HORROR FICTION AS MYSTICAL DIDACTIC EXPERIENCE
Dedication: Dion Fortune
Injecting tenets of occultism into works of horror fiction isn’t new. Many great masters of supernatural fiction unabashedly employed concepts of Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and the Qabalah in their stories.
In my opinion the writer who most deftly mixed real magick (with a “k”) and horror fiction is Dion Fortune. Dion was a well know British occultist and author who lived from 1890 to 1946. Her first work of horror fiction, The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, a collection of interwoven short stories featuring a Holmes-like protagonist unraveling psychic mysteries, was originally published in 1926.
When I came across this book in my youth and read the first story, “Blood Lust,” I was blown away. I couldn’t believe the level of psychological detail Dion invested in her characters, and the veracity of her occult intimations. Plus the story made my skin crawl. From then on, my perspective concerning horror fiction had changed. I realized that horror stories, in addition to being creepily entertaining, could also be didactic.
* * *
Lying asleep in the middle of the night, a voice emerges out of the darkness. I hear it first as a kind of echo, for my ego has plunged down into the abyss of the subconscious, slithering around down there like a salamander, vacant and absent from reality.
I rouse slowly, the world and my bedroom fitting itself back together piece by piece, like a window shattering in reverse. Then I become aware of the voice, the alien chatter filling up the atmosphere about me, and suddenly I snap awake to sit bolt upright on the mattress, the chatter conveying itself to me in a series of images.
The images—such stupendous things—draw me out of bed with their luster, to the desk, to the bookshelf mounted above it—to the one opalescent book with a title inscribed in gold. The language is early Aramaic. I’ve never been able to translate it—consciously.
But when the book comes to me in the night, as though controlled by an unseen master, symbols are obliterated, and the text makes perfect sense.
It is the voice that does the translating. It echoes in the room, thunderous, but also in my head. Sitting at the desk in a trance-like state, the book outspread before me, I am shown things and told things. Great powerful truths that the rest of humanity knows nothing about. The veil of matter is rent for me and the words and symbols in the book are the facilitator.
And somewhere in my mind the questions echo: Is this why I’ve always felt so different, why everyone believed I was crazy? Was it for some higher purpose? Was it all just fate?
My ability to remember the nighttime experiences falters and fades, and yet I am granted fragments. I can see myself, after an undetermined allotment of reading, picking up the book and taking it out of the house. Into the yard. Down the path which my father once walked in a troubled, contemplative mood, smoking his pipe.
Did this really happen—
Standing before the eerie arrangement of rocks in the moonlight, clouds among the stars form faces overhead, and I am chanting. Listen, I am chanting. An old truth is preserved in the text, a rite, an incantation, a prayer really, and it’s a bit like music, this very old chanting, or at least it possesses poetic meter.
The chant is awakening something, something primeval and not of this world, a being beyond the veil of matter. I feel it coming forth from the well of madness that, since childhood, has permeated my existence on this earth.
I had always thought concepts like evil and wickedness existed outside of me, out there in the real world, and that they were perpetually trying to get inside of me. I had never considered the possibility that they lived within me… that they could stream forth out of me into the world.
* * *
And yet the book endures, buried out there under several feet of rocks and dirt. I can still hear it as plainly as when it sat tucked away with the other esoteric volumes on my bookshelf. Since I was a child—since my mother and father disciplined me about my exotic fantasies and brought me to the endless string of doctors, who, in turn, led me down the long path of medications—I believed I was crazy, believed what doctors and my parents said, believed I was defective with respect to the world.
I thought the voices and strange visions—which began after I found myself alone (after my parents’ car rolled on the way back from church one Sunday, swiped off the highway that bisects our little town by a speeding Mack Truck)—were a product of this defection. I thought demons had possessed me. With my parents gone, I no longer felt I had the right to go on living. The time had come to withdraw, to sink down into my voices and visions, into the crumbling country cottage I had inherited, and take up the small parcel of money they left to me. My plan was to vanish into the landscape like a branch clipped off a juniper tree.
The book changed all that.
* * *
There is a difference between feeling crazy, actually going crazy, and truly coming into contact with a divine spiritual reality. Severe episodic cases of psychosis, wherein the subject is suddenly granted vast paranoid fantasies and wanders about gibbering incoherently, are ofttimes the result of a failed elevation into this truth. Without proper training, and without sufficient guidance, the consequence of this tapping into the heart of reality can be a mental breakdown. Nightmarish hallucinations can arise, as well as a tendency to fall out of touch.
I believe this has been happening to me to some degree since my birth, but it came into fruition when my parents died. Up to that point I was merely flirting with psychosis. When the teachers used to send me home from elementary school for sneaking Elmer’s Glue into their coffees, they’d say to my parents quote Something really needs to be done about that boy of yours unquote—implying that something could, in fact, be done!
But that changed when they died and left me alone. Then I stopped believing something positive could be done; and the townsfolk and teachers stopped believing, too. They observed my descent into mental ruin from afar, like spectators at a zoo where some monkey’s just decided to bite its own leg off. They let me sink and plunge into my dreamlike psychosis.
