Killer Wolf

Due to the good offices of Shakti Force, I've been listening to Danzig recently.
(have a look at the video for 'She Rides' on Shakti's blog)

Here's 'Killer Wolf'. Enjoy

RIP Frank Frazetta

Just found out he died recently. Some of his work can be found here.

Such as this:


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'The lust of the goat is the bounty of God' - William Blake

An illustration from 'Lost Girls' (see previous entry). Pretty good.




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Comic Magick

I've loved Alan Moore's work ever since I read the wonderful V for Vendetta. Recently I found Cobweb - Brighter Than You Think , a part of the Lost Girls book (well worth a read in it's own right).

'Cobweb' is a brief story about Jack Parsons. Very tasty. Here's an image I rather liked:



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We bought a camcorder . . .

, , , so I just had to film a little moment with Mocuar and share it with you . . .



When Mocuar first looked at the clip she was concerned in case the cane marks weren't visible enough.

She's a dedicated girl.

Ready

From Nick The Dick

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Just watched Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll about the life of Ian Dury. Brilliant. It's worth it just for Andy Serkis' performance. Totally convincing. See it if you can. Here's Ian himself with the anthem:



Aahhhhh . . . Lovely . . .

The way it's said

A slightly silly Clerihew I penned some years ago:

Aleister Crowley
Thought his magick was progressing slowly
So he made a memorandum
To try Per Vas Nefandum

(If you don't know what Per Vas Nefandum is, google it, then go off and do it)

For this to work, 'Crowley' has to rhyme with 'slowly', and that is indeed the way his name was pronounced. In one of his own poems he rhymed his name with 'unholy' and I've seen interviews with people who met him - they always pronounced his name in that way. The evidence is irrefutable.

So why the hell, after knowing this for years, do I still say it as if the 'Crow' part of his name rhymed with 'cow' or 'now'?

I have to make a mental effort to pronounce it the right way. Usually I don't succeed.

I'm sure there's some deep psychological/magickal truth to be divined here, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is.

Gimme Shelter

For me, the Stones' music always has a Thelemic quality.

Here's one of my faves, the sublime 'Gimme Shelter' a really kicking live version. This is the best quality video of it I could find.

Is it just my perception or is there something very Babalonian about the backing singer?

A feast for the ears

Steven Ashe reading The Book Of The Law (first chapter and a bit of the second)

Rather well done, I think

Pic of the day

From Erectus

Just because . . .

'The gunsights aligned effortless in the beam of his power'

Ted Hughes. Possibly the greatest English poet of the late 20th century. He had an ability to connect to raw nature magick that was unique. No-one comes anywhere near him in that.

Here he is, reading 'Lovesong', I don't think I've heard passion and sexual power better expressed:




And this is 'Wolfwatching'. If I could write something this good, I'd die happy.


Wolfwatching

Woolly-bear white, the old wolf
Is listening to London. His eyes, withered in
Under the white wool, black peepers,
While he makes nudging, sniffing offers
At the horizon of noise, the blue-cold April
Invitation of airs. The lump of meat
Is his confinement. He has probably had all his life
Behind wires, fraying his eye-efforts
On the criss-cross embargo. He yawns
Peevishly like an old man and the yawn goes
Right back into Kensington and there stops
Floored with glaze. Eyes
Have worn him away. Children's gazings
Have tattered him to a lumpish
Comfort of woolly play-wolf. He's weary.
He curls on the cooling stone
That gets heavier. Then again the burden
Of a new curiosity, a new testing
Of new noises, new people with new colours
Are coming in at the gate. He lifts
The useless weight and lets it sink back,
Stirring and settling in a ball of unease.
All his power is a tangle of old ends,
A jumble of leftover scraps and bits of energy
And bitten-off impulses and dismantled intuitions.
He can't settle. He's ruffling
And re-organizing his position all day
Like a sleepless half-sleep of growing agonies
In a freezing car. The day won't pass.
The night will be worse. He's waiting
For the anaesthetic to work
That has already taken his strength, his beauty
And his life.

