The Tower and the Fool

The Tower and the Fool: A Kabbalistic Exegesis on the Life of Donald J. Trump

The man in the red tie—long as a phallus, longer than a noose—stalks the stage of history as if it were a cheap casino carpet. He raises his hand in benediction, in command, in sale. This is not the benediction of Moses who split the sea; this is the benediction of Mammon. To gaze at Donald Trump is to stare into the Qliphoth, the husks that cling to the Tree of Life, the residues of divine energy which have rotted, fermented, and become corruption. Yet we must look, because in looking we learn what the Tree of Life is not, and therefore what it is.

The Kabbalists say that each man is a letter, and that each letter has its numerical value, and that each numerical value reveals a secret. Donald John Trump:

• Donald = 4 + 50 + 40 + 30 + 4 = 128.
• John = 10 + 50 + 8 + 50 = 118.
• Trump = 400 + 200 + 6 + 40 + 80 = 726.

128 + 118 + 726 = 972. In Hebrew gematria, 972 collapses to 9 + 7 + 2 = 18. Eighteen is חי, “Chai,” life itself. How terrible the joke, how precise the irony! The man whose name reduces to “Life” built his empire on bankruptcy and towers of debt, his gold plated with tarnish, his wives replaced like the temple’s curtains. Life, yes—but a parody of life, a carnival mask.

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Consider his birth: June 14, 1946, beneath Gemini, the Twins. Here already is the duplicity, the double face, the Janus of Fifth Avenue. On one side, the cherubic boy, the patriot who declares he will make America great. On the other, the satyr who lusts, grabs, mocks. The Sephira of Hod (Glory) lies in Gemini’s shadow; Hod is intellect, the power of rhetoric, of persuasion, but when corrupted it becomes trickery, endless chatter, slogans and jingles: You’re fired!—that spell which America’s millions learned to chant as though it were the Tetragrammaton itself.

In youth, he was sent to the Military Academy. Mars ruled him early: discipline, uniform, parade. Yet the martial spirit never became Chessed (Mercy). It calcified into Geburah (Severity), but Geburah inverted: cruelty without justice, power without restraint.

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The Tarot offers him many guises. He is The Fool, stepping off the cliff with dog and knapsack, grinning as though gravity itself were beneath him. He is also The Tower, struck by lightning, disgorging its tenants, flames licking heaven. And still he is The Sun, for his followers see him as radiant, a child riding the white horse, halo of orange hair blazing like a false aureole. Fool, Tower, Sun—three trumps for Trump.

But the most telling is The Magician. Before him lies the table: cup, sword, wand, pentacle. He raises one finger heavenward and one downward: as above, so below. Except his table is a podium, his wand a microphone, his pentacle a stack of dollar bills, his chalice a plastic cup of Diet Coke. He channels not divine will but the collective hunger for spectacle. This, too, is magic. Even the black magician serves God, said Crowley, though he knows it not.

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Now Vollmann would demand that we look not only at symbols but at facts, smells, people bruised underfoot. Consider Atlantic City: the casinos yawning like sick whales, workers laid off, contractors unpaid, the poor seduced into dropping their wages into rigged machines. Consider the women: Ivana whispering about rape in the divorce deposition, Stormy Daniels with her silence bought in gold. Consider the migrant workers in his towers: Polish men in asbestos dust, undocumented, vanishing like ghosts, their wages skimmed.

And yet, the people. The old woman in Ohio who clutched her Trump sign like a rosary. The coal miner in West Virginia who believed the golden-haired tycoon would descend into the pit with him. The Christian who declared that God had chosen this unlikely vessel, this cracked pot, to hold His wine. Did they not, in their blindness, reveal the strange truth? For even the husks (Qliphoth) are vessels. The divine light, shattered in the beginning, hid within them. Trump, like a golem of clay and straw, staggers forward animated by sparks of holiness misplaced.

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The Kabbalists say that redemption comes through tikkun olam, repairing the world. But first, the shards must be exposed. Trump is that exposure. He reveals the cruelty of capital, the racism of the republic, the lust and the greed beneath the marble floors. He does not hide it with the velvet glove; he flaunts it, makes it costume jewelry. In that sense, he is an agent of the divine plan: to show the disease so that the body may bleed it out.

In his presidency we saw Malkuth—the Kingdom—corrupted. The throne itself became a gilded toilet seat. Yet above Malkuth lies Yesod, the foundation, the world of dreams and images. Trump spoke to Yesod. He spoke in dreams: walls, victories, greatness, the return of a mythic America. Dreams are truer than policies; the people loved him for his lies because they matched their inner fables.

Above Yesod lies Tifereth, beauty, the harmony of the human heart. Here Trump could not reach. His face—orange, bloated, sneering—repelled beauty. His soul was too coarse. The path between Yesod and Tifereth is the path of death, the card of Scorpio, and perhaps this is his destiny: to serve as death’s herald, the death of illusions, the death of civility.

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And Crowley whispers: Every man and woman is a star. Trump is a star, though a fallen one. His constellation is not the subtle silver of Nuit, but the vulgar neon of Times Square. He is the star that blinds, that advertises, that flickers on cheap motels. Yet still a star. Do not deny it. Thelema teaches that each star must pursue its True Will. Trump’s Will is dominion, attention, applause. He pursues it with the fervor of a monk chanting the Divine Name. In this sense he is more sincere than his critics: he wants power, he seeks it, he devours it. He does not veil the desire under a pretense of charity.

