Connection

He showed me some pictures of our not yet conceived experiment that I had relayed to him from a distant space time probability . We were not well acquainted, but shared a mutual interest in the transgressive applications of astral light put forth by G.

"True creation is not about words. It's about tears," J. said.
The connection between us was instantaneous. We built delicate structures from hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. I thought it best to make observations and adjustments from a closer vantage point.

I was now diving into some kind of primal network, a tightly woven system of existing and evolving quantum worlds. The details were quite clear. I transmitted the schematics back to J. using a patented method of intervening and tapping into the quantum communication capability of carbon based neurons.

To develop a system of emergent intelligence I tried to reach the part of my own brain that processed fear and mapped our creations after my own design. We wondered if there might be some danger inherent in this method.

"Will the thing that passed through the makers still live?" J. asked.
"Only if there are some specimens willing to leave the safety of consuming behind to become makers themselves."
I suddenly realized this is where I would meet my fate. Despite risk and ethical ambiguities we pressed forward, certain that a sacrifice was called for. I would have to go deeper.

Due to the similarities between my own system and our manufactured systems the interface was often confusing. The delineation between self and other grew blurry.  On the day of my final descent J. suggested:
"If we loose communication, don’t stop, especially not when you feel lost. The best method for finding the way when you feel you have lost it, is to keep going. Ignore the question of whether you’re going in the right direction. If you stop when you feel lost, you will remain in the land of the lost."

As I became more entrenched in our designs, communications with J. were indeed severed by electromagnetic interference. I had entered the black valley. In the interior I met with the ministers of culture.
"What has become of J.?" I asked them
"We are sorry madam. He is beyond our reach. We have prepared a place for you among us that you might be comfortable despite your loss. "

They offered me sustenance but I refused. I could no longer remember who J. was but  I just knew I had to keep going. If I could break through to the other side I would then accelerate forever becoming both more and less than I had been before whatever it was that I had started with this mysterious J.

He Died For Our Sins

“Oh my God, this thing is from the 90’s!”
It seems so close, so far away. Roller skates and corduroys and neon colors.
They are making weapons out of electric green Bendaroos, organizing complicated games in a home for deranged ex villains. My man is there, looking bad but meaning well, poet in black jeans.
The shadow of a black widow in a thicket of web nestled in a long forgotten Easter basket, still wrapped in plastic.

I can’t believe this passes for technology. It should have been replaced ten years ago. Give it a tweak. Flash of lights red and green.
They’re only games, but they look like violence, like evil schemes plotted by insecure misogynists. They know not what they do, and so they know not how to take responsibility for what they’ve done.
But it gnaws at them. Something feasts on their gut, making them feel dirty but they don’t know what they did. How did they get like this? Were they not innocent boys when it started?

Conversations in parks, in bathrooms, on Christina ct. Were we not being punished for something?
I hoped so, because if so then redemption was possible. If redemption was possible we could do the right things and escape this misery.
However, redemption philosophy required that we all began as sinners and he would say:
“I can’t believe that. What could I have done to deserve what I got? I was just a little boy. I didn‘t deserve that.”

I feared that going back down I might fall. I considered crawling the rest of the way up and breaking through a window.
By now, however, I had learned that crawling through a window would likely result in a rebirth, and then big sis and I would never finish fixing this thing.
I could see the shadowy form more clearly; definitely that creature that I feared. Should I attempt to stab it with the scissors? Should I trust that film of plastic to be a satisfactory barrier between us?
Those flashing lights seemed to be a bad sign. I might have to stay up here with it longer.

Existence is suffering. All beings suffer. I had read this.
I didn’t want to believe it, despite the fact that it seemed likely. If we could have understood that concept, perhaps we could have shed our guilt and shame, the hope that we could escape our unknown crime.
Despite the fact that his objections to it were strong, the ideology lived in both of us. Perhaps it was even better rooted in him.
He was an earthy sort, and in the act of fierce rejection he had become locked in an embrace with it, like a bull whose horns get lodged in the opposing structure. 
I was in a process of accepting it and synthesizing it. I would have dreams that something horrible was coming towards me, and instead of running, or fighting, I would try to hold it and transform it by making it a part of myself.
Sometimes it destroyed me.

