Notes from the Ruined Temple: Absolute Power And What To Do With It

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My dear brother Faust has a post up on predators and power, inspired due to the arrest of an apparently well known American neopagan on charges of accessing child pornography and some of the frankly baffling comments made by folks online.. You should read it all, because it has directly contributed to the creation of this piece. Please do so, because it willl make this easier to comprehend, for I have been in the middle of nowhere for a week, with no phone signal or internet. It was bliss. I have also had 6 hours sleep in the past 72, while in said wilderness.

Consequently, this shall be somewhat dreamlike, for that is my native thought process when I am away from civilisation and can feel the dreaming All-at-Once beneath the skin of all things. So come with me, friends. Come with me through the wilderness, slipping sideways through the echoes and shards of Memory, into the rawness beyond ordinary conception:

There is a place, you see. A place you may know, may half remember from dreams or visions. A place where something stood for ten thousand, thousand years. Perhaps its stones are cyclopean, as black as the Tower of Chorazin which stands on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Or perhaps they lie festooned, being more moderate in size, in creeper and vine. Wreathed in green; the air all humid with jungle heat, damp with rainforest wetness. Somewhere you may hear the clotted, gurgling roar of a jaguar or nightblack panther moving in the fiercely viridian space.

Look at it another way, and you see the old hieroglyphs, the cuneiform etched deep, as the Wail of Sumer echoes out over the lush green given by the harmony of gods and men. The tumbledown shack in a forgotten, feral Eden. The lost cavern snarled all about with root and branch from the deepest wildwoods.

Long have the winds sighed and roared and howled all about there. Long have hollow voices reached out as whispers on the night\’s air. Many\’s the time you may hear drums and flutes from within, as if they issue up from the very heart of the Deep Below, emissaries from those who dwell in the hollow hills and earth.

But what\’s this? What lie scattered all about but the bones of men and gods, strewn all about? Myriad shades; pale ivory crisscrosses rotting yellow and spongy green, while bleached white stands out against stained scarlet streaks. And make no mistake, all these bones are the bones of predators. These are the bones of kings and lords, of queens and princesses.

Before the entrance to this place lie the last remains of Archons and Kyriarchs.

Some brought with reverence, some cast callously aside. Some shattered into a  hundred slivers, empty of marrow, splintered daggers to prick the pulsing heart of unwary passers-by.

Not that this is likely to happen, you understand, for it is rare that the unwary even penetrate this far.

Neverthess, the wild distance exists – its isolated nature means that even were you to come here with a band of folk, you would in some sense still be alone, each of you enveloped in the presence of this place, an invisible envelope pressing against your skin. For this is the Ruined Temple, the living symbol.

The manifest, recognisable presence exists here. There\’s no hand, no edifice which stands eternal and inviolate, for this is where the wildnerness, with all its puissance, meets construction and subsumes it. This is the shattered place, the broken stone standing as  a momento mori, as witness to the vastness of the universe.

All things crumble, and wolves and lions may yet one day stalk city streets, as once they did. Understand then, that this broken place is not lost -rather that it has become something other than what it was. Stone, once cut and dressed, sculpted and shaped for the purposes of humankind, now lies  forgotten by mortal mind. And in that blind forgetfulness, there is something loosed, for the vital forces of the Zoetic and the Cosmogonic have suffused it.

Look on your works, ye mighty – and despair. See what the kosmos does, even to your detritus. Know how it is crushed, burnt and torn asunder by Time, and through such alchemy, how its apparent deformation renders it immortal.

And so we ask, what has this to do with power and those who would prey on others? Simple:

Power must be maintained.

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The accumulation of it must be guarded. Each exertion, each stretching forth of the mighty hand, has a cost. This is what you have been taught, and it is true, as far as it goes. There are those who have power, and those who do not. The latter seek to become the former and the former are desperate not to become the latter.

But all must succumb. Every one of us will brought to their knees. This is the smiling Saturnine sickle, the mocking curve on the lips of Time. Rhadamanthus and his brothers were thus for the Ancient Greeks, those who stood upon the threshold.  Watch and learn, and allow the scales to fall from your eyes. See them fall into the soil, which seethes with serpents.

