For the Sabbat is a whetstone and we children of Qayin are upon it.
We run with the taste of copper, the city and I, a stranded ichor more valuable than emptying all the veins of London. We see each other, eyes reflected in water and glass, warm hands meet unyielding concrete, give up heat in sacrifice. Crows bring bones to my door and we cast them, revealing occulted futures. Foxes sing through their dusk and I run with them, down twilit streets they teach their secrets. Rain drenched neon illuminates with arcane radiance, while doorways spilling pools of darkness speak to me of the city’s true nature. I watch golden black serpents reel skywards and, passing unaware beneath, you’re surveyed by the electronic peeper, marked for sacrifice. Catch its voice on the wind and listen, hear the city whisper, cry, and shout; trace its contours, glimpse foundations, bury your soul in its freezing filth. The crooked paths lead downwards to sub-basements of Desire, where the Sabbat is enacted in a throbbing electronic howl. For the Sabbat is a whetstone and we children of Qayin are upon it. Conjuring dead in hours of darkness, negotiating careful exchanges, the Other always wants more in return for its gifts. This city is shot through with crossroads and crowned with bodies fallen to ruin. Hold the torch high, for the city knows no bounds!
Fire burns by the waterline, sun crossing from salt to the stars, then falling forever downwards, resolving in blackness and flame. Dreams run like rivers here, threaten drowning in undertow. Look through me with eyes of sleep, I shall cast out old delusions. Diaphanous wings unfurling, feed on psychic emanations, nourishing dream-flesh through atavistic transformation, moving across dimensional planes. This is a hallucinatory place, borne on oneiric tides, to be driven to madness and suffering, revelling in dreams of chaotic catastrophe. This is the abyss at the centre of the subjective universe. The meditation of the void is a meditation on the city. Lucifer is here and his light is blinding; the heat, terror in bright splendour. This crucible where we forge ourselves anew, test our mettle, choose to stand where the night is set on fire. For the city holds its left hand to your throat and laughs at your worthless faiths, it will choke you a thousand times. It is the warm breath of death, a feral hunger, a charnal ground, and you must give your flesh to it. The right to die on the altar is the key to the temple, you must surrender to the city as a sacrifice, let its smothering shadows overtake you, consume you in endless white stone and blackened trees. Place the void at the centre of your heart and crawl through this pit of death. Step inside its abyss and disappear.
You fail to see we have blotted out the sky, and that all around you crumbles and fails.
They deceived you when they proclaimed that dragons only live in the mountains; perhaps mists betrayed poor eyes or oxygen-starved brains. Yet still you yearn to escape to the countryside, the idol of rural idyll, the hedgerow, hearth and heath. Engage in your vain astrologies, lost in distant movement. The patina of time creates illusions of depth but in fact only leaves you dull. You fail to see we have blotted out the sky, and that all around you crumbles and fails. Leaving only the desolate moon as a totem we set it like a jewel in a sea of imitation stars and drift out into the warm darkness of possibility while you shiver in the cold. The world is on fire but you move your magic circle out to the chicken coop, instead of blazing with it. Run to New Zealand, move the bone-crushing machine beyond the horizon, but it can see you and it is coming. This world is not concerned with your cultivation of nothing more than a moral superiority complex, and when the tides rise they will sweep us all away. How vain to believe rejection of the world we have built together will save you, how lazy your flights to archaic fantasy, draped in foolish dreams, to be the connexion man. Tradition will not save you from the mechanical haruspex, it presses down to pluck your organs and it will ruin you, hypocrite.
Have you forgotten that magic is art?
You have forgotten the asphalt way is built atop the dirt track road. Why do you not choose to stand firmly upon it and rend the concrete? Tell me why do we venerate the bones of dead junkies instead of flaying the skin from our own? Step out of the shadow of the beast and ignite in Luciferean splendour. For you are the furnace, you are dust and ashes and smoke. The flame burns you away to the blackness of the void. This world is incinerated in rage and mourning, echoes of old dogmas, the throne of Jesus and passwords you thought would never be changed. The joy you find in atrophied tradition is lost on me, these lazy faiths held dear. You forget the vital hands that took up quill, wielded dagger and forged deed, crushed as you are beneath stale piles of mouldering books. Heap them on the pyre of creation, use them to blaze something new. Have you forgotten that magic is art? And that art is the scalding fire of creation? Bury the past so you may be reborn in the present.
Is this the only heresy left? To speak plainly that the only way out is through, that turning away will not save, that tradition will not save, that you fool yourselves in false dreams of antiquated splendours, that you have forgotten the quintessence of creation powering vital magical currents. When the world has burnt, this city will leave an exquisite ashen corpse; your tradition will have been naught but kindling to the great fire of its mysteries.
…dissolve into the song, transform to mystic resonance
I want not Babalon but Bellona, for the wealth of the forbidden land is a thousand times greater. A master seeks to be born again of their own ashes, to purify yourself through fire and pour fire forth upon the earth. Throw your wand in the molten ore inferno, it holds no power here. Open veins, for it is copper which conducts lighting through your hands. Breathe the air of your dreams and embrace them. Illuminate the pulsing darkness, shifting kaleidoscope refraction of prisms, mirrors and lens. Coil electrical stars over your wounds and let the serpents of wire draw your blood through them; these spiralling veins of sorcery, swirling currents of brash black magic. Concertina through time upon magical serpents of poisonous splendour, dissolve into the song, transform to mystic resonance, burn the leaves that have been defaced for the sake of stone, red pyre sparking the kindling of the night. Call the golden serpent, the star-worker, speak necromantic names, create new solar systems.
Alone in the moonlit sky of a new world, rejoice in your untainted remains, for you are the shadow in the white light of every city. Reborn each midnight and then anew each dawn, what darkness can hold you from the stars? Dissolve yourself into the sea of tears, create a new tradition.
Tom Whiston
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