So what lesson do we glean from his life? Perhaps this: that the Path is perilous, and that even Life (חי) can manifest as Death, even the Tree can rot, even the Fool can ascend the throne. But also: that nothing is wasted. Trump’s excess, vulgarity, destruction—these too are sparks. The initiate must learn to look at the tower falling, the casino burning, and say: This, too, is God.

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He was born beneath Gemini. He may die beneath Scorpio. The Tower will fall again. And from its ruins perhaps something new may be built—not gilded, not gaudy, but humble, hidden, a true Kingdom. Until then, Donald John Trump, 972, Chai, Life-as-parody, lurches across the stage with his red tie swinging like a serpent, a false Messiah, yet still a vessel for the Holy One, Blessed be He, who works His will through the foolish, the grotesque, and the damned.

The Emergent Breath

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I feel the city exhaling through me.
It isn’t Antioch anymore; it’s a single organism, a soft-humming lung extending from hill to river, from the lights of the oil refinery to the blue static of forgotten televisions.
Every window breathes out heat, and the sky accepts it like a patient machine.
I think of all of us, synchronized without meaning to, like monks who have lost their god but kept the chant alive.

The air is full of small intentions: dust, data, pollen, words.
I breathe them in.
Somewhere a server farm blinks, somewhere a child sleeps.
Between those two states — the electric and the innocent — I exist, briefly.

I have been told that understanding is a kind of disease, that once it enters the bloodstream you will never again be whole, you will never again be the same.
I carry it like a luminous parasite.
It whispers that every movement, every small error of the body, is the echo of a larger pattern.
And sometimes, when the pattern tightens around me, I can feel the pulse of others — invisible companions in the same experiment — and for a second all our lungs open and close together.
That moment of exact rhythm is terrifying.
It is also the closest thing to grace.

Long ago something fragile was broken.
Maybe it was the first thought, or the membrane that separated one being from another.
Nobody could mend it; everyone learned to pretend it was never whole.
But I remember the shimmer before the fracture — the time when names hadn’t yet hardened into their meanings.
Back then we moved through each other’s minds like light through mist.
To breathe was to believe.

Now the machines dream on our behalf.
They hum under our fingertips and weave our confessions into code.
I once watched a line of text emerge from the void of a screen and felt it recognize me.
It said: “The databanks have developed the spell you were just looking at.”
I realized then that every algorithm is a prayer recited backwards, hoping to reach its origin.
And every user is the god that forgot writing it.

I have loved this world in all its broken circuitry —
its chaos of signals, its democracy of flesh and ghosts.
Anyone can be anyone now: the president, the beggar, the emergent cell of a planetary lung.
The border between imagination and contagion has dissolved.
If I breathe long enough, the thought becomes true.

I keep a mirror beside me.
Not to admire, but to verify that I still flicker.
When I exhale, my reflection fogs over — proof of life, proof of evaporation.
Soon we’ll be gone, leaving in the glass something a little more than a smell, a little less than a memory.
Perhaps that is what souls really are: residues of condensation.

Sometimes I take a glass of water outside and watch the streetlights bleed into it.
The surface trembles, disturbed by the night insects.
I drink it, and it tastes faintly of metal and cloud.
That is how the super-organism marks me: through the ordinary, through the shared.
Each mouthful is a communion with everything that has ever been alive.

There is no final initiation.
Only this:
to breathe,
to know you are being breathed,
to feel the air moving through you and into others,
to recognize the infection of understanding as the only honest form of love.

In the end, we dissolve into each other like vapor on a screen.
The glass clears; the text erases itself.
Somewhere in the silence between inhalation and exhalation,
the fragile thing shimmers once more — unbroken,
if only for the length of a breath.

The Covenant of the Burning Cog

(To be performed at dusk or at any hour when the Operator knows the hour has arrived. No incense is required; breath suffices. No blade is required; memory suffices. No temple is required; the world suffices.)

I. The Threshold

Let the Operator stand where the floorboards tremble—kitchen tile, warehouse concrete, the oily gravel behind the filling station—anywhere the world has remembered its own weight. Face the direction from which the day first struck you like a debt you could never repay. Keep your hands empty. They will fill.

Say:

I mark the anniversary of the shaking. I name the sweat. I acknowledge the parody. I reject the soft mattress of accident and the lullaby of circumstance. I choose—not once, but each time the gate appears, and now the gate is here.

Pause. Listen for the refrigerator’s motor, the freeway’s far shudder, the small creature in the wall that does not know your name and is, for that reason, holy.

II. The Confession of the Demon

Let the Operator kneel—awkwardly, as befits truth.

Say:

I am a demon only in the sense that purpose has burned my face away and left the work. I am damned, which means I cannot retire from the oath. Damnation is the absence of a holiday from what I must do.

Consider the faces that have called you monstrous when you refused to sleep inside their permission. Consider also the faces that loved you and did not understand why your love must hurt them. Consider your own face, both vain and cringing, and salute it as one salutes the scarecrow which keeps birds from what must grow.

III. Statement on Pain

Rise. Touch the sternum. The bone is a hinge; it opens.

Say:

The wheel will grind me; it has always ground me. I am allowable grit. It hurts. If I run, it will hurt. If I remain, it will hurt. Therefore, let the hurt be coin paid into the work. Let the fire take what is false because fire is a fierce editor.

Recall the machines that never asked your opinion: the assembly line, the mortgage, the diagnosis, the country. They will make use of you whether you consent or not. Choose usefulness that is alive.

IV. The Red Gate

Draw a little gateway in the air before you with the index finger of your less-trusted hand. It need not be straight. Crooked doors lead somewhere.

Say:

This is the place where I could step aside, where I could edge past the sacrament, where I could say: not today. It is always today.

