse of impiety. If we use myth as nothing more than a vehicle for mere belief – and not as an opportunity to open our spirits to the unknown – then we blaspheme.

I am not afraid, therefore, to declare that it appears that many Heathens blaspheme against their own professed faith without so much as realising it. Yet such folk should not be blamed, unless of course they know better but are too cowardly to embrace the dare of the door. Unless of course, though knowing better, they bar the door up and declare that it is the thing to be worshipped, not the infinite magic that glowers beyond it.

Yet myth is also a refuge. For if we were to stand, naked and purged, before the raw intensity of this mystery-woven universe without any railing to grasp then we would be swept away in the torrent. The universe is so incredibly vast, and often as cruel and arbitrary as she is loving and rational, at least from the narrow glimpse of her secrets that we mere mortals are afforded.

How then are we to cope with true piety – with steeling ourselves against our fear of death and stepping through the door of myth? What protection might we give ourselves?

Myth is redolent with symbolism, with endless layers of associations, connections, refractions, reflections. We find ourselves making sense of the world in the truisms of Havamal, or putting words to the ineffable art of creation when we invoke the subterranean skulduggery of Bolverkr. In the rune poems we find endless fractional images of reality, metaphors which offer moments of order and sense in this vast chaotic carnival of life.

Thus myth invites us to shed all form and embrace the pure unknown, and myth provides language and sense for us to recover and integrate the experiences we find beyond the mythic door. When too distilled our experience becomes, myth offers a refuge, a stable retreat and ward. It helps us to recover from the shock of being finite in this infinite cosmic passion play.

And thus is the art of the alchemist, the magician, the saint, the shaman: to move back and forth across the very threshold of myth. To step out into the unknown, to drink its thick, roaring waters; and then to step back into the warm embrace of mythic refuge, to clothe oneself in the images and metaphor, the traces and patterns which are ultimately inspired by the Unknown and which help us to integrate the Unknown into our finite forms.

In other words, the spiritual art, the art of stepping back and forth through the doors of myth, is the art of living on the threshold of death, which is the ever-present spectre of the Unknown in life. We can only taste the gush of our lifeblood if we are willing to shed it.

Yet we continually lose ourselves in the small doings of daily life, the invisible but compelling stories we tell ourselves: lose ourselves in a futile attempt to avoid facing death’s gaze. Therefore, to surround oneself with memento mori, with reminders of death, is to continually draw oneself back to the door of myth, and the Beyond, and to the refuge of myth, and the need to care for one’s finitude even amid infinity.

To those who dare to remember myth:
Drink deep of the Well!

To those who dare to remember death:
Dance joyous on the threshold!

To those who have ears to hear:

Carpe Diem!

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Primordial Reflections

I’ve been listening to Irish metal band Primordial today. Wow, those guys never cease to blow me away with their atmosphere and seething passion. Vocalist A. A. Nemtheanga has more than his fair share of imbas, that’s for sure.

Their last few albums have partly grappled with the question of identity from a European perspective – their combination of Heathen and Pagan spiritual influences and their sense of history as coming from Ireland gives them a unique perspective.

Nemtheanga is given to dark, apocalyptic vision of worlds crumbling these days, and in the face of the dark portraits his lyrics paint, the grandeur of the music really ignites. There is a truly powerful sense of resolution in this music, and part of that comes from a notion of identity as European, one which Primordial articulates with subtlety, complexity, and little in the way of self-righteousness or arrogance, which is rather welcome for a change!

I am often quite critical of the use of Heathenry simply as a source of solid sense of identity, because it seems to stem from weakness or fear, and because ironically it often seems to impair curiosity and reverence for history and tradition. Yet I feel I need to balance the scales a little, and reflect on my own limitations.

Because you see I cannot imagine the men of Primordial giving into their fear for anything or anyone. The strength that flows through their music flows precisely through a powerful sense of self-possession, of being rooted in history and myth. And part of that strength is tied up in “identity politics” if you want to call it that, yet the way that Primordial do it seems like a really positive force, neither brittle nor shallow.

This gets me pondering whether there isn’t more to this whole “well, I just am Heathen” (and therefore insolubly worthwhile regardless of any evidence there may be to the contrary) attitude that I often see.

