Chances are you already have a pretty good idea what it might be: You’re vaguely aware of what a druid is – perhaps even of the distinction between the ‘ancient and mythical’ druids of yore and the modern ‘new religious movement’ of the same name. You might have encountered some of the notions and precepts behind the practice of chaos magic (if so, I congratulate you, intrepid explorer – you’ve seen some pretty hidden corners of the inter-webs).
So how do the two combine? It may seem a little contradictory to be a druid and a chaote (or chaoist) – some of the imagery associated to chaos is pretty dark, ‘chaotic’, veering toward Satanism even – so how can one possibly be a nature-loving priest yet also a practitioner of chaos work?
Words are the true magic. They are what allow us to bring about “action at a distance” so-to-speak. You’ve seen me play with them here. I have become extremely aware of the power that lies in word choice. Choosing to construct this sentence rather than another one will have this consequence rather than the other. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to champion Form over Function, I do mean to draw your attention to both and the delicate balance that we strive to attain between them.
On June 23rd of this year, an independent artist, Ren, launched his new clothing line, “Sick Boi” with the release of a bad-ass black starter jacket embroidered with sigils that carry a strong meaning for him. While I could extol his numerous qualities as a person, this isn’t the intent of this written entry so I will resist the screaming urge to gush over this exemplary human being. Suffice it to say, he is a masterful magician (though he might not use such terms nor share my worldview) and he wields incredible power, which he has been using benevolently and generously.
The human being, Ren Eryn Gill, has for many years been battling numerous ailments and medical complications. Given this history, he has come up with the name “Sick Boi” which he’s used as a reference to himself in a few of his songs.
But here is where my worry-bells went off:
The timing of this launch is delicate, as are the choice of words. Ren is just now beginning to reap the benefits of a lengthy medical procedure, and with that renewed strength and an eye toward securing his financial future, has launched this ambitious and potentially long-lasting enterprise. I mean… Levi Strauss is a clothing line too… The name Ren chose will be around for a long time—I have every confidence in his dedication and capabilities—but that’s the very reason for my concern:
Does he want those two words to follow him around for the foreseeable future?
And here’s where the careful arts of magic must be plied: in order for those words to not stick to him like a black tar, and potentially bring more sickness or prolonged treatments for his future, he must use the very act of encapsulating those two words into a brand so to trap his ailments and keep them away from his spiritual body, much as one might imprison a malicious djinn in a mundane brass oil lamp, thus transforming the mystical into the material.
I am brought to consider a page from the magician’s grimoire concerning “True Names” and how knowing the true name of things gives us power over them. In creating this brand, and in creating fine quality clothing with a visually striking aesthetic, I feel Ren is doing several things at once : he is reclaiming his health by detaching that part of him and he is turning it into something beautiful, thereby rendering it beneficial for himself and his many, many future customers.
After all, the word “brand” does come from the ornately-wrought fire-heated poker used to uniquely identify the livestock of a given rancher. In making a clothing line, the “brand” mark will be on his products; not on himself.
It is my hope that, perhaps if he ever reads this, this post might serve as a gentle reminder and a word of caution: be mindful of the power of words. May this enterprise and label serve as a means of entrapping your ailments, of externalizing them, and if I may loosely invent a word, mundanify them. May your sicknesses forever be removed from your life so that, in growing this very cool and uniquely-styled clothing brand, you may secure a bright and joyous future for yourself and your loved ones, Ren!
Come, come in, welcome! Here, sit down by the fire. I prepared it just before you showed up, and the space has just begun to warm. Let me take that heavy cloak off your shoulders; I’ll just put it over here. There. My poor child! You’re frightened, I can see that. Yes, and hurt by what you’ve seen in the world… I can see the bruises, cuts and scrapes that the hard edges of the world have inflicted upon you. I believe you!
Well, you’re safe in here. This is your place in here. Now, tell me, why have you come here? What can I do for you?
You heard that I know things did you? Well, I am a person, yes, and people speak words. Yes, that’s true too. But you see, I only ‘know things’ if you don’t already. If everything I know, you already knew, then you would feel that I don’t know ‘that much’, that I can’t teach you ‘that much’. So let’s have a chat and find out, shall we?
What exactly is ‘religiosity’ – not the meaning of the word, but rather how does it translate into the real world? How does one ‘measure’ or even ‘detect’ religiosity in other people and from there, recognize it within ourselves?
I don’t go about my day whispering prayers under my breath. I don’t verbally or even physically ‘thank’ some spirits for this-or-that event or thing. I don’t leave offerings.
You might say I’m lacking this religiosity.
But perhaps my ‘religion’ doesn’t require such behaviours of me. Perhaps my religion dictates a normal behaviour and encourages us to see the glory in our every-day lives, not only during some dedicated ritual.
I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing to dedicate a special moment of your day or week to ‘practice your religion’ but that only doing so is to ignore the miraculous in every day life.
