Stripped of his purpose in life and of belief in himself, the thirty-four-yearold Xavier Perdue has his world inverted by a shadowy knight, an elemental blue horse and the knight’s companion, Epsibar Sophia. Metaphorically pitched upon the same path, the three lead him to a realisation of his own value in an upside-down world, releasing within him the entheogen of change. Battling outer odds, ďŹ ghting inner demons, he turns the base of himself into pure gold.
e 22 chapters are named aer the 22 cards of the Major Arcana of e Tarot: the journey from Fool to e World. e unfolding events reveal the power of the individual spirit when pitted against the impossible, how personal transformation can shape the world. e small is like the great. e great is like the small. It is an aspirational tale, set in both future and past, lied by the poetry of its telling.
ThE AlchEMIcAl horSEMAn
JErEMY JAMES
e Alchemical horseman
GolDMArK / UPPInGhAM / MMXII
Published in 2012 by Goldmark Uppingham, rutland 01572 821424 www.goldmarkbooks.com 978-1-870507-77-6 Set in Minion Pro Printed and bound in Great Britain www.alchemicalhorseman.com
Š Jeremy James 2012 î ˘e moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved. no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced without permission in writing from the publisher.
To Karo î‚ťe Black May your Spirit, Good horse, my old Friend, imbue this book.
For Tilly Bradbury Beautiful little Tilly, whom I had the great pleasure to witness riding before she could walk. I trust you will never live in a world that begins this book, Tilly. I trust you will live in î ˘e World that ends it. With all my love JJ
Alchemy harmonises The balance between The Spiritual and Material Plane
conTEnTS C hapter 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
/א/٠ /ב/١ /ג/٢ /ד/٣ /ה/٤ /ו/٥ /ז/٦ /ח/٧ /ט/٨ /י/٩ /כ/١٠ /ל/١١ /מ/١٢ /נ/١٣ /ס/١٤ /ע/١٥ /פ/١٦ /צ/١٧ /ק/١٨ /ר/١٩ /ש/٢٠ /ת/٢١
Arcana The Fool The Magician The high Priestess The Empress The Emperor The hierophant The lovers The chariot Strength The hermit Wheel of Fortune Justice The hanged Man Death Temperance The Devil The Tower The Star The Moon The Sun Judgement The World Appendix Glossary
Page 9 35 46 57 68 74 89 105 125 151 162 174 179 196 212 222 236 256 268 286 311 330 346 349
Chapter Zero / א/ ٠
e Fool e without is like the within: the small is like the great. ‘In the interests of health and Safety protocol, oxygenfree persons will be recycled between 1800 and 0600 hours. curfew passes will be available in oblivion, as usual. have a nice day.’ e schmoozy, synthesised female voice managed to impel a flirtatious note into her morning imprecation, as though recycling the oxygen-free had erotic undertones. Windswept lines of people flowed in buffeted regimental order along the pavement below. no one looked up. no one dared look up. not into that blazing cyclopian eye, the long grey head with rat-ear antenna and the teeth: big, gapped, stubby, iron-brown teeth stuck in a long metal beak. ‘Move along now!’ the sugary voice cooed. e pace quickened. nobody spoke. A tinny Queen of the night suddenly erupted through the teeth, clanging, gonging and clattering the butchered Mozart aria out on a glockenspiel. e crowds shuffled on. Flying plastic bags slapped against the high roofs. Styrofoam boxes and screwed-up polythene meat trays slithered along the pavement in amongst the legs of the people on the street. For a long quarter of an hour Mozart was beaten out on the brass tubes to the accompanying slap of the flying plastics, the shuffling feet and moaning wind, severed mid-bar by honeytongue oozing out another of her sing-song deliveries: ‘no communication on street-level! Portable communicators are banned on street-level!’ her high, ugly, twitching, grey head scanned the frightened shoppers below. ‘remember – r r! risk reduction! P SP P ! Practical Steps to Protect People! [13]
The Alchemical Horseman h and S! health and Safety!’ Mozart was suddenly ejected and Beethoven stepped up to usurp his place on the glockenspiel. e plastic detritus crackled, the wind moaned, Beethoven gonged and twanged – an idiot dirge muddled farcically between the lines of innocents herded through the concrete canyons as the tinny music blared out of the mouths of the brown-toothed monsters grinning above. ‘e time is 0945 hours exactly,’ announced the bedroom voice bursting through the Beethoven without reference to beat or bar. ‘It is day 6, Saturday 3rd April. citizens will keep their identi-chips viewable for scanning. reduced cost state alcohol is available in all supramarkets! remember your Purchase requisition Forms! You can’t buy anything without your Purchase requisition Forms! And stick to your scheduled routes! You can’t go anywhere without your scheduled routes! new health and Safety measures will be announced at 1000 hours – in fieen minutes’ time. Until then – go safely – go healthy! You lucky people! Your health and Safety Executive loves you! loves you!’ And from streetlevel loud speakers, e State Anthem erupted: a jolly, roystering, jingle-belled march belted out in deafening choral exposition: ‘Health and Safety, Health and Safety, Safety all the day. Oh what joy it is to live the Health and Safety way!’ A fragment of sunlight beat through the window of no 16 hylech road. Minute particles of dust swirled in the thin ray, spangling a square of stone on Xavier’s floor. From beyond the glass came the roaring shudder of wind, the crinkling of plastic, of polystyrene, polythene, styrofoam. e Anthem. e quarter-hourly health and Safety broadcasts and their brand of solid-state propaganda trumpeted from the ever-moving and sinister heads, raking the brown sky above the city. Xavier was thirty-four years old today. It was his birthday. 3rd April. irty-four. Sitting at his multi-functional table his eyes were fixed on the middle distance watching the tiny particles of dust winking [14]
The Fool in the light, falling, always falling. his stillness gave the appearance of either hearing everything that penetrated his cell or of hearing nothing at all. e anthem ended in a crescendo of baritones, basses, tenors, contraltos, sopranos, cymbals and plastic bags. A new, strident voice intruded – these loudhailers had the unnerving habit of suddenly changing gender – a synthesised male voice this time, with a militaristic, clipped tone. ‘e Presidente will make his speech at 1300 hours! You will pay attention when e Presidente speaks!’ It was hard to know if the organs of operation of these tall robots were delivered by way of real human voice, of someone, somewhere trotting out their script into a microphone, or whether they were simply a combination of steel and electronic devices screeching out their primed speeches in the absence of processed thought. In any event they got things wrong, and were apt to lose their thread and become thoroughly disoriented. Moreover this gender swapping lent them a kind of lurid transsexual air, and they became moody, petulant and irritated as though hormonally disturbed and yelled so erratically that no one understood a thing they said anyway. ‘oh what joy it is to live the health and Safety way,’ Xavier hummed absent-mindedly to himself. ‘irty-four,’ he muttered, ‘thirty-four,’ and frowned as if he was unable to gather any meaning or relevance from what he’d just said. Slowly counting through his fingers on the intake of a breath he added: ‘ree plus four equals seven. Seven. Seven,’ and he pondered the significance of this number. he rubbed his eyes. he blinked in the dim light. e glockenspiel clanged on. rubbing his temples, Xavier struggled to his feet, shuffled to the chiller and dispensed a measure of grey gm-flakes into his health and Safety, grey, supersecure-multi-foodreceptacle. Banging the multi-food-receptacle with its measure down on the table, he took two steps to the chiller and triggered the door. Bending to the blue-lit interior, he extended his hand in search of a deci-litre of crypto-milk. [15]
