Introduction:
The Sorcerer of Old, The Sorcerer of Late
The Sorcerer of old came to the shores of a pond or the side of a stinking bog; they may have cast some offering into the water, or captured some creature for use in some spell-working. They may have been gathering some herb or taking some water or mud for some magical use. At first, these men and women were following along with time-honored methods of influencing the arising of events; perhaps they were shown the way to make their charms and potions by another.
Later, when a powerful church made it possible to be executed for attempting to tame supernatural powers towards willed ends, they may have been attempting charms and spells based on what some "cunning" or wise person told them, or because "it was known" that these operations sometimes yielded results. A very few were doing it because they were guided to do it by mysterious benefactors- beings that appeared to them in dream or vision, but these few were in the most danger of death for "trafficking with devils or fairies."
The average "witching" person of medieval Christian and post-christian times didn't think of their activities in terms of operating through a diabolical pact; they simply held onto an alternative belief that the power or powers that exist could be constrained or respond in certain ways, in answer to certain actions on the parts of human beings. There was no moral dimension here; the magic was neither good nor evil. The "evil" of it, in the later eyes of mother church, was that it gave people an alternative source of hope or comfort to turn to, which didn't include the walls of a church building.
It served the political authorities too well to have all eyes and hearts fixed on a central institution of hope and comfort; it was worth the ultimate social betrayal- that of murdering people in the society who simply held differing views on petty matters- to hold the vast majority of people together, cementing control in this manner.
Some say that perhaps, in those times gone by, the survival of the many depended on everyone fixing their belief on common religious rites and doctrines; a stable society made cooperation possible towards the ends of feeding everyone, assuring some hint of law and order, and even moving in national group motions, such as joining in armies that saw the boundaries of a state kept safe. Some say that the Christian world's ability to launch crusading armies in a more or less cohesive manner was what prevented Europe from falling wholesale to Muslim armies- Muslims who were quite organized and driven by a common principle of conquest and conversion. There is some truth to all these things.
But within these threads of stability, which bound nearly all people and shaped the destiny of many, a necessary magic dwells unseen. The wild, unguessable, and strange activities of occult experience- in all its many forms- provides a hidden vitality to order. There is no possibility of order without something fresh and unpredictable being at its heart; it is the fact that anything can seemingly happen that makes it possible for something in particular to happen. The strange immensities of the Unseen World provide the needful and hidden "backdrop" for this world's houses and streets, rivers and forests. The world of order needs its fertile field of origin-chaos.
The same is true for the order of the mental world. Those who lived in a world of God and angels, of priests and sinners, and of saints and demons knew that something mystical existed beyond the beliefs they were clinging to - a strange and fearful world of mystery, of things man could not understand, and perhaps for the better. The cracks in the perfect image created by the church were showing- God the all-good still allowed evil to terrorize the lives of good people; God the all-provider still let famine stalk and kill countless people. "Faith" was enough for the first few nights of breathless fear and restless sleep, but it became insufficient for thoughtful people. The official explanations and apologetics for these problems- each of them a desperate finger in the cracks of the dogma- didn't satisfy any thinking person, and they still do not. Only those who were comfortable with the strange and the unknown had any peace. And those people were mystics and sorcerers.
Whatever benefit the "order" of orthodoxy may have created for our ancestors historically, it was never a benefit that included destroying or driving away the mystical and the so-called supernatural. Such a thing is not possible. The failure of the history of Europe was that it failed to include within it an acceptance of the needful nature of witchcraft, sorcery, mysticism, and the secret wildness at the heart of things. It had turned against its own vitality by failing so.
Those of us today who are trapped by the stale and boring rules of mathematics and materialistic sciences also feel it- there's something vital and exciting about life; it isn't all numbers, formulae, angles, curves, and straight lines. If we truly believed the world was so explicable and tiring, we'd all be deep in depression; the soul in us knows greater things, even if we can't put names to them. It knows the wild spaces, the unseen things and we feel the internal report of these potencies though often dimly. It is enough to attract us time and again to the mysteries of the unknown.
None of us really believe we'll only live 50 or 60 or 90 years; we all look forward, in some way, to finding out, somehow, what mystery awaits in the beyond- even if we lack the courage or inclination to claim some grandiose religion or explanation for it all.
People have relied on the strange and unseen spaces of experience- and those who open the door to them- since the dawn of time. The vocation of the strange and the occult will never pass away, because it is a natural part of any order. Sorcerers are not just people trained or learned in what others have said about the occult; they are people born and bound to a special fascination with the unknown and the mystical. They can no more change their nature than a raindrop could choose not to be wet.
The Weird's Ancient Magic
The great field of infinite possibilities is there; it always was and always will be. It is the "great presence" that we feel when we are close to the wild, natural things of the world. It is the basis for the "Unseen World"- the dreamscape of the soul. It is the Weird, it is the natural home of many orders of sentient being. It is our natural home, too- and these bodies of experiential order and solid, stable flesh that we entertain with our bound awareness and our trapped cups of memory are the side-products of the Weird's great and universal magic.
I do not say "side product" as though the Weird merely dumped us out to the side or made us without a serious thought; all products of the oldest magic- Nature's magic- are fulfilling the Weird's great and secret need for expression, its hunger for the completion of experience. Making experience possible in new ways- in infinite ways- is necessary first; countless bodies, countless fateful courses of power, and countless situations of all complexities seemingly "arise" of the Weird. We can call it a "universe" if we like, but I perceive it as a storm of magical power, a maelstrom of light and glamour, the ultimate demonstration of sorcery.
After that, through the many perceptual cycles and eons of the long Day of Life, sentient beings arise to (at some point) become fully aware of the great completeness of things through their own minds and hearts. This is the final step in the magic; then, the world is truly complete. The Weird permeates the whole, as a whole, which of course it always was and is.