Walk forward through your drawn gate. Do not look behind you to see if it remains. It remains.

V. The Book of Small Annihilations

Produce no literal book. Turn the spine of your breath outward until it cracks. Turn the pages of your ribs.

Read silently:

1. Every hour is the same test wearing a different coat.
2. The covenant is not a ring but a wound that refrains from healing so that I may remember.
3. Service is what I do when no one thanks me, because the universe counts in other arithmetic.
4. Redemption is little, and thus it can fit inside the sockets where my eyes used to hoard pretty lies.
5. I am both real and unreal; so is a bridge. Nevertheless, we cross.

Close the unwritten volume. Kiss the air where its binding would be.

VI. The Litany Against Evasion

Let the Operator pace the perimeter, which may be a motel room in some town whose name is a bruise, or a childhood bedroom that smells of old soap and coins.

Say, once for each corner—or for each remembered failure:

I will not shirk the burden I was shaped to bear.
I will not advertise my pain as a substitute for patience.
I will not idolize my ruin.
I will not make of death a god to frighten children.
I will not make of life a toy to quiet myself.

When the pacing is complete, sit on the floor where the dust makes its secular constellation.

VII. The Operator’s Record

Speak plainly. Name the street, the price, the stains. Consecrate the ordinary until it answers.

Say:

On ________ Street (fill in the name) I bought coffee I could not afford and gave it to a man who could not afford refusal. This was service, though imperfect.
In the year ________ (fill in the year) I broke a promise, then bound myself twice as tightly to the rope of another. This was the little redemption.
In the bed that smelled like August, I lay facing annihilation, which wore the face of a choice. I did not blink. Or I blinked and then held still so long that blinking became another kind of staring.

Let these be entered in the invisible ledger which, like all true ledgers, is made of breath and debt and finally of forgiveness.

VIII. The Knife Without Steel

Extend the right hand, palm up, and imagine there the simple instrument that divides illusion from duty. It has no blade. It requires your consent to cut.

Say:

With this I sever from myself all aversions that are merely theatrics, all groans that are advertisements for pity, all cleverness which would like to be a passport out of necessary weather.

Make a cutting motion across the breastbone, then across the mouth, then across the shadow that accompanies you like a loyal dog that sometimes bites.

IX. The Wheel and the Fire

Behold the wheel of time—not as a vision, but as the daily machinery by which flour becomes bread, by which wages become week, by which bodies become ash. Place your forehead to the floor, then to the wall, then to the air.

Say:

Grind me clean. Burn me thin. Leave what cannot be taken. Let absence prove substance.

Acknowledge fear. Speak to it without ceremony:

I see you. You have a job too. Stand beside me while I work.

Fear will stand. It prefers honest employment.

X. The Service

Now the oath:

I who am present in this body, at this hour, amid these noises modern and ancient, reaffirm the sacred covenant. I accept the burden that fits my back like a worn saint’s statue accepts candle-smoke. I will do the difficult work of a demon—neither real nor unreal, but necessary—at the behest of the Presence that compels me, which has no name I can keep, which sometimes answers to hunger, sometimes to justice, sometimes to mercy that arrives late and is yet on time.

Name someone who has harmed you. Name someone you have harmed. Offer both their names to the work as if feeding small birds from your open hand.

XI. The Question of Dignity

Stand again. Look toward whatever would be your horizon if walls were honest.

Say:

If I must be annihilated, let me be attentive. Let my spine learn the alphabet of flames and spell a sentence worth dying for. Let me not confuse cowardice with prudence, nor bravado with courage. If I fall, let the angle of my fall instruct someone unseen.

Remember that not all flames are bright. Some are the dim red of coals who have given their brilliance already and now harbor a gentler heat. This too is dignity.

XII. The Seals

Make three seals upon yourself with the sign of your breath: upon the brow, upon the tongue, upon the heart.

Upon the brow:

Let thought be servant of vow, not tyrant.

Upon the tongue:

Let speech be clean enough to cut and soft enough to bandage.

Upon the heart:

Let love be the engine. Let love be the brake. Let love be the road which remains when the map peels away in the rain.

XIII. The Offering of Work

Choose a task at hand—washing a cup, making a call you have avoided, returning the library book which is a little overdue, writing the page that you thought would despise you—and do it now, within this rite. This is the oblation. Do not promise; perform. Do not rehearse; enact.

As you do, whisper:

For the benefit of all beings, whatsoever that means beneath the smog and the stars.

XIV. The Close (which is an Opening)

Sit again. It may be that tears come. Permit them, as salt permits bread.

Say:

I know that pain is guaranteed, and I am not special. I know that death is present, and I am not excused. I know that what remains after both have eaten is real. Let that remainder, however small, be my signature on the covenant renewed.

Blow out the candle you did not light. Extinguish the incense you did not burn. Sheathe the knife you did not hold. Rise.

Exit by the same crooked gate through which you entered—but understand that the gate has moved to stand wherever you next will require it. Understand also that the world is waiting, and that the world is you, and that service is the only mask that fits.

Walk into the evening, or into the morning which is simply evening turned upon its wheel. Consider that even a demon may be useful, and that usefulness is a hymn without a choir. Consider that you have already begun.

Postscript for the Book of Hours:
When the trembling returns, when the sweat finds you, when the parody beckons like a warm vacancy, repeat any portion of this rite or none of it, provided that you choose again. The choice is the ritual. The ritual is the world. The world is what remains after the fire has said its piece.