He levers his stiffness erect
And angles a few tottering steps
Into his habits. He goes down to water
And drinks. Age is thirsty. Water
Just might help and ease. what else
Is there to do? He tries to find again
That warm position he had. He cowers
His hind legs to curl under him. Subsides
In a trembling of wolf-pelt he no longer
Knows how to live up to.

And here
Is a young wolf, still intact.
He knows how to lie, with his head,
The Asiatic eyes, the gunsights
Aligned effortless in the beam of his power.
He closes his pale eyes and is easy,
Bored easy. His big limbs
Are full of easy time. He's waiting
For the chance to live, then he'll be off.
Meanwhile the fence, and the shadow-flutter
Of moving people, and the roller coaster
Roar of London surrounding, are temporary,
And cost him nothing, and he can afford
To prick his ears to all that and find nothing
As to forest. He still has the starlings
To amuse him. The scorched ancestries,
Grizzled into his back, are his royalty.
The rufous ears and neck are always ready.
He flops his heavy running paws, resplays them
On pebbles, and rests the huge engine
Of his purring head. A wolf
Dropping perfect on pebbles. For eyes
To put on a pedestal. A product
without a market.

But all the time
The awful thing is happening: the iron inheritance,
The incredible rich will, torn up
In neurotic boredom and eaten,
Now indigestible. All that restlessness
And lifting of ears, and aiming, and re-aiming
Of nose, is like a trembling
Of nervous breakdown, afflicted by voices.
Is he hearing the deer? Is he listening
To gossip of non-existent forest? Pestered
By the hour-glass panic of lemmings
Dwindling out of reach? He's run a long way
Now to find nothing and be patient.
Patience is suffocating in all those folds
Of deep fur. The fairy tales
Grow stale all around him
And go back into pebbles. His eyes
Keep telling him all this is real
And that he's a wolf--of all things
To be in the middle of London, of all
Futile, hopeless things. Do Arctics
Whisper on their wave-lengths--fantasy-draughts
Of escape and freedom? His feet,
The power-tools, lie in front of him--
He doesn't know how to use them. Sudden
Dramatic lift and re-alignment
Of his purposeful body--

the Keeper
Has come to freshen the water.


And the prodigious journeys
Are thrown down again in his
Loose heaps of rope.
The future's snapped and coiled back
Into a tangled lump, a whacking blow
That's damaged his brain. Quiet,
Amiable in his dogginess,
Disillusioned--all that preparation
Souring in his skin. His every yawn
Is another dose of poison. His every frolic
Releases a whole flood
Of new hopelessness which he then
Has to burn up in sleep. A million miles
Knotted in his paws. Ten million years
Broken between his teeth. A world
Stinking on the bone, pecked by sparrows.
He's hanging
Upside down on the wire
Of non-participation.
He's a tarot-card, and he knows it.
He can howl all night
And dawn will pick up the same card
And see him painted on it, with eyes
Like doorframes in a desert
Between nothing and nothing.

There's an interesting page on Hughes' magickal side here.


Check out his writing. Absolute genius.

Bookplate

I really like combining my pleasures (as in Shakespeare with Spanking )
So being an avid reader all my life, I couldn't resist this:



(From here via Spanking Blog )

A little something . . .

. . . from Arte BDSM.

I love the 'old comic book' look of it.



PS: (about 15 hours later)
I posted the above pic in the early hours of this morning while watching the election results come in. I was idly wandering around, looking at BDSM art, saw it, liked it, and posted it without much thought (being knackered and brain dead at the time I wasn't capable of much thought). Looking at it again today, I realise that the young lady as depicted bears a striking (pun intentional) resemblance to my good friend, the lovely Shakti Force. Oh yes, she really does look that good . . .

The Wizard

I feel a slight case of early 70's cosmic prog/rock floating it's way up into my conscious mind.

Sometimes you have to just go with it, you know how it is.

So here's the magnificent Uriah Heep and 'The Wizard'. This looks like it's from 'Top Of The Pops'

Ye Gods, those clothes!



Ahhh . . . me youth . . .

