Meditation on Darkness

 some writing about the darkness

by Caradoc ap Cador/Gabriel Carrillo

copyright 1999

 

I have for many years had an affinity for the Darkness,
an affinity shared, I believe, by the Faery Tradition itself.

I was early on taught to think of "black magic" not in terms of unethical behaviour, what could more properly be called psychic malpractice, but as the invocation of a power of an intensity and purity beyond the visible spectrum: the black of Kali, the pure black of the moonless night sky. Oh, how I love the dark of the moon, the dark of the night, and the dark of the year, the Morrigan's scream and the rites of the Old Woman and the Teacher of Mysteries.

There is a strong wild heart that beats in the darkness, and flies laughing on the night wind, a power one denies or overlooks at one’s cost. It is a clean power and a clean laugh, often sinister, sometimes terrifying, but never evil. It is a wild cackle that bellows up out of the depths of wildness, a joy that has not been tamed. In that darkness owl footed Lilith flies through the night and Hekate stands tall and slender at the crossroads listening for the baying of Her hounds.

All that is, is divine; tempest, earthquake, and whirlwind as well as summer breezes and babbling brooks. Our world is not a pleasant suburban garden presided over by the Universal Aunty in her sacred white sun hat, white gloves, and flowered sun dress, who ensures that life is a perpetual garden party with plenty of tea and biscuits for everyone.

No indeed, the light is not so bland and boring as that. The Mother of Summer is in the building rhythms and contractions of childbirth, the delivery scream of pain and joy mingled in the bloody moment of birth; she is in the mother animal eating the afterbirth, and yes the sickly or dead baby.

If the day belongs to Apollo, the night is the realm of Dionysos; the spirits of the night are spirits of wildness and frenzy, whose promise is ecstasy and abandon, the healing madness which purges and purifies the heart. They are mirrors to the soul. They are like the Tibetan wrathful divinities, dangerous only to those who carry the lie in their bellies, to those who fear themselves or what they see in the mirror, among those whom you may always number those who engage in psychic malpractice. The claws of night are long and sharp, but they will only tear at those who fear them, or worse try to deny or control them.

That is the whole heart of Euripides’ message in his play the Bacchae and the death of Pentheus, who trying in the name of light and reason to stop the mysteries of Dionysos, loses first his mind and then his life.

These beings, these forces, partake of the nature of the unconscious, the Fetch, lust and hunger and the instinctual urges; we learn to fear them in the same process we learn to fear our selves, our bodies, our emotions, our sexuality. We learn to fear them as we learn to fear our own animality.

Even the most terrible of all the night spirits will become our allies and helpers, our familiars, if they are met with absolute fearlessness. They will test you, from time to time, especially when you venture down into the deeper darkness within darkness. They will test you, to see if you can be shaken; don't be. Ride the night wind laughing, run with the wolves and howl at the moon.

Find the night-wolf within yourself; run red-eyed through the night; as you love yourself and your life, cast off the leash and run. The forests of night are warm and dark, where terror and ecstasy run hand in hand.

Come "cross the river dark and cool, to touch the night enchanted shore, to gaze upon the starry pool," and give yourself to the dark red lust of the night, rolling like a slow river through the world's unconscious, a wave of innocent abandon to the exquisite pleasures of the flesh, heaving bodies paying homage to the root power of life.

There is a door through passion to wisdom; that innocence at the heart of darkness is the key. The Black Heart.

Walk with me through the forest of Winternight, black and white, naked oaks shadows against the snow, blacker shadows against the starlit sky. Walk with me silent in the silent leafless wood, cold night wind brushing at your face and the only sound the sometimes creak of a bare branch in a sudden gust.

Long of nail and bony fingered
Jar of seed and scent that lingers
Night has swallowed up the day
As we all shall be someday.....
(by permission Karl Franzen )

On a branch a raven perches, and from the deepest darkness beneath the trees a black robed figure moves out into the halflight. Her robe is black as night, her hair hangs in a long loose robe of silver past her shoulders, her skin is as white as moonlight, old and drawn tight against the bone. Nine blue suns are Her crown, and Her eyes burn with Mystery. One hand is raised in blessing; in the other the silver sickle waits its time.