What has been termed The Way of the Rounwytha is locally referred to as the Camlad Rouning [1], or simply and most often as The Rouning, with those of this way known as Rounwytha. It is an aural pagan tradition found in a few rural areas of South Shropshire and Herefordshire together with a few enclaves in the marches areas of Sir Faesyfed and Sir Drefaldwyn. According to the few extant adherents of this tradition, the numbers of people involved were never large – rarely exceeding a dozen people at any one time – with the tradition itself being an hereditary one, passed down from one person to another, often within the same family; and with this tradition said to be so old there are no stories relating to such events, although the consensus is it certainly pre-dates the arrival of the faith and the folk of ‘the risen crist’.
This aural tradition is of ‘pagan things and pagan ways’ [2] and was primarily a tradition of women-folk who were for the most part either reclusive individuals or who lived in small cottages or on small farms with their ‘extended’ families.[3]
The Rouning tradition was and is one centred on certain gifts, certain skills, and is distinct in many ways, for instance:
i) There are no named deities or divinities or ‘spirits’. No ‘gods’, no ‘goddess’. No demons.
ii) There are no spells or conjurations or spoken charms or curses; no ‘secret scripts’ and no ‘secret teachings’; indeed no teachings at all.
iii) There are no ‘secret book(s)’ or manuscripts; indeed, there are no writings.
iv) There are no ritual or Occult or ‘wiccan’ or ‘satanist’ elements at all.
v) There is no calendar, as calendars are usually understood, and thus no set dates/times for festivities or commemorations.
vi) There are no oaths made, no pledges written or said.
vii) There is no organization, no dogma, no codification of beliefs, no leader(s), no hierarchy, and no stages or grades of ‘attainment’.
Four other distinctive features of this Way are perhaps worthy of note: (α) that there is no interest in, no concern with, matters beyond one’s family, one’s local area of dwelling, and beyond such problems of one’s neighbours that they personally bring to one’s attention because they may require some help or assistance; (β) that it is rooted in and nourished by a specific rural Marcher area of a specific country and cannot easily be transplanted elsewhere, as it most certainly cannot live – be lived – in any urban area; (γ) that men are the exception, women the rule; and (δ) that there is no conformity to conventional social/moral rôles but rather certain accepted practices.
(α) means that the external world beyond such boundaries is unremarked upon because there is little or no interest in it, certainly no desire to acquire ‘news’ concerning it, and certainly no desire, no need, to become ‘involved in changing it’. It also means that there is no desire, no need, to ‘expand the tradition’, to recruit people elsewhere, with ‘new recruits’ thus being rare (a few per generation) and for the most part family members or locals or some acquired and trusted friend. (β) means that no transplantation elsewhere, of the traditional way, is saught or desired, and that if anyone do leave the area, their heart, their being is always there within the old Rounwytha boundaries with them unhappy, lost, unless until they find a similar place to dwell. (γ) means that the few men involved tend to be of a certain nature; possessed of a particular and sensitive/artistic character. (δ) means that women often tend to run/govern/provide for the family/farm; that relationships between two women – and between siblings and cousins – are not unusual, and if and when they occur are not condemned and are not even remarked upon; and that there was/is no distinction of social class between those ‘of the gift’.
The Gift of The Rounwytha
The main gift of a Rounwytha – what makes and marks a Rounwytha – is a particular and a natural sensitivity: to human beings, to Nature (and especially the land, the weather), to living-beings (especially animals) and to the heaven/Cosmos. A wordless, conceptless, feeling of connexions, and of the natural balance that we mortals, being unwise, have such a tendency to upset. An intuitive knowing of the wisdom of a natural propitiation: of us as mortals as living, as being balanced, between the earth and the heavens and thus not being separate from Nature. This is the knowing of such balance being necessary for good fortune, for good health, for good crops, and – importantly – of being natural and necessary for our immediate family and the extended family of our friends and neighbours who accept us as we are and thus are well-disposed toward us.
This is the gift of knowing that some deeds be unwise because they upset the natural and very delicate balance that exists between us, our locality, our community, and Nature. This is the ancient knowing that pre-dates the separation of us – as an individual with individual desires, a name, and goals – from our dwelling with Nature. This is the knowing that the very land, as we ourselves, is alive, part of us and aware of us, affected by us: sleeping, dreaming, wakeful, joyful, sad, sick, hopeful, recovering, needful, just-being. That this living – of theirs, of that special unhuman kind – can aid or harm us, and (despite what many moderns have come to believe) is not composed of ‘named’ individual, characterful, spirits, or ‘demons’, or governed by some god or goddess, or whatever, whose ‘names’ we should or must know in order to ‘control’ them or ‘propitiate’ them or whatever.
Rather, there is a way of living, by the Rounwytha few, which balances, which makes/resumes/re-establishes the necessary fluxion of that-which-is through we-who-so-dwell-here, and thus which is/who are or who become the balance and so can pass that gift to aid, to heal, to mend, or possibly to harm what might so need such harm.
For this is the way – the gift – of also knowing the nature of the rotten: human, animal, land. Of the need, sometimes, to cleanse, perchance to cull. As when there was the knowing that a certain individual doing a certain deed was bad, rotten – and not because they had offended some named and powerful god or goddess, and not because such a deed contravened some law or decree said to be divinely inspired or laid down by some sovereign or by someone who claimed authority from some god or gods or ‘government’, but because such a deed signed that person as rotten, and who thus, like a rotten piece of meat eaten, might or most probably would cause sickness, or spread disease, among us, among the land. Hence why their removal – by exile or by cull – would end (cure) the sickness, restore the balance their rotten deeds and they themselves had caused to be upset, restoring thus the natural flow, and gifts, of Life: of health, fecundity, happiness, good fortune.
The Learning of a Rounwytha
The traditional learning of a young Rounwytha was simple; direct and personal. There was the knowledge aurally acquired quite young from an older Rounwytha – a mother or grandmother perhaps – concerning such obvious things as plants and herbs, cures for ailments, human and animal.
Then there was the wordless learning, the gift either acquired or (more usually) nurtured when somewhat older, by the two simple tasks. The first of which was to spend two whole seasons alone, in woods or hills: to learn to see, to hear, to listen, to sense earth below, sky above, and so be, become, quiet, nurturing, and still. The second, and later and last and when adjudged the season was aright, to spend one whole lunar month alone in some cave or cavern, with only candles or a lantern for light, little or nothing to do, with such meagre food and water as required regularly left by a trusted friend who you would have to trust to enter and bring you out at this last learning’s lunar end, more or less for weather permits a few days either end.
Three Recent Examples
One aural recalling, recounted, and written here:
The first Rounwytha met was, in the late nineteen-seventies, in her eighth decade of mortal life, who lived alone not that far as the Raven flies from the Long Mynd in a small cottage set in a hollow with a small stream nearby and who owned some acres of the land around. She kept some chickens, geese, and cows, living mostly in one room in the cottage whose effective heating was from a range at one end of the room and on which she did what little cooking she did, mostly stews. No electricity, and neither did she need nor want any. Her only concession a cold water tap, installed only because her hand-pumped nearby well had finally gone beyond repair. In those days, a few local and mostly older people still on occasion sought her advice, bringing simple gifts in payment; a few candles, a bar of soap, perhaps the luxury of tea. Once a fortnight, more or less, and in her well-worn clothes, she might have to trundle along the lane, mostly walking beside her old rusty bicycle whose tattered baskets, front and rear, would convey her few purchases back from that nearest village store. And when as might be in Winter needed, a farmer red of face and about her age might bring her some bails of hay. No one knew why, or if they did they would not say, but I suspect it might recall some aspect of her youth as when, fair and comely, she did (as gossip so related down the pub) for several minutes paralyse a young man who had annoyed her, just by staring at him.
The second meet, also in those late seventies times: a young woman, home-schooled, quiet but giggly, dwelling with her grandmother not that far from where an edge of Wenlock Edge ended to potter down to level to seep to be land that came to edge a certain river. Not that tidy of hair, body, dress, but pretty still, she would spend some hours some days a-cleaning; walking narrow lanes upward to where that surfeit of houses grew, plentiful with shops, bedevilled by cars. So she would, in several houses, clean, and well, with mood mostly cheery, such few lapses of no account. For she had this gift, this skill, you see as when that frail almost bed-bound lady whose house was one she cleaned would sit before her and she would pass her hands around, above, the knees, not touching, and the elder – happy, smiling – would walk away, no pain for weeks to come. Once and long ago, or so that story go, when young some village boys tried to taunt her for her dress and manner, she thumped them all so hard neither they, nor any, ever dared, again.
The third, some thirty years later, more or less. A married women – broad, strong – and two young children, who ran farm with husband; eighty ancestral acres some would say though no one knew for sure. Mostly diary, but some beef. And chickens, a few pigs, three dogs, horses, and that motley barnful gaggle: gently-fiercely (and mostly) rat-killing cats, though two were rather lazy. She herself, that lady, slow of walk, and slow to smile but when she did it was as if the Sun had broke that gloom of day. She just had this way, with animals and men, you see; no words needed, required. She felt good, calming, just to be near; but no desire there within as men know and so need desire, at least while sap be rising and they winnowing with the wind. So sometimes the few who knew and, being trusted, might bring to her some life sick, injured, or which ailed. Child, pet, animal of house, field, barn, farm, it made no difference. She saying nothing, only smiling, touching, was left some gift. Often – and enough – the ailing, or that sickness, left; and if – when – not, the bringers cast no hurt nor blame for that was just the way they knew it was. That ring of gifts, given, taken, reaped, harvested, sown. Buried, born, and grown.
One interesting thing – possibly – is all that three could not drive a motor vehicle, and did not want to. One, possibly because in her youth they were new fangled, unreliable, things; and a horse and cart did all was needed, and better. Another, possibly because she loved horses, owned horses, and people came to her. The third, because ‘they confused her’, she felt uncomfortable shut away, moving so unnaturally fast; no sky above, no trees, no bush nor field around; no earth to touch with feet still often blessed by being bare…
Perhaps I in person might add a fourth. A rather wealthy lady of a quite large house of well-established many-acred gardens. Musical, patroness of the Arts, graduate of a certain ancient English university, who had some second house in Shrewsbury. She also – as her daughter – so many locals came to for assistance, help, advice…
No Deities, No Calendar
Since there are/were no deities, and nothing was named, there were no ceremonies needed to evoke/invoke/pray-to or feast/remember them and no ‘special days’ to do these and similar silly things.
But one duty which some Rounwytha-kind sometimes undertook was to suggest when certain celebrations or commemorations or tasks might propitiously take place. For example, a good period to sow crops; a good day to celebrate a successful gathering-in; a good – a needed – season to sow some human gift of blood.
There was no given, static, calendar – solar or lunar – to guide the Rounwytha about the onset of such occasions. No division of life into years, months, weeks, or even days of fixed number of hours. No calculations. No ‘astronomically aligned stones’; no sacred knowledge.
The day began at Dawn; night began at dusk and ended at Dawn. There was no ‘week’ since there were no ‘special days ‘ – such as a Sunday – to be reckoned and no given, set aside, ‘days of rest’. Work was done until it was completed, or daylight ended and then begun again next daylight, weather permitting. There were no months; just the flow, the changing, of seasons. A time to sow; a time to nurture; a time to reap. A time when animals might need fodder and when they might again have fresh grass in pasture or meadow. A time for living, to rest, to work, to sleep, to smile, to breed to laugh to die.