Perhaps they didn’t want to get involved—out of fear. What sense is there in rescuing a drowning man if you might drown with him? Still, I think they extracted some sick satisfaction from observing my ruin. I’ll bet it made them feel awfully damn good about their own situations. And whenever they felt burdened, they could gaze upon my crumbling country cottage, with its nets of vines, weeds, and undergrowth, and say quote At least we’re not like him, at least we have our good sense unquote and in such a way my suffering comforted them. After all, what’s more advantageous than a Good Samaritan bearing water in a scorching desert? Only a Nazirite bearing his own crucifixion boards up a dry and lonely hill, upon whom one might spit and feel vindicated.
But either way it was happening to me, this plunge further and further into psychosis, and unless I did something drastic it was sure to be the end of me.
That’s when my nights with the book started.
* * *
The path leading to the bizarre rock formation where I buried the book begins where my property ends. I’m not sure who owns the rest of the land. My nearest neighbor, John Parkers, lives almost three miles away, and I suspect he may own the land, but if he does he makes no use of it, and so I’m free to wander as I see fit.
My father used to walk the path in the evenings smoking his tobacco pipe, while Mother stayed in the kitchen, preparing dinner, or sometimes sitting at the table crocheting. During that time I lurked in my room. Reading was the only activity which my parents thought was healthy, and I consumed many, many books. That path snakes from the foot of my property (I do say it’s mine now, and no longer my parents’) through the thick mass of pines and spruce, down several weed-choked ravines, where it crosses a babbling blue brook. Taken to the final stretch, about a mile into wilderness, the path dissolves into a wide grass clearing. Here, among the hard-packed soil, resides the arrangement of granite bou
lders and limestone rocks.
Did this formation have any significance before it became the burying place of the book? Well my father had brought me there on several occasions. He claimed the rocks were erected by ancient Indians, that they were sacred, and to stay away, to show a little respect. There seemed to me no other options for the interment.
* * *
Where did the book come from? It’s a good question. I’m all about truth: that it exists and can be attained is the sole reason I continue living on this planet.
Such a statement might seem harsh and overdramatic. But the content of it expresses my own inner truth, to which I must always be faithful. For to do otherwise would be a contradiction to everything the book taught me—that beyond the veil of matter, deep within my inmost being, lies the gateway of all that comes into being. By penetrating down to this portal, and having the courage to pass through, is to seek the truth actively. And by actively seeking the truth, I bypass the muck of psychosis and proceed straightaway to the divine knowledge of spiritual realms.
As you can imagine, this becomes rather complex. After all, I cannot convey everything the book taught me. It came into my hands at precisely the right moment, for that is the nature of such things. Perhaps it would be more profitable to you if I recount my experiences with respect to my nightly study sessions—since knowledge of this kind transmits poorly through exposition, and must be carried out using allegories.
PICTURE 1:
I meet a man outside in the forest, wearing an old brown suit and a brimmed hat. His face is blockish, stoutly chiseled, but kindly. His eyes are a deep, piercing blue. And he looks vaguely familiar.
As we stand beneath the canopy of leaves, the summer sun streams through the branches, and I know we are on the path to the rock formation, but don’t quite know how much farther it is to reach it.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hello.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a friend.”
“Are you a Rosicrucian?”
He smiles. “No, I am not.”
“Then who are you?”
“I already told you. I am a friend.”
I glance around and see that the forest has dimly changed, grown more liquidy, less sharp around the edges. Strange gardens and towers appear dimly beyond the trees. Castellated turrets, archways, and high ramparts.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“The Heidelberg Castle.”
I grunt, disbelieving.
“I know everything about you, ——.” He uses my first name, catching me off guard. “I have looked into your future, and your past, and I know what has happened, and what is to come. I look after you.”
“An angel,” I say.
He nods. Then he reaches under his coat and produces the book, hands it to me, the gold script of the title glimmering. “Take this with you,” he says. “Study it. You will know the truth.”
Like that the man snaps his fingers and vanishes, leaving behind a wisp of smoke where he had just stood. I stare at the vacancy for a moment, then look over the book. Intrigued, I head back up the path to my country cottage home, eager to examine its contents.
PICTURE 2:
A loner. I wander throughout the castle grounds, observing the processes of nature with a calm, penetrating eye. Many large, redolent grass plots gleam in the sunlight. Trees surrounding the castle lean their branches over the high stone walls. Many stone furnishings and structures, statues, fountains, courtyards, lush manicured gardens, even fields of complex geometric topiary.
Days are spent in my one special spot, behind the castle’s soaring steepled stone chapels, where grass spreads like a carpet with a single stone bench situated in the center. Leafy branches lean over the walls. Sitting on the bench, I read the book the man gave me.
Much strange wisdom is contained within its pages. Sometimes I think it all rubbish and am forced to close its covers and sit for a moment in the bird-chirping tranquility trying to regain my clarity of thought. It contains so many numbers and symbols that my brain reels, and it takes some time to recover.
