CHTHONIC REALITY

A RETRACTION OF A PREVIOUSLY HELD WORLD-VIEW

by Terri Moore

Here in Africa, Witchcraft is perceived differently according to the culture one belongs to. I work with highly intelligent, articulate people who have no problem with the concept of a 'Witch' turning herself into a black cat - in fact, one of them claims to have seen it.

I used to struggle with the idea of Witchcraft actually physically harming people.
The idea that someone could lay a curse on another and that person would sicken and die, or be killed by a falling rock within the month belonged, as far as I was concerned, to the realms of coincidence, human imagination and tall stories.

And this, mind you, after I became a Witch myself.

We cling, most of us in the Western subculture, to the paradigm of the rational, the individual, the scientifically-explainable. The shining figure of Apollo is the only pre-Christian God we acknowledge- he who stands tall and radiant in the light of his own frontal lobes, telling us that if we can't measure it, can't build equations to explain it, it doesn't really exist. This is arrant nonsense, of course.

What we have mostly forgotten-or smothered and dumped into the cloacae of our bright, brave new world- is the far older, chaotic, dark and stygian presence of the old Goddesses. Those for whom the Pythonesses prophesied before the Sun God appropriated their holy sites. They still exist, however we try to explain them away-the realms of our world we try so hard not to see, the Pythian.

OK, so this is a word I invented. But it seems to fit the bill. It conjures up images of those Delphic Oracles communing with and through the Omphalos in their subterranean passages, before the coming of the light of the world. Plus it retains a hint of the essential nature of the Chthonic – earthy, basic, that from which all else arises.

The Apollonian view is only half of the story. We can measure and quantify how the stars hold their courses, how the particles break down and release their energy; we can predict the trajectory of the atomic bomb as it whistles to the ground. We have the equations and we have the scientific method to apply them. This most of us are taught as children-we can study it and define it and we can tell how it will behave under any future combination of circumstances.

Except, of course, when we can’t.

Why is it that a man with a brain 80% filled with fluid can function normally? We have frankly no idea how or where memory is stored in our brains. Why is it that many of us are visited by loved ones at the time of their death, even when we have no idea that the person is even ill? We have not an inkling of what happens at death.

How is it that a mine worker can curse an absent colleague so that he does in fact die of ‘unknown causes’ less than a moon later? We put this down to auto suggestion. ‘Death by self-induced superstition’. The cry of ‘no evidence’ is our desperate attempt to cling to that which makes linear sense, but it won’t wash.

Then again, the chaotic undertow to our lives often pops up in our dreams, or in waking visions inexplicably accurate.

It doesn’t matter how much scorn the metaphysical naturalists pour on such experiences, they continue to appear, sometimes seeming to drag the night in with them - and the more we deny them , the more insistent they become - as if, frustrated at being ignored, chthonic reality is frantically waving a paw at us from that other part of our lives.

I should know, having subscribed to the bright light of pure rationality for years.
When something heaves into view on the horizon of our circles of light, the easiest way to make it go away is to discredit it - laugh it off, ascribe it to brain chemicals gone awry, or simply, as we have been taught, ignore it.

And it goes away - for a while-leaving us in the blessed explicability of a scientific paradigm.

But then the night comes in again, or the power breaks down, or we encounter an altered state of consciousness so compelling that we have to give it room. The more room we give it, the easier it sits with us-and we come to realise that, after all, we do not yet have all the answers - we have in fact very few of them.

To set sail on the voyage of exploration of this reality is one of the jobs of the Witch and all the legislation in the multi-verse won’t make it go away.

NEXT
Too Kind
Issue No. 39 December 2007