BEFORE CHAPTER NINE OF PART I IS SINCERE RESEARCH WHILE LIVING A SPIRITUAL TRADITION. WHAT FOLLOWS SPECULATES, EXPERIMENTS AND EXTRAPOLATES FROM THE PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE.
It’s allegory, sorry- and there be monsters…
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Preview:
120 [52] ‘The Secret I’
Mixed Media 5′ x 4′ 1988 (Detail)
A bundle of sacred objects hung on a sculptural ‘ground’ implies a secret realm of the ‘Other’ world. The ‘bundle’ becomes a conduit of ineffable energies.
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NEPSIS:
LETTER TO A BISHOP
PART III
Preview
“…During one of the rituals mentioned in the previous paragraph, all of my spirit animals gathered: The eagle; the Black Widow was there as principal spirit guide; the great old man and the dragons. My parent animals also were there. All are gathered in the “land”, the inner landscape of perception, to observe something. We waited and watched for several days. Then, ‘it’ appears. It was awful. A terrible thing. A vast thing. Something out of a primordial place, black al-chem; it emerges. It wakes. Vast. My pantheon seems rather paltry in comparison. But then, after several days of dismay, I remind myself that the spider is a feminine aspect of God himself, and the Great Old Man is a venerable aspect of the Christ. But still, this new beast is horrible. It is like a great black snake. I waited for several days as it continues to rise. I have to go into it. Awful. I do. I must enter into the (feminine?), earth, fecundity, must identify with it. Sex, death, life; a swamp. I fit into a moist slit in its body. We begin to travel. Travel at a speed unimaginable even in these days of imaginable light speed. Then we arrive somewhere. I won’t describe that. What I am sure about is the rising and the travel of the beast, it is “neg-entropy.”
…The black ‘worm’ is a beast of vast power, raised to effect what is necessary for a broader vision of God’s intention in creation than what urbanized, humanistic and religious motives usually allow.
Finally, the black snake entered my central nervous system—macrocosm into microcosm—through the perineum. It stayed stretched through my spinal column, tail to crown. In fact, psychically, it is that bone and nerve structure even now and will become a white and gold dragon that is the skeletal, nerve structure of the world. The kundalini connection seems obvious: Compare with Shri Chacra Mandala in G. Tucci’s
MANDALA.
PART III
An Actual Conclusion
In the process of writing the stories in PART II above–the fictional re-creation(s) of the original Nepsis story–I realized the significance of the Black Widow as my spirit animal and the burnt out (spirtitual) Tree of Life as symbolic of our natural condition, as well as the prophetic, salvific dance with Kali, death goddess. Soon after, we found the crystal skull reliquary of sentience, the encounter the salvific Deer God in association with the Blessed Virgin, Theotokos. Eventually, this process produced MEMO TO A BISHOP and other conclusive materials such as EAGLE ROCK that express these issues most succinctly among these meandering ways. Telling the story and re-telling it also energizes me to continue this pilgrimage process to its conclusion. How it all really worked out is as follows: …actually, these chapters are, I think, indecisive and tedious, but for the Golden Light of Luxor, Mexico and Death, the Deer God and the Great Spider episodes, I would have skipped it.
Part II contains several short fictions and four novels that derive from an original non-fiction narrative. For our purposes here, its not in reaction against the Modern Era that I finally rejected the novel and short story forms among others. Its because the material world has no discernable plot, nor characters, nor moral message–Wisdom, Compassion , Caritas, I suspect, derive from a different vale entirely. I returned to mythic, even Surreal cycles of short fiction, research, image and picaresque narrative, dream-like in composition. This is closer to my pertinent interests than sophisticated cultural constructs of dark enlightenment current for the last 500 years and reflects better the light of essential elements of human perception in my view.
Part III and the following ADDENDUM reaches certain points of view, such as :
–Life has spirit and matter, consciousness and persons. A person might be considered a nexus of relationships, time and non-time; indeed, might be the Animist’s sacred stone, tree or wind. This might be animal, plant, deity and human being–self reflection, moments of ineffable insight, mechanics and psyche in the context of self, environment and spiritual origin. Consciousness is untouchable, a divine participation in the universe.
–Abstract Expressionist painting combines artist training from the Renaissance with artistic intentions stretching back at least 30,000 years. As the visual art of The Nepsis Foundation concludes, certain members of that opus lend themselves to enlargement, to wall-sized murals of 40 feet and more… In a similar way the ‘voice’ of Nepsis poems amplifies to epic length, still Lyric and Abstract Expressionist, to research and record our tale in The Nepsis Foundation, A Poem Of Voices…
–Paranormal phenomena is not taken very seriously in most critical commentary on mysticism. However, examples are usually included in the gospels of the world. As well, any treatment of Shamanism must include sorcery, though it is often a small aspect of the larger traditions. Petitionary prayers–i.e., seeking some change in the world from a spiritual agency–are universal, even among unbelievers under duress and bear a striking similarity to the rituals and spells of sorcery. The Nepsis Foundation is rife with paranormal phenomena, but these examples are the spin-offs of a more religious vocation.
–For tens of thousands of years the figure of the “Berdasche” was of enormous, nearly universal importance in human culture and religion. The importance of this persona was of such magnitude that its ‘removal’ among Old and New Testament peoples requires such violence to the body of being, certainly to the body of humanity, as to merit great attention in this ‘history’ of religion.