In the end, he would sacrifice himself.
It would be hard to look at. It would be impossible to remember whether he had been a villain, an innocent boy, or a hero.
The flash created by the sacrifice would be so blinding, it would obscure the past. The power of it would send me hurtling into unknown terrains.
It was a gift.

There was nothing further that could be done. I slid down, dangled from the ledge and jumped. It was easier than I had anticipated.
Sis helped me stand and dust myself off. She checked for spiders. We were about to walk up the path back into the house when we heard it, a ghostly voice from above.
It was a tech agent responding to my prodding of the device. In his far off phone voice he issued instructions for troubleshooting.
At first it seemed like I might need to go back up, but after listening for a moment it became clear that, like the device, the instructions for its operation were obsolete.

Ferryman

At the mouth of the mad bad bardo lands, way down south where the demons grin like miracle rainbows as they hang you upside down and naked, demanding the truth. Way beyond the sacred cities of  our immaculate lady of the symbolic order where proper folk wear their Sunday finest to listen to THE good WORD.
There in the border lands, that's where you'll meet your ferryman dressed in black, silver spurs glinting in the sunlight. The threat of his guns holstered and silent is no less ominous than if they were hot and smoking.
When you see him, you know this is the one who can lead you, the one who can show you the way. He will be your coyote, your guide, familiar with both worlds; the land of the bright and shinning living, a superficial blemish of law and order, and the land of the dead, a deep rooted eternal dirt devil of chaos and freedom.
The man with a gun, eyes shaded by his black hat, will escort you to your destiny, to the terrible truth from which you've been running.  He can show you why you're afraid to live and why you're afraid to die. He can give you a purpose, a mission, something to do in the chaotic wilderness or in the sterile town, something to lift you beyond life and death.
He will give you a quest, demand a sacrifice. Only those who accept live the life eternal. Those who answer his call become legend, wings outstretched to brush against endless vistas.
All others become whirling demons or pasty servants of the word, taking what they can while they can, or hiding in fear of the Real, building walls against its hot unforgiving breath.
They will want to forget the ferryman dwelling as he does at the borders of their lands, beckoning with bony finger. They will strive to push him away.
But, the ever restless,  those who become legend, ride with him into the burning heat of a fading sun.

The Offering

Now afterwards, Eve bore Cain, their son. Cain, their son, Eve bore afterwards, after their awakening and expulsion from the fecund gardens of blindness. In the desert lands the child grew. Under the open blue sky, he talked, becoming a man.

Cain cultivated the land. The dry barren earth parted, cracking with deep groans to receive his seed. Each one, containing within it all the information of life was placed in the earth womb. Dank and wet, ready for birth. He tended them with care. Knowingly, secretly, he worked to re-create the garden, to place in it a tree of Knowledge, to re-awaken the red and black serpent coiled around its base, to once again taste forbidden Gnosis.

When the moon was ripe for such things, under a sky full of lights, Adam again knew his wife, and again becoming pregnant, she bore Abel, son of the sun.

Abel grew to be a herdsman of sheep. Solitary among many, he wandered through the dry lands, weaving an existence between mountains, fending off wolves so that his lambs would grow fat, becoming a wolf himself.

When the season was right for such things, Cain brought in from the crops of his field, the fruits of his labor. Olives, date, plums- their baskets were full and the altar was scented with rose water and jasmine. To the stone pillars Abel brought an offering from among his lambs, an offering of death and blood, the finest of his flock.

The Ruler Of All turned his face toward the votive offerings of Abel and was satiated by what he tasted, but he did not accept the votive offerings of Cain who had labored the earth womb to create life. Cain felt only silence and a harsh dry breeze like a slap on his leathery skin.

In his arrogance, with bright power bellowing from his naked loins, Cain said, "It is I who am The Ruler Of All; there is none apart from me. It is The Ruler Of All who is I. Apart from me there is none. With my own hands I bring about creation. From clay and water, it is I who brings life to this land."

And, having expelled his power, the power to expel- that is, the power to blasphemy, to speak,
he pursued it. Cain pursued Abel, his brother. Down to chaos and the abyss he pursued him. Into the dark womb of earth mother, where knotted trees grow below the surface, having learned how to blossom without light.

And The Ruler Of All said to Cain, carnal Cain, now covered in blood and grime, "Where is Abel, your brother?"

