by James Palmer
"Removing yourself from the Occult Underground has been compared, somewhat
hyperbolically, to many unpleasant and addictive things; kicking heroin,
flailing in quicksand, sawing off your own leg to escape a mantrap.
Having gone through all of these experiences - you think I exaggerate? I
got somebody to regrow it - I can judiciously testify that none of them
truly capture the difficulties involved. You must understand that the
process comes in two stages; the first is removing yourself from the webs
of contacts, favours, and petty vendettas that inevitably comes with
having any sort of occult pull. That is not so difficult; only
comparable, perhaps, to leaving the Mafia or the American intelligence
services.
So, then there is the second part, giving up magick. The one has to come
with the other, because magick always seeks magick, and if you practice
it, you will be drawn back in to that whole wonderful world of ecstasy and
treachery and pain that you worked hard to escape. And giving up magick
really is hard, because in order to be able to do it in the first place
you have to love it, and to give it up you have to love something else
more. I did, and when I lost the new love, I had to return, however much
I didn't want to, to the first.
But I am telling you about how I left and rejoined this world without
informing you on how I entered in the first place. Like most of the great
occult innovators, I crafted my magick in childhood, free of the
restraints and foolishness of a mentor. The circumstances of my
childhood, unsurprisingly, peculiarly mirrored the school I created, for
where can one find more of what the unenlightened call chaos than in the
middle of a war? - and not just any war, but the Great Patriotic War, the
last war that was truly about blood and steel and men, rather than the
sterilised language and apocalyptic paranoia of these later, degenerate
days.
And I was truly at the centre of this war, where the two great orders of
our time ground against each other and produced pure chaos, Stalingrad.
When the first bombs began to fall upon my city, reducing the hiding
places and perfectly groomed parks of my infancy to rubble (although,
appropriately enough, virtually the only thing remaining among the final
devastation was my old playground), I was eleven years old. Two weeks
later my parents had been killed and the Nazi scum were fighting us over
every last stone of the city, and I had discovered that even in chaos,
there was order.
Yes, I understand why you say that. Almost everyone who meets me
initially thinks I'm German, which is ironic - but I learnt my English in
the Zone, and even cultivated the slight detachment from language of the
civilised German - what is it Twain says, that the German will not be
satisfied, after he has dived into the Atlantic of a sentence, until he
emerges on the other side with his verb between his teeth? In America in
the 50's, it was more acceptable to be German than to be Russian, believe
me.
Anyway, you must imagine me, all of eleven years of age, lost and alone
and hungry in the big ruined city. To give my countrymen credit, they
evacuated a great many civilians, but I was not among them. Put all
images of cute little musical street urchins out of your mind; I was
starved to the extent that you could see my ribs, lice-ridden, diseased,
and wearing filthy clothing. For about two months, after my parents had
been, along with our apartment, reduced to nothingness, I scrabbled around
the streets like a rat, living off theft and the strange generosity of
neighbours who had nothing themselves - even other orphans who would,
despite being in a worse state than myself, give me scraps of bread. I
never succumbed to the altruistic urge; even then, I considered that I was
a cat, and they were dogs. I was petted, and they served.
Eventually, I had the great good fortune to be adopted by a Ukrainian
infantry company as a mascot-cum-scout. They gave me part of their,
admittedly meagre, rations, and I would attempt to discern the German
positions, on the grounds that even the Germans would not be so bestial as
to shoot at a child. This proved to be a false premise, as I rapidly
discovered. Under those conditions, childhood is no protection.
So, there I was, a sniper's incompetence normally all that lay between me
and a sharp, stinging pain in the head. I learned to duck and cover - and
there was plenty of cover in Stalingrad, at that level it was a child's
heaven, a fantasy ruined castle , - but I doubt that I would have lasted
very long if I had not indulged in my little games. They came out of
simple, childish premises. If you took a risk now, without needing too,
didn't that obviously exempt you from a risk later? If I deliberately
dashed out in full view of a known German position, and lived, didn't that
qualify me to survive a later, unknown danger? I would keep score, so
that when I had survived a danger unnecessarily risked, I knew I could
make it past a certain obstacle.
I cannot remember the point when I realised that this had moved from being
a simple faith in the essential equality of the universe to actual power;
no doubt I was exerting my will over chaos long beforehand. You see, this
is where so many people misunderstand us 'bodybags'; we do not worship
chaos, or consider it superior to order, or even believe in it. What we
see is that chaos is false; below even the most seemingly random
occurrences lies a clear and discernible pattern, and to survive in chaos,
one must learn to exploit this pattern. Charging up in Stalingrad was
like rising up above the battlefield and seeing all the men and guns, all
the rubble and blood, merge into squares and blocks and arrows on a
historical map ... seeing the gaps between them, the patterns, how the
randomness of the battle had its own flows and eddies.
