A Coded Coda: Words Made Flesh

The last post here was in July 2014, and represented the closing of a loop, a circle unbroken – an entirely appropriate way to bring it all to a close. As I wrote at the time, there was no clear resolution to the alchemical process that had unfolded over the previous two-and-a-half-years:

Was there a final culmination to the alchemical quest – did I find the Philosopher’s Stone? Well, no, and I don’t think it works quite like that. But I have completed quite a voyage, and stand now on the threshold of a new venture, a new alchemical process. Having pursued these threads through some intuitive stratagem positioned at the shoreline of art and occult practice, I will say only that the Shoreline, the Haunted Shoreline, made a believer out of me.

It is interesting to re-read these words and reflect on them today. Because throughout the Shoreline project, there was, in fact, a sense that it was leading somewhere – that there would be some kind of culmination. On one of the final beachcombing expeditions, I had found an unusual stone ‘cup’, photographed here in situ on the beach at Birling Gap:

This find made quite an impression on me at the time, and I nearly used it as the basis for a final post, in which I would claim it to be the Holy Grail, or at least the Grail of the Shoreline. But this felt a little too glib: the idea was resonant, but seemed strangely incomplete.

Just over a year ago, I experienced a series of events which made the current – I might now say the prophecy – of the Shoreline manifest. These events are too personal to detail here – which may seem frustrating to those who followed the project throughout – how can I convince you that there was a magical fruition, one that arrived in a dizzying sunburst of synchronicities, if I do not detail it? Throughout the Shoreline venture, I tried to keep the question of ‘belief’ irrelevant (more on this here), so it is interesting to note that I nevertheless wrote, in the final post, that the Shoreline had “made a believer out of me”. But it does not concern me whether or not anyone else is persuaded – and in any event, whatever I were to write, there would of course be the usual rationalist refutations available: “these are just coincidences”, “you’re seeing patterns because you want to”, and so forth. Would these rebuttals be valid? Does it matter? Isn’t it like arguing that an extraordinary piece of music is merely a string of sounds: factually correct, but missing the point?

For some time I have been considering adding this coda, to mark the fact that everything did, in the end, reach a resolution, a culmination, a Revelation. I have been unsure how best to do it, or whether to do it at all. But in a week’s time – at Winter solstice- I will be moving house, away from the Shoreline (though I suspect I will be forever intertwined with it, and in any case I am only moving a few miles inland). Preparing to leave has brought things into focus and crystallised the need to document something of this. So here is a small mosaic of images, which if read in a certain way, will give a sense of what happened – but I do not invite you to decode them, rather to simply drink them in, and allow them to percolate through your own nervous system, in the hope they may bring you some measure of nourishment.

To See A World…

For some time now, the Shoreline has been trying to tell me something.

It is difficult to pinpoint when it began – perhaps it was the change in the current towards the end of last year, or perhaps it was when the Shoreline manifested the Wheel Of Fortune, with its implicit suggestion of turning full circle, a cycle completed. And indeed I have been mulling that over ever since – only for the Shoreline to admonish this over-analysing, and push me to stop thinking and act. And now, two separate finds have made the message unavoidable.

The first is the beach ball shown above. As you can see, it is a representation of the world – and I found it not on the beach but in my back garden. It isn’t mine – my guess is that it was blown into its leafy hiding place during the winter storms, and then lay hidden for months amid the weeds and tall grass, until finally being revealed while I was cutting back the overgrown jungle of the garden a few days ago.

In the Tarot, the World is the final card of the 22 Major Arcana – the culmination of the journey that begins with the Fool. It represents completion, ending, the closure of one cycle and the start of another. Some of its pictorial language is familiar from previous communications from the Shoreline: the symbols of the four Evangelists arranged around the corners, and the presence of the great self-resurrecting World Serpent, Ouroboros.