Those still part of the land know that what in northern climes is called Spring does not begin on what has been termed the Spring Equinox nor on any specific day, whether that day be marked by some fixed calendar, solar or lunar. Instead, the arrival of Spring is a flow that occurs over a number of days – sometimes a week or two weeks or more – and which days are marked by the changes in the land, the fields, the air, and by the behaviour of wildlife, birds, and insects. This arrival varies from year to year and from location to location, and usually now occurs, in the land of England, from what the solar calendar now in common use names late February to what the same calender names early or even middle March. Thus someone who knows their locality – who belongs to it – will know and feel the changes which occur in Nature during the season when the days are becoming longer and the weather somewhat warmer with the Sun rising higher in the sky in relation to Winter. They will thus know, will feel, will sense, when the occasion – the time – is right to do certain things, such as planting.
Furthermore, for such people, mid-Summer (and especially the sunrise on some particular day) is irrelevant. What is relevant is the work, the tasks to do, the life to lead, and the coming Autumn, which again will be sensed, known, and which again will vary from year to year and locality to locality; and while this onset of Autumn might be indicated – intimated – by the appearance in the night sky of certain stars, such as the evening rising of the bright star Sirius, that was all they were and are: intimations; one sign among many.
In terms of unfixed celebrations, consider, for example, the ancient celebration – the gathering, remembrance, and Autumnal feast – that the Rounwytha tradition simply called The Gathering. This also varied from year to year and from locality to locality, its occurrence determined by when what had to be gathered-in and prepared and stored in readiness for the coming days of Winter had been gathered-in and prepared and stored. The day of its occurring being to some extent dependant on the weather, on the health and time and numbers of those so gathering in the harvest and storing produce, and on such important matters as what crops were grown, what fruits were available, what livestock were kept, and what fuels were available ready to be stored for the needed fires of the coming colder season.
Hence the date of The Gathering would vary from year to year and locality to locality, and sometimes be toward what is now termed October and sometimes toward the end of what is now termed September, or somewhere inbetween. On the day of The Gathering there would probably be a feast – a celebration of the bounty which Nature, the earth and the heavens, had provided – and also and importantly a remembering; a remembering of those no longer there as they had been the previous year (and not there for whatever reason, such as death from illness or old age) and a remembering of those long-departed, such as one’s own ancestors. Thus there was, as with most such celebrations, a natural balance born from remembrance and respect for the past and from hope and anticipation; here, hope and anticipation of the new warmer fertile seasons to arrive after the coming darkness of what would most probably be another bleak cold and dark season of snow, frost, and ice. For The Gathering also heralded that season when some form of almost daily heating in family dwellings would most probably be required.
As for a communal or family bonfire, it was simply practical, not symbolic, of whatever. Just a cheery presence (most people in northern climes love a good bonfire), a focus for the celebration (and such dancing as invariably occurred during such pagan festivities), a source of warmth and light, and a place where offerings of harvested produce and other gifts could be placed, such offerings and such gifts – as was a common folk tradition throughout the world – being to ancestors, to land and sky, as well as to the always unnamed spirits, sprites, and perhaps those unnamed guardians of sacred natural places.
The Rounwytha Way
It will possibly thus be understood that the old Rounwytha way was a way of living, an attitude to life; a manner of doing things, and of not doing certain other things. Their measuring of the changes around them, in them, in other life, was in terms of fluxions, of how living things slowly flux in their own way from birth toward dying. Thus, for the Rounwytha, their life would not be apportioned out in years, but by how many Summers they had seen; how many Gatherings they could remember.
And yet, even now, this olden way wyrdfully, of necessity, lives on. In a few.
[ A Camlad Rounerer ]
[1] The spelling of such dialect words as rouning, rounwytha, and so on, is an approximation based on what they sound like when spoken. Since the tradition was and is an aural one, there are no writings, with many adherents – even in recent memory – being unable (or unwilling to learn) to read and write.
[2] Pagan in both the historical sense of that term and in the later usage of that term: paganus, someone who belongs to a rural community and whose traditions, ethos, and ways, are not those of the religion of ‘the risen crist’.
[3] Although the Camlad rounerers were incorporated into the ONA/O9A in the early nineteen-seventies, this was ‘in name only’, for they maintained their independent and reclusive existence. However, today [2011] the few extant traditional members are no longer a part of the ONA.
Image credit: The Secret Joy, a painting by Richard Moult
AoB
Alchemical Seasons and The Fluxions of Time
Introduction
Most of the following axioms and brief elucidations form part of the Camlad aural tradition that was, some forty years ago, incorporated into the esoteric association The Order of Nine Angles. The remainder are my own elucidations and development of the tradition, with some of these elucidations of mine using the terminology and ontology of causal, acausal, and nexions. [1]
In the text Auf dem Wasser zu singen: Yet Another Interview with Anton Long – first distributed 114yf/2003eh – I briefly mentioned alchemical seasons in reply to a question asked of me:
“An alchemical season is a natural process which occurs in Nature, and also in we ourselves, who are beings of Nature. They are Change; a natural dialectic… There are also, of course, Cosmic alchemical seasons, some of which we know – in terms of their beginnings and their ending – by various observed astronomical events, often relating to star or planetary alignments…”
Both before and after the distribution of that text – as now, and especially since the publication of Naos in 1989 ce – there was and is much speculation about, and some misunderstandings concerning. alchemical seasons; speculation and misunderstandings which this new text should go some way toward dispelling.
The particular/peculiar numbered layout of the axioms and elucidations in this text is my own, and which layout is much less formal in the section concerning Alchemical Seasons, since there I have often simply recounted or retold the aural tradition itself. The particular/peculiar numbered layout was originally employed by me, decades ago, as a personal aide-mémoire.
I have included an un-numbered section of my own devising which gives some explanation of alchemical seasons.
It should be noted that by alchemical here is meant the esoteric science associated with azoth and other such esoteric ‘things’. This is the science of the changing/alteration/understanding of living beings, and other substances, by a symbiosis/interaction between alchemist and such beings/substances. Which is ‘the forbidden alchemy’ of some Occult traditions, and which type of alchemy, and such symbiosis, has been the subject of, or mentioned in, several ONA MSS during the past forty years. For instance:
” The secret of the Magus/Mousa who lies beyond the Grade of Master/LadyMaster is a simple unity of two common things. This unity is greater than but built upon the double pelican being inward yet like the stage of Sol, outward though in a lesser degree. Here is the living water, azoth, which falls upon Earth nurturing it, and from which the seed flowers brighter than the sun. The flower, properly prepared, splits the Heavens – it is the great elixir which comes from this which when taken into the body dissolves both Sol and Luna bringing Exaltation. Whomever takes this Elixir will live immortal among the fiery stars…”
Which in essence means that “from the double pelican comes Azoth”.
One particular example of such a symbiosis – of such alchemy – is the esoteric ‘perfume’ Petriochor [qv. Sinister Tradition – Further Notes published in Fenrir Vol.3 #2]. The production of this ‘perfume’ during a particular alchemical season is difficult, and takes a certain duration of causal Time, but what imbues the final product, after distillation, with esoteric worth – with acausal energy/the sinisterly-numinous – is the interaction/symbiosis that occurs between the alchemist and the substances, and which substances are all part of the living being that is Nature..
Time
1. Time is Numinous [2] – that is, of living beings, and thus biological not linear (of-causality). Therefore Time cannot be re-presented or measured by a fixed causal calendar, solar, lunar, or otherwise.
1.1 Thus, Time varies according to Physis. That is, varies according to the nature, the character, of the living entity that manifests – presences – it.
2. There are a variety of different species of Time.
2.1 Thus, our species of Time differs from that of the other living entities/beings/emanations, Earth-dwelling or otherwise.
3. Time is a Fluxion [3]. That is, Time is already inherent in living beings, part of their physis.
3.1 Each living being has a Fluxion appropriate to – which re-presents/manifests/presences – its physis and thus which is appropriate to/manifests its type/species of life.
3.1.1 Thus, linear time – as measured by a fixed causal calendar and/or as defined by such things as the ratio of distance and velocity of a physical object – is Appearance/Abstraction not Reality.
3.1.2 Such linear time thus re-presents only the causal physis/nature of material objects/matter and thus manifests the physis/nature of the causal.
3.2 A Fluxion manifests what is a-causal. That is, how a particular living being changes/develops/manifests.
3.2.1 A Fluxion has an outer (exoteric) appearance and an inner (esoteric) nature/physis.
3.2.1.1 The outer appearance is how the being is perceived to change/develop/grow/decay.
3.2.1.2 The inner nature is how the being may, might, or could, change/develop/grow/decay by the use of traditional/esoteric/alchemical arts/skills.
3.2.1.2.1 A knowing of this inner nature is a gift of the Rounwytha.
3.2.1.2.1.1 This gift can be cultivated by the development and use of esoteric-empathy.
3.3 Since Time is a Fluxion, and alchemical, a Rounwytha may be able to alter/change/manipulate/weave Time.
Alchemical Seasons
4. An Alchemical Season is a means of measuring/determining/knowing fluxions, and thus a means of knowing living beings and how they change or could be changed.
5.1 Thus, an Alchemical Season is often what is the best/appropriate ‘season’ to know/get-to-know/celebrate particular emanations presenced to us as living beings, or particular collocations of such beings, and/or the ‘season’ to initiate a particular change or changes.
6. This ‘season’ varies according to the nature/species/type of being/living-entity/emanation, and often differs from individual emanation to individual emanation of each type/species.
7. Knowledge of Alchemical Seasons is both traditional/aural and found/discovered by each Rounwytha.
8.1 It is for each Rounwytha to determine the veracity or otherwise of such aural tradition by their own personal knowing.
9.1.1 This knowing derives from esoteric-empathy.
10. One such collocation of emanations/living-beings is Nature.
10.1 This particular collocation contains a wide variety of types of being.
11. Another such collocation of emanations is the Cosmos.
11.1 This particular collocation contains entities/life having acausal emanations/acausal-being, entities having causal-acausal emanations/being, and entities manifesting causal emanations (a causal-being).
11.1.2 Acausal-causal beings/emanations are nexions between causal and acausal.
12. The beginning and the ending of certain Alchemical Seasons are often associated with, or intimated by, certain observed natural or cosmic phenomena.
12.1 These associations and intimations are often locale-dependant and usually subject to Cosmic and Aeonic drift.
12.2 Such observed phenomena include those connected with Nature and those connected with ‘heavenly bodies’, that is, with the Cosmos.
12.2.1 Those connected with Nature include the behaviour of Earth-dwelling living beings, sentient and otherwise; the fluxion of Nature’s seasons, and certain patterns of or certain phenomenon of ‘the weather’.
12.2.2 Those connected with the Cosmos include the observed rhythm of star-collocations (constellations); the occultation of Sun by Moon, and of certain stars by Moon; the observed rhythm of observable planets; and the first rising of certain stars above the horizon of the Rounwytha as determined by the fluxion of Nature’s seasons.
12.3 Such associations with observed natural or cosmic phenomena do not mean or imply that such phenomena cause or are the origin of the changes, the fluxion, of living-beings.
12.4 Associations/intimations connected with Nature are sometimes known as Earth Tides.
12.4.1 Associations/intimations connected with the Cosmos are sometimes known as Cosmic Tides.
13. Certain Alchemical Seasons form the natural calendar used by the Rounwytha.
The Nature of Alchemical Seasons
It will be thus be seen that Alchemical Seasons are of various kinds, and serve or may serve different functions.
For instance, certain Alchemical Seasons are and were how the Rounwytha determined – knew and understood – the changes of Life around them. That is, how they reckoned Time, and the fluxions of Time that were made manifest as living beings – for instance, the life, the ailing, the foreseeing of death, of humans; and the natural rhythms of Nature and the Cosmos.
