Albion Dreaming

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And so it was that in 2014, the people of the land of Scotland elected to remain united with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But the island of Albion has known many kingdoms and nations. From the  Celts, Picts,  Romans and all the other tribes, the small island has had mankind drawing  boundary lines all over it since humans first settled here. From the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy to the Danelaw and beyond, the maps and desires of mankind have been as shifting sands. Human hands have shaped the island too – the once great wildwoods are either no more, or sadly diminished. Roads criss-cross moor and fell, carrying busy minds hither and yon – and yet, through it all, Albion dreams.

Or, perhaps more accurately, Albion is dreaming.

And though this piece will be filled with the art of William Blake, his complex mythological cartography is not entirely what we mean. Having said that, Blake was a visionary artist and poet who made Art – he went forth and visited the numinous realms and brought back imagery, visions and understandings. Even the most soothing of his pieces exudes a vitality which does violence to the simple act of representation. So when we speak of Albion, we are not simply speaking of that giant who emanated Jerusalem – a feminine spirit as well as a place – but of the primordial Beingness of the island, the living avatar that mankind calls a giant.

(Remember my contention that people can be portals? Not all people are human.)

So, we recall that while we dream, things seem perfectly real, no matter how non-sensical they are, how inchoate and strange they may become, yes? Only rarely do we find ourselves in possession of a flash of lucidity which reveals the true nature of the experience. Unless that is, we have either natural ability or have trained ourselves in the art of Lucid Dreaming – in working with the very substance of experience to achieve our wishes and fulfil our needs.

Now, we know of course, that the structure of dreams has its own logic, its own Deep Structure. We know that the Imagination creates these worlds for us in the bone arenas of our skull; vast enthralling shadow-plays unfolding behind flickering eyelids. And yet, we forget that that same Imagination does the same whether we are asleep or awake. It takes the raw stuff of experience, and, like a smith, it builds the world around us. All that we see, feel or do is of a direct consequence of Imagination\’s Art – our entire lives are predicated on our responses to these constantly updating, vibrant exhibitions.

Is it any wonder then, that the redemptive figure for Blake is the fallen avatar of inspiration and creativity? That Los, as he is called, is in fact a blacksmith, and one who falls repeatedly by becoming too enmeshed in the world?

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Half Friendship is the bitterest Enmity said Los
As he enterd the Door of Death for Albions sake Inspired
The long sufferings of God are not for ever there is a Judgment

To retrieve what has been lost,  he enters the very heart of Albion, descending down to the centre – this anagramatic Sol, this inverted sun surrounded by earth. But, as ever it is best to allow Blake\’s work to speak for itself. His vision, his seeing through the crack in the walls that are no longer fit for purpose, is his own. One can, and I suggest you do, descend deeply into Blake\’s work – travelling far in the vehicles he has created. Vehicles, which despite the Christian overtones, have less to do with ordinary religion and more to do with gnosis and the terrible, awe-inspiring ecstasy of the mystics.

And that, dear reader, is where we meet – for Blake was more than an engraver, he was a poet – he understood the nature of existence was revealed in allusion, rather than illusion; that Truth might be revealed by Beauty, but that they were not the same. The language of dreams is one of symbol and metaphor;  poetry\’s knowing is heartfelt and intimate, a kenning  that illuminates the way, revealing as much by the shadows cast by its flickering flame as by the light it casts. Positively brimming with the laughter of a child, completely innocent in awareness of good or evil, cruelty or kindness, the damonic reality of Albion\’s dreaming affects us all on this island, whether we know it or not.

After all, this is an island of many gods, spirits and wights; as many peoples as have settled here bring their own dreaming to weave together that endless tapestry. The many lands and places of this island have their own boundaries, their own senses of Self which may or may not accord with those held in the minds of humankind.

Here then again, we meet – for it has been my experience that all things are influenced by the Dreaming – that humans are influenced on deep and subtle levels (as well as the explicit, obvious ones in some cases) by these stirings of the Soul of the World. That these perturbations, these eddies and flows and ebbs and tides, influence everything we do and shape our responses.  This is why I am careful to say that Beingness can be reavealed as dreaming rather than a singular dream. For it is an endless process – the dreamer has always been dreaming, which is why they may inhabit endless forms and shapes in all times and places. Not sequentially or linearly, but All At Once – bleeding into each other like a morphing optical illusion or the variety of flavours which make up a gourmet meal or fine wine.

