Finding The Gates

The Cult of the Raven King, part 3

Humans stalked by gods and seduced by spirits — what we call “mystery” in religion is not much different from the mystery of sex. It cannot happen alone, and the call is also an answer. We go looking for those gates, and then find out we were being led there. Like picking up the phone to call a friend and finding them already on the line before you dial, the candles we light are not our prayers, but rather our responses.

Note: This is the third piece in this series. These can each be read separately, but they’ll make much more sense in order. Also, these are paywalled, but a reminder that you can get a yearly subscription for 25% off by using this button below.

I.

Years ago, for reasons barely worth recounting, I was with two paranormal “researchers” on the plateau of a low mount just west of the High Jura mountains. They were guests of a friend of mine, and along with another person, the five of us walked around an ancient druidic ritual site.

I really don’t remember why we were all there. I was visiting my friend, and these researchers were also visiting, and next thing I knew we were all in a van traveling up that mountain.

You’ll have to forgive me, but I don’t really like paranormal researchers, nor the sorts of people that think such “research” is really worth pursuing. I especially didn’t like these two men, no matter how hard I tried to be polite. I remember them as Parisian, though they might not have been. Regardless, they certainly acted like Parisians, running their mouths relentlessly, describing for us all their enlightened curiosity about things they were certain science would one day finally learn how to explain.

We walked around for several hours, finally arriving at the specific place they wanted to research. It was an ancient pagan site, a druidic temple believed to have once been the center of a much larger complex of temples. Their interest in the site was specifically because of reported “UFO” activities, including strange lights seen at night. Using pendulums and other devices, they hoped to find evidence of where precisely the original temple had been located, and to see if any residual “energies” still lingered.

They walked the site for hours, and I, amused, watched their increasing disappointment turn to frustration and eventual resignation. They’d been making a repeated circuit around an obvious central point, a saint’s chapel against whose outside walls I sat, smiling. Just behind me, within those walls, stood the chapel’s original stone altar, constructed from the ruins of the temple itself. Yet for some reason, they’d not even bothered with the chapel or its altar, repeatedly passing the gate they were there to find before eventually giving up.

II.

When I first started writing what I see, someone who was once a friend and no longer is confessed to me his envy.

“It’s like you just walk out the door and into a gate,” he’d said.

But that was never true, was never how it was and is never how it is.

You don’t just walk out the door and stumble through a gate. First, you have to find one, and there are fewer and fewer of them left. Then, you have to walk through that gate, and that’s much harder. Many of them have been locked shut, keys long ago lost, hinges now so rusted no amount of force could open them.