This knowing ‘of propitious times’ aided, and often enabled, their sorcery; their use and manipulation of certain energies – emanations, or fluxions – for a variety of purposes, as it also enabled them to use their skills in respect of such matters as ailments and their cures.
For example:
” A certain knowledge of herbs was/is a useful Rounwytha skill, and some of this knowledge could be, and sometimes was, acquired from an older Rounwytha. But in essence such knowledge is a knowing arising from the development and use of skills such as esoteric-empathy so that such learned knowledge (causal knowledge) would only and ever compliment the personal knowledge (the acausal knowledge) such skills imparted. Esoteric-empathy, combined with the ability of intimation, would enable the nature, the character [the physis, the essence] of living-plants to be dis-covered and thus their personal qualities known and appreciated. Similarly, a knowing of what might ail some person is, for the Rounwytha, just such an acausal knowing – arising from employing the skills, abilities, and qualities, of a Rounwytha, and not something learned from someone else or from books.
Hence, the Rounwytha needs no props, no outer causal forms, no esoteric ceremonies, rituals, chants, or whatever. They just are – they just are uniquely themselves, with their gifts, their abilities, their foibles, their knowing and their skills.” The Rounwytha Way – Our Sinister Feminine Archetype
Like such skills, the calendar of the Rounwytha – their weaving of the seemingly disparate fluxions together, their accounting of fluxions – was derived from their personal esoteric-knowing, their empathy with the beings of Nature, with the being of Nature, and with the being of the Cosmos, and by their connexion to their local rural community. That is, of those whom and that which, they personally know, and of that which they personally observe and experience.
Thus – given that the Rounwytha tradition was germane to a certain area of what is now known as Britain – some of the most important alchemical seasons, and thence their seasonal (‘yearly’) calendar, were those connected with the flux, the rhythm, of Nature where they dwelt, since the season of daily and communal and local life – the life of small, rural, kindred, communities where the skill and knowing and advice of the pagan Rounwytha found favour and was often relied upon – would be one where such matters as the seasons of growing and finding food were important, as were the stages of life of an individual, as were certain celebrations and propitiations.
The favoured ‘time’ in Spring, for instance – the traditional seasonal time of sowing, seeding, and planting – would be known, discovered, locally by the Rounwytha using their skill, their empathy, and, being a fluxion of Nature in their locale, such a favoured ‘time’ would in its arrival vary from year to year. Similarly with the seasons beginning/ending with what are now known as Summer and Winter Solstice, the longest and the shortest days in such northern locales. They would not be found – ‘known’ – by some causal calculation or by watching the Sun alignment with some stones in some circle (or whatever) but rather would be what they naturally are, which is mid-Summer and mid-Winter, and which vary according to when Spring arrives, and Summer arrives, and Autumn arrives in a particular locality. [4]
Similarly with a celebration such as The Gathering, which would mark a successful harvest:
” The celebration – the gathering, remembrance, and feast – that is now often known as Samhain (and which according to the Rounwytha tradition was simply called The Gathering) varied from year to year and from locality to locality, its occurrence determined by when what had to be gathered-in and prepared and stored in readiness for the coming days of Winter had been gathered-in and prepared and stored. That is, the day of its occurring was to some extent dependant on the weather, on the health and time and numbers of those so gathering in the harvest and storing produce, and on such important matters as what crops were grown, what fruits were available, what livestock were kept, and what fuels were available ready to be stored for the needed fires of the coming colder season. Communities reliant on fishing or those who relied on hunted game or required such game or fish to supplement an otherwise meagre diet would naturally have somewhat different priorities and so their date for such a communal Gathering might differ from other communities.Hence the date of The Gathering would vary from year to year and locality to locality, and sometimes be toward what is now termed October and sometimes toward the end of what is now termed September, or somewhere inbetween. It was only much much later with the arrival of the organized and alien moralizing religion of the Nazarene, with its solar calendar system (deriving from urbanized hierarchical imperial Rome) and set celebrations of the deaths of certain sanctified or important Nazarenes (mostly in far-away lands), that a particular date would be used, at least in such communities as had succumbed to the abstractions of such a religion and thus had forsaken their ancestral culture and folk traditions and ways.” Denotatum – The Esoteric Problem With Names
What all this means is that Alchemical Seasons are a way of ‘seeing’ the world; of understanding, knowing, Nature, ourselves, and the Cosmos. Of understanding our various connexions. As well as a knowing of when certain actions, activities – such as sorcery – may have a better chance of success, given how such actions, activities, are just aspects of the flux of Nature, of Life, of the Cosmos: are emanations of our own microcosmic nexion. Or Alchemical Seasons reveal when it is wise – a balanced deed – to celebrate some-things.
There is thus a very pagan – a quite natural and traditional – way of knowing devoid of linear, limiting ‘time, and devoid of abstractions.
Anton Long
Order of Nine Angles
123 yfayen
Notes
[1] My elucidations are mainly of terminology or word-expression. Thus, I have substituted some old/vernacular/obscure and occasionally alchemical terms terms for Greek or later English ones, a case in point being my use of a Greek term such as Physis. I have however retained several older terms.
My axioms are as follows: 3.1.1, 3.2, 3.2.1.2.1.1, 9.1.1, 11.1, 11.2
Incidentally, as mentioned elsewhere, Rounwytha – as its etymology makes clear – was just a local, dialect, word for a type of hereditary sorceress: for ‘the wise, cunning, woman’ of British myth and legend.
[2] Despite the now common belief that the use of the word ‘numinous’ is fairly recent, deriving from the writings of Rudolf Otto, its first occurrence in English – so far discovered – is in a religious tract published in London in 1647 ce, entitled The simple cobler of Aggawam in America. Willing to help mend his native country. The author, Nathaniel Ward – a scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, an English clergyman, and a Puritan supporter – emigrated to Massachusetts in 1634 ce.
[3] The term fluxion dates from the sixteenth century (ce) and implies both a change that occurs naturally and one that arises from or because of itself, i.e. an effluvium.
“If the fluxion of this instant Now Effect not That, noght wil that Time doth know.” John Davies: Mirum in Modum, 1616 ce. John Davies was a scholar at Queen’s College, Oxford; an antiquary, and a professor of Law.
[4] Exact causal calculations of such phenomenon were irrelevant to such ancient rural communities, and the belief that they were important or necessary is just retrospective re-interpretation and the projection of modern causal abstractions onto such communities.
Such communities did not dwell in a world determined by fixed, measured, durations of causal time; but rather by fluxions. By the natural flowing of a living, numinous, Time which dwelt with them, and within them and their own local communities. Thus their work began when it began, and ended when it ended, determined by weather, daylight, what needed to be done, or what was required, in that particular fluxion, that ‘season’. Thus their ‘year’ was marked by the flux of seasons, so that for example they might refer to their age in terms of how many harvest gatherings they had known, or how many Summers had past since their birthing.
It was that other un-numinous world – of empires, of tyrants, of kings, of governments, of abstractions, of planning and supra-personal organization, of hierarchical dogmatic religions – which brought fixed, measured, durations of causal time as a means of control, regulation, conformity, and to unnaturally apportion life and living.
Denotatum – The Esoteric Problem With Names
ONA Esoteric Notes – Rounwytha 3
The esoteric problem with denoting, by means of an ascribed name or a given expression, is essentially two-fold. First, esoteric-empathy [1] inclines us toward a knowing of the numinous essence that such a denoting obscures or hides, and part of which essence is a revealing of ourselves as but one nexion to all other Life, sentient and otherwise. The second problem with denoting is that there exists in various ancestral cultures world-wide (including some Indo-European ones) [2] an older aural tradition of how it is not correct – unwise – to give names to some-things, and of how some ‘names’ are ‘sacred’ because their very use is or could be an act of what we would now describe as sorcery/magick and which naming and which use of such names often tends toward disrupting the harmony between individuals, family, community, land, ancestors, ‘heaven and earth’, that many folk traditions were designed to aid.
Thus there is a different and almost entirely unrecorded folk tradition which is unrelated to the tradition of myths and legends about named divinities, be such divinities Sumerian, Egyptian, Pheonician or whatever, and which myths and legends we are all now familiar with and which traditions of myths and legends include, for example, the fables and stories of the Old Testament with their notions of a people who regard themselves as the chosen ones of some creator-god being persecuted, threatened and tempted by satans and the-satan.
This aural tradition is pagan in both the historical sense of that term and in the later usage of that term: paganus, someone who belongs to a rural community and whose traditions, ethos, and weltanschauung are not that of the religion of the Nazarene, deriving as that religion did from the fables and stories of the Old Testament.
It is possible – as the Rounwytha tradition intimates – that this aural pagan tradition had its natural origins in the way of life of small rural communities of free men and women (such as existed for instance in pre-Roman Britain and for a while in post-Roman Britain) in contrast to the tradition of myths and legends about named divinities and which naming tradition may well have had its origins in that type of living where there is some powerful king or authoritative leader and a more urbanized was of living (as in Sumeria, Egypt, etcetera) and where there was thus a hierarchical division between kings/leaders, court officials, the people, and slaves. For one feature of such early pagan communities was their lack of slaves and their communal way of making decisions.
What is especially interesting from an esoteric perspective is that the knowing that a developed esoteric-empathy provides confirms this aural pagan tradition in respect of both the unwisdom of dividing ‘the heavens’/the unseen by the process of ascribing personal names, and how such a division undermines, obscures, or destroys, our natural place in Nature and the Cosmos, and thus the natural balance both within us and external to us, as individuals and as individuals who are part of a living culture and/or of an ancestral community.
Esoteric-Empathy and Ancestral Traditions
The pagan aural tradition, as recounted in the Rounwytha tradition, is one lacking in myths and legends about specific named deities. Thus, there are no named gods or goddesses, and there is no division between ‘good’ deities and ‘evil’ deities. What there is, instead, are essentially two connected things.
(1) An intuitive, empathic, understanding of natural harmony manifest in the knowledge of ourselves – as individuals, and as ancestral communities – as in a rather precarious balance between earth and the heavens, a balance which can easily be disrupted and which for its maintenance requires certain duties and obligations both individual and communal. For instance, a certain reverence for one’s ancestors; a reverence for certain places traditionally regarded as numinous, ‘sacred’; a certain respect for one’s own mother and father and elderly relatives; a certain loyalty to one’s kin and community; and a certain respect for other but unseen and always unnamed emanations of life, the heavens, and Nature, manifest as this respect was, for example, in the practice of leaving offerings of food in certain places lest some of these unseen and unnamed emanations of life (spirits, sprites) be offended and cause personal or communal misfortune.
In addition, there was the knowing that certain individual deeds were unwise – not because they would offend some named and powerful god or goddess, and not because such deeds contravened some law or decree said to be divinely inspired or laid down by some king or by someone who claimed authority from some god or gods, but because such deeds indicated the person doing them was rotten, and thus, like a rotten piece of meat eaten, might cause sickness. Or, expressed another way, because the person doing such a deed was diseased, and which disease, which infection, might spread and so harm the family and the wider community. Hence why it was that such rotten individuals – known by their rotten deeds – would be removed from the family and community by being, for example, exiled or culled and thus by their culling end the infection and aid the restoration of the balance their unwise deeds had upset.
This knowing of the unwisdom of some deeds is quite different from the ‘evil’ which organized religions pontificated about, and serves to distinguish the aural pagan tradition from the now more prevalent causal knowing manifest in myths and legends about divinities and in organized religions based on some god or gods, or on some revelation from some deity, or on reverence for some enlightened teacher.
For such a causal knowing is inseparably bound up with the manufactured division of an abstract and codified ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and also with the separation of the individual from their own ancestral, rural, community.