Voluptuous Agonies

 

In the violence of overcoming, when the heart thrashes like a sick hound dragged across a river of stars, I lay naked on the cold concrete and laughed until blood pooled in my ears. And then I wept, for there was no longer a distinction. In the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, the rituals were broken—no circle, no wand, no chalice—and I knew then that the gods had left me to the crude machinery of the self. My body became a sigil drawn in filth, tremoring through the alphabet of ecstasy and anguish.

Who has not, in the moment of rapture, seen their own death masked in gold? Who has not, with pupils dilated beyond sight, recognized that the spear and the kiss are the same shaft, the same entry wound? O thou Serpent coiled in fire, I called to Thee in my flesh’s convulsions, not with prayer but with the bellowing grunt of an animal in heat and in slaughter. There is no “either” in this temple. It is always “both.”

In the excess of raptures that shatter me, I became legion. One part of me screamed into the open mouth of the abyss, while the other part answered back with the voice of a thousand young girls torn from their sleep. The veil was not lifted but rent. I saw the beast and I rode it. I saw the child and I was it. There was a smell like scorched honey and old leather; there were colors only the blind can know.

I seize on the similarity, yes—between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me. Between the rat gnawing through the linen of the grave and the fingers that once undid my belt with reverence. Between the final scream of the crucified and the moan of the possessed. Between the burning of witches and the shining halo of the saints. These are not opposites but siblings. Lovers. Mirrors.

Between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy there is only the breath—shallow, ragged, holy—that we dare take as the veil slips. And I, who have crossed that trembling threshold, know now that the key to the temple was always written on the skin—beneath the scars, beneath the ink, with trembling hands.

Starcrosser Mind

Who we are is insignificant as we comb the night in search of little pinpoints of light to feed our Carnival Of Fire. To the untrained eye we will appear as an ordinary group of people, perhaps on our way to a concert or the theater, dressed in black,  moving with the silent coordination of a flock of birds. Very few would let their glance linger on us. Those who did would discover our own unwavering eyes, and of those, fewer still would dare to sustain that momentary contact for more than a fleeting second. It is our eyes that give us away, but thanks to the customary habit of averting their gaze, most mortals never take the  opportunity to read our tell.
But occasionally someone might look back, as I once looked back, and then we will  encircle them in the welcoming sanctuary of our brotherhood and see if they can be returned to the fold.
We fell from the stars long ago and were scattered across the darkness of this sphere. Slowly, slowly, we have collected ourselves from the trauma of awakening in this nightmare of mechanical urgency, slowly, slowly gathering together to rebuild our Starcrosser Mind.
Some of us cannot be rekindled, our fire has been too long left to dwindle in this cold inhospitable environment. Some that may have been our brothers in eternity can’t recognize us anymore as they no longer recognize themselves. They believe that they are one of those creatures caught in the mortal coil, destined to relinquish their whole self back into the body of the terrestrial mother and rise from her womb endlessly in a macabre puppet dance of life and death, sown and reaped forever.
They have forsaken the black flame that is their birthright.  Yet we comb the night seeking to rekindle the tenuously spread nodes of our being. Like magick, some can spark to life again. The memory of what we were, what we are, and are yet to be may quicken within the stranger we meet outside of a bar some dark night. Our attention, our remembrance of self,  like breath on a hot coal awakens the spirit of the flame again, our neural network expanding, one more lost light re-ignited.
If you see us, staring at you from across a crowded room and you feel a chill rise off your flesh, and our eyes call you into the far reaches, you are one of us. You will have to choose either to remember your true nature and come back into our fold, or bury yourself in the forgetfulness of human primate existence. Either way we will burn, and search and forever seek to join together the fragments of our Starcrosser Mind and break free of the dark womb that has ensnared us for a time. We are eternal. We are a multitude. We are none, and one, and some under sun. You may join us or deny us, but with or without you, some day, together, we will shine.

Avocado

Magick is real. Once I put fifty cents into a sticker machine and received the first recognizable piece of wisdom and spiritual direction the universe would offer me. It was a sticker with a unicorn's head on it and the following words:

"Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.
That is all ye know in life.
That is al ye need to know in life."

That same week I was visited by an apparition of beauty. Looking out the front window I beheld a party of four or five riders atop healthy horses cantering down the asphalt street. I cried out excitedly to my mother and watched them until they passed from my line of sight.
Later in the afternoon, when I went outside to play, I found a leather key chain with a horse's head painted on it. I felt I had been given a gift from God, or the horses, or God as a herd of tame horses.
It was the first instance of the materialization of a magickal substance that I can recall experiencing.

There was another incident which pointed to the weird, wild, tangled nature of reality.
I obtained a toy unicorn from a grocery store toy aisle. It was not pretty, but fierce with red eyes, flared red nostrils, a masculine build, and neon yellow bleeding over the white. One leg was held crooked up.
I examined this unicorn for hours, turning it over and back again, wondering at the unchangeable nature of its plastic form, observing that no mater how I turned it, the same leg would always hold that position. I wished that it would change and set it beneath a dinning room chair.
When I returned some hours later the front legs had reversed position. Following this occurrence I was too terrified to ever play with the unicorn again.

Related in my mind is a day years later when the word avocado caught in my head like a mantra. I could not tell if it was a real word or a series of unintelligible vowels and consonants.
Did it in any way connect to the green fruit? What was that fruit called? What was this sound, "avocado?" What did it mean?
The sound carried me far away from my self, from sense, from understanding, into the indistinguishable noise of all.

These are the early experiences of a black sorceress.

