Via Sinistrae is a Shamanic Magickal invocation that seeks to employ modern technology to complement ancient knowledge and involve a contemporary audience in an energized powerful sacred ritual.
VIA SINISTRAE PODCAST Via Sinistrae Podcast An ongoing series of magickal and musical experiments. Thu, 21 July 2011 A Calling A priest, our priest, my priest. He makes his confession, sitting before my glass eye, because priests confess to god, they confess the source of their loneliness to the emptiness beyond. Swathed in black, wearing my seal, face illuminated by the eerie blue glow of your magical tools, I see you and you gaze back in platitude. There is calm between us where there is none between you and the world. We can indulge in endless endlessness together, you step into it with me, commune with all of my aspects before going out to give birth to us in the world. In your way priest, you are another of my aspects, you are the hand of God, doing Gods work in the world. Silly world full of silly children playing games in fields of lies. I am beyond the fence where they play, you come and go as you please, shaman, priest, you come and go as you please, inviting them outside, carrying me inside with you. There are layers of metaphor to peel back unearthing more layers. Metaphors, which avoid the strict production of a singular reality. After all what is real? Why choose just one reality? This is the polygamist’s guide to the universe; why marry one idea when you can engage in unity with many? Ideas, words, music, a drum beat which is a heart beat, a moment that slips shuddering back into now. I am you and you are me and we are we, opening a crack to let a little light in and conceiving ourselves anew. Sitting in the belly of a howling metal worm I smile at the implicit sexuality oozing from your poetic assessment of a cataclysmic event. Shifting tectonic plates rend a tear in the ocean floor and the planet tilts on its axis disturbing the balance between light and dark. Why not simply say to me, open wide and take it? Because we are more slippery than that. We are moving faster than the speed of light, fast as the speed of love, making love with words and gestures, pure sound rumbling all around. We are the sound, we are the sight, we are the touch, the light. We are the fool careening on the edge, the white dog nudging him over the lip, the abyss, a kiss, we are this, we are that, we are that we are, a star-Every man and woman is-A priest, our priest, my priest. Make your confessions and come clean before my crackling blue heart. Step through the door brother and be as I am. We laugh at the fence, the sound is the baying of wolves, the howling of wind rattling the aluminum husk of Tiamat as she speeds towards dismemberment. Can a worm be dismembered? Eviscerate then. In the making place we grind the bones of the past and mix it with our blood, this moment, pretzel wings spread to eclipse the sun, to swallow it. Devourer, devoured, love and beloved. I will make you a fisher of men. A pusher of pen. A peddler of zen. Overflowing with ideas, words, music, a drum beat which is a heart beat, a moment that slips shuddering back into now. Direct download: ViaPod23.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 4:32am EST Wed, 24 November 2010 Dance of Words It is not a one to one relationship. The words “neural flashes” don't accurately encompass that thing that I am trying to talk about. It's like interpretive dance, this swoop of the arm is symbolic, it is a verbal representation of something which exists and occurs outside of the mind and outside of the linguistic structure. Therefore saying something, saying anything at all, is a very creative experiment. Even technical manuals are avant-garde art projects when you consider them this way. The truth is that words cannot express the truth about what they describe, they are merely creative embellishments to the truth. A coiled mystery, that I can sit here translating thoughts into symbols, and those thoughts themselves are already symbolic translations of something else that I can't name, I can't even try. The way the wind tastes, the way the air smells, my mother smoking cigarettes on the balcony or in the garage over the washer and dryer, drinking cans and cans of Folgers coffee, bitter to the taste and smell, looking at the mural that my father painted on the wall beside the laundry machines, a flat depiction of the majestic mountains rising at the west side of the house outside the front door, out the back door you can see the lake and empty fields and a row of olive trees lined up beside the deep outflow channel, the orange and yellow tops of other distant trees are just discernible, everything can be taken in with a sun swept glance. What does it mean, sun swept? That the light is passing over everything like the broom over the linoleum in our cramped kitchen, as it sweeps over this mysterious matter and leaps to life, becomes, house in the distance, small black and white