Take a breath, and begin again.

This, dear reader, I have told myself. Each time, I was wrestling with something I could not see. Each time, it was something I could only feel. Not as an emotion, as a worry, but as a sensation of absolute dryness, as if I was trying to drink sand.

Of course, not all draughts are the same, nor are the libations that are required. One cannot upend a bottle any-which-way, and expect a specific particular response, any more than one could simply dictate which individual plant might drink which rivulet, which droplet of fluid might serve which root. That is not within our human purview, however much we might strive to isolate and focus on a singular point, however much we might strenuously exert ourselves in an effort to be efficient.

It is the whole ecology that guides that flow: the gradient of the slope, the nature of the soil; the amount of water both in the atmosphere, and also in the realms of the deep, below the horizon and ordinary vision.

Miles away from that splashing impact of potential-pouring-out, thickening clouds are woven together by unseen strings; particulate threadings and coalescences around-and-apart-from — shaped by thermals and the rises and falls of ancient dusts. Dry as the Sahara, from which winds carry the diatomic-dead of primordial seas, so that the Amazon soil may remain black and fertile. The forest-of-rain, its leaves greening, turning towards the sun and giving the exhalation, the outbreath of oxygen on which we all depend. This guides the hand that spills, too.

If we drink sand, it clogs the throat, draws out moisture from the tissues, in an effort to moisten. More than that though, it rips and tears: a granulated grazing that wounds. How else would it be, to drink stone, to gulp down mountains? Blood flows then, welling up, as it must, in response to heart’s push, its beating marking the rhythm of the flow. A rhythm with its own time that stretches, compresses, thickens — not in response to a clock, but in response-to-and-in-reciprocity-with, the worlds that make us.

In the blood-rush through veins and arteries, surging on in endless cyclonic flow — drawn from the bone-depths of the living marrows — so each wound is a breathing pore, each a passageway of spreading peripherality. Each bloody emergence answers the question we never knew how to ask. To wit: “Who, or what else is ever-here with us?”

Each clotting a fibrous weaving — not a blocking, a corking; instead, a meeting-with, a thickening. By such encounterings are new fleshes made: beneath the covering of scab or ink, or scar.. We call this healing, but we misapprehend the making-whole as a return to some imagined status quo. In truth, such a wounding may be an upwelling of the holy.

“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
— C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

The above is from Lewis’s retelling of the myth of of Cupid and Psyche, where Psyche is sent to the Mother of the Mountain God as sacrifice, ostensibly out of the Mother’s jealousy. Yet, as is revealed, the sacrifice is not as it appears, and Psyche remains in wondrous bliss until the misapprehension of her sister forces her to perform a series of seemingly impossible tasks. That Psyche accomplishes the tasks is less important than the fact she can only do so with the help of others.

By now, dear reader, you may be wondering where THE BLACK PILGRIMAGE, by David Beth, will make an entrance. When does the preamble gracefully leave the stage, and the main event begin?

I regret to inform you that there is no difference, no distance. The theatre you envisage is an artificial enclosure. What you thought was a spotlight, a position waiting to be filled, has fooled you. Instead, it is a ghost-light: what appears as empty, marks, instead, a will-‘o-the wisp. Now that it has you, the apparent emptiness of the stage is revealed as a daimonic play which streams beyond the boundaries of enclosure. In a very real sense, there is no distance, but the distance. The way in which Eros, as spoken of by Beth in this book, is cosmogonic —is precisely the daimonic-doubling paradox of the wound-that-wells.

For Beth, as for others within the constellation of the ontology and current of that which is broadly termed Kosmic Gnosis, it is the polarity which is the generative force. As THE BLACK PILGRIMAGE repeatedly shows however, this polarity is not dualistic or bound by notions of human sexuality. Indeed, PILGRIMAGE takes pains to extend beyond dualism — repeatedly, we are presented with four-fold (and more) reminders of the subjects being discussed. Again and again, the dense text, written with Beth’s signature voice, is latterly accompanied by a highlighting in red.

It’s a book design choice that, rather than feeling like a series of bullet points to remember, instead felt like a gifting of seeds for the reader to take into the next chapter. As you proceed through the ‘Pylons’ chapters of the first half of the book, one is treated to, and by, Beth’s voice elucidating the experiential reality of the Kosmic’s experience.

