The Writer’s Muse. Whispers from a Supernatural Realm.

Well, the muse told me that after five novels, a short story collection, various author collaborations, and editing an anthology based on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was time to leave Han Crispin and the Rogers family alone (at least for now) and to begin researching my next grand adventure. Actually, the charity anthology was my way of delaying the call; or allowing it to come into a more understandable form. It worked.

Inspired by his lively chats on the Joe Rogan Experience I picked up Graham Hancock’s works Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods. Hancock presents a theory suggesting that the origin of society and civilization stretches much further back than Abrahamic tradition, as written of in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. I was intrigued, so I plunged on with John Anthony West’s work Serpent in the Sky, which presented clear evidence backed by the geological community that rain water erosion on the Sphinx, the largest statue in the world, was easily over twice the age we think society is.

Now I began wondering about the methods of Egyptian construction. To this day, not only does the question remain unanswered, but modern man’s technological prowess can’t even perform the same feat of cutting and moving stones the size of those used on the pyramids near the Sphinx.

Magic. Not Harry Potter magic, but actual changes in the real world. The type of magic that some of you may recall me dabbling in during my Remote Viewing Experiment .  That is what the muse whispered into my ear. It made my neck tingle.

Then I had a weird day, wracked with a bout of depression, so I splurged on one of my only indulgences, books! At this point, I thought I was gathering research material for what would be my next series, an urban fantasy about the world being radically changed and a humanities college becoming the first magical academy after the apocalypse. I later learned that the muse was guiding me away from writing fiction altogether!

What the hell, muse?! I thought you were supposed to guide me toward the bestseller list. Well, what the muse is and how it works were among some of the things I would be learning about while I researched.

What did the ancients know? While the technology to move giant stones didn’t survive the ravages of time intact, had their religion? Had the belief structure? Most important, had their magick? After all, my theory was that the stones had moved through their mental prowess rather than through machines.

It turns out that the Egyptian Book of the Dead had survived into present day. It chronicles the journey one’s soul must make after leaving the body in order to continue existing on higher planes of reality than our own physical world. Sometimes ancient writings can be a bit unclear to the modern mind, so I dug into Lost Secret of Death and Dead Saint Chronicles in order to better understand what the ancients (not just Egyptians, but the mother culture of Egypt and possibly all cultures) believed and also about what modern people experience in NDEs or Near Death Experiences. In short, parts of us are immortal already, our spirits. They reincarnate lifetime after lifetime, pulled back down into the physical world by habitual behavior. The soul, however, is unique with each rebirth. The end of a life is the end of a soul’s new experience. After life, it is enclosed onto the spirit like a single kernel of corn on a cob. The spirit can accumulate an uncountable number of souls on its never-ending journey. The soul doesn’t cease to exist though, it relives the experiences accumulated in life forever. This is where the modern concepts of heaven and hell arise. The Egyptian Book of the Dead outlines a method to allow the soul to reunite with the spirit and dodge its fate.

That last bit is what my muse was actually guiding me toward! Forget shooting fireballs, levitating, and moving huge rocks, I want immortality in a myriad of new worlds with a body that does anything you can in a dream! More on this later…

So if that is what’s real, what about everything else? All the stuff I explored in Letters About Real Conspiracies? Bigfoot, aliens, UFOs, the Jersey Devil, and their ilk? Well, once again, Graham Hancock had explored this territory in his work, Supernatural. It bore a striking similarity to the theme of John Keel’s work Eighth Tower. I sure do like synchronicities! The point of those books is that we’ll never find Big Foot because it is an extradimensional phenomenon. A nonphysical incarnation on our physical plane of reality. It may not even be an ape at all. The giant ape is an image our poor addled brains simply plug in so that we can cope with a presence that is beyond our ability to explain or properly perceive.

I needed to know who had carried the magick of pre-Egyptian (don’t make me say Atlantis!) culture into the present. Because I wanted in on the action.

From the Ashes of Angels tracks down the Watchers and the Nefilim from Abrahamic tradition and suggests that there were mortal men and women who survived the destruction of a once great culture and brought magick into the cradle of modern civilization. Old texts like Hermetica and the Books of Enoch describe some of the earliest recorded treks of magicians who journeyed into the lands beyond our physical world. My buddy Ken Goodsword did a fine job of demonstrating that prophets in the old testament, and even Jesus of Nazareth carried this esoteric knowledge forward in his work, Magic in the Bible, which I had the good fortune of beta reading.

Then the dark age of religious oppression fell upon the western world and the library of Alexandria burned as did most of the work and workers of magick in the world. If it weren’t for Secret History of the World my own quest for the philosopher’s stone may have ended there. Luckily, the muse led me down the hidden paths of wisdom into the masonic lodges of the renaissance, the very birthplace of the Age of Enlightenment.

Now, magic is no longer an excuse for fundamentalists to kill on sight. The works of the Victorian era group Golden Dawn, who revived much of Egypt’s esoteric tradition, have been published and techniques from the East, such as Raja Yoga (think meditation, not stretchy pants) have found their way into present day western culture. There are even new paths for the modern age, like Quareia. Thanks to these initiatic mystery traditions, people can learn about and practice techniques that promise to balance warring aspects of their personality, focus their intentions, and even grow their seedling souls into a vessel that will carry their consciousness outside of their physical bodies like during Astral Projection. Methods for your consciousness to survive your physical body’s death.

It turns out that the muse wants me to develop my soul into something permanent. To take the path toward Justified Adepthood. Preparation for the afterlife trials through deeds and study in the living world. I hope you read and like my books, but it turns out that they were merely the training exercise I needed to discover my real journey!

Update (May 3 2022)

Now that my intuition is stronger, as is my trust in it, and now that I’ve got a solid divination and Imaginational Magick practice, I’ve discovered how my Muse is better known to the West. She’s Eris, Greek goddess of Chaos. All hail Discordia!

Now that I don’t write fiction anymore, I’ve also learned to see her clues about my own shortcomings and delusions, sprinkled throughout my life and the world. I’ve made a habit of working out the stuff that comes up before it blows up in my face. Life skills, yay! Chaos is our world and everything in it. Order is what we build out of some pieces of chaos. Order is never perfect and often in need of updating. As a career troubleshooter, Eris is an easy choice for my ally! She’s goddess of all problems, as well as the ingredients of all their solutions.

I was pleased to discover that she has been celebrating a modern revival through a joke disguised as a religion and a religion disguised as a joke, known as Discordianism. It’s bible is the Principia Discordia. The author Robert Anton Wilson, whom I mentioned in You’re on Autopilot! is also one of Discordianism’s heroes.