Then on yesterday’s beach walk, the Shoreline presented me with this small, but highly charged, double-sided stone totem:

The head of Janus: two sides of the same coin

Many of the objects of wonder that have washed ashore and fuelled this strange quest have been in the form of stone faces, but here we have a stone with two faces, one on each side. This, then, is Janus, the Roman god said to rule all the other deities of the pantheon, the god who looks both forward and back, the god of portals and gateways, endings and new beginnings.

The message is now inescapable, and to ignore it, or pretend I have not seen it, would be a betrayal of my whole engagement with the Shoreline over the last two and a half years.

So this is the end of the Haunted Shoreline project. There will be one further post here, to reflect and sum up, and then your correspondent’s alchemical quest will take a new form. This new venture is currently taking shape, slowly hatching from the egg of Ouroboros, but that is all I can say for now.

Thanks to all those who have followed this peculiar saga, and I hope you will join me here again soon for the last rites.

The Wheel Of Fortune: Springtime For Anubis

As with the previous post, the latest message from the Shoreline comes in the form of synthetic detritus, washed up from the depths onto the beach, on this occasion at Birling Gap, near Beachy Head, a place I hadn’t visited for a while. A recent stroll along the shore there yielded a number of interesting and, in some cases, amusing finds.

Towards the end of last year I theorised that there had been a change in the alchemical polarity of the Shoreline current, from feminine to masculine. The Shoreline now appeared to confirm this in the most direct way possible – yes, it only went and got its cock out:

Punning aside, the most striking find was the large plastic ‘wheel’ pictured above, which had come to rest in such a way that it called to mind the Wheel Of Fortune from the Tarot:

This card drips with allusions – the angel, eagle, lion and bull arranged around the corners are the symbols of the four Evangelists… the letters on the Wheel itself can be read as ‘TORA’, ‘ROTA’ or ‘TAROT’… the interspersed Hebrew letters form the Tetragrammaton, the name of God in Judaic tradition. Then there’s the serpent wriggling down one side of the wheel, an image we have considered many times (for example here).

But here I want to focus on the horned figure that seems to be carrying the Wheel, or perhaps rising into manifestation as the Wheel turns. Most sources seem to agree that this is a representation of our old friend Anubis. The combination of Anubis and the turning Wheel is particularly apposite for the Haunted Shoreline, as Anubis was the start of this quixotic venture, back in December 2011. It was the discovery of the flint ‘head of Anubis’, also at Birling Gap, that signalled to me that it was time to embark on this psychonautical cave-diving expedition: not only was the find simply too striking to ignore, but it was also entirely appropriate, because Anubis, as we have seen elsewhere, is the guardian of the underworld, and accompanies the deceased as they make the transition from the waking world to the afterlife, from the mundane to the imaginal… or, in Shoreline terms, from land to sea. Anubis seemed the perfect starting point, not only for me, but for visitors to the blog – an initiatory presence that would guide them into the world of the Haunted Shoreline (at this point, I naively imagined that interested readers would begin at the beginning and work their way through the thing, and its various interconnected strands, as if it were a kind of novel or map. But I soon realised that most internet surfing is done in gadfly fashion; very few people engage with a website the way they might with a book).

I have often considered revisiting Anubis and saying more about his initiatory aspect here – that original post, simply a pair of images and a link to a painting I considered very relevant – was perhaps too idiosyncratic and allusive to convey the meanings at which I was aiming. But somehow it has never seemed the right time. Until now. The winter storms have passed at last, Spring is here, the Wheel Of Fortune turns, and we are back where we started. Maybe the period of time between then and now is a Shoreline Year, or something. Maybe this is even the end of the project – as ever, I have no clear idea of where it will go next, instead I simply await further signs from the beach, and from the ebb and flow of daily life.

There is, however, one other important message encoded in this latest beach find. The plastic ‘wheel’ is actually part of a lobster pot, smashed by the sea and washed up on the shore. In the last post we considered mental liberation: the breaking of William Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles. Now we have an actual revolution – in the sense of a full turn of the Wheel. Not only that, but this is a Surrealist revolution: a smashed lobster pot. Yes, the lobster is out of its pot, and who knows what mischief will follow as it roams free across the shores of consciousness…

The first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, Paris, 1924

 

Meditate on this. Tell everyone you know, and keep watching the shores. The lobster is out of its pot. 