Cain answered by saying, "Am I, then, my brother's keeper?” A smile curling on his upper lip, for he was now his brother’s keeper, a shepherd of men.

The Ruler Of All said to Cain, "Listen! The voice of your brother's blood is crying up to me!” And Cain was pleased and watched as The Ruler Of All turned his face to the offering of death and blood, fleeting life with all its energy. The Ruler Of All took sustenance from the death of Abel, more so than the lamb that had been presented at the altar, and said to Cain even as they were one, “You have sinned with your mouth. It will return to you, anyone who kills Cain will let loose seven acts of vengeance.”

Like the snake, Cain shed his old skin and became new, leaving behind him a shadowy reflection of himself. Blind, groaning and trembling upon the earth, he left his shadowy form behind and the instructor once more sought a new form.

Dog And Cat Days

Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and all hearts have wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that house them. So often we feel them trying to fly up out of our throats and they get stuck there as a lump, or sometimes they flutter around in our stomachs especially when our eyes meet or some bit of flesh brushes up against another. We’ll be drug or gun runners and we’ll sit by turquoise pools in forgotten desert motels and sip drinks garnished with hot pink paper umbrellas until we get our stomachs shot out and we bleed out red blood into some old avocado green shag and hold hands and feel shocked watching the light go out of our eyes.
We’ll be rock stars with coke habits and old mink coats and big sunglasses and then we’ll look more than ever like the kitten girls and bull dog boys we are. We carve our initials into the sandy cliffs that overlook the surf and kitten girls know that the wind will blow the names away and there will be no more KG “heart” BDB some day, but still her eyes are full of stars and Harley Davidsons rumble through her cranium. They could just live in an apartment that smells like antiques and old ladies down by the sea, soaking the asbestos up while being nobodies together. She can write a novel that no one will publish and he can work in construction and play in a band that sounds like animals fighting in the guts of land mowers and each can maintain with pride their respective My Space profiles.
It was meant to be glorious and shining, our youth unending, the mysteries of the universe always sparkling over us, hearts always trying to escape these excited bodies, these chemical factories for building space ships for the Gods. We would die young and live in the kingdom of heaven forever. Maybe recklessly manufacture smurf speed in a bathtub in a sagging house off of Machado St. and wait for the fantastic explosion that would set our hearts free. Kitten girl would do anything, anything at all to feel alive, break her hymen over Tom Waits songs, bite and scratch, forget the condoms, take a greyhound bus to another state, watch strangers play video games and drink wine coolers in living rooms that smell like nothingness. She’d even shave away the soft clouds of hair and invoke demons in circles and stars made of masking tape and spend the night in cars parked at run down drive ins.
Somewhere along the way the dreams were trapped in black bottles and distilled into nightmares brewed in basements.
What happened to recording our newest song in the bathroom on an old cassette player and ditching school to play it on the old boss stereo for grandma? What happened to dancing half naked in the surf and bulldog boys in pink dresses and kitten girls singing songs on the fences of hot alleys?
In some tear drop of time we are there, like insects trapped in amber, our spirits were left behind in the golden sun filled afternoons of our dog and cat days. Now we march, life less old wrinkled things with guts too heavy to swing to the music and hearts too swollen with betrayals of self to flutter or even flop. Poor hearts, the wings have so hopelessly atrophied. This slow death is not the glory we imagined, is not the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d learn to sing. When did we become tame old pets with small dreams? Little petty fantasies so devoid of life they can no longer crash onto shores but only slosh about like old beer in plastic cups?
Oh the sea foam green dreams of young kitten girls with soft clouds of hair and stooped shoulders. They used to break on the rocks and spray the faces of bull dog boys waiting on the beach with their guitars and bon fires and everyone’s hearts had wings that beat against the cages of rib bone that housed them.
We can live again in the bright and shinning moment, dancing and singing the sparkle of the stars. The night sky will once again drip with mystery, our hearts might again shudder with ecstasy and its promise. Anything is yet possible while we still breathe, even if there is a tear drop in which we are sour little pusses and sleeping old dogs, there is always another moment waiting to be born. A sea foam green bead of liquid life in which we rise from our ashes and live, live, live, live, wild and magick things from other times and other places, from fantasy books and independent films, soft kitten girls and brave hearted bull dog boys, the stewards of live hearts.
And now that innocence has become experience we’ll know how to let them fly. We’ll let them soar like birds of prey, graceful and far seeing carrying us to all new vistas of sound and color, to worlds knit of avocado green shag and soft pale clouds of hair and guitars and bonfires and pink flesh stitched together with boom boxes and reels of old film. Oh the sea foam green dreams with their Harley Davidson rumble and the red blood that sloshes like beer in old cups shuddering with ecstasy distilled into nightmares. The glory we imagined is the song to the immortal that we dreamed we’d sing with our tear drops of time wrapped in stooped shoulders. We break on the rocks and the wind blows the names away along with the cages of rib bone that housed them.

