WWYRDTALE

By Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule
 
 

With bones of flame
And sigils singing
To roots returning
New beginnings
I return to cast
The past I'm bringing
Back
And Forth, betrothed
To Self in bliss of This
And Knowing of That
Understanding what
Wisdom Is

Qabbala expanding
Spawning contractions
Maps and systems
Spurned into action
Interaction, Intersection

Twixt the Visible and the Invisible
Made Indivisible
D
E
S
C
E
N
T…
 

From my Travel Journals:
 Austria, Sept.17th, 2oo3.

  As a part of me aspires upwards to Kether, interest in the outer falling away for meditation and inner
stillness, another part spirals down down into the Sub-Malkuthian realms of Phos Nia (linguistic and reflection and conceptual reflex below the Tree of the Ain Soph above) -the supra-dense Black Light.
 As usual my positions and transitions within the 11-star Working of the Horus-Maat Lodge effect and reflect my journey through foreign lands and their mythoscapes...

 I have been invoking Norse Allfather Odin for a while lately and the effects of this magick seem to be coagulating in a very Malkuthian (even sub-Malkuthian) way now I am in Germanic lands again...
     My '8 Gates' Underworld Journey
http://www.crossroads.wild.net.au/morph.htm
Metamorphic Ritual Theatre production went well in Vienna at Lalish ritual-theatrelab, and now the imminent performance ritual with Terra Tenumbra (´Shadow of the Earth´ -an interesting reflection of ´Pennae Praenumbra´ mani-festing...) on Sept.21st is very physical- going beyond Malkuth by going through (below) it...

 'Terra Tenumbra' don´t mess around -their prospective invocations include 18 piercings (one for each rune) up the spine (a row of nine on each side) and 18 along the arms to resonate with Odin´s pain hanging upon the World Tree -He discovered the runes after hanging there for nine days and nine nights. Steve who receives this will have raven feathers attached to these piercings, then becoming Munin (raven of Memory) when I in turn invoke Odin in Hanged Man posture. He will be connected with rubber threads to the piercings of Hugin (raven of thought) above so that they have no choice but to reflect each other´s movements (no choreography necessary!)
 Since there are no real trees in the venue, I will be painting a Qabbala backdrop, thus also correllating Norse and Hebrew conceptions of the World Tree of Life.
 Hanging upside-down, the Tree will look its Nightside inversion through Daath, while also I gaze down into the inky depths of Mimir (the Well of MEMory below me) to the Phos Nia...
 Inspired by the preceding rite, I am going to have wrist and ankle piercings with physical threads also, so the Norns can more easily pull me into inverted rune postures while hanging, with physical rather than etheric threads this time...

 All this makes me less nervous than the idea of taking fliegenpilz (the local term for fly agaric psychotropic mushrooms) by myself in the woods of Wechsel tomorrow. The hexenrings (witchrings) of such there are reputed for both fertility and doom, and time it is said is very
different within their fae perimeters.
 In 8 Gates I theatrically journeyed the fliegenpilz in relation to Northern (direction of the dark)
 former incarnations, and met Hel/Holle/Hela, the Queen of the Underworld in their pantheon. Now it is time to do it for real again...

 Glad to be leaving the city, despite this particular one(Vienna)´s considerable glamour.
 ...Farewell, I must be off now to make the journey to these woods as the sun goes down...

 May Hela be with me!

(Note: little did I know at the time of writing the above that I would actually end up taking fliegenpilz during the hanging and piercing rite)...
 
 
 

Sept. 25th

A TRUE TALE of WYRD:
 

...So I trekked out from Vienna to Wechsel (pronounced ‘Vexel’, translates as, 'Change'!) in search of the fabled hexenrings of fliegenpilz (fly agaric mushrooms) there.
  I had expected an intense journey and probably ordeals, given past experiences with these potent
fungal allies of mine.
 I wanted to take fly agarics in their own homelands rather than mine (theyare not native to Australia having been imported presumably with the pine trees they grow withsymbiotically), and to connect thus more with the Norse pantheon whom it seems previous incarnations ofmine worked with on these mushrooms.
 

 I had not anticipated the nature of the ordeals or their immediacy however: No sooner had I got off the train at Aspang and wandered out into the small town half-asleep than I realized I had left my belt with attached pouches on the train. I rushed back and wasrelieved to find the train still there further up the tracks and the driver begrudgingly went to have a look. He came back empty-handed and though not good with English eventually relented to letting me have a look myself. The belt and all were indeed not there, so I thought I must have left them on the previousconnecting train. It was only later (too late to confront him) that I distinctly remembered taking themoff on that one and suspected the driver of foul play...

