The Devil is protean, he changes as we change, our closest companion from cave to the starry heavens. This is why we cannot leapfrog him to engage with a horned god of our supposed Celtic forebears. Witchcraft is meaningless if we use it to retreat to an imagined past and play at being the very different people who inhabited it. The injunction of the mysteries to know thyself precludes this kind of escapism. The gods of the past came from the soil, the social conditions, and ours must too, none more so than the Devil. He paws his way out of the farrowed fields unsettling even the crows. — Peter Grey
The left-hand path is … the path of non-union with the objective universe. It is the way of isolating consciousness within the subjective universe and, in a state of self-imposed psychic solitude, refining the soul or psyche to ever more perfect levels. The objective universe is then made to harmonize itself with the will of the individual psyche instead of the other way around. Where the right-hand path is theocentric, or soul/self-centered. Those within the left-hand path may argue over the nature of this self/ego/soul, but that the individual is the epicenter of the path itself seems undisputed. An eternal separation of the individual intelligence from the objective universe is sought in the left-hand path. This amounts to an immortality of the independent self consciousness moving within the objective universe and interacting with it at will. – Stephen Flowers
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Opal Landscape (Redux) by GAR
Emotive (Redux) by GAR
Consorts in the Chambre of the Flame Crystal (Redux) by GAR
“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” – H.P. Lovecraft
Will anything come of the seeds that I plant? Will the virus of inspiration be passed on to others? How about that of curiosity? Each of us may find ourselves at the centre of so many influences making our choices based on either following the flow or resistance to the same. What choices will I make and what roads will they take me down? Life still remains stranger than I ever imagined.
By self-enchantment, alignment and iconoclasm the divine artist ensorcels belief, identifies with its apotheosis and, through his complete identification, the object or icon of belief ceases to be other. — Andrew Chumbley
“I think the only way to avoid going crazy is to get your story straight, and perhaps the only way you can get the story straight is to allow yourself in some sense to go mad. It is also true for mad men and mad women that everything is significant. Paranoids and schizophrenics and depressives deal with the world as if every falling leaf had – well, they take the world personally. That’s almost by definition a mad person. And I guess an artist has to do the same thing.”
Do the beings we evoke have existence outside of ourselves or are they representations of the deepest aspects of our being? I believe that the answer is both. The connections that we make internally become gateways to the external entities on which we call. The more connected we become internally, the deeper our connection to the archetypal externals become. In other words, the only way out is in
“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” ― Oscar Wilde
Maiden of Dreams (Redux) by GAR
The Witch and the Hermit by GAR
Mind Storm 8 by GAR