 

 

 

The Mind in the Cage

And still they come – the fearsome storms of recent weeks persist, and the consequent roiling and churning of the ocean continues to result in all manner of strange detritus, both natural and man-made, washing up from the depths and onto the beach. On 9th February (9/02 – a significant formula in Shoreline numerology) there was a day of respite, and although it didn’t last it did at least give me the opportunity to take a walk on Saltdean beach at low tide, and see what fresh wonders the sea had brought. The first thing I found was that part of the beach was littered with whelk egg cases, a few of which are shown in the picture above. These are not, in fact, particularly unusual finds, but normally one finds the odd one here and there, not dozens of them as was the case on the 9th. The symbolism of eggs, fertility, and gestation has been considered here many times (new readers can find more on that here, here, and here), so I will not reiterate those ideas – instead I want to focus on the fact that these particular egg cases look very much like brains. And mere moments after being struck by this resemblance, I came across this assemblage of flotsam…

… and immediately the phrase the mind in the cage bobbed up from the depths onto the shores of my consciousness.

The mind in the cage – echoes of William Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles, the psychospiritual ties and conventions that bind, restrain and imprison us. But here the violence of the stormy sea has blown the cage open… and elsewhere on the beach there were further fragments of meaning. A little further on I found this:

An orange rubber glove may not seem the most esoterically charged of objects, but the signs are always there and this particular glove is a dead ringer for the one in Giorgio de Chirico’s 1914 painting The Song of Love:

This painting predates the Surrealist movement by a decade, but its motif of familiar objects in unfamiliar and dreamlike juxtaposition is clearly proto-surrealist and it was a key influence on the subsequent art and method of the Surrealists.

Put these pieces together, and the meaning becomes apparent. The anger of the storm, the turmoil of the ocean… all this is the violent upheaval- some might call it a revolution – required to blow open the doors of our mental cages and take the dizzying leap into the Marvellous. The psychological and political implications are clear.

One may not draw comfort from this, but one can imbibe something altogether rarer: hope.

Nameless Guests

It is rare for me to feature something synthetic rather than stone or organic. This was not a deliberate decision from the outset: it’s just that there seems to be truth in them there stones, more than in them plastic gee-gaws. Perhaps this is unsurprising. But here is an exception – this is a small plastic ghost my daughter found washed ashore recently (all the photos of it came out this badly, and then the cat batted it under the oven). Initially I thought it might be some tiny piece of Ghostbusters-related merchandise but, upon Googling, saw that it bore far less resemblance to anything in Ghostbusters than I’d initially imagined. It remains unidentified, one of a number of curious minor characters to wash up on the Shoreline of late.

The remaining oddballs presented here are a succession of stony visages. Together they form a set of quirky, nameless bit-part players. No great deities or demons these: unremarkable creatures in fact, flotsam entities drifting in on the tide of Being.

One could see the first as a frog, the second as a seal…

… and a friend remarked of the third that it could plausibly represent Makka Pakka reacting to being sacked from In the Night Garden (go here if that reference baffles you). Maybe so – and, in fact, popular childrens’ TV characters may well have the kind of mythic power with which I try to infuse the fruits of my beachcombing. But psycho-alchemical analysis of preschool TV seems a flight of fancy too far, even here.

Only recently did it strike me where I had seen such figures before. It is not so much that there is direct physical resemblance, but they have something of the same mien and aura as the figures in Max Ernst’s Feast of the God.

Max Ernst, ‘Feast of the God’, 1948

And it seems an appropriate time to now assemble this motley crew and present them here, because the phrase feast of the god neatly describes recent events on the Shoreline. Stay tuned: these events will be recounted in upcoming posts, in which the glitter prism gaze of psychedelic omnivision will be turned upon them, and they shall give up their secret meanings.