As such, PILGRIMAGE of course builds on the author’s previous written work and spiritual praxis, while being far more clear for those who perhaps found that previous work too baroque. It feels like the clearest and most faithful expression of the current yet (speaking with somewhat of an insider’s view). That some of the themes match my own work is unsurprising, as I am too embedded within that current, yet I was constantly surprised how often the subsequent pages matched thoughts I had wondered about moments before.

So, this is not an unbiased, or objective review — but by now, I am certain you have gleaned that I believe such a thing to be impossible. This is my review: less of a recommendation, and more a descent.

A descent into that which is in fact, daimonic.

“Because every phenomenon is already a daemon and daemons interweave, there is no sharp limit to how they may be combined. Images call to images. A certain plant, a certain stone, a certain hour, a certain gesture, a certain word–each have their own daemonic life. Brought together in the right pattern, they do not simply add up; they awaken in a new constellation in which many spirits speak with a single intensified tone. This is one of the foundations of Kosmic sorcery: not the manufacture of something from nothing, but the deliberate composing of ingredient so that a new presence can step forward and act according to the aim of the working.” (p.26)

It has taken me a little over a month of experiencing the absolute dryness, to get here, to write this. I don’t believe in writer’s block. Yet, neither can I say that I am in accord with those writers who say that the work of writing is getting up every day and writing, and/or those that might say it was ‘procrastination’ that had me. Multiple drafts, attempts at this, have been written, despite the sense-of-sand building with inexorable force — the heralded corona of a dust devil looming on the horizon.

This has been ongoing, as in other spaces, I continue to work on live improvisational stories and performances where the Mother-‘i’the-Mountain looms large as twin lionesses, the hands of Rhea, the circumpolar She-Bear and her cub.

No escape from the dryness, from red dust and howling wind and bruised inner hollows, the, only relief found in those moments of being-with-others and in reading THE BLACK PILGRIMAGE slowly, piece by piece. Not reading to extract, for review, and not for comfort. Certainly not for the echoes of my own voice I heard in the text; feral doubles come again, in clearer form than my own attempts — in the essays that made up my half of Goêtic Atavisms — penned in frenzy four years ago, in the dark of autumn.

Because those very same echoes were harmonics of a single intensified tone. One which emerges, again and again, refracted through the knotting coalescences of wyrd, which give rise to the refractions and diffractions of fleshly existence.

There really is no way to explain just how impossible this piece was to write, without looking at the impossibility fully, looking past the brilliant flaring corona to the black-hole-sun at its heart.

Except to say, I could not write this, until now. To many, admitting this might be seen as an act of self-defence, cowardice, or shying away from responsibility.

And they are free to take it that way. I cannot stop them, or you, dear reader, from taking this any-which-way you choose. But, understanding that the broader, thicker nature of the worlds that hold us in place is not one where the ‘I, or even the ‘you’ is sole arbiter, we must discuss the possibility that it is us that is taken.

Beth’s writing is, at heart, the recounting of that taking-and-being-taken. This is why the erotic is key: not simple notions of penetration, friction or consumption, or the meeting of flesh to achieve a union, to reach a peak or particular end. Rather, for all its ecstatic proems and pylons, the notion of ekstasis here is closer to an older meaning — to be driven, moved, or taken, out of our place of usual standing.

I’ve often written of certain shapes and ways of being in the world as postures (a terminology I owe to my friend Bayo Akomolafe) in that they are held. They require maintaining, and far from from being static, have their own movements, languages, calls, and responses — gestures and forms. That these postures are often passed from generation to generation, to my mind, suggests Beth’s expression of “Kosmic sorcery” has a validity beyond the confines of so-called occulture. This is unsurprising given Beth’s various spiritual lineages and experiences, which he has written about in other venues. I say this because one may argue that many of the postures we find ourselves transmitting, receiving and perpetuating, are not solely conscious, or even fully ours.

We are ensorcelled — veritably bewitched, by consistent daimonic encounters which are shaped, in terms of our perception, by what Kosmics call Spirit. One of the primary bewitchments is that bewitchment itself does not exist. That we remain, always forever, on the straight line, the point-to-point, peak to peak.

“Kosmic Gnosis is not primarily a doctrine, but a way of standing.” (p.29)

That this Kosmic standing recognises difference in posture is required in order to restructure our relating-to-and-with the worlds is important. One can not retain a static position or stability however much Spirit, as Kosmic Gnosis terms it, wishes it. One cannot remain insulated and accounted-for without a wedge being driven into the multiplicity of the forces, the flows, from which we emerge, and which give us life.

