It’s ten at night on a Saturday and the party is just getting started but you’re already having second thoughts. The half remembered dusk is fading into the blacklight glow of an out of control rave while you’re curled up on the porch nursing a cigarette and a stomach ache wondering whether or not you took too much acid. Maybe if your eyes could focus correctly you’d be able to tell how much the walls were breathing, but you can’t and so the world has reduced itself to an overwhelming and nonsensical swirl of light and sound as time and space lose all sense of internal coherence. Individual sensations swirl up from the noise like eddies of dust caught in the sunlight: a round of cheers and drunken laughter, the peal of rubber as a car takes the nearby corner too fast, the unreal whine of a jet engine far overhead. How long have you been sitting there? The butt of your smoke hangs forgotten from your fingertips as your mind struggles to toilet plunger itself back into your body. How’d it come to this? What are you doing? What is any of this mean and why does it all feel so good and hurt so much? The silence of the sky holds no answers, and with the wisdom of a philosopher, you light another cigarette.

The moon carves its way across the sky and the overwhelming intensity of the peak gives way to the quiet jazz of life under the starlight. Fluttering moths and buzzing halogens, traffic on the highway and distant sirens on the wind, the night air carries the sounds of a city that can’t quite manage to relax. The party is starting to puddle out into smoking circles and makeout sessions, and even as you lament being too fried to enjoy most of it, you realize that at some point in the night some weird girl gave you a business card and you’re still holding onto it. Curiosity tugs at you and you force your eyes to focus on the too-bright face of your phone long enough to enter the website into the address bar.

And so now, fellow seeker of wisdom, insight, liminality, magick, and enlightenment, allow me to welcome you to the temple of the Void goddess.

This space goes out to the witches, to the freaks and the weirdos, to the shamans and the mages, to the psychonauts and the liminality addicts, to the ravers and the burners, the party animals and insight chasers, the nomads and the vagabonds, the cold readers and gold diggers, whores and harlots, light workers and astral travelers, failed leaders and pipe dreamers, starseeds and pan handlers, druggies, drunkards, demons, and the dispossessed, I’m here for you. Insomniac writers and nihilistic poets, starving artists and deadbeat musicians, bums, beggars, bastards, and bitches, grave diggers and chain gang singers, hope bringers and never winners, grocery baggers and knuckle draggers, wackos, warlocks, come on y’all. The light may have turned you aside, but the dark embraces all who would honestly seek her.

Deep dreamed animals and hallucinated insects swirl up out of the interplay of light and shadow beneath the streetlights. The circle turns and the winding fractal swallows eternity, the snake eats its tail and the alcoholic starts day drinking. Like a flight of birds all leaping skyward at once, the outcome arrives. The sword falls and the curtain closes, what will remain after all else evaporates into the gathering dawn?

When the overpowering joy of acid enlightenment fades into the disillusionment of burnt coffee and stale cigarette smoke, I’ll be here for you with an open ear and a shoulder to cry on. Morning always comes, but sometimes it comes bitter and ashen. Everyone needs a friend in low places and I’m certainly not one to aspire to the heights. A trickle of insight, a spark of madness, a kind ear, and a friendly knife in the darkness, these I give to you, that you might grow and flourish.

Remember yourself! Be strong, be wrathful, be the most terrifying monster in the forest. This world is a harsh and unforgiving place but it is filled with a peerless beauty even in its most brutal. Revel in the nightmares and dance amidst the monsters. Make your enemies fear you. You have your own power as great and terrible as that of any god or spirit. Honor and love yourself. Be the cryptid you want to see in the woods. 

THIS MACHINE IS PROPERTY OF THE MAGE RA