That being said I do notice that by not having any ‘religiousness’ in my life hasn’t led me out of the woods either. Sure, I have found that I am able to be appreciative of the various ‘ups’ we can have throughout a typical day. I have found that my ‘downs’, however, go so much further down than before. I’m cautious of those moments, and for the sake of my own sanity I only ever let myself rappel down those pits of despair as long as my rope goes, and then I climb back up as quick as I can. Them’s dangerous places they are! But my soul’s landscape is pock-marked by those holes. It is a treacherous and otherwise barren terrain. No sun sets over the horizon, from which to orient my meandering life. At those times I feel aimless and alone. It is a solitude that doesn’t hurt or sadden me so much as it echoes a gaping silence of vacuous pointlessness. That solitude comes from having broken through the veil of truth and illusion, having seen the cardboard props that scaffold what we call reality. Around me people still wear their R-Goggles and ignore this desolate landscape, happily immersed in their subjective experience. I have seen one or two other people who have their R-Goggles off their face and dangling from their necks, but… you know that masterful skill only a stressed-out waiter has of always knowing where not to look so as to avoid any chance of eye-contact? Yeah, we do that with each other. So we know that there are ‘others out there’ but every single one of us speaks a different language, and we’re all so deeply convinced that ours is the genuine truth that we all have a sneaking suspicion that the other guy may have come close, but still doesn’t quite ‘get it’ to the extent that we do. So we don’t quite talk together so much as ‘at each other’. And we part ways dissatisfied and still alone.
We write; just as I’m doing now. It’s our message in a bottle tossed from the beach of our uninhabited islands. We want nothing more than to build a community on this island, have a thriving peaceful and happy community, but we also know, having come to understand the cyclic nature of history and the deep human flaws, that were we to have a community – a ‘cult’ of followers – our community will inevitably wander astray or fuck-up in a messy scandal sometime after we’re long gone. Or perhaps if we were too trusting of our followers and revealed a little too much truth, that scandalous collapse might even occur while we’re still occupying these fleshy shells. Our name, and all the work we put in will be dragged through the mud and pulled back into the pit of forgotten saviors.
Some of us ‘do a Cypher’ and willingly plug ourselves back in, having understood the necessity of donning a subjective experience of reality. To ‘retreat from the world’ is a price too high to pay – because it was the world we sought to save that pushed us to attain enlightenment in the first place – and to fully disconnect, to leave it all behind, to detach from all that and ‘die’ is kind of defeating the purpose.
But you can view this reality as the most sublime and wondrous thing ever, you can renew your faith in humanity and launch yourself from the firm foundation of trust in sheer human capacity into full-blown Nirvana.
France just won the (soccer, for the Americans) World Cup with what was unanimously seen afterwards as a cheat move. That cheat opened the score, and began the downward spiral of the opposing team’s morale that lead to their defeat.
I looked around Twitter to see if I was the only one to feel just a little disgusted by the move and I came across one recurring opinion: the dive (the player fakes being tripped-up in order to fool the referee into calling a foul) was a strategic move. Several spectators had the opinion that this is exactly why the players take a dive, and why it works.
In French the word ‘resource’, used as a verb, means to refresh and replenish oneself, to re-source ourselves.
When we’re feeling empty, a little down-in-the-mouth, a nice long walk out amid the flora and fauna of Nature can do just the kind of re-sourcing we need, as we connect to our own source of life, the true source, and no foot rub or spa or pots of facial creams will do exactly that.
But there’s more too. The ancient Greek philosophers had a ‘school’ of philosophy that called themselves the ‘peripatetics‘ since they walked and thought, working out their philosophical reasoning as they ambled around. A bunch of ponderous old guys in white robes…. sounds pretty druidic doesn’t it? Druids were the philosophers of their tribes. They were the judges and lawmakers – and to do that you have to be a careful thinker, you have to be able to balance the scales of justice carefully.
So those of you who own a car, give it a vacation once in a while, and walk on your own two feet from time to time; you won’t regret it!
When was the last time you were deeply awed by something? How often do you let yourself be filled with gobsmacking wonder by the fact that any of this happens at all? The universe is utterly insane, completely arbitrary and there’s absolutely no reason it should happen at all except that it couldn’t have happened any other way.
This life, this universe, this whole reality is utterly absurd so why the heck do we weigh ourselves down with negativity? There are wonders out there to be experienced: wondrous people to meet, wondrous plants, landscapes and creatures to see, wonders of our own imagination, brought into the real world through wondrous technology. Life is WONDER-full – and we are wondering beings, witnessing and experiencing it all.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Jiddu Krishnamurti
If you’ve been around the less-frequented corners of the Internet and seen some of the occult pages out there, you’re bound to have seen cries of “Conspiracy!” Especially cries of conspiracy that there’s a secret war going on foryourmind. Heck, you don’t even have to go that far at all to find this kind of message. The pop culture classic (yes it is a classic now) movie The Matrix is all about those who attempt to wake people up to “the world of the real” by trying to “free your mind”.
Take a look at this wonderful post about the benefits of being out in Nature.
“A walk in nature walks the soul back home.” ~ Mary Davis One of the many perks of being owned by a canine companion who is as fabulous as she is bouncy, is the fact that she takes me out for daily walks in nature. Add to this the fact that we live in an […]
A family story goes that one day, my father, as a young freelance copywriter whose job took him to all sorts of countries for short two- to three-year stints, came back home to visit his mother. She told him she was very pleased to see him and all, but, she said, “My dear Andrew… just what is it that you do?” Every time her son came to visit, this question cropped up again. And no matter how many times my father told her, she just couldn’t retain the idea that her son wrote text (“copy”) for print and television advertisements.
Chaos Druidry 