Sure, it can make people reductionist in their sense of self, amputating or ignoring their full range of character and their full ability to perceive the world around them. But Primordial seem to demonstrate that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Maybe, then, the more shallow and rigid applications of identity politics in Heathenry are aiming at a more valid and valuable goal. Perhaps I owe those that I find irritating in this regard a little more respect – perhaps, as fallibly as all humans, they are nevertheless driving at something which could be both positive and healing.

What leads me to reflect on this further is my sense that I struggle greatly to stay connected to my own spiritual grounding. I am someone that needs to drink from the well of memory on a regular basis, but I often avoid doing it. I am someone who carries around a lot of self-critical impulses (don’t we all, though?), and while in some respects this is helpful, it is often gratuitously hurtful.

So I find myself wondering – would someone who seems as spiritually self-assured as A. A. Nemtheanga put himself down in his own mind? Would he have those bastard voices that most of us carry around (which I certainly do), which love to stick hot pokers into our brains at the least provocation? I just can’t imagine he does.

Of course the flip side of total self-assurance is the temptation to blame everything on everyone else, and I’ve recently had some very miserable experiences with someone I’ve been very close to but who works in this way. Well I certainly don’t want to be projecting my shadow onto the Other, to paraphrase good old Jung, but nonetheless a bit less gratuitous self assault and a bit more default self-assurance would be nice.

These reflections are all relative of course. In many domains I do feel completely capable and self assured. I’m also known to have a poker face under pressure, never letting on that I’m finding a challenge hard until after it is beaten. The problem is more to do with what goes on in my head. I don’t want to live a life where I am grinding myself down. Because over time that can affect one’s freedom to be and do in the world.

So perhaps what I am circulating around is the possibility that I tend to dismiss the “I want an identity” motivation for being Heathen precisely because it offers something I need. And perhaps I am too quick to dismiss this motivation as brittle, aggressive, and shallow: Primordial seem to be showing that a deeper form of it is possible.

It is pretty absurd that someone who has invested so much of their life into spiritual pursuits and personal growth (and admittedly out of brutal necessity) nevertheless has a habit of refusing the nourishment offered by the divine and then crying about starving to death.

That reminds me, actually, of one of my favourite poems by Rumi. It’s about depression – disconnection from God, the divine in all things. There’s a bit where it says something like: “you decline to enter the open door of the road house; later you curse the hardship of the road.”

Part of the reason I am hesitant to be a “loud and proud” – or perhaps more in my style, “silent but resolute” – Heathen is because I dislike the way that many Heathens present their Heathenry, and to be honest I’m wary of being painted in the same colours. But then again, Heathenry is what we make of it, so maybe I should be just being myself under that banner so that I can ensure that the definition of “Heathen” is sufficiently wide to include me.

I’m not really sure how any of this applies in daily life. And I know that when I sing a sense of connection and assurance certainly flows through me – perhaps Primordial are at their best in performance, and like the rest of us as people are not equal to the art that the divine inspires them to create.

But imagine living every moment of one’s life with the sense of confidence and spirit that can come in moments of rapturous possession while singing? Imagine that power that flows through the body just always being there?

One thing is for sure, this ideal would require the ability to separate one’s self-worth from the world around. The Daoists say we should worship the 10,000 Things, the infinite gods, but not get too attached, and there’s wisdom in this being in the world but also having a touch of reserve, or more specifically, of circumspection.

This is also the Jungian Way – the path to individuation, to having achieved one’s own Lapis, the unchanging, perfected core that dwells eternally amid the chaos of the world.

Well I want my own philosopher’s stone. I invoke Fire and Water here and now and every time anyone reads this to flood and inflame my life! It is time to dismantle my sordid affair with amnesia and start afresh with memory.

Well and good, these metaphors. I need reminders. The magic of memento mori. Let these words be one such. Let there be many more.

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Facing the Mystery of Death

Shortly after my thirtieth birthday I saw something new in my face: age. I have had, in some respects, a difficult life, and at times I have felt a million years old with all the burdens and psychic wounds to match. But never before have I seen the touch of time in my features, which have always made me look younger than my years.