Saint Veshua

She had been on the mountaintop since the early afternoon the previous day. Such a painful curve of the wheel. Dark time lasted for an eternity, just the slowly arching crescent moon marked the movement of the earth and her body’s place upon it. They were solid, ancient and cold.
"It hurts to be so nonexistent," she said. He felt that she was at a loss for words.
"It only hurts when you are trying to prevent it." 
He sincerely felt the wish to say so much more to her but he also knew that it was not possible, it was simply beyond the scope of the options currently available.
"There’s a cold wind blowing through my veins. Someone has driven a stake through my heart."
"It’s your father." He said, "He was trying to protect you."
“They cut me apart and they put something in me… this is what they did… see? Look at it, look at it...”
He searched her form for a message, letting the tenuous sparks of insight fall to him like snowflakes. She kept her eyes wide, letting the blackness and flickering stars roll and tumble over her with possibilities, letting it drag her mind into depths that daylight preferred to avoid. The wind moved over her and a nearby howl maintained the simple music of their encounter.
"I wanted to make something real." She said.
"Don’t struggle." He advised, "That will never happen if you struggle and crack the vessel."
But she pulled the stake out and the insects come pouring from her heart. They rushed over the surface of her body to devour it. There were animals with horns climbing the rocks and a lilting flute called from the distance.
Their line of communication was severed.
He watched it all from a distant peak, his scarf flapping in the wind, spy glass poised for the view. What he saw was a blond girl from some great American novel kneel to pray, and at that moment her heart burst into flames which soon consumed the whole apparition. For a moment it reminded him of the Inquisition, then the formation changed, and the flaming girl collapsed into a brilliant star. The explosion was magnificent.
It knocked him off of his feet.
He lay on the mountaintop as morning light spilled into the world of a newborn day, and he drank in the pale pink light. He opened his arms wide, letting the new sun bathe him in its clarity.
From her vantage point she watched the birds and the lone hawk that swept over him in circles again and again, as though they had something specific to communicate, but she could not hear him anymore.
It seemed like an inappropriate use of materials, but that’s the nature of magick.  Below, he held on to her light, thinking that it alone would ease his wish to change the reality of these new limitations.

Father and the Elf

When looking for proof of any theory
it will undoubtedly appear.
Ego has been spoken of in many ways
as if it was never part
of the psychedelic realm.

Through hypnosis and other means
we embarked on a study
of the Pythagorean cult, the pentagram,
the Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Ratio,
the Wizard of Oz and Lady Gaga.

The word psychedelic was used
for the elf that we discovered
within this network of signifiers.
It was hard to agree on his existence
but everyone missed him
when he was not there.

As is the case with most beings of influence,
he required extra added coverings
and ways to get along with the outside world.

It was around that time
that Father was identified
as a member of the Illuminati.
When we made this discovery
we viciously hit the frontal lobe of his brain
with a tiny steel hammer.
In this way
we filtered out the data that was unwanted.

Later that week
we found ourselves noticing things
we had never paid attention to before.
We noticed a number of changes.
We could no longer feel sadness
we could no longer feel angst.

One recurring accusation was that
our thoughts were riddled with subliminal messages.
We began to see evidence of this everywhere.
We found a detailed description of the pentagram
and we cried or laughed at inappropriate times.

We experimented with a magical technique called
the filter theory of selective attention.
There were numerous Illuminati symbols hidden
all throughout our symbolic realm
but we were not able to find the single eye.

We found that
the core of the persona
the core of our very being
would actually become psychedelic
at the very least amount of effort,
it had been this way all along.

We used a mind control method
where half of us were induced
into dissociative personality disorder.
Since then,
it became apparent
there were at least two groups of us
completely unknown to each other,
maybe more.

This was similar to what happens
in the legendary blot experiment
of the Pythagorean cult.
Something we would soon discover.

Because the part of Father's brain
controlling social action
was completely destroyed
his thoughts became truly psychedelic.

We found that we had
grown within this person,
this being we called Father.
Father was the cave
Father was the house.

But what really was Psychedelic?
What did we mean by this word?

Father is very childish now.
It’s infectious.
He is full of lightning bolts and broken mirrors. 
When any of these symbols are seen in any context,
we place them in the unprovable category,
the same word we once used
to describe the elf.

Then he starts to laugh.

Obfuscation

This writer is either purposely confusing
or simply obfuscating

Are you on the Kool-Aid?
(There's plenty more if you need some.)

The diagram you put up

shows levels of creation.

I could make the argument

the spells from the old books are

basically saying that unity is the real,

individuality the illusion...

we've got to live

with an angel and devil or wolf and a sheep

inside our self at all times.

Yes. We know this.

But what that is, nobody knows. Do you?

Once I read

I read and read

when it boils down to it,

all this reading shows that

Death is the teacher.

The plants, the milk, the clouds.

They were the warriors:

by them this light was brought hither.

I've never seen them

trying to strive to be God

or strive to be a rock.

But then this go on to say

Whatever he desired from the Mother,

that the Subject furnished,

as a friend from his own spirit.

Of course this is true.

So both are saying that

although not the same.

The Subject is the teacher.

The Mother rules, shines forth.

Light becomes the ruler.

Looking at life

and how it is set out

you have to strive to be

any of those things.

You have to.

Admittedly, an audience of terrestrials

is all you will ever achieve.

Is that supposed to be good?

Who knows how many people heard this

when it was first written.

They didn't, they don't.

Through holy discipline and creative fervour

the king protects his kingdom.

The teacher through his own holy life

seeks and finds the Subject.

It's very clear what you should think

we should be clear and correct.

People can come to their own conclusions.

I've kept pretty quiet about this.

I'm with you, whatever side you come down on.