 I wandered off into the night very upset. The pouches had contained not only about 40 euros and some expensive keys I would later have to pay to replace,but more importantly several irreplaceable magickal talismans, as well as the belt and pouches themselves being of great sentimental value to me.
 Their loss released a tide of unexpected emotion in me, and I realized it had activated a rapid purge ofvarious city tensions now I was in the fresh country air.

 Eventually I dried my tears laughing, realizing that of course it was just ´stuff´ anyway: when looked at objectively, what had I lost but a few fancy buttons, beads, baubels and a cracked mirror! It all sent me into a spin about attachment to matter, and gave me a new perspective on my transition from Malkuth to Kether in the 11-star working...

 Not a pleasant arrival all the same, and because I wanted to ring lost property early next morning, Ididn´t wander off into the forest yet but slept near a bridge over a rushing river in the town. I was very cold -probably from the water below?- and my energy was tumultuous, I hardly slept the whole night and awoke early with an awful crimp in my neck.
 The lost property thing was hopeless on the phone with automated menus in German etc. and I decided I had best leave it til I get back to Vienna a few days
later. Letting it go, I walked off into the hills at last, and felt much better wandering through the pine forests…

 No sign of fliegenpilz however and after several hours I was feeling weary after so little sleep. It
was much more difficult to get directions out herewhere few people spoke English much, unlike Vienna, and I didn´t really know where I should be looking as Wechsel is a large area with several towns and woodland betwixt.

 Finally I found a solitary fliegenpilz, but it was still sprouting and I felt to not pick it. I followed
its trail but no neighbours were found, so I decided I should try another area. I engaged in a difficult
´conversation´ with a cyclist who had a map, and determined that the highest hills (not quite real
mountains) in the area were near Munichkirken, so I caught a bus out there and eventually found these hills. I asked a few locals about fliegenpilz but was surprised that even though I had used the Deutsch name for them they just looked baffled. I later laughed to realize that if I had asked your average person in Australia where the ´Flying Mushrooms´ (literal translation of Fliegenpilz) were their response would probably have been the same!

 There was a cablecar up the ´mountain´ but it wasn’t steep (except the price) or far to the top and I didn´t have much stuff with me so had no real excuse.
 Lucky I walked because it was on the way up that, after more than an hour of foraging, I eventually found some fliegenpilz -red and shiny! Only, of course, when I had given up looking,but not long after my second prayer to Odin (I had found the budding one near Aspang after the first)...
 One middle-sized one and a monstrous one big as my spread handspan. I put these out to dry in the sun, although it was already getting low in the sky.
 I went up to the top and wandered around the forests there. It was a beautiful journey, there was quite a diversity of terrain and I felt all my senses opening up again away from urban overkill. I finally feltreally earthed on this land, as I alway do when I get away from civilization enough to really feel a new place.

 Nevertheless I was still very tired and the sharp pain in my neck persisted, that and the mushroomsstill not being fully dried (necessary to prevent poisoning) at dusk convinced me to retire and get up early to trip the next day instead.
  Returning to where I had hidden my belongings, I suddenly came across another whole patch of fliegenpilz (though still not in a ring) and delightedly picked seven.

   I curled up in the base of a fallen tree, nesting in its tangled roots on a bed of moss, and had a nice deep sleep.

 Perhaps too deep as when I awoke next day I thought it was early because of the sun´s position but had forgotten how high (only geographically at that stage) I was, eventually discovering it was actually already noon. With my need to get back to Vienna that night and prepare some things for the performance rites the next day, I could only afford three or four hours more out here. So it would not really be a good idea to trip and have to deal with passage back, etc., but ...
 Everything seemed to be preventing me from having them, but...

 ah Hel, I had come out here to try Fliegenpilz in their homelands, and I had found some so I would eat thereof!

  Besides, it would probably only be a mild dose as only the first two picked were dry enough to eat. I ate the middling one, sweeter than Australian ones but the same pungent intensity. Nausea was sweeping me already at the sensory recollections of past heavy trips...

 The large one was not as dry as it should have been, still a little spongey, but I ate a third of it then proceeded with some yoga, rune postures (thanks Jan!) and deep breathing exercises while awaiting the onset.