In the natural ancestral pagan tradition the individual – and thence their self-identity, their self-awareness – is communal, whereas in organized religions, and in identity derived from myths and legends about divinities and from obedience to some king or to someone who claimed authority from some god or gods, identity becomes more personal, less communal, and related to the ‘salvation’ of the individual, and/or to their personal existence in some posited after-life, with the individual constrained not by duties and obligations willingly and naturally accepted, to their family and local rural community (of shared hardship and shared ancestral pathei-mathos) but instead restrained by some imposed (by others or self-imposed) abstract criteria often manifest in some laws or decrees said to be of some god or gods or backed by some king or by some powerful overlord.
This separation is also manifest in the giving of personal names to both assumed or believed in divinities, and to individuals, a naming which marks a loss of the intuitive, empathic, pagan understanding of natural harmony manifest in ancestral traditions and cultures.
Thus in old pagan cultures an individual was referred by a particular skill they may possess (a skill useful to their community), or by some outstanding deed they had done, or by their family (their clan) place of residence or even by some trait of character or some physical feature. That is, there were no personal names as we now understand such names, and such a naming as existed related the individual to some-thing else: their place of local dwelling, what may have distinguished them from others of their community, or to some work that aided the community. A tradition still in evidence even in recent times in parts of Wales where someone would be referred to locally as, for instance, Jones the butcher or Jones ab Eynon (Jones the anvil).
(2) An intuitive wordless understanding of what may be described by the term mimesis (from the Greek μίμησις). That is, the use of certain actions and deeds – and thence by certain rituals and ceremonies – which are believed to re-present/manifest/presence the natural harmony and which thus can connect/reconnect individuals and their community to what is felt or known to be numinous and thus beneficial to them.
One obvious example here would be the custom, in northern European climes, of lighting a bonfire around the time of the Winter Solstice [3] and which celebration was one of re-presenting the warmth and light of the life-giving Sun in the hope that Winter, as in the past, would give way again to Spring, the season of sowing crops and of livestock able to forage outdoors again and have fresh grass to sustain and fatten them.
Another example might be that of removing a rotten person from the family and community by the mimesis of culling them, with such a culling being undertaken because it imitated/represented the natural process of how Nature culled or allowed to be culled some living being in order that others of those beings may survive and prosper.
For this understanding – this mimesis – was of the connexions that existed between the individual, the community, the wider realms of Nature and of the heavens (the cosmos) beyond, and thus of how the actions of one or more of these affected such connexions. That is, it was an ancestral, a pagan, knowing of the natural balance.
In general, therefore, it was considered that to ‘name’ – to denote by some personal name or even to attempt to describe in words – particular aspects of the connected whole would be unwise because there were (as empathy and ancestral tradition revealed) no such divisions in the natural world, only transient emanations ‘of heaven and earth’ with the individual and their communities one part of, as transient emanations of, one undivided flow of life, and which flow was not – as was later believed – some causal linear ‘history’ of some past to some future abstraction or some idyll and which ‘history’ is marked by some assumed progression from ‘the primitive’ to something more ‘advanced’ and which assumed progression is what has been denoted by the term ‘progress’.
Hence the respect, in such pagan cultures and communities, for tradition – for the accumulated pathei-mathos of one’s ancestors; a respect lost when manufactured abstractions, denoted by some name or by some given expression, were relied upon, striven for, used as the basis for an individual identity, and as a means of understanding Reality.
The very process of denoting by naming and attempting to express meaning in terms of so named and manufactured abstraction denoted by some name or by some expression, is a move away from the wisdom that ancient ancestral cultures expressed and sought to maintain, and a loss of the wisdom, of the acausal-knowing, that esoteric-empathy reveals. A process of denoting that has culminated in the lifeless, un-numinous, illusive division that has been named ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and which denoting is also now manifest in the un-wisdom and the religiosity of The State with its abstraction of ‘progress’, with its manufactured lifeless urban ‘communities’; where a striving, a lust, for a personal materialism and a striving for a personal idealized happiness replaces belonging to a living ancestral or numinous culture; where the individual is expected to respect The State and its minions (or face punishment); and where self-identity is measured and made by State-approved abstractions and/or by some State-approved ideology or religion, instead of by a knowing of one’s self as a transient emanation, both sinister and numinous, dark and light, ‘of heaven and earth’.
Esoteric Dating and Aural Traditions
The dating of certain esoteric celebrations by means of a fixed and manufactured solar calender – something which has become commonplace in the lands of the West – is another example of how the error of causal knowing (manifest, for instance, in naming divinities) has come to usurp the intuitive wordless understanding of aural pagan traditions and the empathy that pagans, in resonance with Nature and themselves, were either naturally gifted with or could develop under guidance.
Thus those committing this error of using a solar calendar rather inanely believe that a celebration such as that now commonly named Samhain occurs on a certain fixed calendar date, to wit October the thirty first; that a fixed date such as March the twenty first (named the Spring Equinox) marks the beginning of Spring, and that sunrise on what has been denoted by the expression Summer Solstice is some “important pagan date”.
Esoteric-empathy and ancestral pagan cultures and aural traditions – such as the Rounwytha one – relate a different tale. This is of the dates and times of festivities, celebrations and feasts being determined locally by communities and families and sometimes (but not always) on the advice of some Rounwytha or some similarly attuned skilled individual. Two examples may be of interest – Spring and Samhain.
Those part of such ancestral cultures – as well as those who possess the benefit of such aural traditions or who have a natural esoteric-empathy – know that what in northern climes is called Spring does not begin on what has been termed the Spring Equinox nor on any specific day, whether that day be marked by some fixed calendar, solar or lunar. Instead, the arrival of Spring is a flow that occurs over a number of days – sometimes a week or more – and which days are marked by the changes in the land, the fields, the air, and by the behaviour of wildlife, birds, and insects. This arrival varies from year to year and from location to location, and usually now occurs, in the land of England, from what the solar calendar now in common use names late February to what the same calender names early March. Thus someone who knows their locality – who belongs to it – will know and feel the changes which occur in Nature during the season when the days are becoming longer and the weather somewhat warmer with the Sun rising higher in the sky in relation to Winter.
This natural flexibility – in relation to a fixed solar or lunar calendar – is why certain esoteric folk of certain aural pagan traditions (such as the ONA Rounwytha one) often write and talk about ‘alchemical seasons’ and not about some fixed seasons determined by some solar calendar.
In the same way, the celebration – the gathering, remembrance, and feast – that is now often known as Samhain (and which according to the Rounwytha tradition was simply called The Gathering) varied from year to year and from locality to locality, its occurrence determined by when what had to be gathered-in and prepared and stored in readiness for the coming days of Winter had been gathered-in and prepared and stored. That is, the day of its occurring was to some extent dependant on the weather, on the health and time and numbers of those so gathering in the harvest and storing produce, and on such important matters as what crops were grown, what fruits were available, what livestock were kept, and what fuels were available ready to be stored for the needed fires of the coming colder season. Communities reliant on fishing or those who relied on hunted game or required such game or fish to supplement an otherwise meagre diet would naturally have somewhat different priorities and so their date for such a communal Gathering might differ from other communities.
Hence the date of The Gathering would vary from year to year and locality to locality, and sometimes be toward what is now termed October and sometimes toward the end of what is now termed September, or somewhere inbetween. It was only much much later with the arrival of the organized and alien moralizing religion of the Nazarene, with its solar calendar system (deriving from urbanized hierarchical imperial Rome) and set celebrations of the deaths of certain sanctified or important Nazarenes (mostly in far-away lands), that a particular date would be used, at least in such communities as had succumbed to the abstractions of such a religion and thus had forsaken their ancestral culture and folk traditions and ways.
On the day of The Gathering there would a feast – a celebration of the bounty which Nature, the earth and the heavens, had provided – and also and importantly a remembering; a remembering of those no longer there as they had been the previous year (and not there for whatever reason, such as death from illness or old age) and a remembering of those long-departed, such as one’s own ancestors. Thus there was, as with most such celebrations, a natural balance born from remembrance and respect for the past and from hope and anticipation; here, hope and anticipation of the new warmer fertile seasons to arrive after the coming darkness of what would most probably be another bleak cold and dark season of snow, frost, and ice. For The Gathering also heralded that season when some form of almost daily heating in family dwellings would most probably be required.
As for a communal bonfire, it was simply practical, not symbolic of whatever; that is, a cheery presence (most people in northern climes love a good bonfire), a focus for the celebration (and such dancing as invariably occurred during such pagan festivities), a source of warmth and light, and a place where offerings of harvested produce and other gifts could be placed, such offerings and such gifts – as was a common folk tradition throughout the world – being to ancestors, to land and sky, as well as to the always unnamed spirits, sprites, and the also unnamed guardians of sacred natural places.
Epilogos
The aural pagan tradition – as, for example, in the Rounwytha one – is of a perspective, a weltanschauung, a way, a culture, quite different from those where myths and legends of ancient named divinities/deities played a significant role, and where there was a hierarchical structure of rank and privilege and, later on, some fixed celebrations based on a solar or lunar calendar.
The Rounwytha way that lived in a specific area of the British Isles was the culture of an empathic knowing where such celebrations as were undertaken were natural, local, and communal ones, devoid of mystique, and which occurred on an unfixed day/evening as and when circumstances allowed and somewhere near what was regarded as the propitious time/season. This was the way of transient ‘sinister-numinous emanations’ where there was no perceived division into abstracted opposites, either within ourselves, within Nature, or within the Cosmos – and where there was no naming of deities or natural spirits.
The cultivation and development of esoteric-empathy is one means whereby this type of knowing, this natural pagan perspective, can be (re)gained. In addition, this type of esoteric knowing leads to – or can lead to – an understanding of how the naming of an entity called satan and all such entities, understood both archetypally/symbolically and as actual living beings in the acausal, are what they are: an un-numinous denoting that obscures Reality and which obscuration led to and leads to the de-evolution manifest in the illusion of and the striving for causal opposites and causal abstractions.
Order of Nine Angles
122 Year of Fayen
Notes
[1] Esoteric-empathy is an Occult Art, an esoteric skill, and one of The Dark/Esoteric Arts of the ONA, and is a specific type of empathy – that which provides a certain perspective and a certain knowledge. This is ‘acausal-knowing’ and is distinct from the causal knowing arising from the perception of Phainómenon. In essence, esoteric-empathy (aka dark empathy) is the knowing of life qua life – of the acausal energy which animates all causal life; of how all life is connected, of how living beings are by their nature nexions; of how Nature is not only a living being of which we as individuals are a part, but also one aspect of cosmic life manifest on one planet orbiting one star in one galaxy in a cosmos of billions of such galaxies.
The Grade Ritual of Internal Adept – and particularly the extended six-month version (over two alchemical seasons) – is one means of cultivating and developing the Occult Art of esoteric-empathy.
[2] One of these European aural traditions was that of the Rounwytha tradition centred on the Welsh Marches and especially rural South Shropshire. This Rounwytha tradition was incorporated into the Order of Nine Angles in the early 1970′s CE and thereafter was mostly taught and discussed aurally, although some aspects of the tradition have been mentioned in various ONA MSS over the decades and the ONA Rite of Internal Adept was for the most part based on the tradition of an aspirant Rounwytha having to spend at least three months (usually six or more months) alone in isolated forests or mountains. In addition, The Camlad Rite of The Abyss, as recorded in the compilation Enantiodromia – The Sinister Abyssal Nexion, was another traditional part of the training of a Rounwytha.