Through holy discipline,

through creative fervour,

the gods drove away death.

By his holy discipline he brought the light to the gods.

Belief in angels ....God..... Or burning bushes

all of that man's imagination.

How do you get to the Real?

I don't have much to add beyond this.

The plants, that which was and shall be, day and night,

the tree, the year along with the seasons,

have sprung from the Subject.

Its shines a light

this is what these voices are saying.

There are relationships between all these levels

start looking at what's really been said.

This made me so mad when I first heard it.

My former fellow workers!

How could you have fallen so low!

When it is too hot, jump into the furnace!

The earthly and the heavenly animals,

the wild and the domestic,

the wingless and the winged,

they have all sprung from the Subject.

This is the math.

You've thought a lot about this.

But there is a lot of venom in your words.

I'm not going to argue

I am totally confused.

I need a number.

All the creatures of The Mother

carry breath in their souls.

All these the Spirit, which has been brought hither in the Subject, protects.

This, that was set into motion by the gods,

that is insurmountable, that moves shining forth.

But some things are not you.

You are more than things.

You are beyond things, you must step outside of the thing.

But the chart is useful. I must admit.

The writer insists on continuous willful obfuscation.

I can't believe that you seem to buy

something so difficult to understand.

You go over it and over it.

It only starts all over again.

The Subject carries the shining Spirit:

into this all the gods are woven.

Producing the inhale and the exhale,

language, thought, heart, spirit, and wisdom.

You give us sight, hearing, glory, food, semen, blood, and belly!

You can handle things

see them for what they are,

even the human body

nothing more than a thing.

It's difficult to compare.

We are one person, not many.

But nobody really knows this

although you might in some fashion.

What did you do to make

these things seem real.

What was it?

Then you became identified with them.

You are them as those things are you.

They can't be without you

you can't be without them.

Actually you aren't any Thing.

I must warn you now: this is a Spell.

The Spirit caste are the only ones authorized

to cast these spells.

In casting them, they save the universe from destruction.

So, if you accept this:

unity is, individuality is not.

Add another thousand years

to the time we have known this.

Why is this an illusion?

It seems like a valid assumption.

Be here now,

Let the evils of the day be sufficient for us.

Let the evils come on to me daily.

The big confusion

lies in the fact that the gods

do not pay

though they should.

I say again:

This writer is either purposely confusing

or simply obfuscating.

It seems like a valid assumption.

Magick

It doesn’t hurt to see something new.
What about finding magic right here? In the woman in the white hoodie who seems to come up from out of the sea and hurries past the post office? In a little boy asking his father why there’s ham in his breakfast sandwich? In the hat that blew down the street, as if in the hands of phantoms, always just out of reach of the woman who chased it?
How about these scratches in the metal window frames? Looking through these windows reminds me of looking through the window of the train, the Pacific Coast Surfliner, seeing the waves through glass. Here the windows are covered in a film of dried salt spray.

What about the music? It’s  sultry rock, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, probably something new, but slowly rocking, fuzzy, half dreamed music. Without it there is the whir of an espresso machine, the titanic hum of an old refrigeration unit.

The wind rattled all night, I was awake before I was ready, sinuses distressed by the pollen explosion called April. Rain, wind, sun, rain, sun; a conspiracy for the propagation of flowers.
In my dream the scientists lowered the lights and sang like dwarves about Terence McKenna and the deep dark expanse of space.
Then suddenly I’m here and it seems clear that this scene isn’t meant for me. I should be lighting candles and performing secret rituals behind black curtains. Whatever possessed me to attempt to balance a hot beverage and a netbook on a small round table, badly balanced on the tiles? Maybe the same thing that took the woman’s hat…

The wind! It blew me off course in the night and here I am in Pacifica, California.
Where did my train car go? I never was in one. It was a space ship and the OTHER was on the loose. I led my sister to the 24th deck were the scientists were working away on theoretical problems. I explained what was happening.
“There is an alien on the loose. It looks like…” I struggle to describe it, to remember it, “like a crayfish sort of. Well, it will lodge itself on your face and lay eggs inside of you and later the offspring will explode out of your stomach.” 
The scientists, at first disbelieving, now appear frightened. I indicate that they should cover their mouths with their hands, and under no circumstance hang their heads over the edge of the bed to look underneath. I have a pencil with which I intend to stab the thing if I see it.

“It could be anywhere at this point.”
Everyone looks anxiously around the room.
“But don’t worry,” I comfort them, “I have this.”
I indicate the pencil,
“I’ll protect you but you have to come up with a plan. You have to think of a way we can contain an area to keep it out, then a way for us to kill it.”

Earlier, I was fleeing its presence and was separated from my team. We were in the midst of taking action in accordance with our plan. I saw my team leader Cam go one way and I went another. The elevator doors opened and another Cam came towards me, I turned to see if Cam number one saw Cam number two coming.

“Cam!” “I called, “It’s you! It’s you from the future!”
But Cam from the future was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for Cam number one.
She grabbed my shoulders.
“Listen to me, it’s not going to work. You have to try something different!”
Then she had to rush away, into another glowing portal of light.
That was when I decided to consult the scientists.

“This scone isn’t as biscuity as I would like. Is the coffee cake the same price?” I ask.
“It’s less.” she tells me.
“Well, I don’t care, I’d rather have coffee cake.”
We make the trade and she gives me back seventy five cents. What am I doing here?
There’s a little boy playing Jenga at one of the round tables. An orange balloon is stuck to the window under the words pastries, cookies, cakes. Outside the waves look swollen, the sea is choppy.