The Alchemical Horseman ere wasn’t a deci-litre of crypto-milk. ere wasn’t even half a deci-litre of crypto-milk. In fact, if he put his mind to it, he would have known there wasn’t anything in the chiller at all. ere was no crypto-butter. ere were no filo-eggs. ere was no reco-spam. ere were no morphigrapes. no pots of crypto-cream. ere was no polyoghurt, no cold recopasta – there was nothing. no mocpastrami. nothing. e chiller was empty, the cupboard was empty, barring the gmflakes, now abandoned, and some chemi-coffee which Xavier was forced to take black. Pushing the gm-flakes aside, he sat down carefully with his chemi-coffee and a line in fractured thought. ‘oh what joy it is to live . . . to thirty-four. Dum de dum . . . recycle the oxygen-free tra la la . . . e health and Safety Executive loves you. loves you . . . dum de dum. Why do they say oxygen-free, why don’t they just say dead? Tra la la.’ outside Beethoven was giving the glockenspiel determined attention. Putting his hands to his ears Xavier closed his eyes and counted. ‘one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . seven.’ en opened his eyes slowly. Slowly he ranged his vision about the room. his eyes ran over the ragged piles of books, the dust on the shelves, the rumpled rug on the floor, the old saddle under the saddle-cloth, the dirty washing-up in the sink, the abandoned gm-flakes, the swirling dust in the sunlight. he frowned, as though all of this were a mystery to him, as though he had been recently deposited here through the agency of some alien cra from some alien place and was now expected to make sense of it. how and why he knew not. ‘What did he say?’ he asked out loud, puzzled, putting his hands down on the table. What Ygor had said the night before had been a simple remark which he now tried to recall. It had bothered him before he fell asleep. Ygor had blurted it out suddenly, as they were quietly, or not so quietly, slugging their way through a few gallons of Wizard’s nip in oblivion. Something about what he wanted, wasn’t it? Wanted? [16]
The Fool Wanted? What does anyone want? Well, a few hundred thousand talents would help, a full-time pass, a case full of purchase requisition forms, one of those super-sophisto dwellings the health and Safety lot got cosseted up in, but that was not what Ygor had meant, he knew him better than that. no, he’d put pungency into the question as he always did. he meant the other thing. What was it? ‘If you don’t know what you want by the time you’re thirtyfour you never will.’ at was it. So how was he going to answer this one? It was impossible trying to think about it. What did he want? Apart from blundering through life on a void ticket, with no sense of direction, no purpose, no aim, he had never had any specific function in mind. not even on a daily basis, let alone a lifetime’s worth. not only did he not know what he wanted, he knew neither who, nor what he was. Maybe his lights had gone out? Maybe they’d never been lit? he’d never thought about it until now, but that was how life ran, scrutinised by the glaring, fixated, ever-watching, evil eye of the health and Safety robo-pets, peering down from their unassailable heights, one moment your silver-tongued pal, the next terminating your identity-chip. outcast, abandoned, sharing the last hours of your life with the suicides under the bridges for the price of a smile. oh no, you avoided that one: smiles were expensive. he sighed. nicotine-stained, shaking fingers stroked the long, unwashed brown hair. he didn’t want to think about Ygor’s remark, it was too complicated. Too weighty. Besides what on earth could he do about it? What could anybody do about it? he did not want to think anything difficult today. he wanted to be le to be miserable and indulge in the mental flagellation that always accompanied a night out in oblivion, which happened, this morning, to have been compounded by another little incident, which had come right out of nowhere in the early hours and le him marvelling at his degraded behaviour these days. [17]
The Alchemical Horseman ings had nearly clicked, last night, in oblivion. nearly. Maybe that was what he wanted. Yes, that was it! at was what he wanted. or it could have been. Just might have been. certainly it was part of it – or rather, she was. at was it. he wanted her. he wanted Eppie. oblivion, that decibel bludgeoning recreational warehouse that provided e Entertainment, according to health and Safety Executive research findings and all the box tickings necessary to show it was what people demanded – democratically speaking, that was. numbers. numbers, the final decision of the great grumbling mob, as if sheer volume set the highest price on wisdom. not that the health and Safety crowd took much notice of anything these days anyway, devoting their energies to bullying, cajoling and enticing the terrorised populace to do things for reasons seldom made clear to a clear-thinking man. e Inn of oblivion had been designed originally with no particular function in mind other than to mop up a little more land in the sole interest of the Global Bank speculators who neither thought nor cared about what value it removed as opposed to what value it added. Painted grey from end to end, it had a corrugated domed ceiling with no concession whatsoever to what might have passed for taste or comfort. It was fitted with strip wall-lighting, grey plastic tables and chairs, a row of black topped bar stools and a raised dais for live performances at the far end. e long bar was made of grey plastic and littered with sticky beer mats over which spilling pints of Bowel Vowel, Wizard’s nip, crumplehead, Knotfoot and cocksure ciders were palmed to outstretched arms, along with 80% proof spirit – Bonnetcrusher. Plastic pots of tranquillisers, antidepressants and pick-me-ups squabbled for space amongst the optics. Music blared from enormous black speakers that hung at either end of the bar. on the far wall, a vast televisor screen played non-stop 3D videos of gyrating musico-porn stars bawling into headset microphones. [18]
The Fool e government had thrown open the doors of such places to fourteen-year-olds upward, in the absence of knowing how else to entertain e World’s Youth. oblivion attracted them: young girls, who arrived in gangs: formidable gangs, Xavier thought once, as he found himself stepping through a huddle of them, like tripping the cheese-wire that divided the split second before the detonator triggered. ese dangerous, explosive, savage-humoured little harpies attracted rival gangs: male gangs, spotty voyeurs, bum-fluffed teenagers and young hopefuls whose chances of chatting up one of these volatile little sirens had recently been primed a good fillip by the latest health and Safety edict which extended drinking hours to a non-stop option. In an attempt to cope with the effects of this new law, the h S E had the foresight to introduce a measure which it considered would spare the town streets the worst of the excesses of teenagers and, copying an historical precedent, installed a glass fibre Ejectorium. Intriguingly, the name of this repellent thing was immediately supplanted by reference to a vessel of alchemical provenance; from where or from whom this allusion to the subtle process of distillation had originated no one knew. It became known as e retort. In many ways it represented the process of a real retort through which the chemical reduction of one substance to the production of another by way of separation, conjunction, dissolution and coagulation was achieved. e retort was a black oval-shaped trough with rolled edges recessed into a blackened dim-lit cubicle, built into a wall on the le of oblivion. Together with the peri-urban planning committee and peri-rural planning committee sectors of the hSE, the wise ruling committee of oblivion reasoned that since e retort would require regular emptying, the function of disgorging its contents would fall to the most worthless member of society who, escaping the normal processes of what passed for e law, would present him- or herself as the most admirable candidate for the foulest job they could devise. Presuming that such a figure would be [19]