And just as the avatar falls when they grasp too closely at the world, this wonderful temple-which-is-also-a-theatre, so we fall when we begin to identify too tightly with particular things. Rather than regarding things as being direct representations, we might consider them as ambivalent – or even polyvalent.

Is becomes may-be and seems-to-my perception.

This is the apparent Gnostic position – that the world as-it-appears is a prison. That the faculty of Imagination and Creation, the divine craftsman has become blinded and deluded. It is innfected or contaminated by a counterfeit Spirit of thought, a codified facsimile of the living logos which insists on A=A alone, instead of  Alpha and Omega – which is a certain Gnostic key familiar to many Christians.

Each stoiechion – letter, element – is an explicit expression of the implicit whole.

We can never isolate an individual element from the whole, because the whole is what gives rise to it. All we can do is refine that element so that it becomes more and more itself, until at last its stands as a uniquely particular revealer of continuous wholism! By allowing ourselves to dream, to be ambivalent about our circumstance, we can discover the multiple meanings of each element of our experience.

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We experience synchronicity as meaningful co-incidence – that is, elements of experience arrive in our consciousness simultaneously, not because we are making a connection but because one already exists on the level of poetic, daimonic reality. We abruptly experience a localised awareness of simultaneity – the All-At-Once reveals itself in explicit, particular form, only to seemingly vanish the next moment.

Why? Because as Gordon explained a while back, everything is entangled!

Now, I\’m a Heathen, so I have a deep suspicion that this is what our ancestors were trying to describe when they spoke of wyrd. The mysteries and runes and weaving associated with the three Norns, and even the similar reflexes across Europe pretty much seal this for me. An endless upwelling, or an endless weave – both of these imply that everything touches everything else in some way.

I can no more refuse to acknowledge the Christian grounding and symbolism which permeated my upbringing and my family, past and present, than I can refuse to acknowledge that I am quite probably a carrier of a lethal genetic disease – Cystic Fibrosis. I could deny it, were I feeling foolish, but it would still be present, would still be lodged in my dreaming.

Likewise, it would foolish not to acknowledge that Scotland is a human fiction, yet also a sovereign nation, as well as being part of the larger UK. And is also none of these things.

It has its own culture, its own dreams and Beingness. None of these, contrary to appearances, is exclusive – they are in fact, inclusive. Like facets on a gem, they are particular and distinct entities, in and of themselves, while also being products of human perception.

So, rather than suggesting that All-is-One, what if we suggest that All-is-Many? What if we loosen our grip on what things mean, and instead accept they are Meaning itself? In the painting of Blake\’s above, we see Albion opening Himself to Christ in what is a quite a traditional posture – a kind of I\’m here, I\’m not hiding, come Be-With, with me  – exposing His heart.

From a Gnostic perspective, this heart-connection between Albion-as-Primordial-Man and the  Gnostic Christ is fundamental. If one considers the painting a while, one can quite easily Imagine a direct link and invisible bond betwixt the two figures.

In Blake\’s mythology, Albion is the personification of humanity as a whole, as well as a place. From Albion emanate all the forms and varieties of Being, separate yet also-with. For us though, we might see Albion the giant as this island and all its dreams throughout the aeons, now, before or since.

We might see the connexion of the Gnostic Christ descending and being crucified in order to form that link with Albion, as a deliberate polyvalent stoicheion. We might see it as a mythic Mystery, a deliberate dreaming symbol; far from descending, the Gnostic Christ-as-revealer is an element which is already within the very heart of Albion. It is only by coming upon the Mystery of the crucifixion – that is, the uniting of body and blood with the Tree of Knowledge and Good and Evil, via death, that the scales fall from the eyes.

Blake\’s Albion is eventually redeemed by Los, who we also note enters the heart of Albion through the door of Death. So we might say, from a Gnostic perspective that the Christ (literally \’the annointed\’) is an Anamnesis, or memorial sacrifice, both philosophically as Plato would have it and liturgically. As a sacrifice, the Christ gives rise to the re-cognition of humankind\’s dreaming nature.