The earth is full of vital kthonic power. Your very own bodies roil with zoetic and biotic forms. Even now as you read these words, your body parts the very aethers, your heart pulses and you expel your used-up breath to feed the very green. For those with eyes that see, and they who have ears – let them hear!

My dear brother is correct – power is transient, precisely because the kosmos is transient. Mortality speaks of ends, all unaware that the womb and the tomb are in fact the same place. Those who inflict crimes against the innocent, also inflict the notion of powerlessness upon them. Folk are robbed of agency and bound with helplessness, precisely because we are taught that transience and powerlessness are not in fact the default state of  humankind. You will fail, you will fall, and anyone who claims not to do so is directly feeding upon the suffering of others, whether they know it or not.

There is much talk of empowerment, or reclaiming what was taken. The truth is, the dialectic between power and powerlessness is self-referential. There is a a secret Mystery here – victim means sacrifice, and a sacrifice is what has been set apart and made holy.Those who have been sacrificed cannot go back to what they were – the events that victimised them force them to find another way to exist, or to put it bluntly, to die.   This fact must be acknowledged, because they have had their choice taken from them – they do not choose to walk a path which isolates them from society at large.

This is why we curse those who inflict such a separation in order to satisfy their own desires – for the paths of isolation and separation which lead to understanding, are not for every soul. Such things must be engaged in wilfully, with clear eyed understanding.

Those who use and and abuse others plunge them into the Abyss, which is less the place mentioned by Crowley, than  an awful Purgatory from which many never emerge. They are rent and torn, brutalised by the shadows and unacknowledged daimons of humanity. The agony inflicted upon them is indescribable; their suffering worse than any hell.

Those who condemn others to suffering do so in a desperate attempt to separate themselves from the mess of their own internal and external conflicts.

Here at the Ruined Temple, there is no compassion for those who abuse, for compassion is as alien as brutality to us. But for their victims, we extend only kindness – and there is a difference between compassion and kindness, mark you. For long ago, we abandoned the concept of power, embracing power-lessness.

Does the ocean have power? Man would say yes – for are not storms mighty? But does the ocean accumulate power? No. It is simply itself, and in being itself, it influences. The ocean is itself, and naught else

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Power is externally defined. But those of of puissant influence? Ahh, now that is another story entirely!

There are thing that cannot be be taken from you, if you can find them, under the layers and layers of impressions, conditioning and contouring. This then, is the Absolute of which we speak, the essence of that which exists beyond Saturn, where the Immortals dwell upon the Isles of the Blessed.

This then, is the Golden Age, which may only be rediscovered through ruthless engagement with the Kali Yuga upon its own terms. We must become blacksmiths and metalworkers in this age of Black Iron. constantly aware of the fact that this grim prison is constructed by the subversion of a material which burns at the heart of stars.

It is for this reason that we echo the spirit of the Christ: The First shall be Last and the Last shall be First.

Is this not our role? To use our knowledge and skills to ease suffering, suffering which is inflicted by the constructs of those who would make themselves power-ful, by carrying out their desires at the expense of others? Desires which, like all else, will be reduced to ash and swallowed by the void.

Abandon your conceptions of power – of gain and loss – and move  beyond and through power-lessness, into Beingness. You are what you are, here and now. Much has been heaped upon you, and many are the wounds you bear.  Yet still you remain. This is the Mystery which you may embrace; that there is no difference between you and the powerful in the sight of Death and Time. In dying while living, we become influence, we become ash and flame and cold – we become daimonic.

We become those things that chains no longer bind, for there is only ever us. We become as that which adheres to an inner law, one which smiles out of ten thousand masks, and in doing so we become one with the forces which lie at the heart of that which is revealed at the Ruined Temple – part of the Kosmic beingness found in all things.

And of course, this places one at odds with the consensus, at odds with a culture which teaches greedy acceptance, an ideological gluttony where thoughts, words and deeds are ingested indiscriminately, always seeking the next new hit. One where comfort and peace are sought at the expense of achieving an ever-evolving conception of what is – for the desire to maintain the status quo is deeply engrained.

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So let me ask you – where were you when the walls fell?