Fifteen miles from my home, there is a collection of stones called the Rollright Stones, about 6,000 years old—across the road from this circle lies another group called “the King’s Men”. The story goes that these men were offered dominion over the land by a witch they met in the road; the condition was that they stepped over the lip of a hill to survey the land. They must have misjudged, for the men fell short and were turned to stone; though they say, once a year, the stones stretch their legs.
We were driving in this direction when, on a whim, I said: “Let’s go and see the fairies at the Rollright Stones.” I had no particular association with fairies and the place, but when we arrived we found the local schoolchildren had built willow fairies right by the stones. It was an autumn day and the stones were covered in ladybirds, every crinkle seemed to have a ladybird on it. At that moment, it was hard not to believe that stone circles—near and far—were possessed with some magical power and influence.
It is said that long ago, before the flood, in the age of the dragon—the Golden Age—that the world was a single geometrical instrument. The stone circles of the world were part of this instrument, an instrument of perfect harmony. God is the Great Geometer; to make contact with him is to be in harmonious rhythm; hence anyone who studied at the Academy with Plato knew geometry—it came down from the followers of Pythagoras. Day-trippers on DMT who see the world shattered in strange geometries could, perhaps, be accessing this realm; it is a fractal world and, indeed, those mathematical phenomena called fractals—based on simple rules, simple triads—show that from simplicity infinite recursion can arise; the form resembles nothing less than the Pythagorean tetractys, the fundamental building blocks of reality. Indeed, the cat’s eyes are fractals and so a cat is a walker between two worlds; her eyes contain other dimensions.
The image above is a representation of a Sanskrit chant. The rhythm jumps outwards and inwards—away and within the circle, as if it were a stone breaking pond water. And what does this pond-like chant look like, other than those stone circles we find across the world? Sanskrit allows a writer to layer meaning upon meaning on a certain word, so that the language contains microcosm and macrocosm within it; it is a baroque language—just as Leibniz’s monadic cosmos is a great cosmic shroud folded and striated again and again. The enlightened ones and the heroes are hidden in the highest shrouds.
The world is sung into existence, as the Aborigines with their songlines knew. Every letter corresponds to a number and every number to a rhythm; this is not the rhythm of mundane time, of sequential events, it is the rhythm eternity; and so “666”, “777”, “444”—the “angel numbers” valued by teenage girls and credulous rubes—take on a special aspect; as, indeed, do the numbers “12”, “13”, “40”—and more. Gematria derives its power just so: it breaks down the words into their numeric counterparts to reveal their relation to base reality. Novel Kabbalahs, such as that developed by Nick Land—the Alphanumeric Qabbala—become portals by which we can summon demons, for good or ill; indeed, every city and every computer is a great ceremony, a great summoning.
There are places—Avalon, Hyperborea, and Atlantis—that reappear when the world vibrates at the right frequency; theirs is always an ephemeral existence, no material traces of which will ever be found. In our times, the rhythm is much disrupted, and we only get confused glimpses of these other worlds. The partisans of these other realms are often found in the worlds of dance, music, and poetry—the realms of rhythm—and their enemies in commerce and engineering and everything that ties numbers and life to the mundane and materialistic.