A period of meditation follows any amount of mystical didactic reading. This settling of the mental state is unavoidable, for what is being delivered via the words is so intense and vastly powerful that without meditation one would inadvertently resist the content. The soul is opening of its own accord.
Thus I read a little. Stop. Let the time pass. Reflect. Read again. Truth is what I am after, and one thought resounds throughout the emptiness—I must know.
Saturating myself in this ancient primeval wisdom, grand, majestic thoughts pass through my consciousness. I have opened myself like a conduit to the divine spiritual inflow of the world. It is not a small feeling.
I am becoming wise.
PICTURE 3:
One day that man in the brown suit and brimmed hat returns. He is suddenly beside me on the bench. I look up from my book and smile at him. He smiles back.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hello.”
“I’ve been reading the book you gave me.”
“Yes, I know. What do you think of it?”
I find this question difficult to answer. The knowledge gleaned from the book is so vast, so comprehensive and world-shattering, that forming it into thoughts and subsequently into sentences seems impossible. But I try.
“Everything’s different now. The entire world—my whole reality and what I thought was real—has changed. I suspected that the world behind the senses is all an illusion.”
“Yes?” The man blinks zealously.
“Now I know, as mystical fact, that it is an illusion.”
He grins, pleased, and he looks just like a young boy. “How do you know? From the book?”
“Not just from the book. Also from my own experiences.”
“Show me.”
I turn my gaze upon the stone wall to our left, focusing all of my will on it. I sink down in the wall, settle my being into it—become it. The man watches, smiling.
Suddenly the stone evaporates like a fog bank in the morning sun.
“Good,” he says. “That’s very good. What’s next?”
Strengthening my will, conducting it as an orchestra maestro conducts his baton, and the image of the forest and trees, beyond where the wall had just been, begins to shimmer, and then bends outright, folding itself in half. Then all of it disappears, leaving a wedge of blackness.
“Good, good!” He is so excited he jumps to his feet. I stand beside him. “And finally?” he says; “finally?”—so intensely now that he’s infecting me with his enthusiasm.
“Finally… there is only the Word behind it all,” I say. “The Logos. The Sleeping God of Infinity.”
And for a single terrifying moment, the darkness beyond the darkness stirs, something the size of a gigantic sea monster, embedded in the underwater soil. Just a single shift—one palpable rolling over of the great god in his eternal bed—and then like that the darkness vanishes. And the stone wall returns, and everything slowly waxes back to normalcy, and there is silence permeated by bird calls and rustling leaves.
A drawn-out breath escapes my lungs.
“Good,” the man says, clapping me on the shoulder. “That is very good.”
PICTURE 4:
“I want you to meditate on this,” he tells me, just seconds before he vanishes into thin air. He has brought me to the rear wall of one of the chapels. Lofty crucifixes tower over us. There is a secret alcove in the stone here, a circular depression carved out of the chapel itself.
“What is it?”
“It is the image of your destiny…”
… and then he is gone.
The image is actually a complex marble/granite/bronze statue sprouting up from the stone floor of the alcove. Hard for me to decipher, to see with any clarity, for the whole of it is imbued with a radiant spiritual substance, and so viewing it is akin to looking directly at the sun. All that I can make out are contours, impressions—so
mething humanoid in the center (a squatting thing like Buddha), a colored shield and a coat-of-arms, long protruding poles and rods, other various uninterpretable symbols. Being in its presence, I’m quickly overwhelmed and step backward out of the alcove, still staring at it, but then I collapse and fall on my back in the grass, staring up at the fluffy clouds forming faces in the sky. My eyes close.
When I open them again, the castle is gone and I am back at me ruinous country cottage, the book resting gently upon the center of my chest.
* * *
I don’t recall quite when the woman appeared. All I know is that she was suddenly there, tied up like a hog, in the closet of what used to be my parents’ bedroom. By then I had lived through one year, at least, of listening as the book was dictated to me in the wee hours of the night. I had also been practicing the exercises described for the past few months, and was beginning to reap the fruits of my hard work. For the most part, stepping in and out of the dimensional portals was becoming second nature.
I would stand in the bedroom, before the open closet door, with the sunlight streaming in darkly through the curtains at my back, and watch the bound woman on her knees, writhing with a sock in her mouth.
Whenever the sock was removed, she was known to utter the following: “You will never be able to keep the book from me—even if you kill me, even if you burn my body to ash, my corpse will return again and again, scratching at your windows and doors, and my spirit will float about in the air, taunting you. You were not meant to come by that book, it was a mistake, someone has committed a grievous error, we will take it back, it will return to our possession and you will be crucified on Calvary—”
And then my clenching fingers would slam the door closed in a seething fit of rage. She wanted to take the book away, my only source of truth. I would never let her. Where she’d come from remained a mystery, but she resembled a demon in all her form and appearance. Sometimes I thought maybe she had sprung directly out my head into the world, as Zeus birthed Athena, but by then I only wanted her gone, to disappear her from my sight.
Aberrations of Reality Page 6