The Alchemical Horseman easily identified, the odious task would fall to them and that would be their way of rendering their service to the community. once appointed to this duty, there would be no escape. ‘Yak!’ exclaimed Xavier to his friend, Ygor, gagging in oblivion: ‘Fancy that! I pity the poor blighter who has to empty the retort! Yak! reminds me of a revolting poem I know, shall I tell it you?’ Ygor groaned, averting a watery-eyed gaze to the gyrating musico-porn operatives on the 3D televisor. ‘Don’t,’ he drawled in his illegal, ancestral argot, exhaling a vast plume of smoke. ‘he’ll pitch in! Imagine! Up to his neck!’ Ygor turned away: ‘for health and Safety’s sake!’ oblivion had been a haunt of Xavier’s for some time, along with the town’s riff-raff, under-age drinkers, alcoholic habitués, deadbeats, businessmen, housewives, labourers, lawyers, doctors, dentists, truck drivers, taxi drivers, busdrivers, tax collectors, requisition orderlies, health and Safety bouncers, judges, politicians, shop-owners, porn-stars, supramarket shelf-stackers, sanitary inspectors, children, teenagers, statisticians, perverts, economists, comedians, the permanently-hungover-unemployed – this last group being allowed to drink for free, all day, every day, year in year out provided they never looked for a job. All of these and anybody else in search of oblivion and a free curfew pass were enticed to its portals, which were the only thing e World, these days, had to offer. e curfew itself posed a curious dichotomy whereby the law-abiding, sober citizen was confined to his doors whereas every drunkard, lecher and lunatic was allowed full-rein of the streets, provided he, or she, secured a free pass from oblivion. e place by night was bedlam, the streets lethal, the state military police drinking themselves into piques of uncontrollable sadism as they roared about in their nuclearfuelled trucks from which they leapt without warning onto any hiccupping malingerer, abandoning him to the mercy of their truncheons. Upon resolution of a bloodied thrashing [20]
The Fool under the hSE Police care Programme, they’d hurl him into a cell, leave him waterless and unfed for a few days before carting him off to the nearest sanatorium, where he’d be instantly lobotomised and tossed back onto the streets courtesy of the great maternal health and Safety Executive who loved him so much. on this particular evening, 2nd April – the night before – a mysterious process had occurred in oblivion delivering Xavier of a jolt, which, had he the wit and foresight to see at the time, he would have recognised as a call from the Spirit to consider his ways. he’d been celebrating his birthday a night early which meant he would have to nurse a hangover on his birthday, rendering himself more or less wholly debilitated for the rest of the day – when an Enchantress had miraculously been conjured from the dark stones beneath oblivion and stood alive and iridescent in its midst, ministering to the mortals of this twilight upper world in exemplary simplicity. She’d appeared at Xavier’s table with a cloth, picked up the illegal ashtray, which she emptied and banged onto the side of a tin bucket. e sudden proximity and sharpness of the sound had made Xavier leap from his skin as he sat dragging on his cigarettes and yelling at Ygor about the latest prognostications of the health and Safety Executive. Stopping mid-flow to turn and swear at whoever it was who made this confounded din, he found himself trawled by a pair of cool, lingering, lion-green eyes. A fish-scaled djinn leapt from the deep and rapped sharply on the screen of his mind: something went ping! e music stopped; Ygor disappeared; oblivion vanished. Xavier hovered alone in a whirring world of blue, gold and silver with this angel, momentarily whipped up by some swily rotating emotional whirlwind leaving him stuck fast to his seat. Where had she just alighted from? What seventh bluecrested wave had just borne this little mother of pearl along to deliver herself up on a silver platter before him? She had been small – he liked this – standing a snatch over [21]
The Alchemical Horseman five feet. She was olive skinned with blue-black hair. her face bore a refinement, her skin unmade-up, she was broad in the beam, big where she should be big, little where she should be little, wholesome, lissom, full, alive, vibrant. oily. Shining. her features were neat, yet generous. her skull was toned, the line of her eyebrows matching the evenness of her lips and set of her chin. She had a self-conscious smile, revealing an indent above her upper lip which matched the dimples in her cheeks. her smile made her eyes glitter and her eyes were astonishing. Even in the colourless light inside this smokestinging grotto he had noticed her eyes: lion-green and large, lined in fine black eyelashes. She had displayed no distaste, no judgement as she came swabbing the table. She had glanced at Xavier briefly, acknowledging him inwardly – he felt – instinctively. Something had happened. Something had passed. Something he was unable to articulate. In that momentary glance, he fancied he’d seen her in a completely different place: by a grassy knoll, beside a clear stream and a white cypress, with a red and black-banded snake, a bird with a feline head, and she, the naked, ministering angel, kneeling by the stream’s margin, holding two pitchers, pouring water from one onto the land and from the other, into the brook. e girl smiled, wiped the ashtray, put it back and moved to the next table with her bucket of death and ash-coated cloth. is girl was definitely not one of the Saturnalian-minded bargirls who normally flung ashtrays and insults around in oblivion. She was completely different. She stood at odds. Indefinable. Set apart. An absence of lead with which the others were permanently ballasted. Something gentle about her. Some essence, as though she were possessed of a secret and concealed within her slight frame a calm, a stillness, untranslatable into words, revealing a mysterious insight into life as though she were waed along by a loy scent le swirling in the ether aer she had gone, and which those of certain casts of mind [22]
