Ecstatic Agendas

“Nature’s first green is gold” – Robert Frost

Is there a boundary between the biophysical and the spiritual? If so, where does this perimeter lie? Is it our skin, which separates the interior of our physical processes from the exterior world? Or is the division between that which is verified by the collection and analysis of sensory data on one hand and on the other… the so-called imaginal realm? Between the living and the dead, the logical and the irrational, the day and the night? Many years ago I wrote a piece, which I have since lost, that considered desire and fear as “twin pillars of the self”. Now I ask myself, do these pillars stand in the physical, or the spiritual world? Or do they perhaps rise from one to hold aloft the other?

Is there perhaps a tertiary space which sits at the membrane between two hypothetical states? A liberated zone not wholly respondent to the laws and mores of either, but rather a terrain which grows and ebbs in the rhythm of its own pulse and breath, born of both states but evolved or mutated into its own porously-bounded universe? Is this life? Is this you, me?

My approach to solar devotions began in a very mytho-symbolic fashion. My conception of the sun god came from familiarity with names, stories, sigils, and otherwise accrued traditional discourse culled from religious, magical, anthropological, and literary sources. Meanwhile I have studied ecological science. I have tended my small patch of land. I have gardened, taken walks in the woods and in my urban locality, steeped leaves and roots into teas, and bathed in the radiance of the sun. I have prayed and ensorcelled, begged and demanded, dreamed and danced. What I have learned is that the sun’s color is not gold; it is every color in every shade. The sun’s day is not Sunday but every day, every hour, and every season.  I am enraptured by the varieties and qualities of light in this place. The sky of course is blue – except when it is silver or black or blazing bouquet of rosy-fingered yolks and petals and stardust. The light is mind-bogglingly distant. It is inside me.

The sun brings destruction as well as life. The light blinds, the heat burns. Worm is hardened on sidewalk, forests blaze and the blood that pulses in one’s veins is spilled copiously across parched battlefields, hospital tables, schools and houses of worship. That which is within us comes out. If humans reflect the gods we house in the temples we build, then it is little wonder that the old stories of wrath, plague, rape and decay are played out daily in our towns and hillsides and homes. The sun shines upon cruelty as well as kindness, and flowers sprout from both orchard and graveyard.

A position sometimes attributed to the Western-Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts is, roughly paraphrased, that the soul is not something contained within the body, but that the body is a particle afloat in the medium of spirit; that we are not born into this world from abroad, but emerge in fact from it, the way a fruit emerges from a tree. To this I would add that the world of spirit – of magic – is not a territory to be accessed, a line to be crossed, a membrane which one must penetrate. It is an inherent quality of existence and that the spiritual and the physical are in each other; a commingling qualitative inter-rapturous play of hunger, lust, longing, pain, habit, cycle, satiation, resonance and breath. The world that makes us is what we make it. The gods are here with us, in the garden, always.

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Jason Triefenbach is an artist, writer, and non-denominational minister with a garden and a lifelong interest in lurking around the Occult/ Paranormal shelves in bookstores worldwide. As Sun Duel they record and sometimes perform music with a variety of friends and loved ones. Jason has been self-publishing zines and pamphlets since the early 1990s, beginning with a sloppy collage broadsheet Licking the Toe Jam, and culminating thus far in the limited edition perfect-bound paperback Barbarous Tongues: a Journal of Arts and Esoterica.