That Spirit is runaway spiral within and beyond the mortal experience; a sharp blade that has turned upon its co-conspirators (the worlds of the All, which are the Kosmos) is without doubt. It must be borne in mind. It is not enough to acknowledge the butchery which is ongoing —the endless commodification and attempts to bind the voices of the daemons of the worlds to endless silence, so that only the Spirit’s voice may be heard.

No, we must, Beth insists, acknowledge that this butchery exists to perpetuate the notion of ground, stability, and supremacy, to generate an ersatz simulacrum, a counterfeit world which promises safety and insulation. If we only obey that singular voice, we are told, by Spirit, we may come closer to it. We may begin rising higher within the hierarchy which Spirit employs as a furious extractive algorithm, up the ziggurat, as if it were an antediluvian Silicon Valley billionaire with delusions of lone godhood. .

That this blade has forgotten its own origin, has cut out its own memory, and excised it from the surface of the worlds is true. That the conflux of the daimonic edge has been subsumed and bound by the singular line and passage, is true. That it no longer sings in counterpoint to the voice of the fire; the ashes of the ancestral dead and the cooling plunge of the waters; the rhythm of the hammer and anvil — this is also true. That it ignores the arteries and veins deep within the earth which make up its own substance, the blaze of the novae which were its birth, and the attendant life and death, and endless whirling of the stars in the dark womb of Night — these are facts. Its denial thereof does not make any of these things less, or absent.

For beneath the shadow of that blade, as it carves up and sterilises — wraps in insulating plastic and arranges for endless consumption —the blood that is hurriedly hosed away still flows back into rivers and seas. Each cut casts off molecules unseen, as iron returns to earth; as spark dances when blade meets steel, the defiant lucifer(r)ous salience appearing and then seemingly gone in a literal flash.

Yet as PILGRIMAGE outlines, it is that appearing and seeming retreat that is proof of daimonic life. The emergence and submergence are not in opposition, rather they are part of the spiralling process from which Chaos is apprehended as ever-manifest. .

Here, as Chaos is revealed, its place in the fourfold schema unfolds. It does not come-before, in the sense of being linearly earlier, or elder (none of the figures in this scheme are orientated within any kind of linearity). Rather it is primordial in the sense that it is always the first recognisable experience/process that is recognised as a place of gathering of the unrecognisible which is ever changing. In this sense, it is primal, and never more, or less than itself. It is not that Chaos emerges from the groundless Abyss, but that Chaos is Abyssal. In this sense, is ever retreating and ever over-flowing, protean in all-form-and-none. So when we say, as above, that Chaos is ever-manifest we are not saying it is always there, even when it seems to disappear.

Rather, we are saying it is ever-here.

That Chaos is Abyssal means that the opportunities for descent are not ours to take, rather, they take-us as co-conspirators, as sympathisers, in the elder sense of the term, with the xenopathic. There is no apparent solidity that is not flow, profusion — and perhaps more importantly, endless depth.

So, as PILGRIMAGE outlines, no matter how much the blade attempts to excise its own memory, that which gives rise to the very idea, the image, of Memory, exists beneath the surface. A surface which is, in itself, a doomed attempt to still the waters so they may serve as static mirror and reinforcement of Spirit’s counterfeit world. A world which, despite the attempt to be modelled in solely Spirit’s own image, nonetheless is populated by, and contains myriad other images.

Myriad faces surge forth and retreat from from the pool of Narcissus, but the self-besotted youth cannot sense their erotic subtleties. He has bewitched himself beyond his own understanding, desensitised and insulated himself in a pornography of selfhood, only able to recognise such images as extensions of himself — for his love only came when the strange image was reconstituted and contoured as himself. Yet even there, the erotic charged surged, and Eros had its way. Narcissus burns and bleeds. and once again blossoms, returning to the reciprocal rhythm of plant and Earth.