The Fool apprehended, and turned, to determine its source. A shocking thing had happened. e minute Xavier had clapped his eyes on her, something inside him had clicked into place. It was a bio-chemical reaction: a physical thing, thermo-nuclear in its fall-out. he was powerless before it. ‘Did you see that?’ gasped Xavier rising to his feet, watching her broker her way through the tables all the way down the length of the long, crowded bar. Following Xavier’s gaze through the smoke, Ygor leaned forward, focussed vaguely, tapped the ash off his illegal cigarette in the now-clean, illegal ashtray, leaned back and drawled: ‘See what?’ Xavier remained on his feet until the girl had disappeared into the gloom at the far end under the huge televisor and gyrating musico-porn stars. ‘at lovely girl!’ he breathed out in a pall of smoke, pointing into the gloom at the end of the bar into which the lady with the lion-green eyes had slipped. ‘Did you see her eyes? e colour of her eyes?’ ‘What? What eyes?’ Xavier shook his head, ‘never mind,’ and searched the fug to see where she had gone. ‘Must be in here somewhere.’ ‘Who must?’ ‘My emerald-eyed Enchantress!’ ‘Your what?’ ‘She – her!’ he said motioning with his head as he saw her take up a place behind the bar. For one fleeting moment he thought he saw her flash him a glance. Maybe, maybe. he could just make her out in the lit-up bar and its sea of pink outstretched arms with plastic mugs in every hand. Xavier stood watching as the music blared. oblivion roared. Ygor puffed out something in an oral smoke signal which Xavier failed to decipher. e music thumped on. e guitars whined. e keyboards squealed and the snares on the drums grated a constant, rhythmic metallic hiss. [23]
The Alchemical Horseman It didn’t take him long to abandon Ygor, find a barstool, perch himself on it and get a little closer to this otherworld, enigmatic little calypso. ordering another pint of Wizard’s nip he settled on the stool and waited. A few little snatches of conversation. he managed to get her name: Eppie. Eppie! She was too busy to talk, to say more. is place was all empty plastic mugs going one way, full ones going the other. All arms and hands, mouths, teeth, youngsters yelling orders, smothered beneath the thrash, bang and roar of the music which shook the tesserae of grimy mirror squares behind the optics, the glasses on the shelves, the barrels, bottles – the whole building. Eppie was on the beer taps in front of him. Glancing at a string of little blue beads that hung around her neck, Xavier had experienced a head-swimming déjà vu. It was strange: he actually knew that he had been in her company before, in some other dimension, which created the illusion of a union existing between them, on some nebulous psychic plane, which, if he had had the chance to tell her, would attract her inner attention and cause her to be drawn to him – so the logic might follow. he tried. She couldn’t hear. hands cupped to his mouth, he shouted. She shook her head. Pulled another ten pints. e army of youths clamoured for alcohol. Eppie was swept along the bar. Xavier waited for another hour. A lobotomised youth, victim of the Police care Programme (which excelled always in placing the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time) pulled him a plastic mug of Wizard’s nip and Xavier resumed his seat with Ygor. Unable to hear each other above the din, Ygor and Xavier resigned themselves to the dead-head-nod that always accompanied the ear-splitting, thrumming wail of the musicoporn kings and queens. ey drummed their fingers. ey tapped their feet. ey watched the supple-bodied youngsters writhe provocatively in front of one another thickening the air with pheromones and sending pulse-rates rocketing. By 0200 hours Eppie had slipped away. ‘Ah, the wheels of fortune!’ Xavier fumed soly, and, leaving [24]
The Fool Ygor to the music, rose to his feet to make for the outside world in the hope of discovering her loitering beyond the portals to this rocking inferno. e shock of exiting the roar of oblivion made his ears ring as he stepped through the threshold into the glossy ocean of night outside. Adjusting his eyes to the gloom, swaying around in the sulphurous darkness trying to roll a cigarette, he was immediately accosted by a religious group: a knot of six middle-aged men and five middle-aged women, all dressed in black, whose speciality it was to prey. ‘Unless,’ a tall, blackbonneted woman of sixty-one demanded, rattling a tin, ‘unless you truly repent of your sin, and give us seven talents, you will go to hell.’ he considered her wryly for the time it took a lop-sided grin to sculpt his lips, one of his cigarettes to be rolled and the sticky line to be licked. ‘not only do I not possess seven talents to squander on such speculation, but it is too late, I fear, to repent for my sins, I am in hell already,’ he hiccupped, ignited the cigarette and breathed out a pall of blue smoke in one fluid gesture. Departing with an oath, blessing or a curse, they le. Button-holed directly by another group, this time all dressed in white: ‘If you truly repent of your sin and give us seven talents,’ a bright-eyed young woman rattling another tin sung out happily: ‘you will go to heaven.’ leaning against a street lamp to steady the effects of nine pints of Wizard’s nip, weaving a dragon’s tail of smoke about him as though he were summoning the fiery salamander itself, Xavier responded: ‘little need have I to squander seven talents upon your generous entreaty for I am repented of my sins and am in heaven already.’ And they departed, to seek a more malleable, less articulate victim. A micro-skirted woman with a way in her walk and a mop of pink hair slipped out of the darkness, a serpentine temptress sensing a submissive quarry. ‘Mmmm,’ she cooed soly, sliding an arm through his, falling in step as he set off from the lamppost on a vague [25]
The Alchemical Horseman homebound bearing: ‘that lot,’ gesturing with her chin, ‘seem to think you have some repenting to do.’ at wasn’t a bad opening gambit. She felt comfortable on his arm. She was holding him up. he was drunk enough to tolerate a direct frontal assault that promised a little more give and rather less take. he said nothing. ‘Mmmm,’ she cooed again, leaning her head on his right shoulder as they walked slowly through the shining sulphur yellow-lit street. ‘If you truly repent of your sin, you should read e high Pandeuch, chapter 3, verses 4–18.’ Xavier swung her a look: a smile curled around the cigarette. his eyebrows arched and his right eye closed to the sting of a taper of smoke. ‘If not,’ she breathed, pheromones waing the so night air, ‘you could come to the nymphaeum with me.’ one and a half hours later, the lady in question – Amorette – departed the nymphaeum with a better portion of Xavier’s identi-chip credit, a slam of a white plastic door and a fitting measure of his conscience. recoiling from this gross importunity at 0950 hours as he sat at his multi-functional table in his flat aer sneaking home through the dangerous streets, no smile wreathed his face. Self-deprecation surged all over him. he lacked, he recognised, any self-governing principle. his internal security mechanism had collapsed. no longer comported by any code of acceptable behaviour he had abandoned the steadying hand of his calm and measured auto-pilot in favour of the extravagant outbursts of the drunkard of impulse. he inhabited an episodic, seesaw world of binge and remorse. no sooner had he decided to follow one path than he was immediately pitched onto the next. Inconstant in every way, he held no respect for, nor any belief in himself. he had no idea of his own abilities nor talents. he scoffed or made light of what he knew he could do. he undermined whatever he did. his words, he knew, were always empty. he was good at laughing, excelled at enjoying himself, was jocund in company and yet in the [26]