[3] See the section below, Esoteric Dating and Aural Traditions, for how ancestral pagan cultures – as recounted and intimated by the Rounwytha tradition – ascertained the dates of communal celebrations, a tradition of dating totally different from that based on a solar calendar.
Words/Forms. This article had its genesis in: (1) private discussions, earlier this year (2011 CE) with two Internal Adepts (one of whom was based in Scotland), and which discussion was continued by private correspondence, and (2) in some private correspondence (during October 2011 CE) with someone living in Africa who, having been acquainted with the ONA for over a decade, sought to elucidate certain esoteric matters relating to the ONA tradition, and one of whose questions related to the aural tradition of the ONA.
Thus, in many ways this, and similar articles – such as the recently published The Discovery and Knowing of Satan – represent some of, or some part of, the aural ONA traditions that have, for the past forty years, been revealed on a personal basis.
Image. The Day’s Consecration – a painting by Richard Moult.
Final Words from Anton Long
Esoterikos – Final Words
(pdf 60 kB)
Image credit: NASA – Earth and Moon
as seen from the departing Voyager interplanetary spacecraft
Article in pdf format – the-enigmatic-truth-by-anton-long.pdf
The Enigmatic Truth
Last Words From Anton Long
As mentioned in my companion text Lapis Philosophicus regarding the apparent division of the journey to wisdom into a Right Hand Path and Left Hand Path:
” The ‘outer secret’ of the inner, the real, the living, alchemy is that the end and the result of both our apparently separate journeys is the same; the same place, the same understanding, the same knowledge. For wisdom is undivided, the same for all of us, whatever we believed or assumed when we began. Or expressed another way, lapis philosophicus is what it is, and always has been, and does what it does, and always has done, in terms of how it affects and changes those few who have succeeded in their decades-long endeavour and thus discovered it, and discovered it where it has always been hidden.”
This understanding, this knowledge – the wisdom acquired, the finding of lapis philosophicus [1] during the penultimate stage of the Way – means two particular things, and always has done. (i) living in propria persona [2], in a private manner and sans all posing, all rhetoric, all pomposity, all ideations; and (ii) having an appreciation, an awareness (sans words, ritual, thought) of what is now sometimes known as the acausal – of Nature, the Cosmos, of the connexions that bind life and thus of the illusion that is the individual will, and which illusion sillily causes a person to believe ‘they’ are or can be ‘in control’. These two things form the basis of a particular and reclusive way of life of a particular type of person: the type known, in one locality, as the rounerer of The Rouning.
In effect, the enigmatic truth is that those who have found lapis philosophicus – whatever path they took on their journey, whatever their prior views, beliefs, assumptions, ideas, praxis – live in a similar manner and have acquired the same weltanschauung. An enigmatic weltanschauung that needs no descriptive name and cannot, in its simple fundamentality, be communicated, let alone taught, to those who either have no natural intimation/intuition of it (for or from whatever reason) or who lack an inner changing (wrought via pathei mathos) of a sufficiency necessary to propel them beyond the illusion of conflicting opposites and thus beyond the deceptions of their known and their unknown (their hidden, inner) egoist.
There is thus no magick; no one true Way; no one true praxis; no one true system; no one ‘genuine’ Order/organization/group. There is no secret knowledge – no secrets, no mysteries – to be revealed, to others. No chain of authority. As there can be no disciples since there is no mastery. No individual or individuals to be lauded. No longer any need to pontificate about, or even inform others about, the journey, about what has been seen, experienced, found, along the way.
There is only lapis philosophicus and its individual discovery. There are only those, on their own individual journeyings, journeying in their own way in their own species of Time, and who may or may not arrive at their planned destination. For we are life, the Cosmos; we are Time beyond its perceived illusive dichotomy and are and have been and will be Being, presenced and unpresenced, particular and general, past-present-future, and beyond the illusion, the deception, of ‘a being’ and of ‘beings’.
Therefore, silence and reclusiveness become the few whose esoteric peregrinations have after decades – and by and because of lapis philosophicus – been ended.
Anton Long
December 2011 CE
[1] Lapis Philosophicus – the jewel of the alchemist; the goal that the alchemist, through the symbiosis that is alchemy, seeks. al-χημία [ from χῡμεία ] – ‘the changing’.
[2] “He wolde be in his owne persone, the example of our hole iourney.” William Bonde [lector philosophiae] – The Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526 ce), i. sig. Dvi.
Image credit: NASA – Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager interplanetary spacecraft
O9A Adversarial Action – Success or Failure?
Between us, we [of the Order of Nine Angles] have over fifty years – half a century – of pathei-mathos resulting from personal experience of adversarial action, ranging from political, religious, and social activism, to ‘criminal’ activities, to clandestine revolutionary and subversive deeds, to military, paramilitary, and law enforcement experience.
For some of us, such practical experience was acquired before involvement with our esoteric Way; for others, such learning resulted from using and applying one of our Dark Arts, such as an Insight Role. Given that our base was and mostly still is in the Isles of Briton, perhaps the majority of this experience relates to events in these lands. From the protest movements of the 1960’s, to ‘the troubles’, to the social unrest of the 70’s and 80’s, to recent conflicts involving the alleged ‘clash of cultures’ between Islam and the West, there is a wide variety of experience. In addition, we have the mostly aurally related experiences and learning of several individuals – drawn to us decades ago and now no longer with us in the causal realm – whose pathei-mathos derived from major conflicts such as that commonly known as the Second World War, and which experiences of that conflict were of those who fought on both sides, allied and axis.
There is thus a diverse, rich, heritage here – an ancestral pathei-mathos of our new culture – from which we might learn, especially in regard to the effectiveness of adversarial action and regarding the use and manipulation of causal forms.
However, before proceeding further it might be useful to recall what we mean by ‘success’ and ‘failure’. For us, there are two criteria, individual and Aeonic; that is, whether such things have been shown, by experience, to work – to be effective – on the personal level and/or on the Aeonic level. The personal level obviously is that of a personal learning and development, and thus the alchemical, interior, change produced – in terms of esoteric skills, change in personal character, and so on – is often apparent, and often manifest by the progression of the individual along the Seven Fold Way. But the Aeonic level is often not so apparent, involving as it does an understanding and appreciation of our Aeonic aims and goals, and a shared desire, among us, to aid them. [1]
Personal and Aeonic Perspectives
In general, what we may with some justification call our ancestral pathei-mathos indicates that our particular adversarial praxis works both in respect of being a vector of alchemical, interior, change in our people, and in respect of testing and weeding out those lacking the character, the potential, to be of our kind. That is, it is and has been successful in breeding the requisite personal character and in enabling individuals, via their own pathei-mathos, to move toward the goal of wisdom. Or, understood in terms of our aims, our goals, successful in producing and nurturing our new type of human.
But what of Aeonic change, our Aeonic aims and goals? There are, in my view, several questions, here. (1) Has the use of adversarial praxis by our people over some forty years achieved anything Aeonically? That is, in practical terms of undermining, replacing, The System and/or moving toward our New Aeon? (2) What does our ancestral pathei-mathos indicate in this respect; that is, the practical learning from experience of those whose learning was acquired before the foundation of the ONA and who subsequently became ONA? (3) What does a reasoned, scholarly [2], overview of the past thousand or two thousand years of human history reveal in respect of methods of human change?
I shall consider the last of these questions, first. Thus, what – to use a mundane cliché – do the past two thousand years of wars, revolutions, empires, conquests, tyrants, kings, insurrections, revolts, riots, religions and their schisms, propaganda, rallies, marches, demonstrations, speeches, political parties, and so on and so on, teach the sagacious among us? Or, expressed more precisely, what does the pathei-mathos of those who endured such things, who experienced such things, who participated in such things, who lived through such things, who learned from them, teach us, as recorded in their writings, their aural accounts, their lives, their deaths, their literature, their reflexions (philosophical or otherwise), their artistic, musical, emanations?
My own conclusion, derived intellectually nearly forty years ago, was that they reveal something important; and quite a lot of my life these past forty years has been devoted to testing this conclusion in a practical manner, often via my own pathei-mathos, as well as devoted to acquiring more intellectual knowledge that might prove or disprove this conclusion.
My conclusion was that all such external things have not in any significant way aided, changed, evolved, the majority of humans. That humans, in their majority, remain mundane, rather primitive, beings – in thrall to their feelings, desires, and addicted to and reliant upon causal abstractions; easily swayed and easily manipulated. That the cultured, the noble, the aristocratic, among us are and have remained a small minority, never more than five per cent, often less. That the potential which humans have, as a species of sentient living beings, has remained unfulfilled, and that as a consequence wisdom is still the prerogative of only a few human beings per century.
In brief, that as vectors of effective human change, such large-scale, supra-personal, events and means, just do not work; that all they do is add a few more to the roll of those distinguished by their personal learning from adversity, hardship, suffering, and the overcoming of challenges.
The past forty years of my living has, for me at least, revealed the veracity of that conclusion, and which conclusion then at that early time was one of the inspirations that led to the founding of our esoteric, our Occult, Order.
The answers to the other two questions I posited, previously, also – and again to me – support this conclusion. That is, that both our ancestral pathei-mathos, and the experiences of our people in using adversarial praxis Aeonically, have shown that such external means, and our adversarial praxis, have not affected The System in any significant way, and nor are they likely to in the near future.
In effect, our people – those with us for a decade or more – have, via their own experience and their own scholarly studies, learnt or come to learn what I myself have learned, and which learning has affected them, changed them, internally, alchemically, as indeed is right and fitting, and Occult [3].
Where then does this leave us? With what knowing? What knowledge?
Our Aeonic Perspective
It leaves us with our unique Aeonic perspective, and which perspective is, in my view, a part of wisdom; part of our esoteric tradition. An inner inspiration for our kind.
This is of two things. First, how real, genuine, change in individuals – of their physis, their nature – is a slow process, and while our Occult ways and our Order exists to aid and propagate this process of interior change, to affect/infect a significant number of humans will take long durations of causal Time, from a century to many centuries. Second, that our real work, both as individuals and as an Order – our Magnum Opus – is genuinely esoteric and Occult, and thus concerned with lapis philosophicus and not with some purely causal self-indulgence, or some ephemeral outer change in some causal form or forms, or with using such forms to try and effect some external change. For it is this esoteric, this Occult, work which will, affectively and effectively, introduce and maintain the Aeonic changes we desire and plan for – in its own species of acausal Time.
Which leads us naturally on to two other connected, and important, matters concerning the nature of our Order – of our family, our culture – and concerning the nature of our own human lives and why we are part of and stay with our esoteric family.
Our Order is predicated on us as nexions. Of we individual human beings having both causal and acausal physis, and of there thus being things that are Occult; of us having the potential, the ability, to change, to learn, to adapt, to develop, to evolve in a conscious manner, by using certain faculties, and certain Dark Arts, and so developing other Arts, other faculties; and of our Order by its existence gradually increasing the number of human beings who do so change, evolve.
In practice, this means, as I mentioned just now, that our Order is in essence and intent an Occult one, devolving around the individual quest for lapis philosophicus and which individual quests, collectively, over durations of causal Time – and involving as such quests do adversarial praxis and a certain collective, family, co-operation – are our Aeonic sorcery and thus produce and will produce Aeonic change in an affective, a lasting, manner.
But this predication also means that such an individual quest does not necessarily end with the termination of the causal shell, our fragile microcosmic physical body, that contains the inner acausal physis; which is why of course the last stage of our Seven Fold Way, of our individual Magnum Opus, has no representatives, and can have no representatives, in the realm of mortals. Since it involves using lapis philosophicus to egress beyond the causal and into the acausal spaces. Which is to say that the few achieving this, while no longer dwelling in the causal – no longer ‘alive’, no longer having their old causal shell – become, by the very nature of their now acausal-being, ‘unseen’ vectors of human, Aeonic, change, and of the evolution of the Cosmos itself. A type of change, a type of existence, open to many many humans, were they only able to see beyond the veil of the mundane and free themselves from abstractions, from the desires of their primitive, illusive, self.
