Episode 5: Stripping Down Reality - Part 1: Liminality

 

Episode Five: Stripping Down Reality

Part One: Liminality

Peitho nods, looks at the horizon, nods again. There is a quick calculation behind her eyes, and she says, “Stand. Strip.”

I can't say that I'm surprised by the command – not after the kiss. But I am surprised by the timing. I make a flabbergasted noise in my throat, then, shaking my head, push myself to my feet to do as I'm told. I'm not sure whether it's to my chagrin or my comfort, but Peitho is doing the same.

I keep my eyes off her.

I don't know why. If public displays of affection up to and including impregnation weren't taboo, then it goes without saying that nudity was far from the taboo it will become by the end of the 19^th century. As I'm sure I've said elsewhere, it was actually more uncommon for Commoners to wear any clothes at all in public than it was for them to be totally nude – especially in the summer – the hottest in memory of which we are more than a month into – with plenty more to come.

Peitho knows I desire her. I'm a man, of course I do. And now we are stripping, presumably for the very act which most requires nudity. And yet—

“If I'm going to teach you magick, then we have to have the same definitions. Forget everything you think you know – for now. Magick is not about saying special words or waving your hands in a particular way,” Peitho is saying as I make a pile of clothing at my feet. “Magick is about dedication – it's about ritual – devotion. It's about thinking the same things in the same way in the same places so often and over so long a period that they became habits. In that way, Magick is like art. In fact, you could call it The Art – the art from which all others first sprung. Without the magick of the Will, there could be no other artifice. The imagination, Inspiration to see in a piece of obsidian a knife, is, quite literally, a form which magick takes. Which you took, before this carnation was created for you.”

I can feel her eyes on me as she says this, but I don't look at her. I'm moving my pile of clothing out of the way – and thinking about that word, carnation.

I - Like the flower?

R – She is probably playing with the word incarnation.

S – Incarnation – So—

R – Carnation - From the Latin Carn – flesh.

S – Is she suggesting that I—

I – Yaldy said as much.

“But magick is not the knapping –“ Peitho continues at my side, “the chipping away of flakes of stone until the artist has a workable tool. Just as you are no longer only an Image, an Idea in the minds of Men.”

I've stepped away from my clothes and am now staring at the back of the stable somewhere near the center of the little clearing we find ourselves in. I turn to Peitho as she says this. My face is screwed up with How can that be anything like possible – that is, until I see her.

She's stunning in the dark. Just as stark naked as I am – as all the noise she was making without her mouth suggested – but that isn't what blanks my face. Nor is it the way her hood of curls obscures nearly all of her torso from me. The way she seems, approaching me with the copse of trees at her back, like a nymph emerging from a Classical Greek forest— Actually, no. I know you will say that it is all the talk of Lamiya and thinking about Lilith – and my own, pre-existing interest in snakes in all their forms – god and monster alike.

But for all the world, her silhouette in the night, with only the moon and the stars to light her, is that of a raised cobra – or a woman a some stage of metamorphoses between human and serpent.

Stories fill my mind so suddenly and of such profusion that, like a river with logs, it jams up. But even that isn't it.

It's the way she doesn't seem to notice me at all that wipes the incredulity from my face. It's the way she walks to a spot nearby, equidistant from the stable, the way she seems to have eyes only for it. The way she is obviously thinking more about what she is saying that me. This is a lesson – something important – and the only way she knows how to share it.

I should be listening closely.

“Magick is the artist's practice. Magick is practice. It's about learning to strengthen – to exercise – your Will, to harness it, and, yes, to use it. What beast, once harnessed, is not a tool to be used? What, to the human mind, is not first a tool? But more importantly, the study, the practice of magick is about learning when to use it.”

I look over at her. The emerald of her gaze flashes toward me then away. Her lips curl up in a knowing smile.

“The Master and those Masters whom he brought you to no doubt told you that power of that sort, magick, is not meant to be used. No doubt the monks you met taught you that The Truth is a secret, that magick is meant to be hidden, concealed. That the Light – and the Dark – are not meant to be touched – or if unavoidable, to be touched as little as possible, to be denied and ignored at nearly all costs – to one's livelihood, one's beloved, one's very health – of body and mind – and, eventually, even one's very life – perhaps even one's very existence. They told you that true mastery is mimicry of what the Light is – that Ascension is about rejection of the Human experience, about remembering the pre-human existence and returning to it.”

“Philosophy as preparation for death.”