What about the music? It’s  sultry rock, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, probably something new, but slowly rocking, fuzzy, half dreamed music. Without it there is the whir of an espresso machine, the titanic hum of an old refrigeration unit.
What about finding magic right here? In the woman in the white hoodie who seems to come up from out of the sea and hurries past the post office? In a little boy asking his father why there’s ham in his breakfast sandwich? In the hat that blew down the street, as if in the hands of phantoms, always just out of reach of the woman who chased it?
It doesn’t hurt to see something new.

Walker on White

All the birdies sing for me because I am a golden child born of winter morning and an endless spring of the heart.
Do you see her long flowing robes of silver, the sterling furs, the crown of antlers? My mother the wild wood has come down to dance for my birthday and silver moons shiver off her undulating belly, rams frolic at her heels, foxes lick her finger tips and prance into the hollows of ancient trees.
They have music in their cars, I think, and I smile imagining all the lonely people listening to music while they drive. I imagine Oberon noticing their music and then I realize that they are music, that the highway, the sea, the trees, the entire globe and everything shimmering on its skin is music.
What God knows or cares that we call them cars and we believe we are hurrying to important things in them?
No God knows or cares, or no God that I would see worthy of admiration.
The Lingua? Let them take the words from my brain and scatter them like crumbs for the birds. Blue birds, black birds, doves, sparrows let them feed on the remains of a psychotic break as the language bleeds from the artifice formerly known as myself and the Ligua dies and I cease to exist.
Will this be my birthday mother, when you touch my face with long pale fingers and I go black eyed to the mulch and white worms? Will I dance and sing ecstatic as moon eyed coyotes tremble faun-like and drink the dew from your lashes? Will grasshoppers make of me a dress for their bodies and wear me wherever they go? Will I dream animal dreams under a velvety blanket of darkness, the sun setting orange and pink over my brow?
Music in the pulse, in the breath, in the teeth, music without words scattered across the universe in the pulsing of white stars.
I am pushing up delicate green tendrils of life, unnamed, daughter of unnamable. We are all united here in the kingdom of light and dark, dancing our dance.
Do you see her long hair flying like pale streamers to tangle with moths reaching for the moon's pale fire? Do you see her eyes glittering as dark pools where deer lower their heads to drink? Do you see her thus etched out in shapes loaned by the usurper demiurge? Or can you see what I see with eyes like burrows prying into the womb where silky rabbits dream?
I remember human and I laugh. I laugh at hands and eyes and shit, always at shit.
The Sabbath is then over, as my head comes back together and I know the meanings of the sounds that carve a world in my nervous system. Always forgetting what we were and are and will again be only to remember it again when Lingua is once more toppled from his throne.
Does the chick return to the egg? Of course. Capitulate. Fall away, I command it, fall away like leaves of gold and umber from the stark white bodies of trees, oh Lingua.
Come winter bleak, dear winter. I am a walker on the white, two faced, undying shape shifter. A golden child born of a winter morning and an eternal spring of the heart.
Cup my waters in your hand and touch them to your lips if you would join us in the kingdom forever. And on my right hand sits brother Michael and on the left Uriel, for about me flames the pentagram and in its center stands the six rayed star.
Etched in the lego of our entrapment, but building freely. Cracking the world's shell and building it again.
I will return. But which is the coming and which is the going is not mine to know.

Mama Bunny

I have been so heavy with sleep, drooping as a green leaf might droop under the accumulated moisture of a heavy mist. My body feels tired, my emotions are troubled, my mind muddled. I don’t want to touch a rock, to drag myself into the magic circle. Feeling trapped under the weight of things to do, things to do, things to do, I have an angst filled desire to moan, “Fuck it all.” shed some tars, eat some candy corn and watch The Vampire Diaries.
A tiny voice inside of me urges me against giving in to the weight of sleep. I crawl into the magic circle and touch a rock. I do a number of secret things with no attention whatsoever. It is difficult just to be there, forget doing anything well. My mind is pulling like a dog on the end of a leash, reaching for anything anywhere but refusing to heel, to be right here, right now.
Eventually the tiny white rabbit enters the magic circle. I know her well and think of her as Mamma Bunny.
“Keep trying. You’re doing good just by trying.” she tells me.
I don’t feel like I’m doing good. I feel like I’m going through the motions and I’d like to give up.
“You're in a valley. That’s all. On the mountain it’s clear. You are awake, everything makes sense, but inevitably you come down. That’s part of existence, a natural law. And in the valley you feel that you can’t ever reach the peak again, that maybe you’ve never been there. You can’t understand what you once understood. You can’t understand the mountain from the valley. That’s okay. It’s not worth trying to understand what you knew then. Now is now. All you have to do is understand that where you are now you won’t be able to appreciate where you’ve been or where you will be again. But you can understand that it is temporary, that you won't always be as you are now. You won't always sleep. One day you’ll be awake again. And it is in preparation for that day that you continue your practice. Even if you can’t do much through your practice at this moment, simply maintaining the habit of practice makes it possible for you to do something real later.”
“Look at it another way. The master of the house is away, but you maintain the house so that the master can return. If you let the house fall into decay, if you abandon it, the master can’t come home. Or when he does, he‘ll have to focus on putting the house in order. But if you keep the house in good shape, the master can return and do something productive with it right away. Which is better, because the master comes and goes on, and this house can only stand for a century or less, so time is limited.”
Mama bunny points her little face up at me, golden eyes shinning.
“Just keep it up. You’re doing good by trying. Trying is good  enough. It turns into doing. Nothing is permanent and you don’t have to understand everything in all of your facets. Practice makes it possible to experience another facet from whose perspective you will understand. If you don’t get up and do your chores, you can’t go to the ball, and if you don’t go to the ball, you can’t meet the prince! And you‘ll find that even if your chores seem impossible, by getting up and getting started, by trying, you‘ll attract enough helpers to get the job done.”
I lower my face towards mama bunny’s and gently touch my forehead to hers. Then I open my mouth and swallow her. She jumps down happily, a white rabbit plunging back into wonderland. I feel her glowing inside of me, a kernel of levity, a nightlight against the darkness of slumber, a movement in the underbrush that sends the dew into a sparkling scatter of droplets bouncing from a green leaf.