Conclusion
In peroration, it is such understandings, such arcane knowledge, such knowing, such ancestral pathei-mathos, which separate and distinguish us, our Order, from the many others – groups, individuals – who in these times of ours claim to be Occultists, or of the Left Hand Path, or who now proclaim to use some adversarial praxis or other.
For we view ourselves, and our Order, in a Cosmic way, in an Occult way; as nexions. Our aims, our goals – our physis – making us a family bound by loyalty and oaths of initiation, and which family, in its growing, its slow, natural growing, is becoming a culture, a tradition, with its own ancestral pathei-mathos. Our perspective thus and of necessity including not only our family, past-present-future, but also being of the acausal spaces, the existences, that await for us beyond our own individual causal ending.
Anton Long
122 yfayen
[1] These Aeonic aims and goals include breeding a new more evolved human species; developing new ways of living for this new type of human and thus replacing The System; and for our new species to leave this planet we call Earth (our childhood home), grow to maturity, and establish ourselves among the star-systems of our own Galaxies, and other Galaxies.
[2] By scholarly is meant both learned and having undertaken meticulous, unbiased, research on a specific subject over a period of some years.
[3] By Occult is meant The Dark Arts, and the sinisterly-numinous, and those matters and skills and abilities which are hidden from, or unknown to, or not possessed by, mundanes.
An Enigmatic Truth
As mentioned in my companion text Lapis Philosophicus regarding the apparent division of the journey to wisdom into a Right Hand Path and Left Hand Path:
“The ‘outer secret’ of the inner, the real, the living, alchemy is that the end and the result of both our apparently separate journeys is the same; the same place, the same understanding, the same knowledge. For wisdom is undivided, the same for all of us, whatever we believed or assumed when we began. Or expressed another way, lapis philosophicus is what it is, and always has been, and does what it does, and always has done, in terms of how it affects and changes those few who have succeeded in their decades-long endeavor and thus discovered it, and discovered it where it has always been hidden.”
This understanding, this knowledge – the wisdom acquired, the finding of lapis philosophicus during the penultimate stage of the Way – means two particular things, and always has done. (1) living in propria persona, in a private manner and sans all posing, all rhetoric, all pomposity, all ideations; and (2) having an appreciation, an awareness (sans words, ritual, thought) of what is now sometimes known as the acausal – of Nature, the Cosmos, of the connexions that bind life and thus of the illusion that is the individual will, and which illusion sillily causes a person to believe ‘they’ are or can be ‘in control’. These two things form the basis of a particular and reclusive way of life of a particular type of person: the type known, in one locality, as the rounerer of The Rouning.
In effect, the enigmatic truth is that those who have found lapis philosophicus – whatever path they took on their journey, whatever their prior views, beliefs, assumptions, ideas, praxis – live in a similar manner and have acquired the same weltanschauung. An enigmatic weltanschauung that needs no descriptive name and cannot, in its simple fundamentality, be communicated, let alone taught, to those who either have no natural intimation/intuition of it (for or from whatever reason) or who lack an inner changing (wrought via pathei mathos) of a sufficiency necessary to propel them beyond the illusion of conflicting opposites and thus beyond the deceptions of their known and their unknown (their hidden, inner) egoist.
There is thus no magick; no one true Way; no one true praxis; no one true system; no one ‘genuine’ Order/organization/group. There is no secret knowledge – no secrets, no mysteries – to be revealed, to others. No chain of authority. As there can be no disciples since there is no mastery. No individual or individuals to be lauded. No longer any need to pontificate about, or even inform others about, the journey, about what has been seen, experienced, found, along the way.
There is only lapis philosophicus and its individual discovery. There are only those, on their own individual journeyings, journeying in their own way in their own species of Time, and who may or may not arrive at their planned destination. For we are life, the Cosmos; we are Time beyond its perceived illusive dichotomy and are and have been and will be Being, presenced and unpresenced, particular and general, past-present-future, and beyond the illusion, the deception, of ‘a being’ and of ‘beings’.
Therefore, silence and reclusiveness become the few whose esoteric peregrinations have after decades – and by and because of lapis philosophicus – been ended.
Anton Long
December 2011 CE
Image credit – The Secret Joy (a painting by Richard Moult)
Lapis Philosophicus – the jewel of the alchemist; the goal that the alchemist, through alchemy, seeks. Possession of this jewel is, according to aural tradition, sufficient to gift the alchemist with both wisdom and the secret of a personal immortality.
Let me begin the story – of the secret of lapis philosophicus – at the end, and which writing about this particular story will be the last writing of mine on any Occult, esoteric, matter, and thus the end of my chatter.
The story ends with an anticipated discovery: that the penultimate stage (however named: Magus, GrandMaster, GrandLadyMaster) of that life-long genuine Occult journey which begins with initiation (of whatever kind: hermetic, ceremonial, self) is the same whether one began on, and thence followed, what has been described as ‘The Left Hand Path’, or whether one began on, and thence followed, what has been described as ‘The Right Hand Path’. For in the context of beyond The Abyss, such designations based on such a dichotomy become, and are, irrelevant because without sense and meaning.
That is, the ‘outer secret’ of the inner, the real, the living, alchemy is that the end and the result of both our apparently separate journeys is the same; the same place, the same understanding, the same knowledge. For wisdom is undivided, the same for all of us, whatever we believed or assumed when we began. Or expressed another way, lapis philosophicus is what it is, and always has been, and does what it does, and always has done, in terms of how it affects and changes those few who have succeeded in their decades-long endeavor and thus discovered it, and discovered it where it has always been hidden.
Naturally those who have not discovered, not found, lapis philosophicus either will not appreciate this or will disagree with it; as will, of course, all those who pretend to others (and/or to themselves) that they have found lapis philosophicus and thus claim or award themselves some exalted title or some Occult grade or whatever.
As I mentioned in a previous MS:
“Our real work, both as individuals and as an Order – our Magnum Opus – is genuinely esoteric and Occult, and thus concerned with lapis philosophicus and not with some purely causal self-indulgence, or some ephemeral outer change in some causal form or forms, or with using such forms to try and effect some external change. For it is this esoteric, this Occult, work which will, affectively and effectively, introduce and maintain the Aeonic changes we desire and plan for – in its own species of acausal Time.”
Furthermore, this work as one moves after decades of pathei-mathos toward The Abyss of necessity involves a living of the sinisterly-numinous. For those of the LHP – having followed ‘the sinister’ – living numinously for a period of some years; for those of the RHP – having followed ‘the numinous’ – living sinisterly for a period of some years. For such a living (and the pathei-mathos which of necessity is part of it) is a means to know, to live (to move toward becoming) the natural balance, the Life, beyond abstracted opposites and all abstractions. There develops thus a knowing of Wyrd, an Aeonic perspective, taking the ‘sinister’ individual beyond personal destiny, beyond the self, and far beyond the attempted, the primitive, deification of the ego of the charlatans and the novices of one particular ‘path’. After which follows the ordeal of The Abyss which, for both types, both paths, is a living alone for a month or more in a certain difficult if simple manner, as for example outlined in the traditional Camlad rite of the abyss.
What, then, is the ‘inner secret’ of the living alchemy? What in other words is the nature of lapis philosophicus, the affects, of the object whose discovery is the ultimate purpose of our life-long Occult journey? The last part of this ‘secret’ is symbolized by the last stage/grade, begun but not yet attained as one’s mortal nexion closes: during the right alchemical season, and at the right causal Time beyond one’s mortal power to choose, to decide, for it is when it is, and will by the discovery of lapis philosophicus become known and can neither be chosen/decided by us nor forestalled by any means. The middle part of this ‘secret’ is that the object of our journey never really was distant and neither was it hidden at all; we only assumed or believed it was, and we only had to learn to not only see as we can see but did not know we could but also to know, to understand, to feel, to appreciate, what is seen, sans denotatum, and be such denotatum words (verbal, written), symbolic, ideation (of ‘the mind’), archetypal, or whatever. The first part of this ‘secret’ concerns a certain knowledge: about ‘the living water’, azoth; about the nature of Time, of Being, of consciousness, of the Cosmos, and thus about our nature as mortal existents, as beings, in this realm of phenomenon; of how we are Time beyond its perceived dichotomy and are and have been and will be Being, and have the potential to become/return-to Being beyond our perceived temporary existence as conscious mortal beings. But one has to be ‘there’/here – now/then/when and in/within/beyond Time – in order to ‘see’, to know, to feel, to appreciate, to understand, this. The rest is either preparation or null.
Anton Long
2/2/123 yfayen
Some Occult Terms Briefly Explained
Aeonic Perspective
The expression ‘the Aeonic perspective’ – also known as the Cosmic perspective – is used to describe some of our pathei-mathos, some of our experience; that is, to describe some knowledge we have acquired through a combination of practical experience, through a scholarly study, and through using certain Occult faculties and skills, such as esoteric-empathy.
This knowledge concerns several matters, some to do with how we understand the individual human being, some to do with our perception of Aeons, and some to do with our praxis and the purpose and effectiveness of our methods and techniques both exoteric and esoteric.
In terms of causal forms, there is the initiated understanding that what, for human beings, is esoteric, evolutionary – that what presences acausal energy and thus Life – is inner not outer change. That is, that no causal form, no non-Occult praxis, produces or can produce Aeonic change, although such forms, such praxis, may occasionally result in some, a few, individuals each century, via pathei-mathos, achieving a certain insight and understanding and thence becoming changed, more evolved, human beings.
Or, expressed differently, the changes wrought by causal forms – by wars, revolutions, empires, nations, and through means such as politics or social reform, or by governments – are transient, and do not, over centuries, affect human beings en masse. For humans remain and have remained basically the same; rather primitive beings, dependent on and in thrall to abstractions, to their emotions, to archetypal forces, and never developing their latent faculties, never fulfilling their Cosmic potential, with only a rare few human beings achieving wisdom.
Alchemy
al-χημία [ from χῡμεία ] – ‘the changing’.
According to aural tradition, esoteric alchemy – the secret alchemy – is a symbiotic process that occurs between the alchemist and certain living ‘things’/elements, the aim of which symbiotic process is to acquire or to produce Lapis Philosophicus, and which ‘jewel of the alchemist’ is reputed to possess both the gift of wisdom and the secret of a personal immortality.
Alchemy, correctly understood and appreciated, is not – as the mis-informed have come to believe or been led to believe – concerned with the changing, the transformation of inert, lifeless, substances (chemical or otherwise) but with the transformation of the alchemist by a particular type of interaction with living ‘things’, human, of Nature, and of the Cosmos, and of living ‘things’ existing both in the causal and the acausal realms. [Hence the old association between alchemy and astronomy.] This interaction, by its nature – its physis – is or becomes a symbiotic one, with the alchemist, and the substances/things used, being thus changed by such a symbiosis.
That is, it is concerned with what we describe as ‘the sinisterly-numinous’; with accessing and using/changing the acausal energies of living beings, and which acausal energies of necessity include the psyche of the alchemist.
Hence, esoteric alchemy is a particular type of ‘internal change’ within and of the individual as well as a practical esoteric Art involving the manufacture/use of particular types of esoteric – living – substances/’beings’/things.