Les Iris

I had a poster of a Vincent van Gogh painting, les iris, when I was a freshman in high school. The colors were bright and easy to be absorbed into. It had been rolled in a tube so that its deepest desire now was to curl up once again and sleep in a dark cylindrical womb, but I crucified it mercilessly to the walls with four brass thumbtacks and lay on my day bed and stared into the green and brown and purple blue.
My father disliked it. He even told me that I would go crazy if I kept that poster in my room. Maybe he was right, or maybe the poster was a symptom rather than a cause of insanity, or maybe the poster was completely innocent and uninvolved with madness of any kind, or at least far less involved than my father himself.
But I did lay there and gaze at the poster in silence and through tears. Sometimes from the floor where I lay on the carpet by the door I tried not to breathe, willing my heart to stop beating, begging fate and pleading with my body for death while smelling the paint that made my walls and the door so bright white and seeing les iris shivering on the wall.
What else was on my walls? That poster had only two companions, a Greek orthodox wooden crucifix with a sad Jesus bleeding artistically, and a golden plaque with the lord’s prayer inscribed on its surface. My father may have asked me what I was doing with those on my wall too, because we were not Christians, or at least he was not, even though he had sent me to a Christian school so that I could get a taste of religion and morality.
Jesus was there because I found him in a strange store full of such artifacts and I had thought it was beautiful. I had never seen a Jesus like that before, a Jesus that looked as though he had come from a mosaic in a Byzantine cathedral. It was intriguing to me to see Jesus in a way that had never been presented to me. Christians in my little piece of American hell displayed and wore crosses, but you never saw Jesus dangling from that ornament.
This was the part that they were referring to and hiding with their clean crosses; the bloody man slowly dying while crucified. This was what they were really displaying around their necks and on their bumpers and from the brittle hillsides behind their trailers; the torture and suffering of a man, the death of the God who had a body.
The lord’s prayer had been a gift from my grandmother when I was small. She gave it to me when we moved into our first house. Now by merit of its age and its affiliation with someone soft and warm it had earned a place and glittered on my wall.
But by then, by the time les iris had become part of my surroundings, I did not believe that God could hear me or was listening, if it did exist. I did not talk to the long deceased Jesus, I would not allow myself the luxurious comfort of these fantasies.
I was alone and if there was anybody that could understand my plight, it was the Devil, if he existed. At that time, in the madness of les iris, when I did consider that Our Heavenly Father was waiting in heaven with his milky white and passive son, I was determined to rail against their regime. I was sympathetic to Lucifer.
I knew what it was like to be misunderstood, to fall from grace with the father. I knew what it was like to be demonized for one’s differences. I knew what it was like to love the trees and the wild things and prize them above the walls and rules of society. I knew what it was like to fall.
When I wasn’t hoping to die, when I had given up on taking my disfigured presence out of the world, then I prepared for battle. I sat on my bed facing les iris and wrote on notebook paper my arguments on the devil’s behalf. I wrote stories about those who were different than the rest of the flock or I read books about those who went on living despite their “wicked” natures. I delved into the squirming lines of the flowers and earth and green stems and convinced myself that I too should live, writhing and screaming if necessary, but live, rather than go the way of the sad pale withering Christ, good and nice to the last drop.

