The Hill in the Distance

The Cult of the Raven King, 2

When a man in a dream meets you on a hill and shows you really strange visions about the end of humanity, and then you, by complete “chance,” stumble upon a picture of that very hill, what can you really do except go try to find out why?

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

I.

I started to tell you about the imaginal last time, but I didn’t really tell you anything. I just quoted a section of my Tarot book about the imaginal, and left it at that, which isn’t very nice of me.

But I guess maybe there was a reason. That reason is the same reason why a few days ago, once I realized the train I intended to take into the city was canceled, I decided to trek up the hill in the distance. You know the hill, I’m sure, because we’ve all got a hill in the distance.

For some, that hill is a mountain, not a hill. But let’s all be honest: the hill in the distance might as well be a mountain for each of us, because we act like it is. We look at it, and dream about it, and think that one day it might be nice to climb it, to go see what our world looks like from there.

And then we don’t.

There are literal hills in the distance, and symbolic hills in the distance. Either way, they’re the same thing, and we don’t climb them. The hills in the distance seem too far away, and we’re certain it would anyway be quite an ascent, and who knows if there’s even a path up to it?

There is a path, though — quite a few of them. You just need to know how to look for them, and more importantly need to finally want to find them.

The imaginal is the hill in the distance. In those hills are quite often giants and their kin, going about their lives like we go about ours, but in different processions of time. Our time is the time of clocks and machines that tell us we don’t actually have time to go up into those hills. You have other things to do, the machines tells us. And we listen.

The time of those hills and those who dwell there isn’t like this. Theirs is the time of dream and erosion, slower and unrecorded moments which shape the world without notice. There are no other things to do but be, they whisper. But only sometimes do we hear them.

The imaginal is that hill in the distance, and others like it, waiting, curious to see who might make their way up their paths.

I found one of those paths the other day, because my train had been canceled and I hadn’t even really wanted to take it anyway. It was the equinox, and I’d been trying to write, but that wasn’t going so well. So I threw some stuff in my backpack, and went to the nearest train station, intent to go into the city. And then I waited, and waited, and then saw my train was canceled.

You can see the hill in the distance from the train station, and I was looking at it. It’s the same hill I see in the distance from my garden, and from my balcony, and from almost half the windows of my house. I see it when I ride my bike home from the gym, or when I go walking in the nearby forests. It’s there, silent and watching, every time I look up.

But it’s not so distant from the train station. In fact, it’s right in front of you, and there’s a road at its base, called “rue de la montagne,”¹ daring you — I mean, me — to finally do what I always wanted to do.

II.

The first time I took a rue de la montagne, I was climbing a hill I’d seen in a dream. Dreams are a kind of distance, though things often feel closer in them than they are in waking. In that dream, I was standing atop a hill, surrounded by heather, gazing across a river valley below, and someone was standing beside me, telling me things I didn’t know.

I never saw the man’s face. He stood behind me, and then next to me, but an ancient code of politesse dictated we not look at each other directly. He felt familiar and strange, and I suspected he was dead many times more than me, dead enough times to live more often in dreams than in waking.

I looked into the distance across that valley, instead of into his face, and he told me to watch. I watched, and waited, and saw a village full of people. I watched for years, and tens of years, scores of them, and centuries. The village grew, and the lives of those in that village did what lives of people do. Sons became fathers and then grandfathers, daughters became mothers and then grandmothers. They watched their children and grandchildren grow at first through living eyes and then through the earthen eyes of death. And those children and grandchildren watched also their own children and grandchildren in the same way, until the village was destroyed.

The man with me said only, “watch.”

Another village arose, and everything happened again. Parents became grandparents and even great-grandparents and then dust, watching their great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren raise more homes from the earth. The village was larger, and in many ways happier, and this made the calamity which befell it feel deeply sad.

“Keep watching,” the man said.

And I did, as centuries became millennia, and the same thing happened again and again. Village after village destroyed, town after town razed to the ground, and each time a new one was birthed in its place.

I watched for what felt like forever, because it felt like this would happen forever. But it would not — could not — and that’s why he had told me to watch.

The last city was the most happy of them, and the one which stood the longest. Warm lights glowed from every window, life and its laughter resounding across the valley to where we sat. Finally, it seemed, there would be no end, no need to build again.

But it was destroyed like all the rest of them, with a strange fire I could not comprehend. Everything was gone, and dark, and even the dead no longer watched from the earth.

I waited and watched. Waited, watching. Waited more, and more, and then understood. There would never be another city, nor town, nor even a village. No one survived to build again, and nothing remained with which to build. Everything would always be dust.

“You understand?” he asked me.

I nodded.

“Then I will open to you the gates of the dead.”

III.

I had stood upon that hill in dream, and then I later stood upon it in waking. And this is where the story gets quite strange.