dog, man calling dog, resplendent treetops, shimmering blue lake, child bent in the tall grass to play with a ladybug. What is it before it is sun swept? Does the occluded landscape exist before the sun takes creative liberties with matter? It is not even the sun which does this, but our eyes which translate light and its absence into some of those neural impulses which are further interpreted into a dance of words, house, dog, man, trees, lake, child, bug. It is all complete gibberish and it always was, every verse of the Bible, every page of that computers user manual, every line of that love letter, every word of War And Peace. It was all Lacan, college, typing, artist, happening, human, memories, senses, touching, gibberish dance. Blasphemous, wicked, movements, perceiver, sun swept, deceiver, majestic, depiction, outflow, occluded, none. Leap to life. Becomes. Words, unchained, signified, undefined, then defined. Costumes, masks, opera, that is the play of words, the dance of the symbolic, the dance of shapes without substance. Just a little something insignificant, neural flashes translated into words, just to break it in, creative embellishments of the truth, complex variations on a theme without conclusion, a melody without a solid form. Direct download: ViaPod22.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 9:32am EST Thu, 24 June 2010 Confronting the Clear Light Speaking Voice and Altered Bass Improvisation - InkxpotterSinging Voice - EtannaGuitar Improv - Scott JonesAdditional droning voice - KoyoteNoisemakers - Lydia and Michael FongLooping, Mixing and Deconstructing - Kyron Text from "The American Book of the Dead" by E.J. Gold Direct download: ViaPod21.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 4:59pm EST Sun, 16 May 2010 The Angelic Body Direct download: ViaPod20.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 11:31pm EST Mon, 26 April 2010 How El Became King Of The Universe In the beginning, the people of the fertile crescent worshipped a Mother Goddess. She was often paired with one of two Gods: the God of the Sky known as El or Horus, and the God of the Earth known as Baal or Osiris. While the sky God was often represented by a falcon or other winged beast, the earth God was associated with horned beasts, the bovines whose two horns and cloven feet signified that the world and its creatures were the result of a coupling, of savage lustful intercourse. While the Earth god clearly had sex and died and was reborn like the things that rise from the dark soil, the sky God by merit of his association with the vast and unreachable expanse above, grew ever more abstract, separate from the Goddess, above the God of the Earth. The worshippers of El told the story of how he came to their people and commanded that they should have no Gods other than him. In exchange he would give them a land all of their own. He insisted on being the only one, the one that rules from above. As a result of assuming this lonesome position as the only deity in the heavens, without a Goddess to keep him company, El gradually became an asexual entity, beyond desire, beyond passion, beyond lust. The worshipers of El, under the guidance of Moses, set about the task of being faithful to just one God and they sought out the land that they had been promised in exchange for their loyalty. However, old habits do die hard, and in the desert the people slipped naturally back into worshipping the Earth God recognized by their parents. Baal rose once more from the ashes in the form of a golden calf. It fell to Moses to remind the people of their covenant with the sky God. This he did with threats of punishment from above. The Earth God became a tempter, the eternal adversary of El, the locus of evil. When the followers of Moses at last reached the land they had been promised, they settled in and began to cultivate it. They might have remained a small and relatively forgettable cult had they not been conquered and carried away by the Babylonians and then later conquered and carried away by the Romans. In Babylon, they wrote the story of their agreement with the sky God in words weighed with regret and desperation. Sadness and resentment dripped from every letter of their tribal history, a fanciful mythology still popular to this day. When the Persian King conquered Babylon, he was agreeable with the worshipers of El and restored them to their promised land. That first defeat was important to the survival of El’s cult as it gave them the opportunity to to assemble their three ring binder, their linguistic and symbolic genetic code. In the long thick scrolls they established their history and stated their mission. It was, however, their later defeats under the dominion of the Roman empire that helped them to export their cult to the rest of the civilized world. Through the years, decades and centuries, that original cult underwent various mutations and broke off into warring branches: the followers of Jesus, the followers of Mohamed and the