I hear my words, the solemnity in my voice. Peitho must as well. I don't know how she reacts – I'm looking at the stable, as much because she is and to prevent any unexpected erections. Except to say that she reacts only with silence for a long while.

I'll tell you a secret,” she eventually whispers.

In my mind, I almost imagine that we are back in the carriage again – but it's always a carriage, in my mind, even if it isn't in reality, isn't it? – and she's leaned forward to me; she side-eyes to see whether Tedoro is listening, then puts her fingers over her lips, the emeralds of her eyes glowing in the half-light peeking through the shuttered windows.

“When we were children, they taught us – my Sisters and me – that we would know when the time was right to exercise our Will – when the time was right. But that's an obfuscation. It's not a matter of waiting – it's a matter of being prepared. The right time can be any time. Magick is about being ready at all times to use it – it's about total dissolution of oneself within the Light. ...Or the Dark.”

“Hmm,” I say. Why does it feel like she's leaving some detail out? Skipping over something to keep this as simple as possible? “That sounds like every martial art.”

“It's good that you say that,” Peitho says, her face forming a smile.

We are, I realize, standing far enough apart that if we were to raise our arms parallel to the ground our fingertips wouldn't touch. It doesn't take me long to figure out what's going on when Peitho begins to slowly step into the first form of some fighting stance. The motion is so fluid, it's like watching a dance.

I almost do just that – watch, admire.

I am not nearly as practiced as she is – both in terms of I don't know the order of the form she is using when I do know the movements, and that it's been probably five years since I last practiced any kind of martial art regularly. Enough to keep myself in shape – for the most part – and to keep myself alive – as evidenced in Genoa. But not so much that I'm not sweating and aware of my breathing within the first ten minutes of our slow-motion dance. Eventually, I am able to focus on something other than getting the motions right and my eyes drift from Peitho.

That's when she starts talking again. Naturally enough – and of course – she is having no problems whatever. She may as well still be sitting with her back against the stable.

S – Am I getting old?

I – Nah.

R – You're just lazy.

“That is why you fear the dreams. Dissolution. You fear losing yourself to the magick.”

S – Is that what this is about?

R – She has already stated that she wants you to explore the dreams.

“The fear is a well-founded one. This is a risk. Magick is hidden for a reason. Christians turn their faces from the world of magick. They craft talismans against everything immaterial. For good reason. Their god was among those who left.”

Peitho says this, and if I knew what it were yet, it would be like a bomb had been dropped between us. But more like we were in a virtual simulation of a bombe being dropped between us – because neither of us seems to react all that much.

Maybe it's the thing we're doing with our bodies – basically a cousin of Yoga or Tai Chi. But I don't think so. I already knew this, if I had not given it the thought that maybe it deserved. I had other things on my mind, all right? But, really, I'd been in His Pit, hadn't I? Was that a metaphor? Was the Pit another Illusion, like his different Forms? Was the Pit just the place he made for himself while occupying his Promethian, Lucifer Identity. Or did he exist in that Hellish place at all times, forced by his own choice to leave the Material Realm and active engagement in the affairs of Humans to wait, like a prisoner, in his own filth?

I didn't like the thought.

Because if that's the case, then Yaldy was imprisoned right along with all the other Watchers Azazel brought with him from the Heavens.

S – Brought with him.

I – Returned.

R – Peitho did make mention that many of the gods returned, as Enoch writes.

Did that mean that the entire story as we know it now could be an obfuscation – itself the very kind of manipulation I witnessed Yaldy use on the Ninth, only on the Authors of History – the very real people laid the foundations for Civilization as it is?

S – Is that why Peitho hates them – the Architects?

R – Is that what you're calling them, then?

S – It's as good as anything.

I look over at Peitho. She's been quiet a while. Maybe she's giving me time to absorb this, or she's waiting for some kind of reaction – or I've already given it. Perhaps my ponderation is as evident on my face as though I were straining with the actual weight of a boulder than the metaphorical heft of her claim.

Or maybe she can read my thoughts.

“It is dangerous – if you do not know what you are doing. If you do not know enough to be cautious about where you poke your little nose.”

Now I'm looking at her because I'm wondering what, exactly, she's talking about. Because if she's talking about mind-reading—

“The Christians are afraid. The very philosopher who more or less made Christianity acceptable to the learned class of the Roman world himself, Augustine of Hippo, laid down the basis for this fear. When he argued that the Pagan gods could not exist, he argued, whether Christian theologians knew it then or whether they choose to know it now, that the historical god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, could not have been the same god as the Christians' Neo-Platonist – because you have to call them something, right?”