 Soon I was beginning to feel a bit strange, but the dominant feeling was one of wanting to puke my guts up. I managed to stall this for a while, found the best sound to allay it was a deep, ´Uurrr...´ This is the name of the primordial rune, and I began to realize its connection to Urda, first (´Past´) of the Norns (Norse Fates) or all of them together, and apparently the root of both the Words Wierd -from Wyrd -´Fate´-(via the Germanic accent) and Earth (via the Scottish accent)...It helped for a while but, ´Urrr... uurrrrr... u...   URRGKKKGH!´ I just couldn´t keep the poisonous fungi down any longer.
 Nevertheless I think I had absorbed enough and went on a mild trip for a few hours, during which time I wandered the woods, meditated, and met Frau Holla/Hel as a fleeting astral vision during an autosexual sigil-casting in the tree-roots. She appeared to me as incredibly beautiful and alluring one moment, but then as I responded to this vision, the decomposition on one side of her face and body became evident. Rather than retract from this as was my first impulse, I maintained arousal and went right into it, finding the strange beauty within death and decay -an interesting tantric exercise.

  As usual on these fungi I felt the great web -though only on a very subtle level this time- of interconnections branching out and the spiral wheel of Fate slowly rolling interminably around.
  Well (well) the odd thing was I felt very light, and as if I was lifting upwards. Odd because whenever I have taken fly agarics in Australia I have felt heavy and like I was sinking or spiralling down down down into the Underworld.

 So in my strange state I came up with the bizzarre theory that perhaps this was to do with hemisphere orientation and magnetic polarity: that if I took them in the southern hemisphere (Australia) I would be going 'down' into the Underworld, whereas if I took them in the northern hemisphere (Austria) I would be going 'up' into...?
 Although from a non-geocentric (why should fliegenpilz operate on the usual human laws of gravity?) viewpoint I would actually be going in the same cosmic 'direction' -perhaps towards Hunab Ku, the Galactic core?
 It was such a mild dose though that I could not really know if this was the case for sure.

 So I decided I would take more the next day for the performance rites in Vienna. This made me laugh as I realized that as I would be hanging upside down as The Hanged Man for this I could really test the theory!
 The new piercings aspects of the rite, combined with the inverted hanging, were't exactly the easiest circumstances for such a trip, but it would certainly be interesting (and challenging)...
 It seemed apt for an Odinic rite also, as there are myths associating Him with these mushrooms: That of Him being chased across the heavens by a horde of demons on His eight-legged steed Slepnir. Faster and faster they rode through the stormy skies until Slepnir began to foam at the mouth. Where this fell to earth up sprang fliegenpilz, and the white spots on their red caps are these flecks of foam.
 Discovering recently that this was supposed to happenat Yule, I couldn´t help but parrallel it with the strange theory that red and white Santa Claus is derived from the fly agaric trips of the Siberian shamans, who drank the urine of their mushroom-drunk rednosed reindeers for a purified trip. In Austria which lies between Siberian and Norse-Germanic lands, I learnt that people here give each other fliegen-pilz shaped and wrappered chocolates around new year. Yes, I am suggesting that All-Father Christmas perhaps somehow evolved from this cross-cultural wyrdness...
 

  Returning to Vienna was strange as I was sitting facing the opposite direction to that the bus was going, and had an impression of travelling emit ni sdrawkcab as I do in the pathworking used in my 8 Gates ritual theatre meeting with Hel. (When I performed this in Vienna, Walter ­a psychically-sensitive runereader complete with classic Odinic ´one eye turned inward´ physically manifest- perceived this walking backwards sensation just BEFORE I started speaking it!)
  The bus dropped me right near one of the galleries I wanted to see on the ´Lang Nicht der Museen´ - on this one night of the year you could see any of 58 museums all on the one collective ticket til 1 am : one of the reasons I had hurried back to the city.
  Most of this first gallery visited was modern art crap, but there was amongst it a clock going backwards fast, like a bizzarre continuation of my pirt esrever ... I checked my waist but no, the belt wasn´t back...        Oh well.

