THE MESSIAH

IS MY SISTER

14 Dialogues

Towards a Belief in Magic and Ressurection

text by Tarlq Ibn Zayld

draWirl9! by ko!tmar
dediCated to dlc!ne diprml

are you all here"

said to you. It is constant ly repeated in the open air: who are you,

front of your face. It is as though you do not hear anything that is

Outside a stonn i s hmv ling you cannot see y o ur hand_ in

,

We are completely dazzled at having discovered magic whose effects are immediately felt in the flesh, more and more dis tinctly hearing the voices of the two streams which are flowing at the allegorical end of the night. This is the laboratory ours pock ets are now filled with, magic carpets and a desire to fly, if only in dreams and visions and being in love, again and again and always. We are completely dazzled that things happen again and again, as shards piercing our ears, future shock realms and resem blances, artists, drug addicts, sorcerers, goddesses, the civilizations bouncing together in rhythmic dance, layers on layers, quick blind fish, beautiful salvation by the extermination/transformation/resur rection of our consciousness.

The French poet Mallarme set out to know the laws of the languages of all the peoples of the world in order to reach not an original language - this was the linguistic fantasy - but the .. engendering, universal, anonymous principles of every language. The distinction between the traditional and the traditionalistic has often been applied to contemporary painting to designate the dif ference between simple influence derived from the classically solid past and a use of the past. This distinction, while implying an ever present duality, clearly collapses as a conscious concep tualization of the process of what is basically a case of repetitive ness.

There are several ways we could go on this question- the whole analysis bit called into check, whether structural, masturba tory, just plain fun, or on a number of arcane and esoteric levels.

' pose to that of ordinary life. The rhythmic,

language of magic; phonetic,

with its weird

metaphorical and alliterative effects,

cadences and repetitions - though it should be noted that no audience of listeners is necessary for the effectiveness of the spell.

Jesus hasn't come back and so what if he did? Would things be the same? You know that things have changed, that the world has become a lot larger than a Middle Eastern desert culture - back then you would have thought the world was a flat parcel of dust in the center of the entire universe (except for several mys tical astronomical sects scattered about) and you could hardly have known of the great civilizations of South America, Cambodia, India, China, Africa, Russia, Northern Europe, Japan, and nowa days you'd be a sorry fool to suggest that a 'white man' is going to save the world. But its not His fault, He's a prophet of His time, as prophets always have been, and besides you now have the touch of real flesh rubbing against your body and there's the whole eroticism the Church cut out of the gospels anyway, not to mention all the gnostic works labeled as heretic, so this Second Coming idea gets quite complex. You could also bring this all round to shamanism, cycles, or consider that Jesus replaced what earlier was a vegetation deity (quick examples: Jesus died and rose
in three days, exactly the time of worship pagan cultures had wor

shiped the symbolic 'death' of the moon, the new moon which

disappears and reappears in three days, or the cycle of crops, Easter, the end of Fall and the long W inter to be reborn again and joyous <;:elebrating) - and here's the big difference - Christi(lnity replaced a system based on nature with one based on the human form. In patriarchal religion, only God has power. Power does not exist in nature, and is nothing he shares with his creatures. Dreams, faith, and energy must be strictly directed and controlled by his church. His police force on earth. And no one may fly through the night with the moon, or envision other worlds, or commune with the earth and the stars, or cure illness with herbs - without being seen as an agent of the Devil. Yet these are all

still things

now, to make It current. and real

\ve

can know. the point is to join in the participation

.

In this context it doesn't play out as repetition but eternal recurrence. We can take a past event seriously and try to incorpo it can become an essential part. Or we can refuse to take it seri event of no significance and of no lasting consequence for our life and character. If it is not, we succeed only in assimilating it into our personality, as if we manage to see it and the other things of the past fall together and change themselves, undergo that rel egation that transforms melancholy and misery, passion, pain, and the effort into experience and knowledge, into the material future, resentment is again out of place; for no place remains for thinking about the consequences of the past on the self, and therefore this self as well, need remain unchanged. No reason remains for think ing that any action or any accident is in itself harmful or benefi cial. The whole character of each event depends on its eventual implications for the whole of one's constantly changing self. The justification of a life, or an album, or a poem, then, lies in those moments, in accepting the present, one also accepts all that is past; for though perhaps one did not will something in the past, one would not have it any other way. rate it inro a co mp lex harmonious, and unified pattern of which
,

ously and, through further action, turn it into an exception, into an

11

If you don't make something of these connections that are made on the tarot planes, right there above you, it gets awfully dangerous. In fact, this whole day has this sort of magical trance like feel.

Take this as sacrifice: The community sits with a shaman and sings until they go into a trance. The shaman takes a large snake out of the water; they all sit on it and fly through the air at great speed. They fly so fast that other shamans can see only the quivering tip of the snake's tail. After country. There they sit on the ground in a circle around the snake. The shaman takes a stone knife and kills one of those present. He cuts him in pieces and gives the flesh to the snake to eat. The other people sit there quietly and watch the snake devouring their comrade. Then they themselves eat ofthe flesh (a earlier variant on 'take this and eat it, it is my flesh'). The shaman cleans the dead person's bones and lays them in a certain order on the ground. He lays the out the bones exactly the reverse of the way they really ought to lie. He has placed the thigh bones on the shoulder blades and the head in the pelvis. The bones are left lying like this. The shaman remains behind with them. The other peo ple mount the snake again and return to the place from which they came. But the shaman touches the bones of the sacrifice, strokes them and sings magic songs. Then the bones cover them selves with flesh again; the shaman goes on singing until the slain man lives again. Then he draws from his navel a second snake, the two of them mount it and fly back to the others. Then all the people wake from the deep trance in which they have had these experiences. None of the people, apart from the shaman, remembers what has happened. Even the person who has been sacrificed knows nothing about it. But then he dreams of a snake, and a few days later he 'really' dies. Note: the idea of the sacrifice is mingled with that of the shaman's ability to kill by magic. It often seems as though the shaman is able to combine the necessary with the practical, that is to say that he offers as a sacrifice a persori whom a collective decision of the group has condemned to death.

time they reach a distant

I'd rather not play around \\ ith the magic here and to show you how far we can take this thing, \\ould like to remind you of Yeats' poem on
'The Second Coming: Turning and turning in the widening gyre Tl1e falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannOt hold: Mere anarchy is. loosed upon the world, The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and e1erywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned: The

best lack all conviction, while the_worst

Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Smely the second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to

be born