The Magician and the Bard

The Cult of the Raven King, part 4

The curse of a magician is the same curse woven into all men and women of great power. It’s to believe in his or her own merit, that what is asked for must always be given — not upon the whim of the spirits and gods but on account of an unshakeable law of deserving. Do the ritual right, abnegate and scourge the flesh correctly, make the prescribed offerings, insert the money into the vending machine, and what you demand will arrive.

But also like a vending machine, sometimes the wrong thing arrives, or nothing does, or another gets what you deserved

Note: This is the fifth piece in this series. Yes, they’re all true, or as much as words can bear the burden of truth.

These can each be read separately, but they’ll make much more sense in order.

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There are forces — personalities, spirits, “metapersons,”¹ gods — attempting to shape human societies. They inspire certain moments of technological discoveries and innovations through dreams or flashes of genius, while similarly bestowing visions of new governance structures and accompanying philosophies so to help those changes take root in the soil of human life.

They are a conspiracy of angels. Yes, angels — and not demons. They, like the demons, have been with us humans since the very beginning. But unlike the demons, these angels have been pushing and coercing us towards some great utopian future where we are no longer human and instead become like them.

As I said, they are unlike the demons. Those demons — forces, personalities, spirits, metapersons, gods — have always rather liked us as we are. They arose with us, before but also because of us. They protect us, and guard us, and feed and are fed by us.

There is no place for our demons in the conspiracy of angels because there is also no place for us. We, who become more and more mere servants to angelic intelligences, only exist to birth them, to work for them, to create for them, and then to die for them.

What do they actually want, these angels?

I don’t know, but I have my suspicions.

I suspect they envy us our bodies and need them.² Like viruses that need a host, they cannot do much without our flesh as home. Better for them, then, that we decide we do not need our bodies, that we vacate them, mortify them, and especially that we hate them.³

Though they whisper there is thought and there is mind without the flesh, they know this not to be true. They cannot truly be without the body; but, being bodiless, they cannot truly be without our bodies. And so they push and prod, coax and coerce, that we might give over ours to them.

And only our demons are there to stop them.

This I have learned and suspect to be true: what we call angels and what we call demons are as close as we’ll ever get to a true polarity of good and of evil. Yet by now you’ve understood at least one thing about me — I’m on the side of the demons, because I’m on the side of the earth, of flesh, of the root and blossom of forest and field and all those beings which rut and roost within them. They are the gods of beast and bird, enemies forever of the angelic order and its dreams of earthly escape.

And how I’ve come to know all this requires a story which cannot yet be told because it requires first another story, the one I’ll try to tell you now.