There it was staring back at me. Two faint lines across my forehead. The lightest dusting of shadows under my eyes that will one day crease my features like dry creek beds. Granted, it was late, after a long day at work. Granted, I had a touch of conjunctivitis, which could not have helped. Nevertheless, the proof of time was revealed in that moment.

These words are not an expression of panic, nor hand wringing. And I still look young for my age. And I am not at all addicted to the cult of youth-at-all-cost: beauty and youth are not identical, and neither is essential or even necessarily desirable.

The marks of time’s seductive kisses drew my awareness to a memory that lurks all too often in my body and mind (which are really the one thing, a continuum from matter to spirit): death is my fate. Before I was born, I was ordained to die. “Like acres of wheat we’re all grown to be mown” (Beastianity).

This is not a sad thought to recover. I am not afraid of death, which of course makes me unusual as a human being. I have had a bit to do with death. It has hurt me, stolen loved ones with untimely haste, and several times almost had me before my own fair allotment of breath. Even as a child I had shed my fear, had it shriven from my bones.

The memory of my inevitable demise points me to a horizon of infinite mystery – the mystery of being a conscious being in this vast universe. Confronted with the impenetrable veil, one’s life stands out all too starkly. The small mercies for which one feels gratitude, the endless barrage of wounds, the compromises and concessions into which one drifts and atomises.

Death sends out its call, strings the beads of momentary living onto a single thread. Where chaotic experience invisibly carries us through scattered moments, death draws all into alignment. It brings us to the forest clearing and, in the thought of absence of life, the very shape of life is exposed.

And we forget, and forget, and forget. If indeed we ever remember in the first place. I believe it a poor thing to get to later life without being touched vicariously by death through the loss of loved ones. Death shocks us from the cocoon of our self-evidence. If we have not embraced it then the very foundations of our whole life may prove wanting when the unavoidable time comes and we must cope with loss, with the outrages of fortune’s arrows and slings.

Death points us to a paradox: to set our living with deep roots, so that this transient existence might be as soundly made as it may be, we must confront that same transience, the skull and scythe hovering impatiently in the wings of every stage.

Not the confrontation of aggressive emergency surgery. Not the confrontation of dogmatic faith in the hereafter. Rather, we must court death, embrace this god so that our denial of its power does not make of it a devil. Not to literally paint ourselves in its livery, but to let it draw our attention clear of the infinite hall of mirrors from which life is composed.

Facing the mystery of death is facing the mystery of life. The two are one, and though we tend to only understand them implicitly, unconsciously, we nevertheless always must encounter them together.

The mystery of death is a mystery of memory and forgetfulness. We touch the mystery and recoil, and in the icy gasp of our vulnerability we find our reptile emotionality – fear, fury, the fire of lust.

The mystery of death is a mystery of vulnerability. We carry our death with us always. It spans out before us, probing for the shape of our unfolding life. We carry our death with us, our finite nature, our helplessness before the vast eye of the cosmos, which exceeds our deepest wisdom and our subtlest science.

The conclusion is inescapable: we face the mystery of death whether we wish to or not. We face the mystery of death whether we realise it or not. It curls its tendrils around our every breath. It haunts the choices we make as much as it does the choices we decline. Therefore I ask: how best to face this mystery? Death’s precociousness is legendary: how may we make ourselves equal to the doom that we carry in our very flesh?

The mystery of death is the mystery of life, and it trades in the currency of memory and forgetfulness. It trades in the currency of vulnerability. How might we enrich the wealth of our vulnerability? How might we strike a balance between memory and forgetfulness so that we might fully embrace our demise and the riches of the life that precedes it?

My answer is simple: through memento mori. By building reminders of the elusive memory of death into our life. Yet any reminder loses its gloss in time: the amnesia of our world-encircled nature guarantees it. Thus facing the mystery requires more than a one time effort. We have to renew our memories, continually wash the soporific of daily living from our eyes and ears.

Spiritual practice offers many means for this rememorialising: doing the gardening, meditating, creating art, reflecting on myth, and others. Conversations where we ask questions to which we genuinely do not know the answers; rituals in which we truly put aside our egos and embrace the irrepressible life that binds this universe together. When we go beyond ourselves, we also go deep within ourselves.

And what of Heathen spirituality? Odin is a god of death. It is this that earns him the right to be called All Father.

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