The Death Atlas

When I was still trafficking in an initiatic order one of our cardinal rules was, “Be Concealed”.  It was not uncommon for us to use phony names and give out false details about who we were.  Keeping it all straight became a monumentally difficult affair at times.  The reason for this anonymity was quite simple.  In a “magical” universe where there was a possibility of being attacked physically and on the subtle level, it was important  to never give away your address or identity.  Often times the identities we created were not done by simply thinking up a name, but by literally becoming a different person through a process that is proprietary to the previously mentioned order.  While I thought this entire fiasco was very shady and bizarre, I wasn’t aware until later that the practice had nothing to do with protecting ourselves as much as it was about uncovering the false identities that were already there.  The same identities we were raised to believe in from childhood.  I learned rather quickly that identity no matter how real it seems, is very nebulous, particularly when a person is defined by what they believe, how much money they make, and what political party they belong to.  We’ve been bamboozled.

In an outrageously bizarre conversation I once had with a man that I considered very wise, he explained to me that, “Dan Mitchell only began to exist when his parents began to speak to him as if he were real.”  On the surface that sounds pretty outrageous, but there is a lot of truth behind it.  He was not talking about negating human individuality, he was talking about how human individuality from the time we are children is put into a box almost against our will.  It isn’t until we actually die that the panoramic view we are offered reveals this life for what it truly is.  My friend would then say, “Did you ever wonder why children cry so much?”  It was because little by little, as the filters of a contrived existence are put into place, a child is slowly starved of a much truer view of existence.  A view that is tarnished by the leftist and rightist bullshit of their opinionated and moronic parents.  How much we are willing to believe these contrivances is proportional to the amount of genetic debts we will eventually have to pay.  So being an overly-emotional sob is just as bad as being a stone-faced killer.  We have radically misunderstood what it means to be human.

On this blog I explain that life is a very long and sometimes painful process of self-exploration and development.  In the ancient world, when life was both short and harsh, the people living had a much more direct pipeline to the divine because they didn’t have the privilege of turning away from the reality of death as we do today.  Orphism in particular was a direct pipeline that expressed the flow of life and death in the ancient world.  The descent into Hades was a descent not into some other dimension, it was a literal descent into the darkness of oneself and ones Soul.  The key was remembering the fullness of oneself and not losing the divine memory of ones origins and totality.  Orphism was most certainly one of the final revelations of God to humanity that emerged near 600BC, which was pretty much the beginning of the final phase of the creative cycle.  It was at that time that nearly every sage of worth and divine merit came into existence delivering the final word of Tradition to this world.  Nearly everything (not everything) after that time has been a mere dim reflection of the divine.

The cost of modern conveniences  is that the pipeline to the divine has largely disappeared in our modern era, but even worse, our very identities have been compromised.  When death comes knocking these people will ultimately drink from the River Lethe and the journey of that individual will reach its inevitable conclusion without producing any fruit.  Even though we have a name, form, and beliefs, we still know next to nothing about who we really are and how we got here.  We are therefore in dire need of a death atlas.  And this is only granted though a long process of self-exploration.

I personally know people in their 30s that have never laid eyes upon a dead person. In the ancient world that was unheard of.  When I was 14 years old I decided that I wanted to face my fear of death at my grandmothers funeral at least to some limited extent.  The idea of death mystified me at a very young age.  I was just as obsessed with it then as I am now.  When everyone had went outside after the funeral I decided to go up to her body and hold her hand.  I don’t know why I did this but I knew I had to.  I would visit my grandmother as she laid upon her deathbed unable to talk or move for two years.  I would brush her hair and tell her about what was taking place in my life.  On numerous occasions I would see her eyes stare off into the space above her as a huge smile would come across her face.  Toward the end of her life this became much more common.  I strongly suspect even now that she was experiencing visions of the world to come.

I remember my hands shaking and having minor dizzy spells as I approached her casket.  My hands were sweating and I felt out of breath.  All of these effects were the result of anxiety, the anxiety I had over the terror of death.  I felt this way because that was how I was raised; to view death as if it were the ultimate bogeyman while at the same time being told of a heaven of pure joy awaiting me when I died.  I could never quite reconcile that as a child.  Death was beautiful, I was told, but I should fear it with every fiber of my being.  As I stood over my grandmas body and took her cold hand in mine I felt an explosion go off in my head.  I literally let go of her hand and fell backwards onto the floor.  It wasn’t that her hand was hard and cold as a rock, it was that this literal explosion I felt in my head terrified me profoundly.  I knew it wasn’t a physical effect, but something else entirely.  It was almost as if for a moment I remembered something and my conscious mind had to shake me back into myself.  After this event many of my odd experiences became much more pronounced.  I had seen my grandma on numerous occasions after she died.  Once in a car.  Once trying to crawl through my bedroom window.  No.  Life was nothing like what they told me.

I believe in a gradual revelation within the individual.  I think that being exposed to the full truth is libel to seriously damage a person and end a journey before its time.  I also think that many people, often without realizing it, turn their backs to this journey of revelation out of fear.  When doors are opened and arrogantly shut you cannot simply say, I didn’t understand it at the time or it wasn’t a good time for me.  Initiation is about the undoing of the contrived self we have come to believe in.  It is always harsh whether we want it to be or not.  For that reason humility and maturity are of the utmost importance in any valid journey.  Without them there can be no real progression because they are a sign that a person has attained a certain degree of selflessness.  I stand by what I have written in the past that in our present era having a family is one of the most transformative things a person can do.

However, the family is no longer a sacred institution in the West.  The historian Polybius 140BC:

“In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics…For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.”

The glory that was once Greece eventually died the death just like every other civilization the West has produced.  This is a natural though unfortunate process.  Today, particularly in the United States, Europe, and Russia there are far more old people than there are children.  This is a curse of extreme significance.  It ultimately means that a culture and a people are dying.  The reason this is so important is because the institution of family is itself a means, a step on the initiatic journey.  There is no other practice that offers the benefits of selflessness, sacrifice, and humility than being responsible for others.  The west has fallen into the pit of pseudo-spirituality and counter-initiation because it is in the death throes.  This unspeakable evil has come into play because the contrived human individuality has entered into a hedonistic phase where it views children and relationships as burdensome and pointless.  They are viewed in terms of dollar signs and convenience.  And the result of this is grown men that are immature, selfish, and idle.   These are grown men ill-prepared for both life and death, men that stare at computer screens all day long watching porno or playing video games.

People will often say, “the world is too terrible a place to raise children.”  I have always viewed this as a monumental cop out.  Throughout all of history, during wars, famines, and plagues people have been bringing children into this world.  It is designed to be exactly what it is.  It is a part of a long cosmic process that cannot simply occur at the financial and environmental convenience of people.  I am going to go out on a limb here and write something that people no longer understand because life in the modern world is not conducive to the initiatic journey:  Harsh environments where idleness is not allowed always creates human beings of greater depth and intensity. It creates beings whose identities expand not only into the physical domain, but also the imaginal and the divine.  I am not simply talking about having children, I am talking about harsh environments that we live through like loss, disease, death and every hurdle inbetween.