 I was refreshed by Klimt´s wonderful Beethoven Frieze, a mural celebrating Art and Life, then on to the Vienna Natural History Museum, which has the biggest and most varied collection of stuffed animals I have seen anywhere in the World. Quite amazing to see in my still-somewhat-altered state. The strange deepsea creatures were in Saal (Cell?/Atu?) 23.
 One of the most amusing things in this museum seemedunnoticed by the numerous other visitors fixated on the display cabinets -the usual (for architecture in Vienna) statues decorated the ornate ceilings and arches, but in some of the rooms these were tinged with humour -typical neoclassical heroic figures were now grappling with plaster prehistoric beasts andstrange aquatic plants, some with quite perturbed expressions!
 A quick browse through the Art History museum revealed the usual European Christian romantic
paintings with the works of a few masters like Caravaggio standing out, and the meticulously detailed works of Brueghel and some other lesser-know surrealists-ahead-of-their-movement; and the impressive Egyptian rooms guarded by two sphinxes and two seated Sekhmet statues.

 ...I got to sleep by 3am or so after painting the Tree of Life backdrop for the next day´s performance to the nauseating stench of fliegenpilz bubbling in a pot on the stove...
 
 
 

 Part II -An Inversion of Inversion ­The Hanging Rite
 

   So the next day I awoke and put the black brew in a thermos just before being picked up with bundles of props and taken to the Arena (the venue) to set up for the imminent performance rites. After the rope and anklenoose were well-tested and secured and all other practicalities attended to, I partook of the bitter brew, offering homeopathic doses to other participants so they might ´tune in´ also...
<picture: wPICT1540.JPG>

 It was an extreme rite. An interesting crowd of Vienna´s gothic and esoteric underground turned up.   Late upon this Sunday afternoon we began with three priestesses invoking the Three Norns and reading (in German) from the Edda (a Norse holy book)- one of them reclining in a bathtub full of blood- about Ragnarok and of Odin hanging from the World Tree. They then converged into 6-armed Kali formation and danced together while I sang and played (violin) my musical adapation of the Kali Vidya.
 

 The audience were then invited into the next room which was introduced as ´der UnterWelt´, where to Marcus´s new atmospheric musical recording (complete with howling wolves and cawing ravens -some of it is presented on the
http://www.crossroads.wild.net.au/silkmilk2.htm SILKMILK #2, Verdanthi (the
Present) was tied to a Hagalaz/Gebo cross (diagonal cross-shaped bindrune of sacrifice and transformation) cross at the back of the stage by the other two Norns (past and future). In front of them an intense piercing rite began. Steve invoked Odin and Frank began to pierce his back, 9 feather-fledged needles down each side of his spine (for 18 runes) to resonate with the pain of Odin hanging upon the World Tree.

  Then Frank moved to Marcus and Flo on either side behind Steve, and pierced their forearms with three metal hooks each, three chains running between the two of them while they chanted to the music, invoking the two wolves of Odin -Geri and Freki- to share His pain.

  The piercer returned to Steve and another 18 penetrations adorned both his arms with raven feathers also... Then he stood resplendent in his new plumage, turned and one by one broke the (thin) chains between the wolves, to reach Verdanthi and remove Her from the cross at the back of the stage. The energy of this rite by Terra Tenumbra was powerful, as well as it being visually and sonically captivating. With a fliegenpilz high coming on, I chanted harmonic overtones and played violin along from amidst the crowd. And it WAS a ´high´ in that I did indeed feel -as the day before but more so- lifted, like I was almost rising up off the ground!
How strange, that the effect would be in this way opposite to the sinking feeling I had on these
mushrooms in Australia. Now I understood why they were called flying mushrooms here! I could quite imagine flying around in a coach drawn by reindeers on a larger dose...
 for this was still not a super-intense one as the shrooms are less potent (though much more digestible) as a brew ­ probably a good thing though as the rite I was about to perform is dangerous enough even when straight...

 After a brief break in the other room (introduced as Valhalla -where the bar was!) with hurdy-gurdy and drum music by members of Der Elft Chor, the audience regathered in ´der Unterwelt´ as I was hoisted Up on a rope to hang upside-down in front of the Qabbala backdrop.  I announced the title of the piece: ´Der Gehangte from Down Under´. Munin -Steve fully fledged as the raven of MEMory above, er below- reflected, ´The Hanged Man aus der Unterwelt´ -the way Alex Nym of Bavaria had translated 'Down Under' into German -which translates back ironically as 'of the Underworld'; the script of this piece is in <A HREF=“http://www.crossroads.wild.net.au/silkmilk1.htm”>SILKMILK spool #1</A>. The new dimensions of this joke suddenly unk in: I had often quipped to Europeans that we were actually ´Up Over´ and they were Down Under, but with my fliegenpilz experiences I had to admit that we really did seem to be, ´Down Under´ and that I was perhaps still rising ´up´ when I took fly agarics ´down´ there but rising up into the earth, the
Underworld, from Down Under??  Wyrd...