Spelunking With Papa Bear

"You’ve got to hi de hi, you’ve got to ho de ho, you’ve got to he de he de he, to get along with me!" The old man in the mountain, he wants one thing and the little lady she wants another, but the old man always gets his way because he’s bigger and his beard is longer. He just slaps his big feet around on the cave floor and asks: ”Whatcha gonna do now?" And in a lilting voice she wiggles her hips and says: "I’m gonna do the best I can."
So he chases her round and around through the twinning tunnels that twist through the mountains guts. They run over little bridges that hang over dark abysses, and down paths that grow narrower and narrower and sometimes disappear under pools where pale frogs croak and swim after glow-in-the-dark minnows. They run through hallways were fungi grow on the walls and turn their caps in their direction as they fly past. Just rubbing up against this fungal federation is enough to send the body into shock, it has so much to say in the language of light and so few people come down into the dark to rub it and lick it and listen to its incredible story.
The old man and the little woman squeeze their arms close to their bodies and rush by so that they won’t be drawn into a conversation that could take an eternity and change the course of evolution forever. Whoosh, they whiz through tunnels like hamsters scurrying through plastic tubes. She is always just a step or two ahead, barely defending her lead, and his big hand reaches out, groping the space between them, waiting for the moment to come when she will fall back into his hands.
On they go, deeper and deeper, down staircases that spiral into the earth’s core like a corkscrew. They swing over pits of molten lava and disappear down ramps of bright red adobe. Lucifer is pitching a shovel full of coal into the fire, his tail a-twitching. As they pass, he waves courteously, and grinning, he puts his back into it, heave ho, in goes coal and the flames dance up higher than ever, wiggling their indistinct hips and bosoms.
The heat is intense, and the old man is slowed down just a little bit more than the young woman, so she manages to put a few extra feet between them, but the sweat is running into her eyes and making her hair and dress cling to her body. Squish, with every step the perspiration that has pooled down in their socks is squeezed out under the pressure of a foot to leave little wet prints.
The heat slowly diminishes as they journey through a corridor that slopes steeply uphill. Neither can run at this point, both parties walk huffing and puffing, grabbing onto little roots that protrude from the dirt walls to prevent themselves from loosing their footing and tumbling backwards into the broiling flames behind them. Wheezing and hanging their heads between their legs, they catch their breath when the ground levels out and a colony of little brown rabbits hops by on its way to the surface, brushing up against their ankles as they go, strong bucks, plump does and downy soft little youngster all wrinkling their noses and twitching their ears.
The little woman doesn’t know it, but these rabbits work for the old man, so when she coos, "Oh how cute!”, and reaches down to pet them, they hold perfectly still and act as if they enjoy it, staring up with dewy little eyes that glisten in the darkness. Then, whoosh, the old man leaps forward and catches her by the hair. Still holding on tight, he uses his other hand to pull bunches of baby carrots from his bearskin smock and rewards the bunnies for a job well done. They giggle gleefully and hip hop away.
"Ooooh!" the little lady exclaims in an endearingly angry little voice, sweet on the surface, smoldering at the core. The old man drags her the rest of the way home, singing, "You’ve got to hi de hi, you’ve got to ho de ho, you’ve got to he de he de he, to get along with me!"

