After a recent Litha celebration in a roundhouse in the woods, drawn away from the post-ritual socialising, I found myself once more scrabbling up a muddy hillside in rain-soaked twilight in search of fairies.

Fairies. Me. Indeed.

A magicurious friend of mine has some difficulty coping with my earnest references to fairies. After all, am I not (for want of an adequate description) a chaos magician, incredulous of creeds, piratical of paradigms and sceptical of systems occult and otherwise? When this friend asked me to explain about the fairies thing, I told her something like “In certain circumstances (like scrabbling up a muddy hillside in rain-soaked twilight) I have certain experiences for which my culture has no ready words. Checking around, I’ve found that people like pagans and magicians have words that most closely correspond to my experiences. I translate the experiences into such words and the these people seem to understand, judging from their responses, which sometimes include remarks not prompted by me but which I recognise as a similar sort of experience to what I was describing. So I’m stuck with talking in terms of fairies.”

You feel sorry for my friend, yeah?

Now where was I? Oh yes, chasing fairies up a muddy hillside. The rain is pattering gently on the leaves of the old trees around me, the tea lights and bonfire of the roundhouse are glimmering in the dusk at a surprising distance, and I’m getting a light dressing of mud. Above me there’s a ridge beyond which I seem to sense the fairies sniggering at me. We’ve played this game before. They don’t seem satisfied until I’ve fallen on my arse in the mud or slipped off a stepping stone and stuck a foot in the stream. In the middle of the woods, in the middle of the night, I feel drawn away from whatever else is going on and I absolutely must wander off, sometimes getting lost among the trees with my feeble torchlight revealing no more than an undistinguished mass of greenery in any direction.

What the hell am I doing here? This is the question that drew me into and out of religion, through philosophy and into magic. The whole quest of the Kite has been some variation on “What is really going on here and how do I know?” Now often, when people ask ‘how do you know what you know?’ they seem to be looking for certainty, but I learned long ago that certainty is an invented criterion that we don’t really need in order to function well. I need no certainty about the nature of fairies to have this experience of getting muddy, sweaty and lost in the woods. And freed from the ‘certainty’ dogma, I can get on with knowing what’s going on and relaxing about what I don’t know. Which is most things, actually. So it’s just as well that I can be relaxed about not knowing them.

I don’t know how to get back off this hillside. I imagine the fairies rolling around, holding their sides laughing. They’ve done it to me again. What to do? What I did in the first place, when I felt drawn out of the roundhouse and away from my lovely pagan friends. I looked around and saw the trees and … the spaces between the trees.

Fairies! Wow!

It’s the spaces between. Near the roundhouse there’s a little grove, a stand of comparative saplings, and to me it’s a power spot. I stand with the trees and the world goes still, as though it’s just gone “TA-DAA!” and spread its wooded arms wide to reveal to me the miracle. The grove waits expectantly for me to see and go “Wow!” And of course I do. And the grove still waits, silent, expectant, as though I’ve only begun to see what it’s revealing to me. So I stand very still so as not to distract myself, and I simply pay attention to what is really going on. The rain patters, the dusk deepens, an occasional bit of birdsong, chatter from the roundhouse, and as my vision goes to peripheral, the feeling of the spaces between. I’d like to say that total silence descends, but this is me, right? Talking. But even the interior monologue becomes unimportant as the grove’s Great Presence permeates my awareness.

As my awareness grows wider, I begin to feel other Great Presence, glimpsed up the hillside. More trees and spaces between, and I feel my attention drawn in a particular direction, as though I’m being invited. So of course I make my way up the hill, crossing little rivulets, taking fences, struggling up the slope to space after space, stopping frequently and Paying Attention. No more than that; paying attention. When the monologue recovers, I move on. As usual, I feel eyes on me from atop the ridge.

Again, the story of my life. Moving from one great place to another, seeking and finding fresh insight each time, but drawn onward by some sort of vaguely intuited invitation which I call Fuck Knows What, numerologically rendered into my magical name as ‘625.’ So Fuck Knows What is going on here, and Fuck Knows What is inviting me to Stop & Pay Attention. So you see, I know what the fairies are. Fuck Knows What the fairies are.

At last, I’m on the ridge. And wouldn’t you know it: it’s a footpath with a view to both sides of the ridge. I Stop & Pay Attention. I can’t readily describe what my attention consists of at this point: you’ll have to do this yourself. But it’s something around a sense of belonging there. We are not put onto this earth, we’re grown from it like apples from an apple tree, and right now in the dark and the rain and the wooded ridge and the little groves and glades I am no visitor but relaxing into my natural place. Fuck Knows What is happening and I’m doing it right here, right now.