I nod. “Any term is as good as any other.”

“Augustine, whether he knew it or not, was talking about the War, about the different Eras – and he was admitting that the gods people pray to are gods who have been powerless to answer their prayers for more than an Age. The modern Christian conception of God is a being who is nearly entirely hands-off – except when he chooses otherwise. And arbitrary at that. Fickle. And that fickleness, as much as it is a description of Reality – is not one which inspires courage.

“It embraces fear.

“What—“ Peitho continues, “is fear but ignorance?”

“You can be afraid of something without being ignorant of it,” I answer.

“Incorrect. You fear what you do not know. Fear is the imagination, the mind filling in the blank with the worst it possibly can, all the worst outcomes. That is fear. Fear is imaginary. Fear is artificial and manufactured. What you describe, that is terror. Terror is the known – terror is the predator which stalks your camps at night, the knowledge that someday you will be less that perfect and you will be consumed.

“The Christian death is one of terror – one of certainty that after death there is only a Hell waiting. If the gateway to Christianity is to be like the Christ, the time of martyrdom is over. Who but Christ is as perfect as he was, and what even is Grace? Grace is an afterthought, a realization that there must somewhere in your philosophy of moral temporal perfection being the only path to spiritual purification be a route to a pleasant afterlife for the common person, the person who discovered the Path to Righteousness after a life of immorality—“

“The unrighteous deserve a shot at whatever the Kingdom of Heaven is. Jesus said as much. Grace is—“

“Grace is as inscrutable as the god who dishes it out. Do not patronize me, Robert.”

“I wasn't going to patronize you. I wasn't going to say that Grace is simple – or even that you're wrong.”

“Then what is Grace?”

She's looking at me, and it's weird – watching her body go through this slow mother dance while her head remains fixed in one place, her glare ever locked onto me.

“I was going to say that Grace is an attempt to marry these two very different philosophies and make them accessible to anyone.”

Peitho makes a noise in her throat that may as well have meant Fair enough.

“The Occultists are afraid of what the Ignorant might do – to themselves and others. So they've made magick a secret. They've made it seem too dangerous. But it's more than that. Magick is the exercise, the use of the Will. Holding it, containing it fully. Magick is Willfully acting in such a way that the Weave will warp itself around you.

“So that's what magick is. But what is it? Magick and all it contains and everything it means is a perspective on life. It is a way of viewing the world – a worldview, if you like. Magick is religion, but personal – not in a church or a temple, not on specific days at specific times, not a reminder of the Subtle. Magick is the Subtle. Magick is seeing the Subtleties, the threads of Fate and of Reality, of communicating with and being a part of Reality. It is participation – dissolution.

“But that is the destination. As you well know, life is not the destination. Life is the journey, and the learning you do along the way.”

S – It's always the back of a damn carriage for me.

“If you want to work magick – if you actually want to exercise your Will in a meaningful way, you first have to be paying attention. Only then will you notice some aspect of the Secret Cosmos, the Mind of Atum, the All, the One, the Good. It will make itself known to you. They call it an Angel of the LORD in the Bible.”

“Right,” I agree. “Like the Angels who visited Abraham before the destruction of Soddam and Gomorrah.” Why did that feel poignant? Like I'd been thinking about it intensely recently but came to no particular conclusion – or one I couldn't remember, at any rate.

“Yes. While magickal, that is not magick. That is not even the Beginning. That is Contact. It goes kind of like— There's an Observation of the Mysterious, then there's Interaction with it. Then there's Contact. As above so below, right? By the time the Angels of the LORD were visiting Abraham, he had a long history of Contact and Interaction. His Contact moment was sometime before the story begins. How is he introduced?”

“Abraham?” I ask, surprised by the question.

“Yes.”

I have to think about it, and make the appropriate gaping-mouth noise.

“Something to the effect of his father lived in Ur of the Chaldeans and took him and Lot and his wife and left for Canaan, but they only made it to Haran. Then, after his father died, Abram – that was his name, then – was told to leave Haran and—“

“Right. The telling him to go someplace, that's The Command. That's the next step. We're not there, yet. We're still talking about the moments before Observation, before the Beginning of the experiential ascent toward mastery of the cosmos – or something like that, whatever you want to call the magickal process.