Rap to Pan

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Thrill with lovely lust of the light,

O man! My man!

Come charging out of the night Of Pan!

Io Pan! Io Pan!

Io Pan! Come over the sea

From Shambala and paradise!

Roaming like Bacchus, with his guards

Companion females and males all hard

On a milk-white ass, come over the sea

To me, to me! Come with priestess in bridal dress

(Shepherdess and pythoness)

Come with Artemis, who in wildwood trod,

And wash your white thigh, beautiful god,

In the moon of the woods, on the lotus press,

The golden tongue my jewel to bless!

Dip the purple of passionate prayer

In the crimson shrine, lusty & bare,

Your soul that startles with eyes of blue

As we watch your ecstasy seeping through

The tangled thicket, the ancient grove

Of the living tree that is spirit and soul

And body and brain — come over the sea,

Io Pan! Io Pan!

Devil or god, to me, to me,

My man! my man!

Come with trumpets sounding shrill

Over the hill!

Come with drums low thundering

From the spring!

Come with flute and come with pipe!

Am I not ripe?

I, who wait and tremble and wrestle

With breathe that has no way to settle

My body, weary of empty embrace,

Strong as a lion and smooth as a snake —

Come, O come!

I am numb

With the lonely lust of devildom.

Thrust the sword through iron fetters,

All-devourer, all-begetter;

Give me the sign of the Open Eye,

And the token aroused of horny thigh,

And the word of madness and mystery,

O Pan! Io Pan!

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan Pan! Pan,

I am one love

Do as you will, as a great god can,

O Pan! Io Pan!

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! I am awake

In the grip of the snake.

The eagle slashes with beak and claw;

The gods withdraw:

The great beasts come.

Io Pan! I am borne

To come on the horn

Of the Unicorn.

I am Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan!

I am your mate, I am your one,

Goat of your flock, I am gold, I am god,

Flesh to your bone, flower to your rod.

With hoofs of steel, I race on the rocks

Through solstice sunrise to equinox.

And I rave, and I howl and I rip and I rend

Everlasting, world without end,

Maenad, Mystoi, Woman, Man,

In the might of Pan.

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan!

 

(found after AC)

A Sand Book, Poems by Ariana Reines

Reviewed by Mogg Morgan

 

A Sand Book, Poems

Ariana Reines

ISBN 9780141992693 (2019) 388pp, Penguin UK £12.99 

 

“To you? There are nectars hidden in your body. Suck your own tongue.” (Son of a Jar/Ariana Reines) p.4

I’ve been reading this book for a couple of weeks now, like any collection of poems; it’s quite an intense journey and best accomplished in manageable sections. So the collection is arranged into chapters, which makes that easy, although I still have a few to go, I thought it was time to write something of it now, and then finish it off in my own time. Maybe it’s my imagination but it does read like a continuous narrative, I’m guessing its talented author intended it so. It feels like being a fly on the wall in the author’s magical playroom or reading the record that magicians often keep. I was offered this book to read because the publicist said it covered a number of occult themes, as indeed it does, and they seem to be increasing, as the book progresses. 

One theme that I recognised as it recurred several times looks like what’s become known as tantra. The little couplet with which I opened this review is a good example. Like one of those tight packed sutras, one finds in old Hindu texts from the eponymous sutra period, during which the Yoga and Samkhya sutras were conceived. Each couplet is a distillation of a whole lot of complex, magical ideas. They are like seeds, waiting to germinate in the mind of the reader; which is another common Tantrik metaphor.

Poetry was and indeed is a common form of magical exegesis – so the results of magick are often expressed in bardic speech. That’s the result but the methods also involve the tongue and the mouth. The tongue that intercepts and thereby tastes the elixir, thought to emanate from the brain, dripping down the spinal column. The tongue that tastes the elixir in another’s mouth, usually a lover. And as Tantrik texts always have at least three possible meanings, the elixir can also be that which flows from the so-called “lower mouth” – all very Tantrik. I’m sure I haven’t exhausted all the meanings.

So returning to A Sand Book, which again might also allude to those marks in the sand made by spirits, who cannot speak apart from in signs and symbols, thus are geomantic.

Not all the poems have this same magick, but they do all steadily build up a picture of the poet as she moves from one moment to another in her life, interesting, disturbing, mundane, magical. And, as my partner remarks, the poet is very readable with a knack of painting vivid pictures with her tongue. So, being in the mood, she read the whole poem to me as the valediction to our ritual; and though it is quite long it slips off the tongue. 

The author’s magick is astrological and involves a technique she called “lazy haver eye” which I think might be a kind of dissociative, defocused perception of her world, which is also often ours. She even uses a poem to tell us elegantly about her influences – thus in the title poems of “Arena” she says “Because I had studied the dust bowl, the architecture of Delphi, Judaic and Islamic legends of Moses, Midianite theology, the history of Haiti, Aryan horsemen of ancient Iran, the collapse of Sumerian agriculture, Kundalini yoga, etc etc.” p18

 

The fine title poem of “Gizzard” – is inspired as it is by the destruction of the Yezidi sanctuaries at Sinjar – so she takes modern events and sees the mystic background.

 

“ I’ve seen the iridescence 

On the surface of spilled oil, I’d seen

Rainbows. Until the fan spread

Across my vision I had mistaken

Peacocks for decoration

Were they secretly Quetzalcoatl

The phoenix, guardians at the gates

Of Eden …” p121

 

As I write this review when the sun goes down, it will be Thursday, and today I found another favourite poem in a chapter called Thursday, headed up by what I believe is the veve, or mystical diagram (perhaps yantra) for voodoo Loa (Maman) Brigitte. It begins with an invocation, which I’m am sure I will use again:

 

“Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter

 

Bring me my gold

My serpent my rod

Pour hot gold into my teeth

Bind my silver tongue

Soak it in soft white gold

Jupiter

Unbind my tongue Jupiter 

And loose it on the world” p 191

 

Later we learn, in the same long poem, how the author will marry Jupiter. Then someone, perhaps the Mama, says she has the rings. The poet protests that she is already married to Mercury but no difference. In the poem we come full circle to where:

 

“Your tongue is in my mouth

I will suck you through the god in my mouth

 

He lives in the back

I am his student

 

I will suck you through the god in my mouth

Whatever man you say you are .”p 192

 

Which seems as good a place as any to finish this review of a highly recommended collection which I am still analysing and learning from. 

 


Mogg Morgan works in Oxford for innovative ‘new edge’ publisher Mandrake,  described as a ‘respected literary catalyst’, and responsible for the discovery of many new authors, including his friend and one-time mentor Jan Fries.

Mogg regards himself as a practitioner-cum-scholar of all aspects of occultism. He was a Wellcome research student at Oxford, where his teacher was the late Professor B K Matilal, a widely respected expert on South Asian thought. Over the years Mogg has been exploring the connections between the popular magick of ancient Egypt and its continuation/crossover with the living magical traditions of the Middle East, and the Kaula/witchcraft of south Asia and beyond.

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