The Fool reclusion of his own thoughts, he knew he was a tattered reed. he lacked gravitas in any form and was badly in want of spine. he was not alone. e world, these days, urged the quickly-beguiled civilian to drop the intrinsically priceless in favour of the outright worthless. To render value to the cheap; to give merit to the tawdry, to applaud mediocrity; to revile real quality wherever and whenever encountered. Beauty was usurped by the hideous, the stately by the squalid. Excellence was dispelled by the commonplace: action was overruled by apathy; grace by glitz; proportion by the ergonomically correct. colour, by its absence. newspaper articles, televisor advertisement, government-funded documentary programmes exhorted the creed of the immediately accessible, promoting only artefact, any and every instantly consumable thing, animal, vegetable or mineral. no one, no authority, no agency addressed any other need. Any venal or destructive thing passed muster. In spite of protest from the colossal world population, the government urged consumption and only consumption. All was fair game. remaining unchallenged, the jurisdiction of the health and Safety Executive urgently imbued itself into the psyche of the citizens of this society, engineering between each and every one of them suspicion and mistrust. no longer did anyone feel safe. In the days of an earlier epoch, this system had been instilled, when every man, woman and child remained under suspicion and were assumed guilty unless proven innocent. owing to its own inability to organise itself and baffled by its own surfeit of legislation, the health and Safety Executive lured citizens into breaking the law in order to discover what the legislation was, thereby setting storm through the people’s innate sense of ethos that the health and Safety Executive’s excesses might expand uncontested, and its absolute powers rage without limit. Tobacco had long been illegal, and smoking a habit set most profoundly against the law. And yet it was the health [27]
The Alchemical Horseman and Safety Executive which created the traffic in tobacco, importing vast tonnages, marketing it through the black economy in the Inns of oblivion where its value sky-rocketed, thereby securing its triumph as a highly-prized, forbidden commodity. Shrewdly acquainted with the vagaries of human nature to seize upon the principle that if something were denied by law it would be all the more popular, the h SE remained assured of its success in the marketplace. Turning their now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t singly-focussed one blind eye upon the masses who clamoured the luxurious texture of its prohibition, the health and Safety Executive officers running the illicit tobacco trade found unlimited scope to top up their personal identi-credits while imaginatively victimising anyone who squealed or attempted to level a finger at the double-standard that was rife in this meritocratic parliament of thieves. In the very bowels of this stealth-controlled society there existed no charity. All were urged to be dubious of one another’s intentions. An overwhelming sense of suspicion pervaded the streets, the supramarkets, the sky, the clouds and in amongst what few stands of trees remained in town squares. People walked face to the ground lest they catch one another’s eye and be held responsible for paedophilia, or for sexual harassment, for infringement of personal space or for deeming to be over-friendly and therefore extrovert – another punishable crime since extroversion in this age was regarded as a precursor to malfeasance, a crime against humanity. Born into debt, the civilians of this Brand new order slogged through their blighted lives trying to divest themselves of this onerous burden, struggling to find the monthly crippling wherewithal to meet their punitive obligation while scratching from the remainder the pittance upon which they eked out their narrow lives. Debt clung to them doggedly. It could not be shaken off. If their credit rating was seriously compromised defaulters had their personal identi-chips terminated without notice, which rendered them unable to buy anything, or to go anywhere. ere being no provision for social welfare or [28]
The Fool for social support, these defaulters were brought back into line through sheer, screaming desperation. Many failed to return. Figures for suicides were not revealed. Work was impossible to find. More and more robotic devices had been engaged to substitute for the human labour force and as the population exploded, fewer and fewer people were employed. As more and more communication devices proliferated throughout their world, less and less was allowed to be said, information on all calls being recorded by the vigilant and ruthless communication police, a veritable contradiction in terms. Sense of helplessness and apathy was whipped up through the release of brutal documentaries followed by banal gameshows; through vicious reality televisor programmes and lottery draws promising fabulous wealth. carefully shaped by the puppet tycoons of the health and Safety-controlled media, stories that portrayed ever escalating scenes of human depravation, of degradation, of violence and of greed were run at prime time in order to keep the pitches of apathy and of helplessness see-sawing, subtly casting into people’s minds an ever greater sense of distress and of isolation, that they might turn to the health and Safety Executive to save them from the panting monsters which stalked their frightened lives. As for security, there was none. e many random attacks that terrorised sections of the planet’s frightened population being laid at the foot of Al Kaplomb and his Gang, a splinter group of independent-minded reactionaries who inhabited sets of caves in mountainous regions at the Middle of e World. Televisor programmes regularly pitched footage of the unconventional lives of Al Kaplomb and his Gang, filming ragged children playing games in the streets – wholly forbidden in the outer world – mothers illegally breast-feeding their offspring on cicada-ringing verandahs, and of old men sitting on wooden benches in shady parks, watching swans glide across the waters of the Middle of the World’s inland [29]
The Alchemical Horseman sea. Worst of all, members of this Gang wandered about on haphazard streets in haphazard towns which housed haphazard shops selling naturally made clothes, foods and drinks made from unevenly coloured and unevenly shaped fruits. regarded and vilified as primitive outcasts, they were to be despised at all costs. histrionic articles were fuelled against them by the health and Safety controlled media; not one solitary part of their lives was le underided or unmocked. ey were deemed a primitive form of savages that needed exterminating. Yet stubbornly they clung to their perverse way of life under the perverse leadership of Al Kaplomb, who managed with dextrous ingenuity, through some unknown trick, to be forewarned of any impending attack by the health and Safety Executive military arm upon their land and homes, from which they always emerged resolutely alive and well, sun-browned and smiling. is resourceful, self-contained society existed not a thousand miles from the brutally armoured, black-uniformed military police force ordered to prey upon citizens at zero tolerance level for any offence, real or imaginary, relying upon the probing eyes of the brown-mouthed loudhailers to scan the identity-chips of the herded mob below. Everyone knew the identi-chip system was unstable. names were confused, information was muddled, genders were swapped and bank accounts jumbled every time the grid collapsed. Following one such collapse, upon power being returned, everyone had found their identi-chip gloriously credited by a million talents and had gone out instantly and cornered every remaining scrap of poly-meat, bread, gmbran, fat, litre of oil, oranges – real ones – junk, tat and frippery from every stall, shop and supramarket across the planet. e value of money imploded. chaos reigned. Inflation shot to 60,000%. Identi-chips were switched off. Everyone on the face of the globe (excepting politicians, bankers, land speculators and members of the health and Safety Executive) was divested of the means to buy any provisions or to go [30]