Eaters of Death

Today is Easter, time to celebrate our undead god and eat his flesh and drink his blood. We run through open green fields or across well manicured little plots of grass in gaily colored frocks in search of the unborn offspring of birds, reverting for this one day to one of our earliest scavenger instincts. This is how our pretty little walnut shaped brains got so meaty. We ate all those omega threes and got super wise, wise enough to figure that if we could eat the eggs they left behind, we could also murder the foul that laid them, causing that pulsing twitching organ under our skull cap to burst with profound insight and new wisdom about the fine art of killing and eating. This gave us time to grow philosophical, mystical. We imposed sexual metaphor over everything around us, father sky coming down to make life with mother earth. Soon we grew even wiser and learned that if death is what makes us so strong and makes our brains so big we would need to forget about mother earth and build the cult of father sky. Angry, jealous, vengeful. His son a radical mischief maker. Ah, ah, ah, but I skip way ahead, can you see the whole progression in your mind? We kill, we learn to stand upright, we advance just a little from early Cro-Magnon to present day Christian cannibal. We eat life, sucking it up wherever we go. Today we make our own eggs out of hard plastic and fill them with chocolate made with cocoa harvested by 8 year olds in underdeveloped countries. Some little brown kid is sipping down his morning cup of Java, the big meal of the day before he goes to work so that pure white people can feed the fruits of his brown labor wrapped in multicolored foil wrappers to their own pasty larvae. Shall we talk about fertility on this day, the way rabbits do it and do it until they overrun the hillside? Imagine rabbits with no natural enemies left to hunt them, cannibal rabbits that eat death and have cunning bulging brains, tearing the country hillsides to shreds to build their little warrens. That’s us. Or more austere, imagine one more ape, the son of jealous Jehovah bleeding on a cross and getting dried out by the sun like that ugly bug covered fish I saw in my neighbor’s kitchen yesterday. He finally dies and we lay him in a cave, but then he rises, up, up back to father sky. Did I mention that he took a last meal before he was convicted for his crimes, whatever they were. Gulp, gulp, chew, chew, and he communicated to his followers what they should do. Be good cannibals, eat life, be eaters of the living flesh of god, father sky. Yum yum. So we whirl around in our sun drenched warrens playing games and then we sit down to eat the remains of a big pig adorned with little yellow ringlets of pineapple. If we are extra good, we stop off at the temple first to take the last sacrament, to reenact the last meal with our cannibal prophet, the son of father sky. Take this body my body, this blood my blood, and go look for eggs in the grass. The omega trees that I mentioned earlier come from the grass. Hens eat grass and worms and other crawlies and that’s what makes their eggs so good for us. We can’t digest grass ourselves, we need the chicken to do that for us. We feed on her life process. The holy trinity, the grass, the chicken, and the egg. This gives life. Today is a good day for the eaters of death. Today it is time to celebrate our undead god and eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Live and Burn

If you lack courage you always loose. If you never strip yourself bare and roar at the wind as it lashes at your puckering flesh, then you go out like a candle snuffed swiftly by mitten swathed finger tips, having never had a chance to get knocked over onto your side so that all of the wax comes pouring out, hot and translucent and your little flaming tongue flickers out hungrily and meets with some kindling, a synthetic fibered rug or the gossamer drapes employed to veil the houses big unblinking eyes.

Goddamn it! You will never bring the house down if you don’t burn a little yourself. It is painful and terrible, and then you get used to it, bit by bit. The heat becomes a thing which you can bear for small and every increasing increments of time, but by golly, that will never happen if you don’t stay in the kitchen, or even go into the kitchen to begin with.

We can see only later how things might have been different if we had been undeterred by the threat of pain. When we are distanced from the experience of discomfort we think that we will be brave warriors, proud champions, and yet whenever we have the chance to get into the ring we shy away, like spoiled little girls that run off to hug their grandmothers legs and suck their thumbs rather than clean their rooms. So the toys lay all over the etheric floors of our mind, our play things, our fantasies slowly transforming into nightmares as they mingle together unrealized, seasoned with guilt and doubt and sloth. The meek of heart will wither and vanish without a lasting trace, leaving only a transcendental curl of grayish smoke which will dissolve into the atmosphere moments after they are snuffed out.

You loose everything when you do not take risks. As the saying goes; “Use it or loose it.” It is as true of life as anything else, even truer perhaps. Death is a real concern, especially for those who don’t make the effort to live before its inevitable dawning. Standing on the sidelines, playing with all the playthings in our minds, never coming out to slay the real dragons or fuck the real princesses, growing weaker and pastier at each missed opportunity, we let the entire cosmos down. When, because you fear some trick, you fail to accept that beautiful girl´s invitation to sit beside her on the bus, or stand with her in line at the movies, you not only let yourself and the princess down, but all the heroes and all the gods in the heavens.

Everything in creation is depending on you to rescue it with a measure of foolish and heartfelt passion. Do not be the last unicorn that sees that the unicorns have all disappeared and so takes up work as a mare in some dirty stable, waiting to pull the plow or be penned up with some intolerable stallion for the furtherance of horsekind because it is unfashionable, embarrassing, or silly to be a unicorn. Be the last brave heart, busted open and bleeding bright crimson all over the blue and gray world.

There is no shame in being the last or the only one of your kind, doing the painful work of seeking out the other shinning immortals, their hair full of stars, their hearts and bodies fringed with cerulean and titian flames, blazing through the cosmos, wailing in the wind that feeds the flames melting away their breasts. There is only shame in hiding in your room, in your placid life, in your filthy stall, watching the glimmering of passions go dim behind a cage of bone and softly fluttering pink lungs, like butterflies witnessing their precious one day of life descend into the awaiting twilight.