But how strange that beings should need to become aware of it! Do they change it, somehow? No. Do they change themselves? In one way, yes, in another, no. Is this "other" change needful to the Weird? In one way yes, in another, no. The possibility always exists for this change and the awareness of it on the parts of the sons and daughters of mortal men.
It is this strange possibility reserved for us that makes us "men", and not "beasts", though the beast is never far from us because it is a natural and eternal part of this flesh and soul. There is simply something else in us, woven by the Weird- that "finest point of the soul"- the possibility of spirit's undying fire bursting into its own conflagration, the outpouring of real awareness and self-illuminating radiance that changes everything and nothing at the same time.
It reveals the truth about things, but it does not thereby create those truths; it shows that true "union with the divine"- or "union with all that is" is (paradoxically) not a matter of total self-obliterating fusion, nor a matter of total egoistic separation. It is eternal and lasting dynamic relationship and interaction with both the ground of being- itself not to be considered some static thing, but a perpetual unfolding and living process- and all forms that derive their own existence from the ground of being and from countless other co-creating and sustaining sources. It is joyful, perpetual dependency and co-creativity with everything. A small hint of just this state is found in the ordinary human experience of love.
The Crooked Path
The crooked road of human life- that is, the turning road, spiraling inward to some secret place of transformation- also spirals outward at the same time. Don't try to visualize this or wrap a logical mind around it; the act of going "inward" is simultaneously the act of going "outward", though only the truly wise grasp this. This is what it means to dwell in a wholeness of things, which we certainly do. The crooked path is haunted- other beings dwell on it; some hinder travelers, some help them. Some guard the way, others merely watch it. Some wander about on the road, others seem to be going somewhere, intently. Some sit as still as stones, seemingly quite asleep.
There is no place you can go where you will not be on the path, and no person, animal, or other being you can meet that will not fulfill one of these seven roles. You too shall occupy these roles at times, and after you have made it to the secret place at the center, you will emerge, changed, but continue to occupy some of those roles, though perhaps for different reasons.
It doesn't end. That road has no end, for even reaching the secret center- and after a harrowing and a mystery- one may well discover more openness and possibility of time, place, and being. We won't know until we arrive, though mystically awakened beings from all times in the vast history of our world have reported hints to us of the lay of that secret land.
What is before you is the Toad Bone Treatise- a guide down the path, a collection of short works by yours truly that cast light on some dusty corners and hidden clearings of the Witching art. It is a study of the the recondite sciences and other arts now excoriated as "marginal knowledge" and "superstition". It represents my attempt to consider the logical ramifications of our belief in Fate and the all-pervading power of the Weird and create steps towards an occult "natural science", but it is also a grimoire of some power- containing many of the inner keys of the Witching way. Some of those keys have been given before, in other places; some never before now. Seizing this toad bone can grant many wishes- including control over the beast that is one's unrestrained self and the strangely dazed and wandering mind with its many dark dreams and fantasies.
Studying the world from new perspectives- hopefully more whole and truthful ones- must make sorcery stronger, for none exist who can claim power in sorcery without grasping something of the truth about the way things are in this world, both the world that is known and the hidden world.
You must decide if the poetry in your soul becomes clearer when you read and engage such things as this treatise, for if it does, then power is there and you can use that power to affect the world and your life in the oddest and deepest of ways. If it does not, then these words will be like dust to you. One thing is for certain, without poetry, without secret things that fill us with the fire of awakened imagination, we are all dust and will never be anything but.
Before the Beginning; After the End
The Oldest Things in the world are aware of you, even now. Call them Gods if you like; call them Weirds, call them spirits; call them anything. They've watched you come and go every day of your life- you along with everything- and you were there with them before you were born, when nothing existed but ghosts and strange combinations of color, when nothing was there but vast dark spaces of timeless dwelling and strange companies of beings that were beyond your conception. Nothing was there before you became a blood-mote in the womb and swam into this odd yet needful world except the strange possibilities of all things, the undying Weird-space and your fateful perceptions of it. Nothing was there except the tug at your emotional center to find, seek, discover, to be in a new way.
Nothing was there before your birth except the sprawling world of those who have established themselves in the unseen through a dozen secret entrances. Some will reign there, in courts of dazzling splendor, until the breaking of the world. Some will fall from their castles and odd dwellings, to be drawn into deeper shadow than any darkness you've ever known. Perhaps you were there once. Others will wander in twilight, following unknown courses. Others will sleep. Some will gather around the blood of the world, all the light and passion, and seek ingress. Some will be driven to shift their shape into all manner of creatures and nightmares; some will think of this human world in as mythical of terms as we often think of theirs. Some will never know a thing about our world.
The Weird has woven it all- all possibilities of time, place, and experience, and we are wandering in a mental space with borders that cannot be found. Powers are shrieking through here, through all things, and through us. We have sought the quiet. We have sought the flesh and found the world of alternating light and darkness. We have largely mercifully forgotten the strange chaos, but we feel its extraordinary presence, creeping back up on us at times. What happens in the depths also happens "here"- for they are not so different places- and we cannot guess it out. Sometimes it kills. Sometimes it brings to life. Sometimes it takes and sometimes it gives. We can be terrified of it or try to cast ourselves into the bonds of love with it, but at the end of this mortal road, we must face it. It is never what we imagined, as well as all that we imagined.
We are bound, with all the things of the world, and all the things of heaven and hell, to this life and her many experiences. Darkness and Light are not our choices. They are powers who will take their share regardless of who we are or what we do. Wisdom is our only choice, and the power that comes with it- which we should seek for the use of life.