The Fool anywhere for three long weeks. It was high summer. ere was water rationing. People died. nothing was said. e health and Safety Executive, like the demi-gods of an ancient time, continued to indulge their utopian and untroubled lives on the halcyon Isles on palm-waving shores beside their make-believe, turquoise ocean. e rigid principles of the health and Safety Executive were simple: to numb citizens into a psychic torpor from which few were able to think themselves free with or without the assistance of the many carers and psychiatrists, who had been carefully groomed by the health and Safety Executive for their incompetence in dealing with matters of the mind. Individualism was rated as anti-social and thus it was that Xavier found himself snared, for as an individual, he represented a natural target, and one day was bound to feel the wrath of the health and Safety Executive for no other offence than for being a free-thinker, even if, by comparison to a more glorious past on this planet, his free thinking was a mere fraction of what once it might have been. rejecting such overtures upon his soul, Xavier held no apprehension of natural obedience, and, because he saw no other way to act, granted himself licence to abscond from personal responsibility, avoiding, evading and circumscribing any notion of consequence, provided that he received some thrill of sensation as oen as possible. ese momentary, fleeting pleasures brought him momentary, fleeting satisfaction. Save that now, as he grew older, reflecting upon his behaviour, some essence writhed within him, giving shoulder to unsettling admonitions that lighted the slumbering quarters of his soul, whispering to him that this was not how it should be, and that he had been brought into this world for another, finer and more illustrious cause. is voice confused him. he thought, at first, it was the voice of liberty. And liberty, to him, meant licentiousness. committing himself to nothing and to no one he described his actions as those of a free spirit and lived accordingly. Yet a moment’s positing would have chivvied him to his wits and [31]
The Alchemical Horseman made him apprehend that his impulses to his lusts, his thirsts and his appetites were true slavery, and that of all the people he knew, he was the most wretchedly shackled. nothing was rooted in his heart and his heart was rooted in nothing. It was as though in the sink of existence he had set about life without meaning. he tracked down only sensory accomplishment in a vain effort to tap its secrets through indulgence, that he alone would find them and that in some glorious momentary tableau, all would be revealed, his desires and passions sated – but even then, he knew he’d forsake them. religion, at this time, was regarded as the preserve of fanatics and of fools. It was an idiosyncrasy of the past. An aberration of the fastened mind. All observances, strictures, rituals and earnest struggles to find another, more wholesome way were considered abhorrent. Gone. Useless, expendable. A facet of an earlier and more primitive epoch. Besides, science had long proven the non-existence of God. e Universe had been explained. At some unarticulated level, this caused Xavier anxiety. It destabilised him. If he was ever honest with himself, insofar as his vision of his world would allow, he remained disloyal to an inner voice which exhorted him to adopt a different mental poise. he refused to listen. he dealt only ever with effect, never with cause. life was to be lived in the flickering, impermanent brilliance of sensation, in which the inevitability of outcome was dismissed. live today and let tomorrow fend for itself was his motto, if he had one, even though he had begun to discern that each tomorrow, as he aged, became thinner and thinner. lacking both inner compass and inner guide, his irrational behaviour and the whimsical nature of his outlook magnetised all the worst elements of chaos and disorder to him, from which he so earnestly longed to divest himself. In a sense he was not to blame. e world he inhabited [32]
The Fool offered no role models. Inspirational literature was derided. Although books were available, the public were not encouraged to read since the health and Safety Executive found it more beneficial to its own, limited ingenuity, to reign over an inarticulate, ill-informed society rather than an articulate, well-informed one. Even Xavier’s own private collection would have landed him with a hey fine and its immediate confiscation if it were ever discovered. ere was no overall guiding hand. no spiritual leader of any kind. Yet it remained an irony that whereas most people managed a modicum of self-control, even of self-respect, which made them content, within the execrable confines of the health and Safety Executive, to inhabit their own skin, Xavier was lost to the lessons that are taught by the heart. he lived a life that was plunging him deeper and deeper into the abyss. he’d lately taken up a hobby. A big interest in lots of how-To books. opening the drawer in the table where he sat he pulled a few out: How-To Become a Millionaire, How-To ink Yourself Rich, How-To Attract Everything You Want, How-To Deal with Debt. How-To Use e Global-Bank Helpline, How-To Get e Perfect Partner, How-To Claim Tax Credits. How-To Pay Off Your Identi-chip Debt. How-To Access the Health and Safety Executive. How-To Get Into How-To Books. In the drawer underneath the how-Tos was a pile of Final Demands. Xavier picked one up. ‘Why is it that the Global Bank presumes that if you are unable to pay a small debt you are able to pay a large one?’ he thought. ‘From whom do they learn their logic?’ ‘not Euclid,’ he said, tossing it over his shoulder, grimly wondering whether today would be the day they switch off his identi-chip and fling him to suicides under the bridges. rooting through the ashtray he searched for a cigarette butt. Without luck. he’d been through those once already. It was a flattening piece of perversity that dictated that when you were down on your luck, everything else went wrong as well. he’d tried visualisation techniques: pictured himself living [33]
The Alchemical Horseman in the perfect way in the perfect place only to find it hadn’t worked at all. not a glimmer. In fact it had driven him into an even worse position than before. Why was this? ere must be a reason. Aer all he had had a good education, been to school, been to a university even, where, along with everybody else, he’d gained a hSE Standard Degree in life Enhancement Skills about which his father – long since dead – had remarked that that sounded like a nice, abstract discipline; no doubt he’d earn nice, abstract money. clearly that insight had chewed a whacking great hole in his psyche at exactly the wrong age. at alone had made it impossible for him to earn a living right from the word go. obviously, he reasoned, he had bad karma. e Great Jester in the sky had laid it entirely upon his incompetent shoulders to restore harmony and balance to a broken, fallen world – ha! What a cracking joke that was. Xavier gazed along the rows of dishevelled books herded together on dusty shelves in no particular order: ragged heaps on Astrology, Astronomy, Egyptology, Plato’s Timaeus, books on the Magi, e Golden Bough, e courses of the Planets, books on e Tarot and Shamanism, Sun Signs, e Seven Signs, Seven Planets, Seven colours of the rainbow, Seven Days of the Week, Seven notes of e Scale, Septenuary Journey of Man, From Sinner to Saint in Seven Steps, Gospel of the holy Seven, e lucky Seven, e Book of Seven chances – all of them. copies of the holy books. Everything. cosmic paraphernalia lay scattered about: a rabbit’s foot for good luck. crystals. A Monas hieroglyphica; sticks of incense, an Eye of horus, a dreamscape, a silver pendulum, a tuning fork, fossils, wishbones, a crystal ball – a good one – a prayer bowl, a little wooden tortoise, a golden hare, a stack of dud scratch cards, a heap of screwed up lottery tickets, a meanlooking little glass god, two bags of rune stones – and what had they advantaged him? not a jot. nothing. once, he’d even gone into an abandoned cathedral, sat on his own in silence in a lady chapel for two hours and prayed earnestly that whatever it was that held him back be removed. [34]