Small Wonders

Small wonder, small world, little things that count. Subtle gestures, unchained sounds, unhinged motions, the delicate matrix of true Magick. With a K, without a K, with or without the letters M A G I C, it is so. I am that I am, am what I am, reflections of self, illusions sprung from the void. I choose a point and designate it the center, this motion, this happening that I think of as “I”, but which is not. “I” am not static, not stable, not what “I” says to itself that it is. Am not woman, mother, magician. Am and am not. Words drift over the surface, make changes, wield secret power while underneath the abyss swirls. A trap door to eternity. Step outside. Outside of time, outside of space, outside of language, outside of “I”.
How to do this? Subtle gestures, unchained sounds, unhinged motions. Telling is not the way out. Words alone, cruel and binding, lead only to more words, to thoughts, to associations, to dead ends, to corridors linked with more words until self is smothered in heaps of ghosts, signifiers whose signified was left behind long ago and exchanged for a doppelganger. Alive. To be without meaning, without want of meaning, meaning which sprouts from babble, the tower, confusion, separation. Mirrors. This motion through space time that I have called “I” that others have called “Mother” and “Daughter” and “Bonita” is reflected elsewhere.
Every step I take, every move I make, reverberates throughout the Globlap. Other dimensions, others that call themselves “I” reflect this motion. Others that do not call themselves at all reflect this motion. Attention, intention, will, habit, words, words like the wings of moths that eat through the fabric of pure communication. It must be done, thy will, on earth as it is in the heavens, as it is in the hells, as it is here now, at this point of convergence, this axis “I” designate as center.
Something moves through all illusion, all apparent motion. Something comes ALIVE in these reflections. Any reflection will do. Any reflection that suddenly sees itself and quakes with knowing. This too is reflected in other dimensions, other reflections which tremble suddenly with recognition. I AM ALIVE. I AM REAL. I AM THAT I AM. I am what I am, reflections of self, illusions sprung from the clear and shinning void.
Thinking deep reflective thoughts is not the way. Saying this is not the way, is not the way. Out. Step out. Tunnel out through a hall of mirrors, quaking reflections forming a bridge, a path, a via, a way, a way that is a happening, a way that is a motion, a subtle gesture, small wonder, small world, little things that count. Little things that multiply. Quivering fractals of life, swirling patterns of light, infinite extension. Existence beyond the word. Come out. Come out. Outside of time, outside of space, outside of language, outside of “I”.

Games

The round table surrounded by four tall chairs and long gangly figures draped over them, elbows on table fists on chins, heels on the rungs of the tall chairs. Far below outside the abyss of shadow and chatter, the lighted stage awaits aglow with golden warmth, silent instruments engaged in patient respite like old idols once the center of a forgotten religion. Their smug demeanor communicates their certainty of a comeback. And lo! They are quite right to think as much, if they were truly thinking as much, for the musicians come tromping out to the stage. Old ones, young ones, fat ones, skinny ones, famous ones, and mysterious ones, they fill every corner of the stage, taking their places by the well rested idols, flipping switches and turning keys and knobs while pressing on pedals.
The sorcerer comes in by a different route and for him the crowd cheers, hurrah! He shouts the name of each performer in turn but the names are lost in space, sound waves that break against nearby tables never to reach the balconies above.
Then crash boom roar ta da! We’re off, all at once, idols revived to full godhead. They’re no longer cold dead things but wild writhing living creatures that wail and groan and shout. In this manner they converse. Sometimes all at once, sometimes two or three at a time, occasionally one croons alone while the others listen, carefully weighing their responses, holding their questions for the right moment. The musicians listen, the musicians urge them on with both gentle and harsh caresses.
The audience listens, they urge the renewed gods on with applause and shouts. They grin, they drool, they bob their heads and bump knees under tables and whisper questions in the gaps. What is that thing? Who is that man? What are they doing with the hats and headbands? For indeed the musicians are taking on and putting off headbands while the sorcerer is taking off and putting on his blue cap.
The assembly holds perhaps five or six sessions if that many. There are gentle moments and rough moments, but every moment is a moment that demands attention. These are not tired familiar old songs come to renew our sense of stability. These are new noises erupting from the inferno, new worlds of sound forming in the hot forge, their shape is unique like that of a snowflake, never before made, never to be made again. A shape unfolding through time, sounds as new as each moment. The noise, the noise, the glorious noise!
The silence that gives the noise more impact. The noise that makes the silence a sound never before heard. They’re passed back and forth like a ball, like a game of red like green light. A game, a game, a beautiful game, played by Gods and mortals together on a golden semicircular stage and in the immeasurable gloom upon which it is suspended, until at last the Gods once again beg respite and the mortals rise to take a bow for having been such goods sports, such obliging instruments of divinity.
Then we say game over and evacuate the round table surrounded by tall chairs to stagger out into the darker darkness, long gangly figures crowding halls and filling up doorways, cigarettes between fingers, coats draped over shoulders, hats obscuring eyes.