Beings of darkness and light are we, defined by the boundaries of our chiaroscuro which represent our Janus-like masculine and feminine halves; each creates the other and seeks to realize and awaken itself as a unitary and whole being through dreaming the other.
Often have I written of the primary human act of rebellion and refusal to submit to authority, of negotiations and seizures of power versus authorized identities including those of sex and gender, of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle as both systems of oppression and as the limits of our forms, but when we interrogate our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty we must also consider that such systems of signs and representations also describe the work of integration and the origins of human consciousness.
The human psyche is both male and female within itself, anima and animus in Jungian terms, because the soul is born from this dynamism, and we can seize control of our own evolution and processes of adaptation and becoming human through embrace of our darkness and chthonic elements of our unconscious, shadows which include the side of us which is the opposite gender of our conscious identity and sometimes of our absurd flesh in which we are bound to this life, this reality, this system of social contracts and agreements about human being, meaning, and value and about how to be human together, this sideral universe.
How do we negotiate the boundaries and interfaces of our masculinity and femininity, processes of change which are recursive, chaotic, nuanced and complex, relative, conditional, ephemeral, a dialectics of truths and illusions and of authorized identities, simulacra, falsifications and systems of oppression versus our autonomy and self-creation, and a ground of struggle which lies at the heart of becoming human?
As I wrote in my post of February 14 2024, On the Redemptive and Transformational Power of Love: the Case of Valentine’s Day and the Festival of the Wolf; Valentine’s Day is a holiday we can celebrate as an unambiguous good, without conflicted historical legacies; named in honor of a man who was executed on February 14 278 AD for performing gay marriages in defiance of Imperial law, adelphopoiesis or brother-making which refers to his marrying Roman soldiers not to their girlfriends but to one another, the wedding of same sex couples, legal and sanctified under Christian law, which Emperor Claudius II forbid as related by John Boswell in his Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
The modern custom of sending messages to one’s lover, whether a forbidden love or not, originated in 1415, with a message sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
So we have in one holiday defiance of Authority, transgression of the Forbidden, and the injunction to seize the gates of our prisons and be free.
But this holiday is far more ancient, dating from the sixth century BC and encoding the historical memories of primordial rites of fertility and poetic vision called Lupercalia, the Festival of the Wolf. Rites which echo through our flesh and find form not only as Valentine’s Day as a celebration of the uncontrollable and liberating power of love which exalts us like a madness, but also as a form of the Wild Hunt which we know as the story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.
Angela Carter got it nearly right in The Company of Wolves; so also with season two, episode three of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Ah, to be a Wild Thing, and free.
Midnight approaches, and as I ready my wolfskin for the sacred Hunt I think not of the ravishment of our passion, which seizes and possesses us with nameless ecstasies and totalizing truths written in our flesh, but of the redemptive and transformative power of love, of its unique function as a force of healing and reconnection, and of transgression of the Forbidden and defiance of Authority as a seizure of power over the ownership of oneself.
Of this I have written a spell of poetic vision, awakening, and transformation, which I share with you here. Good hunting to you all.
Love Triumphs Over Time
When first I learned of love,
And realized that in loving others we humans were not merely escaping
the boundaries of our lives and the flags of our skins
As transcendence, rapture, and exaltation
But discovering ourselves and those truths written in our flesh
And the limitless possibilities of becoming human
Among the unknown topologies of being marked Here Be Dragons
In the empty spaces of the maps of our Imagination
Beyond the doors of the Forbidden
Where truths are forged,
And in the years since I have always known this one true thing;
We are more ourselves when we are with others
Because humans are not designed to be alone
For we are doors which open one another
And restore each other to ourselves in an indifferent world
When we are savaged and broken and lost;
Love is the greatest power of all the forces
which shape, motivate, and inform living things
Love creates, love redeems, love transforms,
Love triumphs over the pathology of our disconnectedness
From Beauty, from the Infinite, and from the community of humankind;
Love triumphs over Time.
Idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty and identity live at the origins of our power of love and the forms it takes in our lives; If my female side could perform our truth on the stage of the world as songs, without any limits whatever, what would we sing?
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina | Straight to Hell Music Video Trailer | Netflix; because I love this version of Persephone’s myth. How if we must seize our power or be subjugated to that of others?
Little Red Riding Hood – Amanda Seyfried’s cover of the song; sung in a fragile voice filled with such anguish, loneliness, and the absurdity of hope.
I dare the darkness and the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, beyond all boundaries of the Forbidden. Where is the wolf who can match my daring and embrace together the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves?
Wednesday dances; How if we must tell our stories, or be rewritten and falsified by others? I find it interesting that Jenna Ortega chose a queer cruising anthem for her signature dance, which confuses and conflates in ambiguous meanings the rituals of mating and hunting, as this Netflix series does as an extended metaphor and allegory of subversions of authorized identities of sex and gender
So for the anima; what of the animus? Who speaks for me in masculine register?