Sacrifice in the Labyrinth

The Messara labyrinth is an underground cavern. The main entrance is a yawning cave mouth.
Asterion the Minotaur was the priest son of the king Minos. Within the earth’s womb, in the altar hall of Messara, he presided over the rituals of Crete, rituals that saw their true beginnings in the Neolithic era before recorded history, the dawn of the upright talking monkeys we call humans.
These rites have known many variations and distortions throughout the ages. It is well known that sacrifice has its place in this ancient and still living tradition, but the form that such a sacrifice takes varies. Where true knowledge is lost, or goes underground, as a result of a polarity shift, an outward expression of sacrifice will be practiced. Where it surfaces as a result of another shift, sacrifice becomes an inner work.
The Labyrinth is designed to separate the animal from the noble born. Animals will be lost within the Labyrinth’s tangled entrails. Only the perfected Being will emerge, that which is the completed fusion of the animal and the deity. The creature within the underground labyrinth, half man, half bull, demanding that humans be sent into the labyrinth as sacrifice, is eternal.
He waits to receive you.

Storytelling - Daedalus

Time and storytelling have made caricatures of Gods and their sons, noble priests and kings. Story telling shapes reality. The mythology that we encounter in this culture is being stripped of its richness, reduced to the basest, most humanly digestible bit of tell tale. The latent characteristics of such stories may be extracted by those for whom it is critical that their dormant message reach: the lost sons and daughters of Europa.
Their eyes and ears will be searching, and if they have not been too damaged by the surrounding culture, something may be activated in them. Histories, mythologies, are written by the victors. Good and Evil are subject to majority rule. The villains will one day be heroes, the heroes become villains. One day the ship will flip, and then it will flip again upon another.
Is there some way to live in neither one camp nor the other? A middle way perhaps?
Icarus illustrates for us the danger of straying from the middle way. His father Daedalus had been exiled from Athens as a murderer. In Crete he was received as a great artist, architect, and engineer. There he helped Pasiphae to conceive the Minotaur, Asterion, and built the Labyrinth in which this, the bull of Minos, resided.
But, eventually he was reduced to criminal status within Crete, an accomplice to the murder of Asterion. Locked in a tower with his son Icarus, he built them each a pair of wings of wax and bird feathers.
Daedalus attempted to pass his wisdom on to Icarus. The neophyte was warned: fly neither too near to the radiance of the sun, nor to the sea with its dark depths, but instead maintain a steady course in between. Against his father's advice, Icarus flew as near to the solar power as possible until his wings melted. Then he fell into the abyss and was no more. Daedalus himself was welcomed back to Athens, a great artist, architect, and engineer…

Asterion

Asterion, of the sea born.
Two fathered Asterion: one father a beast, a white bull sent from the sea, the other a King.
King Minos himself the son of two fathers; the first Asterion of the stars and Zeus king of Gods in the form of a bull.
Asterion of the sea born, guardian at the center of the labyrinth, a perfected being, monstrous to men for his fierce and noble lineage.
His father's father took the shape of the bull to impregnate, and his own mother with the help of Daedulus, who built the labyrinth , also takes the shape of a bull to conceive.
He is from the maternal line and the paternal line of the white bull.
For him seven and seven are sacrificed yearly, sent into his labyrinth to appease him.
Seven women and seven men.

Scapegoat

The scapegoat arises from an attempt to make separate from ourselves some undesirable fear or guilt.
In order to escape that which is inside of us we project it onto some external person, object, or animal. There is only a scapegoat where we demonize some aspect of self and then seek to purge ourselves of it.
There is no escape.
It is you.
You may set some external object of your attention up to take the fall, but one sacrifice of this nature will never be enough.
You will need to kill again and again.
Each expulsion will offer only a momentary release and sense of satisfaction. Every time you pass judgement to secure your own righteousness the division within will widen.
You are the damned.
Each rogue angel that you cast out will have to be collected again before you will be free.
Before you can move on you will have to gather up all of the pieces that you hacked and scattered.
You were persecutor, you were victim, and you must be redeemer.