Esoteric
By esoteric we mean not only the standard definition given in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is:
” From the Greek ἐσωτερικ-ός. Of philosophical doctrines, treatises, modes of speech. Designed for, or appropriate to, an inner circle of advanced or privileged disciples; communicated to, or intelligible by, the initiated exclusively. Hence of disciples: Belonging to the inner circle, admitted to the esoteric teaching.”
but also and importantly pertaining to the Occult Arts and imbued with a certain mystery, and redolent of what we term ‘the sinisterly-numinous’.
Psyche
The psyche of the individual is a term used to describe those aspects of an individual – those aspects of consciousness – which are hidden, or inaccessible to, or unknown to, the individual. Basically, such aspects can be considered to be those forces/energies which do or which can influence the individual in an emotional way or in a way which the individual has no direct control over or understanding of. One part of this psyche is what has been called “the unconscious”, and some of the forces/energies of this “unconscious” have been, and can be, described by the term “archetypes”.
In practical terms, the psyche of the individual is a nexus, between causal and acausal.
Wisdom
By term wisdom we mean not only the standard dictionary definition – a balanced personal judgment; having discernment – but also the older sense of having certain knowledge of a pagan, Occult, kind to do with livings beings, human nature, and concerning Nature and ‘the heavens’. To wit, possessing certain faculties, such as esoteric-empathy, a knowing of one’s self; possessing an Aeonic knowing; and thus knowing Reality beyond, and sans, all causal abstractions.
The Rounwytha Way
Our Sinister Feminine Archetype
The way of the Rounwytha is the way of the independent, strong, empath: of those who have developed their natural, their latent, their empathic and muliebral, abilities, qualities, and skills, both exoteric and esoteric [1].
Given the nature of these abilities, qualities, and skills, the overwhelming majority of individuals who follow the Way of the Rounwytha are women – who thus embody our sinister feminine archetype – although a minority are men who, following The Seven Fold Way into and beyond the Abyss, have successfully melded the sinister with the numinous and who thus embody and are that rare archetype, The Mage, with such archetypes, by the nature of such entities, being in constant fluxion. Or, expressed exoterically, being an expression of the uniqueness of such esoteric individuals.
Among these muliebral abilities, qualities, and skills are: (1) Empathy; (2) Intuition, as a foreseeing – praesignification/intimation – and as interior self-reflexion; (3) Personal Charm; (4) Subtlety/Cunning/Shapeshifting; (5) Veiled Strength.
Rounwytha skills and abilities were evident, for example and in varying degrees, in the Oracle at Delphi, in the Vestales of Rome; in the wise, the cunning, women of British folklore and legend; in myths about Morgan Le Fey, Mistress Mab, and Ἀμαζόνες; and in historical figures such as Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia, and Boudicca.
It is these skills, abilities, and qualities, and the women who embody them, that the Magian ethos (and its abstractions) and religions such as as Nasrany, Islam, Judaism, and the patriarchal nation-State, have suppressed, repressed, and sought to destroy, control, and replace. It is these skills, abilities, and qualities, and the women who embody them, that the distorted, Magian-influenced and Magian-dominated, Homo Hubris infested, Occultism and ‘Satanism’ of the modern West – with their doctrines such as the patriarchal ‘might in right’ or the vapid ‘harming none’ of modern wicca – have also suppressed, repressed, and sought to destroy, control, and replace.
Esoterically, these skills, abilities, and qualities, were celebrated and maintained by the pagan aural tradition of the British Isles, a tradition mentioned in the ONA text, Denotatum, The Esoteric Problem With Names (ONA Esoteric Notes – Rounwytha 3)
Traditional Rounwytha Rites and Training
According to ONA aural tradition, the Rounwytha way – as the etymology of Rounwytha suggests – is the way of a few wise women who dwelt and who dwell in the Marches areas of the British Isles, and in particular in rural South Shropshire and areas around Trefyclawdd and the Camlad.
There are only three rites of this tradition: one celebratory [2], and two to train, to breed, the Rounwytha. The training is and was simple, and involves the candidate in living, for two whole alchemical seasons [3], alone in an isolated area, as per what is now known as the Rite of Internal Adept, followed – some unfixed causal Time later (sometimes a year later, sometimes longer) – by undertaking the Camlad Rite of The Abyss, and which Rite lasted for a whole lunar month [4].
To these three traditional rites, the ONA added – nearly four decades ago – another, in order to train candidates in certain necessary Martial skills, with this training lasting from six months to (more usually) a year. [5]
Thus, this simple training of the Rounwytha develops in the candidate the necessary esoteric and exoteric skills, abilities, and qualities, and breeds the women (and the few men) who embody them.
To give one, often misunderstood, example. A certain knowledge of herbs was/is a useful Rounwytha skill, and some of this knowledge could be, and sometimes was, acquired from an older Rounwytha. But in essence such knowledge is a knowing arising from the development and use of skills such as esoteric-empathy so that such learned knowledge (causal knowledge) would only and ever compliment the personal knowledge (the acausal knowledge) such skills imparted. Esoteric-empathy, combined with the ability of intimation, would enable the nature, the character [the physis, the essence] of living-plants to be dis-covered and thus their personal qualities known and appreciated. Similarly, a knowing of what might ail some person is, for the Rounwytha, just such an acausal knowing – arising from employing the skills, abilities, and qualities, of a Rounwytha, and not something learned from someone else or from books.
Hence, the Rounwytha needs no props, no outer causal forms, no esoteric ceremonies, rituals, chants, or whatever. They just are – they just are uniquely themselves, with their gifts, their abilities, their foibles, their knowing and their skills, and a knowing how to use all these, in either a numinous or a sinister way, or in a sinisterly-numinous way.
The Future Rounwytha
The traditional Rounwytha, pre-ONA and as manifest in many traditional ONA nexions, can and should be the inspiration for new esoteric and thus archetypal forms. That is, a guide and inspiration for women who desire to or who have liberated themselves from the restrictions of Magian abstractions and Magian-Nasrany made archetypes, and which abstractions include political feminism, since such ‘feminists’ for example almost always act within ‘the law’ as made by The State and often demand more State-made laws to ensure ‘their rights’ (political, social, economic, religious) and which notion of ‘rights’ is itself an abstraction.
In contrast, our new female esoteric and archetypal ways of living derive from four important things:
(1) Women of our kind living by our code of kindred honour who thus are ready, willing, and able (trained enough) to defend themselves and rely on themselves and thus who possessed attitude, and skill enough, and/or carry weapons enabling them to, defeat a strong man or men intent on attacking or subduing them.
(2) Women of our kind placing this personal code of honour before any and all laws made by some State, and thus replacing supra-personal authority (of, for example, some State or institution) with their own self-assured and individual authority.
(3) Women of our kind relying on their own judgement, a judgement developed and enhanced by pathei-mathos, by learning from direct practical experience, from tough challenges, and one’s mistakes.
(4) Women of our kind developing and using their natural, their latent, their empathic and muliebral, abilities, qualities, and skills – such as empathy and intuition.
It is no co-incidence that these express the unique, living, sinisterly-numinous ethos of our unique living adversarial, defiant, and anti-State, kulture.
Order of Nine Angles
123 yfayen
Notes
[1] By the term muliebral we mean: of, concerning, or relating to the ethos, the nature [physis], the natural abilities, of women. From the Latin muliebris. We use this particular term in a precise and esoteric way, as we do with many other terms which also have or have acquired a common, exoteric, meaning – for example, the terms psyche and archetype, qv. A Glossary of Some ONA Terms.
This use and definition of such terms, together with ONA-unique terms and sometimes our unique spelling of some words, means that ONA people sometimes speak and write a language (ONA-speak) that is often – and intentionally – obscure or confusing to outsiders, and often – and intentionally – leads such outsiders to make certain unwarranted assumptions.
[2] The traditional celebratory rite was the rite which formed the basis for the ONA’s Ceremony of Recalling with opfer ending. The traditional rite was often called The Giving and often formed part of The Gathering, and is and was simple, involving no Occult or magickal aspects, and consisted of an extempore communal celebration and feast, in the Autumn and generally around a bonfire, at which a chosen young male candidate (willing or unwilling) would be sacrificed and some of their blood sprinkled on the surrounding land to ensure the health and fertility of livestock, crops, and community.
Two fictional portrayals of this traditional rite are in the short-story Hangster’s Gate, and in the instructional text The Giving.
For context, see the ONA text, Denotatum, The Esoteric Problem With Names (ONA Esoteric Notes – Rounwytha 3).
[3] The rite is usually begun on the Spring Equinox and ends on the following Winter Solstice (occassionaly begun on the Summer Solstice and ending on the following Spring Equinox).
It should be noted, however, that these ‘alchemical seasons’ are not – as mundanes suppose – determined by fixed calculation deriving from a fixed solar calander. Thus, the Spring Equinox (or rather the alchemical season whose beginning/ending is associated with what is termed Spring Equinox) is not when some fixed solar calender determines it is (a certain causal Time on a certain day in March) but rather when the Rounwytha considers mid-Spring (which is what the Spring Equinox is, esoterically, alchemically) arrives, having already and locally known when Spring begins in that particular year. Similarly for what is termed the Summer Solstice. For context, see the ONA text, Denotatum, The Esoteric Problem With Names.
Hence, alchemical seasons are not determined by a fixed solar or lunar calender – or by calculations based on such – but rather individually, according to locality.
[4] That is, for one menstrual cycle of the woman undertaking it. The Camlad Rite of The Abyss has been published in the pdf collection Enantiodromia – The Sinister Abyssal Nexion.
[5] Many, although not all, ONA Rounwytha nexions are Sapphic in nature, and thus celebrate the type of sorcery mentioned in ONA texts such as Sapphic Sorcery – In Praise of The Feminine.
Introduction
The Dark Goddess is often called Baphomet, who is described, according to the aural tradition of the Order of Nine Angles, as:
a sinister female entity, The Mistress (or Mother) of Blood. According to tradition, she is represented as a beautiful mature woman, naked from the waist up, who holds in her hand the severed head of a man.
In former times, as again in this new millennia, it was and it is to Baphomet that human sacrifices were dedicated.
However, often – as in pre-ONA days (that is, before the tradition was given and described by the ONA name) – the Dark Goddess is not referred to directly by name, as, for example, at the end of the instructional text The Giving, where Mallam is sacrificed in a communal ceremony, and where Lianna says, “[Satanism] is not the way I follow. My tradition is different, much older.”
Understood esoterically, an archetype is:
a particular causal presencing of a certain acausal energy and is thus akin to a type of acausal living being in the causal (and thus “in the psyche”): it is born (or can be created, by magickal means), its lives, and then it “dies” (ceases to be present, presenced) in the causal (i.e. its energy in the causal ceases).
Thus the Dark Goddess in general, and Baphomet in particular, can be considered as types of living being, manifest most often in our psyche [1] but also capable of becoming present in our causal continuum [2].
Mythos and Aural Tradition
According to the aural history of the ONA [3] the old tradition inherited by the present Grand Master was carried on for many generations by mostly reclusive Adepts who instructed only a select, few, individuals. In addition, it should be understood that: (1) the tradition existed mainly in rural areas of South Shropshire and the Welsh Marches; (2) with a few notable exceptions (one being the present Grand Master) all those who guarded and transmitted the tradition, and who instructed candidates, were women; (3) the tradition – never called by any particular name or described by any term – consisted mainly of esoteric chant; the mythos of The Dark Gods (including tales such as later recounted in the stories Sabirah and Jenyah), certain ceremonies (such as The Ceremony of Recalling), propitiation of certain natural forces by means of communal culling, and so on; and (4) a fictional characterization of one such fairly recent Lady Master/Mistress of Earth is the character of Lianna in The Giving, and which fictional work gives a general background to, and a few details about, the old tradition itself.