Lucifer’s Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
“Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
With film montage of Marvel’s Loki; let us embrace our monstrosity and proclaim; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
David Bowie sings of Resistance, beyond hope of victory or survival: Shoshanna prepares for German Night in the film Inglorious Basterds, a song I post to signal that I now begin a Last Stand; that I am about to do something from which I see no possible chances of survival. This I have done more times that I can now remember, yet I remain to defy and defend. Love too is a total commitment beyond reason, a glorious mad quest to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
References
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, by John Boswell
The Company of Wolves, Angela Carter
Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale, Catherine Orenstein
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, William S. Burroughs
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23930.The_Wild_Boys?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_13
The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem and liberate him, the final part of Burroughs’ Anarchist Trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil.
He did claim to be possessed by the Toad as a chthonic spirit, identical with Nietzsche’s Toad which the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra, a novel I later adopted as a counter-text to the Bible, feared he must swallow as a symbol of our animal nature. Burroughs claimed to be Nietzsche’s successor on this basis, as avatar and priest of all that is reviled, disgusting, loathsome and bestial within us, which he identified with Lovecraft’s Tsathoggua and transferred to me as a successor and avatar.
As I never conceptualized or ascribed negative qualities to my own shadow self, I experienced this simply as a seizure of power and not as possession by a malign entity. For myself, from childhood and in a family utterly free from the consequences of Freud’s father as lawgiver or from Abrahamic ideas of God as Authority, I imagined nature as truth and freedom, and nothing to be feared.
The magic Burroughs and my father practiced was based equally on his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche called Acephale, the mythos of his model H.P. Lovecraft, and elements of shamanism, traditional ritual magic from grimoires, and the occultism of Aleister Crowley. A decade and more later, Burroughs would be claimed as a founder of Chaos Magic, and his host of invented literary methods designed to destroy systems of control represented an ars poetica which was also a personal faith, including the cut-up method, playback, dreams, out of body travel, mandalas and gates to alternate realities, ecstatic trance and vision, curses, demonology, tarot; I still have the deck of tarot cards he gave me and taught me to use. To this my father brought the family Voodoo, werewolf mythology, ancestral history interwoven with versions of Grimm’s fairytales, and his brilliance as a theatre director; he directed some of Edward Albee’s plays, and I grew up from the age of four listening to them discuss drama during rehearsals from a center front seat in the theatre, which often interrogated Albee’s direct influences and references among his fellow Absurdists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter, but included sources in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, and Eugene Ionesco.
As Burroughs wrote The Wild Boys during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from my father’s ideas and the claim of our family history that we are not human but werewolves, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as Brides of the Dragon, and we were driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions. He was writing it during the Stonewall Riots, which may be a more direct context as a fictionalization of the witness of history. Like much of his fiction, it is also filled with episodes both historical and imagined and set in mirror worlds of exotic locations like Mexico and Morocco transformed as Orientalist fantasies or gateways to underworld realms.
When I asked him, at the age of ten or so, if I was in his book and what he was writing about, he said; “Freedom, nature as truth and civilization as addiction to wealth and power and theft of the soul, and how our pasts get mixed up with our futures.”
The Wild Boys reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, of which fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar and a source for Burroughs, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is its direct model H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, references Octave Mirbeau, Bataille, Genet, and extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint or binding and limit of our nature. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; wildness as nature and freedom here mingle and intertwine.
All the works of William S. Burroughs are masterpieces of anarchist liberation and transgression, Surrealism and occult mysticism, even if difficult because they are told in collages of random and nonlinear episodes which he described as vaudeville turns, with an iconography that is bizarre and obscene. In spite and possibly because of this, they remain among the great classics of world literature, revealing endless chasms of darkness and infinite possibilities of rapture and illumination.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Go ahead; swallow the toad.
Tsagothoggua
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsathoggua
The Toad is summoned by performance of that which is loathsome to you; as embodiment of disgust, horror, degradation, and what Freud called the Uncanny. It is a type of the Guardian of the Gates of Dreams who must be eaten to transform it into a Guide and ally or protector in underworld journeys. In the Dreaming one may assume its two Battle Forms, the Grendel-like water dragon and the chiropteran raptor as depicted in the film Dracula, and as a chthonic figure of underworld illumination confers powers of insight into others secret desires similar to Lucifer’s power in the Netflix series which fictionalizes the great question of Lacan, What do you desire?, as well as the ability to enter the dreams of others as does Freddy Kruger in the Nightmare films based so faithfully on the cult of the Bhairav in Tibetan Buddhist-Shaivite Tantric faith. I discovered much parallelism between the magic of my childhood and that of the Vajrayana Buddhist Kagyu order of monks in Kathmandu of which I was once a Dream Navigator.
Burroughs had a whole pantheon and system of magic worked out from Lovecraft and Crowley, but that is a different story. What I find interesting is that like Crowley’s mirror image angels and demons who are really the same being, Burroughs’ reimagination of Lovecraft’s mythos has his Others as both good and evil, like wrathful and beneficent aspects of Tibetan gods.
In the end all that matters is what you do with your fear, and how you use your power.
William S. Burroughs, a reading list
Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, Ted Morgan, William S. Burroughs
The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs, Matthew Levi Stevens
The Road to Interzone, Michael Stevens
With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker
by William S. Burroughs, Victor Bockris
Torch of Liberty 
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