The Fool no light had lit in his soul. no angel tapped him on the shoulder. no heavenly lips whispered in his ear that all would be well. nothing had happened at all. e place had been empty. he couldn’t help wondering if e Epopteia – of whom he had read much but learned little – had ever casually breezed through to extend his eternal blessings and deciding that no such thing had ever occurred, with bitterness, departed, damning the whole hollow charade. Any day now the identi-credi-debt collector would be around and he would lose the only thing he really treasured: his saddle. he gazed once more upon this saddle, sitting in the kitchen under a cloth, on a stand. It was an old-fashioned saddle, with a high pommel and high cantle. A beautiful thing. A copy of a medieval saddle, the kind of thing knights rode around on when distressed damsels flung themselves from towers. he’d blagged it three years before, on a dodgy loan scheme, which he knew he’d never be able to repay, and as soon as he got it and took it home a strange thing had happened. It seemed to emanate an inexplicable sense of incompleteness, as if the main character in the act was missing and would need, one day, to be found. With it came a peculiar, kindling resonance, a subtle vibration, willing it to be reunited with the principle for which it had been made. e longer the saddle remained in his cottage, the greater became Xavier’s yearning to own a horse that fitted it. e image persisted and distilled to one in particular: one single horse. A magnificent horse who was so black he was blue. Xavier saw himself mounted, on this very saddle, on this very horse high up in the mountains of some remote land, somewhere, in search of some fine, high, noble thing, on a quest for some splendid cause. More of element than of earth, the horse remained aloof in some abstract way, as though, not quite embedded in this world, nor part of another, he bore a quality hovering between the two. once here, once there, he dried through dimensions [35]
The Alchemical Horseman with ease, as though this were his natural state. Whole, tangible, touchable, possessing that distance of look which reveals knowledge of another place, an infinite beyond, unknown by man, unknown to man, well known by this horse. is was not a creature to be possessed: it was one who did the possessing. In some arch way he made Xavier feel that he belonged to the horse in greater degree than the horse belonged to him. he was a stallion. Sixteen hands. Blue hooves. Powerful hind quarters. he was black inclining to gun-barrel blue, the colour that is cast on either side of a full moon on a great ocean; a deep, deep living blue. his colour would turn again in shadow and be black, utterly black. Abruptly, under the light of the sun he would shi back to cobalt, such was the trick of light about him. e horse’s head was fine, patrician, cut to the convex, yet not overly so, darker than the rest of his body, with something inscrutable about it, driing from real to dream: a composite of the mind of an assassin tempered by the stigmata of a saint. Set in this fine head lay his eyes, eyes that simmered with such brilliant intensity they burned with an internal fire. his legs were unmarked. hard. Unsplinted. his mane, fine and long. Tail black and feathery, reaching to the ground. Xavier never gave this horse a name, he never found one to match the spirit of this mysterious creature of his dreams. e thrill of riding this great horse would cause a frisson to run through his body. he could summon him to mind at any time, dozing or walking, sense him in a crowd, see him sometimes afar off, watch as the great horse looked up, tossed his head and whinnied. once Xavier waved to him from a nuclo-train as he galloped alongside. As the train sped along the tracks he watched the horse clear a fence, turn and thunder off through woods, lost to sight: an echo in the ether, hoofprints in his soul, a withering cry in his mind. Xavier could feel him in his heart, know that whenever he liked he could reach out, touch him, mount, ride away, and saw himself upon him one day, inexplicably, waiting by e [36]
The Fool Tower, in the town. Saw himself in his saddle on this horse with an exceptionally pretty girl behind him, arms round his waist. Passers-by waved, threw flowers under the horse’s feet. Great blue hooves slammed into the tarmac and trotted down the road past the supramarkets and the nymphaea; past oblivion and past the casinos to the fields beyond, lost to sight. It was a peculiar vision and erupted from nowhere. he pondered about it – the horse and the beautiful girl. If he could not sleep, all he had to do was to think of his blue-black horse in any setting, at any time, in any place and feel again a warmth and profundity of admiration that nothing else he ever knew upon the face of the earth could touch. e irony was not lost: this horse would forever be a thing of his imagination. A creature of his own devising whose form was ethereal, of the spirit, never of substance, never to take physical shape, for how could such perfection exist in this mean and broken world? It was another signal to him of the perversity of life that one minute it drew to him his heart’s desire, and the very next, was rendered hopelessly redundant. e chemi-coffee was not good. It was health and Safety instant chemi-coffee which always made Xavier feel nauseous. Particularly with a hangover. how come he’d managed to go and get drunk last night when today was his birthday remained a mystery to him. no, not a mystery – a guilt. he’d gone and ruined today. of all days. he sighed again. It was no mystery. Always he had found himself doing the very opposite of what he intended. ‘My birth sign,’ he said in a hoarse voice, to himself. ‘e influence of my constellation. I am a ram.’ Swallowing the last dregs of his chemi-coffee, he pulled a face and shuddered. Something, some entity was clearly at work, opposing his every move. he was jinxed. e thought filled him with an overwhelming sense of worthlessness. he was a prisoner of life, incarcerated behind bars of ether, contained in a small, spiteful parameter where all his hopes were distempered with despair. his self-confidence was a tiny [37]
The Alchemical Horseman shadow of the man he was. A mewling little squib of a thing, frightened to face itself, even in a mirror with the curtains drawn in his black-blanketed mind. ‘Why me?’ he cried suddenly to an empty room. ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ and received no reply. ‘What kind of a God are you? Eh? Supporter of the exploiters and speculators, enemy of the innocent and oppressed, muddler of minds and general instrument of hostility to all decent forms of life, always abandoning those who need you most?’ Silence met his declamation. ‘Well??!!’ no deeply benign, resonant voice replied. Exasperated by the day already, by its lack of promise, by its emptiness, by its sheer opposition, the young Xavier abandoned his books and his charms, his empty-cupboarded kitchen, his precious saddle, his magical horse, even his empty dream about the girl in oblivion who had hardly given him so much as a glance and stumbled back to his bed, crawled in and pulled the covers over his head. We are what we perceive ourselves to be.
