The Setting

Abdul Alhazred describes Leng as a place where different realities converge, which might explain why its precise location cannot be pinned down.

The Verse

The Universe can be divided into two broad categories: The Bonelands and the Shadowlands. We live in the Shadowlands. We die in the Bonelands.

The Bonelands is the cold unfeeling infinity of this world of flesh and bone in which we live. The so-called real world, the world of flesh and bone, the world of fact and science- the alien world so far beyond the capacity of the human mind that we created the Shadowlands again and again to escape it.

The human mind is a small thing, and fragile. The universe on the other hand is vast. Indeed, the universe is vast beyond human imagining. To say that the universe is beyond human comprehension is to undersell the scope of things quite spectacularly. The human skull runs over trying to hold the seemingly impossible scope of the universe. The concept of zero drove men mad. The idea of an infinity universe terrified the wise. The Catholic Church was so threatened that it declared heretical idea of earth as a tiny speck in a small galaxy in an insignificant corner of a universe so vast that light could only trek across it slowly.

The story worlds of myth and illusions, we call the Shadowlands.

The Dreamtime of the Australian Aboriginal mythology depicts the ideas that some things of spiritual dimension exist outside of regular time or ‘everywhen’, to steal from anthropologist William Edward Hanley Stanner. Traditional Australian spiritual practices include walking song lines and singing the necessary songs to hold the world together. The writer, Alan Moore, argues through much of his more esoteric writings that story itself is magic, quoting everything from the bible to hermetic writings of such occult figures as John Dee. Grant Morrison talks about his encounter with his own fictional creations that he invented to act as fiction suits for himself to transform his life by dragging the fictional version of himself into the ‘real world’.

What does all this mean? Probably not much yet. But the short answer is: fiction is a place. ‘Once upon a time’ is an incantation to open a portal to a timeless land. When this book calls gods, or magick or demons and many other things fictional, do not for a second think that we mean something tricky or fancy. We do in indeed mean fiction in the classic sense of the word. But also do not imagine that just because something is fiction that means that it is not real.

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.”

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

 

The Atlas

The Universe of The Blood Red Dreaming is a Narrative Universe, the universe of the story- the one in which we live every day. The difference between how will normally live- sleepwalking through the Shadowlands- and how Psychonauts in the Shadowlands live is dramatic. The Psychonaut Sorcerers of the Shadowlands lucid dream through the Worlds of the narrative.

 

Excerpt

You may now realize, belatedly, as you open this forbidden book that what you’re doing is insane, and that you are most likely insane as well for trying. But the book is open in your hands now and so I expect that you will press on.  Still, you should be struck by the absurdity of what you’re doing. You’re reading a book on magick in the age of science. And the book spells magick with a ‘k’ at that. Humanity has split the atom, traveled to the moon, created a virtual network of information that circles the globe. We have decoded the very code of life and made such ancient killers as polio and small box bow their heads on the chopping block before the power of our science. Why, you ought to wonder to yourself, are you reading a book on magick with a ‘k’?

Perhaps you feel that there might be more to life than the world of flesh and bone. Perhaps there lies a shadow cast by the Bonelands. Some Shadowlands? Perhaps you aren’t even interested in magick as magick. perhaps Demons and mystic pretensions bore you, but you think that the ritual aspects of magick might serve some higher social purpose that huamns need. Perhaps you are grappling with existential angst or depression. You suffer from a loss of purpose. You lack a mission or a reason to go on. 

You are a fool of course. But we all are.

– Excerpt from the Ars Holistica

 

Contributing Authors