followers of Yochanan. But in all these branches, the central tenant remained the same: one God was to be the only God who ruled from the heavens above. El, an incorporeal, inhuman deity, a deity that, without a body, could not have sex and need not have sex, came to have a great following throughout the Middle East and Europe. The great rivalry between the God of the sky and the God of the Earth dictated that one and only one could be held as good. The other would be seen as evil. The more evil that the God of the Earth became, all the more evil was sexuality and the cycles of nature, including menstruation and death. And so we fear the darkness. And so we fear the end that is not the end. And so we fear the earth and the dissolution that comes with it. And so we fear the dissolution of our unity, the moment of openness where the opposites meet and the two Eternal Gods are finally, as always, one and the same. Again as it once was. Again as it would be. For now, El reigns above, lonely and diffuse, an empty void, lacking in meaning or direction, ready to be used by any and all comers for their own purposes and machinations. Baal lurks underneath, at the edges of reason, in the dark spots where language cannot go, the regions that humans avoid for fear of seeing their true nature. Direct download: ViaPod19.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 5:31pm EST Sat, 20 March 2010 Consequences The consequences of what we create are unknowable. We create for the sake of creating, we do for the sake of doing, and then, it is sent, it goes out into the world, drifting like a carefully constructed leaf in the wind. Will someone catch it? Will it go straight to the sea, straight to the blue waves that will swallow up the orange and yellow and green? Or maybe it will drift to land with the high tide, and perhaps a little girl will pluck it from the ocean foam. And maybe it will end up in her collage of thoughts and dreams and her memory of changing seasons. There is just no way to tell what will happen, so we just let them go. Just as we were once let go, like tears already dispersing into the fog before the song that provoked them has come to an end, like ribbons of stardust dancing in the bottomless void. Direct download: ViaPod18.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 3:23am EST Tue, 5 May 2009 Clear And Ancient Knowledge I am clear and ancient knowledge, tested and proven, wrinkled but strong, slow but solid. In my eyes, the faces blur into each other, the boys are men, the men are corpses, the corpses give shade and my forehead is burning in the sun, as I look at the boys once again. Without any need of word or exclamation, I know of the singular impulse that runs through all the ones that now run around me. The tall man that is my mirror. The young girl that is my hands. There is so much I could say, so many tales to tell, so many burdens to unravel. But my years have taught me silence and my silence has turned into silky glimmering music, the kind that slides away between the chirping of the birds and the creaking of the branches in the wind. With a smile, I rush into their chest and push open the doors that remain shut in their stubbornness. With a little laugh, I can pull out tears from the most stoic warriors. I have traveled beyond words and I live in the land of shadows, without fear, without pity, without shame. Direct download: ViaPod17.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 11:19pm EST Wed, 9 July 2008 The Vast Invisible World During the early 20th century and before, reality was assumed to be everything you can see, smell, touch, and hear. The discovery of the electron, radio, and x-rays turned that assumption around. By 1930 it was clear that 99.9% of reality is not contactable or apprehendable by the human senses, thus making us blind voyagers in an invisible world that may touch us without our knowledge. Society carries on relying on the old assumptions, looking away from the terrifying new gateway beyond its reach. But looking away won't banish the vast spectrum that engulfs us in its many colored hands. Direct download: ViaPod16.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 2:35am EST Wed, 21 May 2008 The Ritual Begins The Ritual begins before it starts. It begins at a different moment for each of us. It’s like making love with a new person; you have to find this particular rhythm, this particular night. For some, the beginning involves the costume and the mask.For others it’s claiming the space; walking the perimeter, focusing. Lighting candles. Welcoming guests. All with a sense of something coming. Vaguely dreading its arrival.This night there is a play of opposites; dualities, mirror images. Disquieting videos, disquieting loud music present throughout. Energy pulled into space.Played with, amplified.Identities fused.Masculine and feminine integrated.Pairs.Triads.Connection.Transfers of substance, increase in energy. Music as fuel, people as keys unlocking space.Convulsive movements. Forgetting of self and lack of sensation in the physical body, all normal in this place. Out of bodies and through doorways of opportunity. Opportunities to push through your own barriers. Opportunities to connect on an essential level. (September, 2005) Direct download: ViaPod015.