Chapter One / ב/ ١
e Magician Nothing is what it seems. Noted subject and relative to the Twice Times Eleven Paths of the Tree of life when the Tarot trumps together; guided by the royal star of Isis, queen of heaven clad in her mantle of blue – and horus, her only begotten son; Sirius, spirit of wisdom, star of baying hounds, parting the sands of eternity beneath the thundering hooves of the Blue horse, the silent, lion-green-eyed Epsibar Sophia plunged into the night. All about huge moving curtains of light rainbowed across the dark sky. Mighty Aurora Borealis shimmered in the high heavens in majestic, moving waves. now she was here, now she was there, conducted to a precise rhythm; an eerie sight, as though she had music attending her, some arcane symphony writ among the stars by the mind of the divine, a score unheard by human ears; too fine; too high; too impossible to understand; too intelligent to apprehend. Ah but what is wisdom? Where does it lie? Where must it be found when the trap of life is sprung? In ceaseless torment between the flying moments from transgression and transgression we wrestle the two eternities: bliss and folly. We strive to be fulfilled, to achieve, to know, to be content, to gather, to be known, to be – but conjure from the alchemy of life, antithesis. e vultures gather. e hungry wolves approach. e Tarot reveals. e Zodiac reigns. e alchemy weaves and a destiny is spun. Are we masters of our fate or [39]
APPEnDIX 1 • ThE AlchEMIcAl horSEMAn Ch. Arcana
Planetary & Astrological Symbols
Faculty
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
Uranus Mercury Moon Venus Aries Taurus Gemini cancer leo Virgo Jupiter libra neptune Scorpio Sagittarius capricorn Mars Aquarius Pisces Sun Pluto Saturn
lack of Discipline Initiative, creativity Serenity, Wisdom Development Will Inspiration harmony Difficulty courage caution Destiny Decision Sacrifice End of Era Accommodation reformed habit Alteration hope, Insight caprice harmony new Potential Triumph
e Fool e Magician e high Priestess e Empress e Emperor e hierophant e lovers e chariot Strength e hermit Wheel of Fortune Justice e hanged Man Death Temperance e Devil e Tower e Star e Moon e Sun Judgement e World
APPEnDIX 2 • SEPTEnArY oF MAn
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Physical
Constitution
Influence
Material Body Vital Force Etheric Double rational Soul Animal Soul Spiritual Soul Divine Spirit
Depraved Man Self-accusing Man rousing Man Balancing Man Fulfilling Man Accepting Man Purified Man
night Sunrise Dawn Mid-day Aernoon Dusk Sunset
[346]
Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday ursday Friday
Planet & Metal
Faculty
Quality
State
lead Mercury Quicksilver
logic
lack of Self-Knowledge land of calcination
Venus copper
rhetoric
lack of love
land of Dissolution
Mars
Music
Justice
land of Separation
Iron Jupiter Tin
Geometry Insight into Immortality land of conjunction
Saturn lead
Astronomy î ˘e gaining of Wisdom
State of Fermentation
Moon
Grammar
land of Distillation
Silver Sun
Arithmetic Beauty
Sight of Splendour
Kingdom of coagulation (Transformation)
Gold
Rainbow
Music
red orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet
G A B c D E F
[347]
GloSSArY Apotropaic, having the power to ward off evil. Hylech, refers to the point in the sky at which the positioning of the stars and planets, the sun and moon which dominate at birth, influence the whole life. Konx Om Pax, of Sanskrit origin. Konx comes from Kansha and signals the object of desire. om is the sound of the Soul of Brahma. Pax comes from Pasha, meaning to turn, or to change. In all it means May Your Aspirations Be Met: the Universal Soul responds. Telesma, A term used by rosicrucian Alchemists when referring to the First Material, or e Stone, meaning an inherent, self-perfecting physical presence. Tetractys, Principle of Pythagorean harmony, symbolising the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. e Epopteia, God. Allah the compassionate, the Merciful. Shiva. ra. Ahura Mazda. e Divine Architect. e Great Spirit. e living Power of e cosmos. e living Universe. e Universal Pool. e Universal Soul. e High Pandeuch is a gnostic text, being neither religion nor philosophy. It has few Adepts. It is a work both of Exhortation and of revelation. It cannot be found, it is revealed. e Seventh Wave, Denoting the frequency of the Intuitional Wave. A psychokinetic resource resembling the predictability of every seventh seashore breaker to be greater in height and power than the others. Utilised by extra sensory perception (the Intuitive retort) by those having the sensitivity to detect the most propitious time for the successful launch of any enterprise. Key e Knight, Will. Epsibar Sophia, Wisdom. e Blue Horse, Intuition. e Unity of the ree, Pure love. e Termagant, conscience.
[349]
of this ďŹ rst edition of î ˘e Alchemical horseman by Jeremy James 1000 copies have been produced in hardback. A further 26 copies in hardback are lettered and signed by the author and housed in a slipcase. 10 hors commerce copies are numbered i to x.
Jeremy James was born and brought up on a coffee plantation in Kenya where he developed his love and respect for the natural world. Inspired by the nomadic travels of African camel drovers, he set off on his own journey on horseback from Turkey to Wales in 1987: an adventure which led to the writing of his first book, Saddletramp. Since then he has written several books, including Vagabond – his story of riding through Eastern Europe during the collapse of communism, and e Tippling Philosopher, a collection of rural short stories. he now lives in a remote part of Shropshire where his peaceful, unspoiled surroundings continue to inform his unique and lyrical prose.
Turning the book over and over in his hands, he absorbed its texture, the depth of its colour, sensed the frissons that radiated from it, the subtle energies that hovered around it . . . ‘is thing,’ he muttered soly to himself, ‘is more than I know.’