Furthermore, the instructional account Breaking The Silence Down is a fictionalized account of the awakening (the development) of a young Rounwytha, manifest in the character of Rachael [4]. Rachael, for instance, enchants naturally, without words or ritual or ceremonies, and forms a natural empathic link to the area where she dwells, and has (being a Rounwytha, albeit a young one) the natural ability to bring forth, to induce, in her lover (Diane) a deep, intuitive, understanding of the importance of the feminine and of Nature.
Breaking The Silence Down also contains an old, traditional, text celebrating the female:
Wash your throats with wine
For Sirius returns
And we women are warm and wanton!
Before I WAS, you were sightless:
You looked, but could not see;
Before I WAS, you had no hearing:
You heard sounds, but could not listen.
Before I WAS, you swarmed with men,
But did not enjoy.
I CAME, opened my body and
Brought you lust, softness, understanding, and love!
My breasts pleased you
And brought forth darkness and joy…(Synestry: The Dark Daughters of Baphomet)
Mistress of Earth as Sinister Archetype
In contrast to nearly ever other manifestation of The Left Hand Path, in the West – and in stark contrast to all other groups who claim to be or who describe themselves as Satanist – the ONA has always been biased toward the feminine aspect of The Sinister.
For example, a majority of traditional nexions, in both the Old World (England) and the New World (America and Canada) are organized and run by Lady Masters/Mistresses of Earth, just as the ONA has always had many Sapphic nexions (for example, The Dark Daughters of Chaos, in England). Conversely, groups such as The Golden Dawn, the OTO, the Temple of Set, and the Church of Satan, have all been dominated by men and are redolent of that posturing masculine Homo Hubris ethos that is anathema to Dark-Empathy and the gentility of the well-mannered Adept.
In addition – as hinted at in many ONA texts, such as The Rite of the Nine Angles and in The Ceremony of Recalling [5] – the ONA emphasizes that it is the female sorcerer (“the priestess”) who is one of the most important keys to opening a nexion to the acausal, and it is through her that acausal energies flow when a ceremony to open a nexion is undertaken.
As someone wrote concerning the depiction of women in the sinister fiction of the ONA:
In general, such depictions – and the mythos of the ONA in general – may be said to empower women; to depict them in a way that has been long neglected, especially in the still male-dominated, materialistic, West. However, this empowerment, it should be noted, is based upon “the sinister”: upon there being hidden esoteric, pagan, depths, abilities and qualities in women who have an important, and indeed vital, rôle to play in our general evolution and in our own lives. Furthermore, it is one of the stated aims of the ONA to develope such character, such qualities, such Occult abilities, in women, and the following of The Seven-Fold Sinister Way is regarded as the means to achieve this.
Furthermore, the ONA’s depiction of such women – its explication of the dark feminine principle – is very interesting because it is a move away from, and indeed in stark contrast to, the “feminine principle” of both the political “feminism” which has become rather prevalent in Western societies, and that particular feminine ethos which many pagan and Wiccan “White-light” and Right Hand Path groups have attempted to manufacture.
This political feminism is basically an attempt to have women imitate the behaviour, the personality, the ethos, of men – which is what the strident calls for “equality” are essentially about, and as such it is often a negation of the character, and of those unique qualities and abilities, germane to women. The pagan and Wiccan type of feminism is most often about some dreamy, pseudo-mystical vision of a once mythical “perfect past” or about goody-goody types “harming none” – in stark contrast to the dark sinister goings-on of the ONA feminine archetype, which most obviously includes using sexual enchantment to manipulate those Homo Hubris type men “who deserve what they get…” The Occult Fiction of The Order of Nine Angles
Return of The Dark Goddess
One the primary aims of the Order of Nine Angles is:
to use the sinister dialectic (and thus Aeonic Magick and genuine Sinister Arts) to aid and enhance and make possible entirely new types of societies for human beings, with these new societies being based on new tribes and a tribal way of living where the only law is that of our Dark Warriors, which is the Law of The Sinister-Numen. (A Brief Guide to The Esoteric Philosophy of The Order of Nine Angles)
It should be noted – and needs to be emphasized – that the Law of The Sinister-Numen applies to both men and women, and that no distinction is made between male, and female, warriors. That is, the only distinction that matters is living by the code which is the Law of The Sinister-Numen, so that, and for example, disputes are settled by having a man or woman of honour who is highly esteemed because of their honour and known for their honourable deeds, arbitrate and decide the matter.
Furthermore, it is possible, and indeed probable, that the new tribal way of living which will evolve – and which will replace the lifeless, un-numinous, male-and-HomoHubris-dominated, abstraction of the nation-State – will veer toward a new and natural balance between male and female, made possible by the real and natural equality that the Law of The Sinister-Numen manifests and creates, and by the re-emergence of the Mistress of Earth as Sinister Archetype.
For, implicit in this archetype – as in all those who are Mistresses of Earth (of traditional nexions or otherwise) – is that necessary dark-empathy which returns us to a correct understanding and knowing of our relation to other Life through a natural and esoteric resonance with the abstractionless emanations of Nature and the Cosmos. And it is this dark-empathy – this natural, wordless, ritual-less, esoteric resonance – which is the quintessence of the old tradition, presenced in the character, the very nature, of a Rounwytha. The Mistress of Earth – the warrior sorceress – is thus, in essence, an evolutionary development of the Rounwytha, where the practical (manifest for instance in the Law of The Sinister-Numen and in an outer sinister life of dark deeds) meets and is blended and balanced with the esotericism of Dark-Empathy.
Thus it is that one of secrets of a male Adept (and more so, of a genuine Master) is their unification of the opposites within themselves (for example, and in symbolic exoteric-speak, the archetypes re-presented by Satan and Baphomet), and the emergence from such an alchemical process of a new, more evolved, individual. Manifestations of this new type of male individual (in terms of character) are Dark-Empathy (a natural esoteric resonance and sympathy with Nature, other living beings, and the Cosmos), and the nobility (the excellence of personal character) that comes with being cultured and possessing personal manners and yet being prepared to die to save one’s personal honour. All of which stand in almost direct opposition to the type of hedonistic male Adept that all others Left Hand Path, and so-called Satanic groups, desire to manufacture and which, indeed, they do manufacture, perpetuating as they do that untermensch sub-species, Homo Hubris.
Our archetype of The Dark Goddess – our warrior sorceresses – are one means by which we ourselves, and our current untermensch way of life may be transformed, for:
Δίκα δὲ τοῖς μὲν παθοῦσ-
ιν μαθεῖν ἐπιρρέπει [6]
and it is through a real πάθει μάθος that a genuine alchemical transformation begins. Part of which πάθει μάθος is, of course, the Rite of Internal Adept, wherein the faculty of Dark-Empathy can be discovered and cultivated.
Thus does the Dark Goddess, Baphomet – Mistress of Blood and Mother of Culling – come to be both invoked and evoked and so presenced on Earth, since:
“It is of fundamental importance – to evolution both individual and otherwise – that what is Dark, Sinister or Satanic is made real in a practical way, over and over again. That is, that what is dangerous, awesome, numinous, tragic, deadly, terrible, terrifying and beyond the power of ordinary mortals, laws or governments to control is made manifest. In effect, non-Initiates (and even Initiates) need constantly reminding that such things still exist; they need constantly to be brought “face-to-face”, and touched, with what is, or appears to be, inexplicable, uncontrollable, powerful and “evil”. They need reminding of their own mortality – of the unforeseen, inexplicable “powers of Fate”, of the powerful force of “Nature”…
This means wars, sacrifice, tragedy and disruption…for it is one of the duties of a Satanic Initiate to so presence the dark, and prepare the way for, or initiate, the change and evolution which always result from such things…..” To Presence The Dark [7]
AOB
Order of Nine Angles
119 Year of Fayen
(Revised 121 Year of Fayen)
Notes:
[1] The psyche of the individual is a term used, in the Sinister Way, to describe those aspects of an individual – those aspects of consciousness – which are hidden, or inaccessible to, or unknown to, the individual. Basically, such aspects can be considered to be those forces/energies which do or which can influence the individual in an emotional way or in a way which the individual has no direct control over or understanding of. One part of this psyche is what has been called “the unconscious”, and some of the forces/energies of this “unconscious” have been, and can be, described by the term “archetypes”.
[2] qv. The Grimoire of Baphomet.
[3] As has been explained many times, these traditions are simply aural traditions, and may or may not contain certain historical facts, it being for each individual to make their own judgement concerning them,
[4] A real-life account of one such similar encounter was briefly recalled in The Girl Goddess, published in the now defunct zine, Exeat. An expurgated version was later published in vol 3, #2 of Fenrir.
[5] Where it is written:
You who are the daughter of and a Gate
To our Dark Gods…
Kiss me and I shall make you
As an eagle to its prey.
Touch me and I shall make you
As a strong sword that severs
And stains my Earth with blood.
Taste me and I shall make you
As a seed of corn which grows
Toward the sun, and never dies.
Plough me and plant me
With your seed and I shall make you
As a Gate that opens to our gods!
[6] ” The goddess, Judgement, favours someone learning from adversity.” Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 250
[7] For an explication of Satanism in an Aeonic context, refer to ONA texts such as Frequently Asked Questions About The Order of Nine Angles and A Glossary of Order of Nine Angles Terms, where it is stated:
According to the ONA, Satanism is a specific Left Hand Path, one aim of which is to transform, to evolve, the individual by the use of esoteric Arts, including Dark Sorcery. Another aim is, through using the Sinister Dialectic, to transform the world, and the causal itself, by – for example – returning, presencing, in the causal, not only the entity known as Satan but also others of The Dark Gods.
In essence, and thus esoterically, Satanism – as understood and practised by the ONA (presenced by means of Traditional Nexions) – is one important exoteric form appropriate to the current Aeon, and thus useful in Presencing The Dark.
Is the ONA a Satanist organization?
Yes, and also no. Yes, because Satanism – or perhaps more correctly, traditional Satanism – is one of our causal forms; part of our heritage; an important exoteric means to Presence The Dark. But our understanding of Satanism is not that of the mundanes, and in the mudanes we include most if not all of those who now consider themselves “Satanists” and who thus follow the mundane so-called “satanism” of the likes of LaVey and Aquino. Traditional Satanism is outlined in such MSS of ours as The Ontology and Theology of Traditional Satanism.
The ONA is not just “satanic” because even traditional Satanism (a term we first used, some decades ago, and now appropriated by others) is only one particular causal form linked to one particular Aeon (the current one). That is, it is only one means, one way, of currently presencing The Dark Forces; of provoking change and aiding our evolution, individual and social. That is, Satanism is but an exoteric (or public) form of the current Aeon – an outer shell which just encloses, or which can enclose/contain, some particular sinister, acausal, energies in a certain span of causal Time. Of course, most who today profess to be “satanists” will have no idea what we are talking about here, which is one reason why they are still mundanes.
Thus, we tend now – in this the Third Phase of our sinister, centuries-long, Aeonic strategy – to use the term sinister instead, to describe ourselves, and the ONA itself. Hence, we now describe the New Aeon that we seek to bring-into-being, by our practical subversion and our dark sorcery, as a sinister Aeon, rather than a Satanic Aeon, since the next Aeon will take us beyond our currently limited causal forms (beyond exoteric Satanism), and beyond the abstractions of the mundanes, who so like to pretend they understand some-thing by giving it some label or describing it by some term, some -ism or some -ology.
For the reality is that “we” cannot be defined in the simple, causal, way the mundanes want, and need.
Rounwytha 