I killed a man before I ever had a woman, ran between bullets to get water
to front line positions, blasted twenty-three German snipers to their
graves and so terrified their comrades that I could eavesdrop on their
conversation at night and heard them talk of the Russian witches and the
stories of our little Grandmother. My Stalingrad -how can I show you that
year of rough-edged harmonies? Only through snapshots:
- the German sorcerer and SS colonel, the last great phobomancer, who
almost killed me with fear when I touched a skull and triggered a web of
terror he had laid, so that my own skull seemed to be growing inside my
skin, the flesh growing tauter and more painful over it. We hunted each
other through rumour, the bloody words of the city, and the crying words
of captives, but he never suspected my age. Soon I had his name - and it
is one I will not trifle with even now. I wrote it on a bullet, threw it
into the general ammunition supply, and it found him two days later.
- when I gambled fifteen men's lives, and my own, on the chance that a
German commander had won his game of poker yesterday, and had won the
alcohol I heard him promise his men, in order to change the previous day
so that my pet dog wasn't shot by accident.
- when a soldier looked for me in the right place, among the darkened
wreckage of a printers, and I sat there, powerless, listening to footsteps
coming closer and closer, until I remembered whispers heard in my dreams
and whistled the Eaters of the Unwanted down on him, and all I could hear
were a thousand scuttling legs and his screams.
- the joy of running, acknowledged a man at thirteen and clutching a
rifle, across a snowy plain, hundreds of others running by me."
After the battle was over, I left Stalingrad - well, what was there to
keep me there? Nothing but emptiness, aftermath, streets of shattered
stone. I had never been officially accepted into the army; it wasn't my
age that prevented me; that was never any problem, when the Motherland
needed every man, every boy, that could be raised, but my reluctance to be
categorised, labelled. Even when I later lived a normal life, I was
always reluctant to sign forms, to let my name be put down in some
bureaucrat's file. One of my soldiers, a man in his forties, offered to
adopt me, but I had no need - I thought I had no need - of a family. I
coped with the absence of my parents by forgetting they had ever existed,
denying the reality of my previous life, as though whoever I was had
sprung fully-grown from the thigh of my own magick. I do not know if I
was really a person, then, sometimes it feels as though I was simply a
function, a cog in the machine, a subroutine in the programs of the
universe. My life was like one of my granddaughter's video games; I ate,
drank, slept, played what is now fittingly called Russian roulette every
morning for power to see me through the day, insulted drunken soldiers to
chalk up more points, ran in front of trains and tanks and towers ...
I made my way around the vast expanse of Russia, pretending to be a
soldier or a refugee when necessary, slipping between the claws of the
bureaucracy by pulling on the skeins of fate. I was some five inches
below my adult height - and about three inches below what I am now - but I
could still pass for sixteen. After every disaster, there are jackals who
feed off the bodies of the dead. I was one of them. I made my living
from exploiting victims, robbing corpses, terrorising those too weak to
resist me. I lived for a week off a couple who took me for their son, who
they had thought dead. I bullied a girl too shattered from seeing her
baby brother impaled on a German bayonet into taking my virginity. I shot
men too weak from hunger It was not that I took pleasure in it, or that I
needed to do it to survive, but that it seemed like the way chance took
me. I associated with other jackals, on which I looked down upon as much
as my victims, and I became familiar with the Darwinian etiquette of the
brutal, which is much the same the whole world over, and was to serve me
in exceedingly good stead in later life.
All in all, I do not think I was a very pleasant teenager. That is an
understatement. I was evil, and there were no excuses for it. Not
trauma, not youth, not magick, there are never any excuses for being the
kind of man that I was. The first step in my mastery of entropy was
realising that it was an illusion, that underneath it was still order, the
second was by making myself part of it, part of the urge to desecrate and
humiliate and destroy that will always, in whatever universe we create,
haunt us. It was during this time that I learned to summon and bind
demons, because I was very close to being one myself. A demon - a hungry
ghost - is not, despite what some may have told you, human in any real
sense of the word. They have ceased to have that privilege; they are
almost nothing but desire. They cannot think, they can only function.
The first demon I ever summoned was named Victor; he had been a farmer who
starved to death in the house I had taken shelter in. I drew him back
across the border with a plate of bloody ribs, freshly carved from a pig.
He entered through me, and I frightened him from my mind and into an egg,
where he remained for three years, until I let -them- take him back. I
kept all my demons in raw eggs; it seemed appropriate, and I had a large
collection by 1945. I would talk to them sometimes at night, tease them,
threaten them.
Now, listen carefully. I tell you this only because you are my
granddaughter, for it is a powerful secret that many would kill to know,
and fittingly so. Only the workers of my school have ever been able to
bind ghosts the way we do, with a mere thought and twist, without any of
the paraphernalia of goetia, and others often seek to know how it is done.
The answer is simple. We entropy-workers divine the skeins of fate that
underlie seeming chaos. Often we pull at them. Sometimes we cut. Do we
remind you of anyone? Yes, that's right, although we don't come in
threes, being naturally solitary people. Well, those you think of - but
will rightly not name - have another function, the overseeing of the
divisions between the worlds of the dead and the living. Call them the
Cruel Ones, or the Kindly Ones, or the Clergy's Whips, or the Daughters of
Saint-Germain; they are far too old and powerful to care what euphemisms
we use - but whatever their names, the magick we do is close enough to
their divinity for us to, for the few moments it takes to terrify a demon,
assume a little of their eminence ourselves. It is a shame, in some ways,
that I am a man; if I had been female I am sure I could have worked even
more wonders with their power.