“The Mater is not a figure seated beside Chaos. She is that same unfathomable origin as bearer and devourer, the way the Abyss curves towards relation,”

The Mater is what gives rise to all our concepts of matrixiality. The folds and hollows where things may germinate, transform, and die. Without the Mater there would be no figuration, no engendering, no making or dissolution. No endlessly thick time, or any menstruum — that which both dissolves a substance and holds it in suspension, in utter heterogeneity. Yet this suspension is never an arresting precisely because the menstruum flows. To be amidst such flows is to have one’s own hetergenous nature revealed, distilled, and reconfigured. So, it is a curving of us back towards the cyclical. We are shown ourselves, not as singular particle, but revealed, as-and-by, layer by layer of fluxing and sedimented becomings. Ancestral lays, laws and tendencies curve us like the bow of Heraclitus — what is in variance agrees with itself, as in the harmony of the bow and the lyre.

Bent-back, as it were, rendered amongst a host of seeming-strangers and stranger-seemings, so we are greeted once again by the oceanic ambient Dead, passage-and-crossroads revealed not as singular point, but wandering line, knotted-with and split-apart endlessly by the weavings of becomings at the hands of the keepers of the loom. Beth makes clear that such hospitality is not safe — the becomings are as much devourings as birthings, the gathering of Abyssal groundlessness in Mater’s folds does not render care as immunity, but as fierce maw and gaping wound.

The Lionesses muzzles are bloody, the She-bear’s roar is the hunter’s bane. Her cavernous hollows lead endlessly back and down, bones broken to reveal marrow, or lying fleshless and eternal deep within the earth. Her sacrificial pits seethe and writhe, all blood and dark soil, ten thousand shades surging into secretion, taking on faces long-forgotten and never-yet-to-be-born. Her paradox is the soothing of a shattered body, the hands doing the work for the limbless, yet also the griefsong of the child left to die, or become something-else beneath the stars.

Without the Mater, nothing is born, and nothing dies. Her teeth tear the umbilicus and the heart out with equal measure. In this, Beth illustrates that the reality of the Mater is the beginning and end of all human relationality. It is she who not only configures us towards relation-as-method-of-survival, setting that blessing-curse upon us, but provides the room in which we may be the human which is required by the kosmos itself. To put it another way, as human comes from earth (humus, etc, etymologically) the Mater, as chthonic matrix, allows us to be autochthonic via the medium of the dead. This is not a matter of territory, it is a matter of ecology — of matter-ing itself.

Suspended as we are, as-and-amidst the flows of the Mater it is not that we hang-on-high. Indeed, the methodology of hanging is that wherein the tension of suspension reveals the inexorable pull of gravity — the curvature of space, shaped as matter, pulls without exertion. Suspension is as stillness-and arrest is the misapprehension of ongoing, endless katatbasis,

There is is no floor, thus the fall is infinite, and in the infinite hollows of the Mater it appears as if we do not move, or rather more accurately, that moving-without-moving-is-ever-ongoing.

And so, it is not that the eye of the storm is calm, rather, as the dust-devil spins up, and the throat opens, bloody, it is the relational bonds of the fierce forces which collectively produce the appearance and experience of calm; their shrieking violence only perceivable by the circular whirling of the seeming-periphery. Yet this is not two separate phenomena: indeed it is a conclave of myriad presences and relations. As one swallows mountain long worn down by water in aeons past, so blood calls to breath, to atmosphere. As the granulation grazes, opens wounds, are we not being grazed upon, devoured by the Mater’s teeth?

PILGRIMAGE is two books: the pylons laying out the arrangement as sorcerous bricolage, first. Then the Work, a collection of rituals and attendant commentaries I shall not discuss here. I leave those to the prospective reader, confident that their gravity will call to those who need them. Yet, as I write this I cannot help but think of the doublings and repetitions in both this piece, and the book itself. I cannot help but think that the dryness calls to rain, as desert to sea — as desert-once-was-sea, and will be again. I cannot help but think that it was the impossibility of writing this, as daimon, which conjured this into being as is.

Here and only here, could the gathering occur, in this way. Is this kairos? Perhaps, but the Black Pilgrimage spoken in the book can never end, its wandering curves and spirals met only through the human, the more-than-human, and its ancestry, in something that Heidegger briefly touched and expressed via the fourfold. One might argue that such a philosopher spent his entire life, for good or ill, attempting to articulate and relive that touch — hunting the Open Life, seeking a path back.

For the Kosmic, at least for me, there is the understanding that the hunter-becomes-as-the-hunted. In order to eat, to be nourished, we must first be eaten — remembering we are food for the Mater.