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And what happens when we realise we are dreaming? Why, sometimes we spontaneously become lucid.  We are no longer enmeshed in the dream but can play as we wish, and live an existence of onrushing gnosis instead of static idea.

One does not need to be a follower of the Christian religion to obtain gnosis. Indeed many would argue that religion is inherently  structured so faith and adherence to the teachings – as well as acting on and expresing those teachings in daily life – is enough. But that is not enough for some; the perennial Gnosis of the kosmos as vital, living Beingness with infinite variety of difference and form reveals itself again and again the world over.

This island, this Albion holds many gods, wights and spirits –  portals, persons, and people who participate in the Dreaming, some lucidly, others not. As a Heathen it is my nature to engage with that plethora of ways, that cornucopia of Being that wells up from all sides – we are all dreaming after all, whether we be humans dreaming we are butterflies, or butterflies dreaming we are human.

Both. Neither. Polyvalence.

Wizards are quite lucid about and within the Dreaming. They read its signs, its many faces, its multifarious spoor. They too are beings of living Imagination. They craft it like smiths, stir it like cauldrons. Sorcerers bang Imagination against other bits of Imagination to create weapons to do battle and make tools to manipulate the dreaming even further.

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Did you ever wonder why Albion produces so many wizards? Why they stalk our dreamscapes like wild-men and wanderers, feral urbane gentlefolk in sharp suits and funny hats; spymasters and angelspeakers, confidants of kings and dirt-poor cunning folk all at once? Trench-coated bullshit artests and art-school geniuses turned to sketching in pubs, or breaking into Egyptian pyramids?

We\’re bloody everywhere. I mean that quite sincere, and as polyvalently as possible. Dig anywhere in the world, look up  and away for a moment and you\’ll find a wizard\’s counterfeit bones suddenly there, where none were before. Except of course they were, you just didn\’t see them, did you?

Turn the right way and you\’ll be tripping over oracles. Whole ossuries of severed-head-prophets waiting to spin you a yarn with a serpents tongue and breath like fire. We\’re drowning in lucidity – labouring in the liquid light of Leviathan.

I grew up in Cornwall, like I said in my last post – and it\’s what I call gnarly land in a Pratchettian sense. It\’s absolutely huge but it\’s folded up into a very small space. Folds within fold within folds, like a fractal; it depends which way you look at it, and for how long, and what you think you\’re thinking at the time – and also what you really are thinking, but don\’t know it yet.

All of Albion\’s like that really. Goes down deep into the labyrinth, into the heart of it. That\’s the Dreaming as a whole of which Albion is but a part because Albion is also a dream which is dreaming and is being dreamt by something larger, as well as simultaneously being dreamt by the things it is dreaming.

Remember, everything is connected to everything else – it\’s the entangled folds, you see. Fold a sheet of paper, punch a hole – you know the drill.

The Gnostic Christ hanging on the tree is connected to Wodan hanging wounded on Yggdrasil;  Wotan-Krist, the Master of Fury steals the sacred mead and flies away into the sun as an eagle, while Taliesin shifts shapes after taking his three drops from the cauldron as Gwion Bach; Bran the Blessed\’s head is struck from his shoulders, but not before he\’s been a little too close to the cauldron that raises the dead. They bury his prophetic head beneath the tower and clip the raven\’s wings to keep London unfallen as Arthur sleeps beneath a mountain and Myrddin Wyllt loses his mind in battle at Arthuret.

On and on, aeon after aeon. Makes you wonder what kind of wizards of Westminster the Queen has on staff – because you see the Sovcereign and the Land are One, if things are dreamt one way. Another and we have  City wizards playing with the fire of the marketplace, and doors that revolve between corporate-politics and billionaires.

Because they\’ve crafted Nightmares before, haven\’t they? Stained a few dreams with fear and loathing, watched it spread. Watched the world thrash in its fearsweat, getting tangled in the sheets, and smiled as we demanded they turn more blood into lamp-oil to keep away the imending Night.

And so it was that in 2014, the people of the land of Scotland elected to remain united with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Albion is dreaming.

Same as it ever was. And not.

So it goes.

Now, if you\’ll excuse me, I have  to bang some bits of Imagination together so I can shoe the horse of the bony rider outside, y\’know?