iWill explain further
This is another transmission due later to be reworked into a new text; this is not the final version.
why zen werewolf
it began before the role playing game, i think the first werewolf to impress upon mythinking wazthis slipknot of an ideal launched from early, early fascination with the lupine-specif. the prairiewolf or coyote: smart enough to travel in cult-sized packets, coyotes moved through spaces that timber wolves never could - i grew up hearing them howl outside the half-acre fence that was my childhood backyard at night
growing the animals and their cousins the fox family became talismantic, a touchstone in my personal landscape across which i mapped desires - to be fast, furious like a wolf, crazy like a fox, these were word associations that assembled themselves against my individualized identity - arcade games where i studiously focused for hours to develop hand-eye coordination would ask for three initials - i never liked my own, and always entered FOX instead, an abcession that manifests even now in various ways
As i grew, 'FOX' became not nearly enough to self-identify with - especially with the advent of 10-13 Production's The X-Files on the FOX network - i felt as if in a small way an element of my individualized self-image had been co-opted - by then I'd been long fascinated with (and often used instead) werewolf, especially against the various cultural refence points which I had to understand the werewolf against... starting with the earliest of Abbot and Costello against some dimly lit wall in a wood panel basement - it's a shame I can't recall for sure - but I'm positive commercials seen on NBC of An American Werewolf in London left me wandering the spaces between my home and a neighbors late at night through empty fields and the nearby orchard both fearing and needing to be set upon by wolves.
by then i'd learned the legends - so far as to wonder if i could drink water from a wolf-print or make a belt of wolfskin - reading of the indians who used the pelts for hunting magic i felt positive there was something calling to me from the blackness beyond the backyard fence.
defining oneself is an act of magic - the process of splitting from the backdrop and manifesting an actual presence in a social space is an act of will. Religion is the weight of tradition carried by the social, and is loaded with the trappings of myth secreted by time, and the greatest social mysteries of sacrifice and initiation are bound up within; while magic is the binding - and stays driving the greatest of engines.
this understanding is something i infer from study and experience now, but is not what led me to the skin and names i wear, rather it is an understanding driven of necessity to parse out where i've since become and what shal i do from here, and this is were i wear the werewolf flow. it began by reverse engineering the meaning of who i could have been - and my fierce belife and desire to be taken back to something I couldn't quite understand
all of this is a calling, a beckoning - the name came to be long before i fully formed my notion of zen, and was instead a puzzlement about the nez peirce indians stuck in my head when i threw we flower ew nez against the page again and again stoned silly on young adventures with opium. Years later confirmation would come illuminating some of these strange suppositions arising out of nature, not nurture, and a legal impsition of adoptee identity, out of which a whole different and complex complex arises like Moses or Oedipus Rex, and of that even more of the complexities of naming arose. Establishment of identity is an act of magic requiring rituals and rites, be they christening or legal decrees of adotion. DIY Totemism by Lupa, I pause momentarily to quote:
While
i am comfortable recommending Lupa's book DIY Totemism as a
foundational map to begin one's own sojourn into shamanic studies, i
was first exposed to shamanism by reading Michael Harner's book The Way
of the Shaman in 1990 when it was first published. It likely informed
my understanding of totemic animals from the first time i'd read of
them - although the concept reflected back against childhood experience
to flow together with the constant canine companions (at one time four
of them, playing with them like a pack) to the ongoing fantasies played
out half in fear of werewolves carrying me away to change with them in
the Rockies and the Sawtooths.
Zen Werewolf is my childish name, in the best way. I learned from Dr Timothy Leary's book Changing My Mind, Among Others, that to be a brain change artist is to be perpetually prepared to confront chaos as it arises and to channel creativity to immediate ends. to attain a precise state of stability within an ongoing transformation of self and society while retaining a peaceful unruliness was, yes, specifically who i sought to be... and specific enough that it identitfies the me i sought to establish in the strange otherspace arising alongside our culture in internet ethers
this pondering of why i specifically sculpted the identity zen werewolf is triggered because of the book Stolen Lightning: A Social Theory of Magic, written by Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe and compounding an abbreviated but engrossing sweep of (apparently) all prior academic scholarship on magic prior to its publication circa 1982 (assuming a scope of time prior to the psychedelic and chaotic currents that arose from medium is the message and postmodern condition (the flaws of which this'll ponder we later, first though) the verse then illustration taken from this profoundly dense and choleric text:
It is with some amusement I continue quoting, however here is a different passage entirely out of context with the previous, yet overlapping:
Lévy-Bruhl shows primitives used group images in place of person ideas. Thus, a man of the wolf totem was a wolf--his idea of himself was the idea of a species. This meant person ideas were shadowy, affectual and impersonal, but totemism also gave the person duality and bipresence (he could send his totem, like a witch's familiar, on errands).
The deconstruction breaks down as my initiation into witchery came about spontaneously, through the sending and recieving of imaginal visions throughout my childhood revolving endlessly around themes of the spirit world, the animal world, and the alien other - always with the theme of communion, or initiation. Sacrifice wouldn't come until later (with the spiders). O'Keefe goes on to outline the ways in which magic tries to protect the self from society, before roundly trashing magic as a whole in defense of the rotting superstructure of agnostic scientism. Rather then spend my time and digital ink debasing this blog with my personal distaste for the conclusions of O'Keefe, I'd rather highlight the profoundly useful elements scattered throughout his text. I feel that this speaks for itself, enough so that I suggest you pour/peer over the following flowing analysis of self as network:
The above image is by no means the only points of value in the book. Previously, he points out the very important point underlying this essay, previous essays, and all upcoming essays penned by the Zen Werewolf) "Religion is not the only institution that creates and models magic for society, it is only the first." (I added the underlying line there). With the advent of the internet and a space to go called (at first) cyberspace, and now just generally called 'Online' (parse that out like so - we used to meet in cyberspace back in the day, these days we go online to chat).
This new space is evolving new institutions, and when I was first kicking around the idea of magical combat with legal rituals being hacked through chaos magick principles, I was also spending more time than likely healthy reading through the various bits coming out of New Falcon under the aegis of the Extreme Individual Institute - the EII - which seemed enough of a precursor to a 1%-er movement or an actual attempt to kickstart off-planet migration that I was attracted to the (admittedly toxick) marketing. Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension - Galt's Ark, a massive off-shore data haven, all sorts of awesome shit were promised those who saw through the bullshit and cut the cord - the great pirates built the countries, and schools, and institutions, all in service to selves - and as the ego dies, and the individual left behind is institutionalized (into a myth, or a god, or a father of a country, or mother of theosophy) new opportunities arise for those who can navigate the social strata while maintaining the important bulwark of the self.
An individual earns social immortality through external structures that mainly manifest within the wake of the interlaced structure of the individual that grows ownership of social spaces through, quite literally, the culture of individuism which accretes in the structural wake of the post-modern condition, while debt is the manufacture through ritual and rote of a social affectation. This is the institution of the individual as sculpted out in theory across stolen lightning, and is the endpoint of this particular text linking the two images:
So all of this then, we's ask again - why Zen Werewolf? I am not, even in totem, tied to a wolf - it is a stance, instead. A steed, a thing to ride - a private world tied through puns and a love of Warren Zevon's initials and music enough to flow back through retroactively and align my mind with a specific harmonic, perhaps? Retroactive enchantment then - today it's become more than that, or perhaps less - I use it to track half-developed ideas, to watch where things may evolve, a shadow externalized that as it grows I might reflect on the elements it brings to light - one of several selves that lies halved and shelled on the other side of dreaming, in the in-between where we all bear souls the size of suns.
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