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 10:27pm EST Sat, 15 March 2008 Tale of the Baby Birds Direct download: ViaPod014.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 7:34pm EST Tue, 19 February 2008 The Invocation of the Medusa Birds and serpents.Transdimensional gateway.Transfigure, transform, transfix.Hail to the fallen, the mortal gorgon.In flesh we find new doors.Beautiful and horrible.Fragmented to create the possibility of life.To move, to dance, to live.A point in every direction is no point at all.’Creation is separation.Separation is Death.Hail Metus, living blood of the most ancient.Alchemical priestess.Embodiment of dark wisdom.You who are your own birth and death.Corrosive to one, restorative to another.Goddess, woman, monster.Forbidden sex.Transdimensional gateway.Hail to the fallen,the mortal gorgon,Medusa. Direct download: ViaPod013.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 3:25am EST Sun, 16 December 2007 Through the Labyrinth The labyrinth is this…it is this life- this experience in the body. The voyaging Being uses the machine to navigate through the labyrinth. The labyrinth is all around, all encompassing, and mostly invisible in the sleeping state. Driving down the street, one decision to make a left turn is a path, a new doorway with infinite possibilities ahead- the impulse to stop at a coffee shop is another.We cannot travel in all directions at once. Only one path can be voyaged at a time, and each action takes the Being up or down, to the right or to the left- through time- in the multi-dimensional labyrinth.Just imagine a vast labyrinth, with its multitude of choices, its many paths spill forward with promise. But the place you want to get to is the inner courtyard- you cannot just hop walls- the path must be walked- and sometimes when it seems you are descending- seemingly far away from the goal- it is because you are walking a non linear path which may ultimately bring you closer to the heart. "...your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. Hebelieved in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent,convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached oneanother, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries,embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of thesetimes; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, bothof us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you havearrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found medead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost." Direct download: ViaPod012.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 9:33pm EST Sun, 18 November 2007 Opera Rotas It’s a story that travels in circles. I remember you, I struggle to be free of you, I see you coming to redeem me again. I lack the control to decide which it will be in any given space. When I am aglow with pure love I am a beautiful care free maiden. When I resist, I become monstrous, clawed and toothed, with an indiscriminate bite. As I returnto the life electricI take the shapeof a mad old woman cackling and bending in the street,...babbling incoherent truth. All the heavensand all the hells that I have visited in my various shapes, I have visited accidentally. Unable to man my ship, I arrive wherever the change wind blows. I kill you in this play, love you in that, give birth to you in another, on and on. When I do remember, that too is an accident. As an accidentit is no more beautifulthan when I forget. What is beautifulis the moment outside of the fold,...that placewhere I amanother you,where puppetand masterand stageare the holy trinityand the circle is enlivened by purpose. Direct download: ViaPod011.mp3 Category:podcasts -- posted at: 6:16pm EST Sun, 7 October 2007 Kanenas While traveling, somebody stops and asks me: -Who are you?-I am Nobody. Who are you?-I am None, Nothing, Nowhere. There is no more. You’ve reached the bottom. Stay for a while.-No, I don’t want to.-I am telling you, stay.-I don’t want to, I am scared.-Don’t be scared. After all, you have nowhere to go, no one is expecting you.Whereas, I love you. I will give you all my silence and solitude. I am gonna make it yours.-No, I am telling you, I am scared.-And I am telling you, don’t be scared. I am for you.-Who are you?-I am you.-No, no way.-Yes, still.-That is, I look like you.-You don’t just look like me, we are the same.-And so, who are you?-I am Nobody.-And then, where are we?-We are in Nowhere. But don’t be afraid. I am gonna hold your hand and little by little we will find the way.-You think?-I am certain Direct download: ViaPod010.mp3 Category:podcasts -- poste… truncated (10,926 more characters in archive)