Identity and the Magickal Personality

We’ve been watching Dollhouse recently, and great fun it is, too. A fairly well-written sc-fi series about people who are ‘imprinted’ with a complete personality and sent out to do various jobs. The drama arises out of the ethical problems arising from this and the ‘dolls’ having touble with different personalities surfacing at different times. There’s also stuff about nasty corporations etc, which can only be a good thing.
OK, this is just a piece of dramatic entertainment, but it has started me thinking about identity (or identities). Most of us have a concept of the ‘real’ me, with various aspects of that trotted out at different times. So Mocuar and I are husband and wife, we’re also parents and grandparents, Master and slave etc. These multiple facets exist in one form or another for must of us, and that’s pretty much the way the world goes.
It becomes a bit more complex when we start to work on the magickal personality (MP). Googling around for a definition of the MP, I found this. It's written from a wiccan point of view but it can be applied to any belief system. This paragraph puts it accurately, I think:

It is simply the creation of an alternate personality. In some ways this is a controlled schizophrenia. There is an occult philosophy that states that we are more than just body, emotions, subconscious and conscious. They include a spiritual part of our being that exists beyond the physical plane and our own perceptions, This is called by many names including our "high self". By creating a magical personality as a psychic reality we are also giving our "high self" a tool to use to communicate with us and to function with on this plane.

The key word here is 'controlled'. The MP is something we flow into, or invoke, at will. But before we can get there, we have to set it up. The first step is to find out what we really are and want to be, or if you like, our 'true will' (That can take some time!) Then we create the MP which matches that. In practice, I've found that the more honest and aware of myself I am, the easier the MP comes into being, almost as an organic process rather than a conscious creative act. Eventually the MP assumes it's own reality, it becomes, in effect, a person who's always there, the voice of our magickal selves.
What often happens then is that there may be a disconnect between our 'ordinary' self and the MP. This is because the MP can be a real smart-arse at times, always pointing out uncomfortable truths or directing us towards courses of action which we know to be right, but we still fight them. And the the resistance to the MP is always, and I do mean always, our hangups. This is particularly true of any sex magickal stuff. The hangups are more deeply rooted. Bloody Judao-Christian 'morality'. As it says in the Book Of The Law, 'I spit on your crapulous creeds.'

So in my case, the MP is The Master. Not just a master on a purely physical/sexual sense which I'm quite happy to see as part of my 'ordinary' self, but The Master. With capital letters.
I've mentioned this before, particularly my tendency to be over-cautious. Now The Master hasn't got a cautious atom in his being. He simply doesn't give a shit. He points me towards the goal and says "just do it". And that's OK, most of the time, but I sometimes find myself having reservations and pushing him away as a result. He doesn't care. He just sits back, grins and says 'Fine, do what you want, but you'll find out, sooner or later, that I'm right' And the damned annoying thing is that it always happens that way. Whenever I've given in to my caution I've always regretted it, and whenever I've gone with The Master, it's always worked out, even the failures have resulted in me learning something important that I otherwise wouldn't have done.
Smug bastard.

Or as the Book Of The Law says:
If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought.
If Power asks why, then is Power weakness.

So who is the 'real me? My 'ordinary' self? The Master? The answer, of course, is that they both are. It's about where we place the emphasis. The ordinary me is fine for daily wear, as t'were, and as time passes there is less division between the ordinary me and The Master. So I try and ignore any resistance to The Master whenever it crops up. I find that works.
Mocuar often refers to her MP as 'being in my power'. When that happens, the different aspects of the self seem to work together, rather than being in conflict with each other. Things are cleaner, simpler and a hell of a lot more easy to do.

Many years ago, an old man I worked with once said to me "When you're old and looking back on your life, the only things you'll really regret are the things you didn't do" and he was right. Listen to that part of yourself that wants to go forward, to do the outrageous thing, to take the risk. You won't regret it.

Happy Beltane!

A little rhyme someone quoted to me some years ago:

Hip hooray, it's the first of May!
Outdoor fucking starts today!

It may be lacking in lyrical finesse but it gets high marks for spirit and enthusiasm.

Personally I always think this picture captures the spirit of Beltane:



But then again I would, think that, wouldn't I?

(I've just realised that if you click on any of the pictures here, you get a larger version.)