 So what did it feel like hanging upside down on ye old flying fungi on this side of the World??  Well what with the blood rushing to my head, trying to stabilize my swaying and reMember my lines, being off the ground ánd off my head but upside down and wrong way which I didn´treally know what was up and what was down anymore anyway!

 Anyhow the performance rite flowed alright, with some nice new spiral hand movements up from the mirrored surface of the Well of reMembrance, which I could just touch with a reach of the fingertip (and my fingertip reached back to me from the depths of der unterwelt)...

 As in the performance at the http://www.occulture.tv 2oo3 Occulture Festival the thread was pulled forth from the piercing in the spider-abdomen nipple-tip of my new 13-star chest tattoo (see 'Bridging Dayside and Nightside' essay in this issue), but now there was also the added dimension of having real threads attached to piercings on each wrist and one ankle (the other being noosed). I had to unravel these carefully so as not to tangle them in the threads betwixt the piercings of Munin in the Well and Hugin (raven of Thought) in the scaffolding above the Tree as they reflected each other´s wing movements like oversized puppets.
<picture: runenorns.jpg>

 

 The effect when the Norns pulled me into the rune postures WAS more effective with real threads especially when they were outstretched in a pyramidic shape.

 The rite ended with the sharp caw of Hugin, followed by me yelling, ´CUT!´ and Munin the Deutsch equivalent, ´Schnit!` at which the Cutter sliced through all the threads including those they had webbed over the doorway, releasing the crowd back into 'Valhalla'...

 Later as usual I ate the eyeball I had dropped into the Well of reMembrance, which this time was a carved-down apple (very apt for my staring into the inverted Nightside through Daath, ´Knowledge´) and when I bit into it sideways I unintentionally created a perfect pentagram with the pips in the core...

 Feedback for the performance rituals was very good and I was certainly high for many hours afterwards, still feeling the web of sychronicity and realization tightening...

 The clincher was when someone as about to leave casually said, ´The Underworld is really Up anyway of course...´
 `Wait!´ I cried, ´What DO you mean?`
 When I had performed ´8 Gates´ in Austria the week before I had been advised by several to call Hel ´Frau Holla´ as, ´Everyone here is told a tale about Her when they
are little...´ but no one had yet told me what this fable was. Now I found out at the perfect moment:

 It is a tale of girl who fell in a Well (well well, a Well! and I had been on lately about how my ´8
Gates´ Underworld journey is the reflection of my Hanged Man performance, as it occurs from ´the other side of the Well´ within the waters of reMembrance) and met Hel, well Frau Holla. She was instructed to shake out the Lady´s pillows, and as the Feathers (!) fell down to earth, they became snowflakes falling to Earth, this being the onset of winter...  So Hel seems to be ´Up´ here, explaining why I canstill meet Her while rising on fliegenpilz on this side of the Wyrld...
 

 Later as Elft Chor Stephan left he told me (knowing nothing of my trip with the above) that snow falls to commemorate cosmic deaths and Weddings -this on the anniversary (by date) of my EquinoXuliuqE http://www.crossroads.wild.net.au/wedding.htm self-marriage
 

  CODA:

 This experience has inspired a new cycle of ritual performancy revolving around The Hanged Man play and 8 Gates shamanic journey. I am now planning further explorations of the themes in relation to this northern-southern hemisphere axis. Video filmed from a low angle of the Hanged Man performance at the Arena (as described above) in Austria will be played on the roof at Australian performances of 8 gates, with ripple effects as if I am in the Well of reMembrance ('unterwelt') looking up at myself hanging above the Well on the other side of the World.

  Then further Hanged Man performances in Germanic/Norse lands will include footage of me on the other side of the world looking up from 'down under' in the well (now a circular video screen rather than traditional mirror). Thus I will be building a Rainbow Bridge (Norse passage twixt the realms of Gods and mortals, stemming appropriately from the World Tree) to the Land of the Rainbow Serpent and back...
 For more about this project: http://www.crossroads.wild.net.au/morph.htm

 It is significant that the old French name for the Tarot Trump the Hanged Man is 'La Pendue' -the Pendulum...