After a while I feel that the fairies have taught me all they’re going to tonight. I spot the warm lights of the roundhouse down among the trees and head back down. It turns out that the fairies have one more lesson for me: wear non-slip boots next time. Bastards. Still, the entertainment I apparently afford them is small price to pay for what I’ve received this Midsummer Night.

Kaitŵm.625 – The Kite

“When I was 17, I had fasted, I had not slept for 24 hours, and I put staples in a wall to pull ropes through in the outline of my body…I started lashing myself to the wall, legs and torso tight…I wanted an experience right on the edge of death…I had a conscious out-of-body experience…You have a body but it’s fluid.”  Extract from the RE/search interview with Fakir Musafar in “Modern Primitives”.

Having spent a fair amount of time musing over the significance that the Gurdjieff work might have for the contemporary magician, I thought I’d take a bit more time unpacking each of the paths that combine to make up the 4^th Way. If awakening within the 4^th way entails the activation of the body, heart and mind within “the usual conditions of life”, in my mind it’s essential that we look at what working with these aspects of Self might look like. At the outset, I’d also add that while using Gurdjieff ’s language, I don’t feel that artificially distinguishing between body, emotions and mind fits well with most of our experiences of reality.

Gurdjieff describes the way of the body as being that of the “Fakir”. Perhaps not a term that familiar to the average westerner, but given his extensive travels throughout the middle-east (Cf. “Meeting with Remarkable Men”), one that was very familiar to Gurdjieff  The Fakir was generally a contortionist who through training, dedication and a fair degree of masochism, performed amazing feats with their bodies. The way of the Fakir is one in which the starting point of one’s journey is the physical body and the use of austerity and asceticism in order to harness its potential. For Gurdjieff the Fakir learns from observation-like a hatha yoga class or five rhythm’s dance workshop, we learn best by seeing others seeking enlightenment through the body.

The story of how we relate our physical selves seems critical to our age. Much ink could be spilt on the way in which the Judeo-Christian and Decartean traditions have led to many of us in the west having an experience of being cut-off or ostracised from our bodies. We can feel like “ghosts in the machine”-disembodied drivers of unruly vehicles that struggle to stay on the road. So many of us want more, and as we struggle with the sense of psychic fracture, we turn to the body as a possible route for a more visceral, earthy connection.

This need to connect has birthed a multiplicity of approaches and responses: martial arts, a multitude of bodywork therapies, tattooing and body modification being just a few examples of how we are seeking to recapture our journeys by marking them on our bodies.  This impulse drove the 17 year old Roland Loomis to become Fakir Musafar the father of modern primitivism. Shamanic lore is rich with examples of technologies that use the body as a means of seeking gnosis. Whether via application of weights and constriction or through consciously seeking bee stings, these animist psychonauts sought a multiplicity of means for inducing consciousness change via the body. I would argue that the stereotype of the pierced chaos mage is as much about this need as it is our love of cyber-punk aesthetics!

Magickal modifications

This re-visioning of the body as a means of enlightenment fits well with the tantric axiom of “Samsara as Nirvana” i.e. the realm that others see as illusion or impediment is actually the avenue via which the “higher” centres of emotion and cognition are accessed. To my mind the tantric endeavour is primarily concerned with using the senses and the body as a means of awakening. The primary technologies of mantra, yantra, mudra and nyasa challenge us to find God in the body. These technologies are techniques of extending and intensification-we more fully access the natural by using applying “non-natural” or ultra-natural means.

Make mention of tantra to most people and it conjures images of endless orgies and Sting’s long-suffering wife. Whatever the value to be found in neo-tantric practice as a contemporary sex therapy, unless these techniques challenge our conditioning and loosens the blocks to liberation, they are apt to become little more than another hobby (albeit a highly pleasurable one!). Why limit bodily ecstasy to the genitals? The technologies of occult tantric challenge us to open every pore as Shiva/Shakti in union-each moment then becoming a means for accessing Freud’s polymorphous perversity.

The Gurdjieff Work’s means for engaging with the body similarly challenges the participant to work with the natural in a non-natural manner. The “Movements” are a series of gestures which when put together become dances that pretty much stand alone in captivating the viewer with their mesmerising strangeness HERE If the goal of the Work is to awaken from a machine-like sleep state, the movements are designed to force the body out of slumber via their running contra to “natural” tendencies.  While an attempt to awaken via the body alone may have limited results in Gurdjieff ’s schema, if we integrate it with both the heart and mind, it can become the work of the cunning man.

To pursue the work of the magician via ritual and the use of ecstatic technologies means to be in the body. Whether via dance, yoga or sacred sexuality practices, as we bring greater consciousness to bear on the kinaesthetic so the body transitions and mutates to become expansive and mysterious. Whether via kundalini awakenings or Holy Ghost shaking, the hidden potentialities of the body loosen the armour of our outdated personas, so that we might risk the new vistas of our future Selves.

SD