Carcosa Bound

We met heard about how the Magician Gordon White was dead, same way as everyone else – on the digital world wide web, where he contributed so much.

His work was the catalyst that brought a crew of us together, really – initially, we formed as a reading group for Star.Ships, and a working group for The Chaos Protocols, and especially a drinking group for rum, which fuelled the whole jagged, swaggering affair.

The group and its history endure, though we meet less, and our interests have evolved, as they can only be expected to. Horizons tend move as they're approached, and none of us were staying still.

It was a wild time – I certainly gained a lot from it; I'm sure the others did too, and each in our own way. I've found huge value in having peers and fellow travellers in this enterprise – even though we've been on radically different trajectories, that have only diverged further over the years.

Dissenters anonymous

None of us agreed whole-heartedly with all of Gordon's positions, either – and, with his work rate, there were a lot of them. His work elicited, provoked, and suggested exceptions and divergences. We all felt he was a fellow traveller, for sure.

We'd all signed up to his premium membership, when it launched, explored his material, taken what applied and left to go our own way. Some resonated more than others. I appreciated his whole “restoration of context” angle. That early history of the grimoires course was an absolute banger.

Then and now, I personally disagree with his various collapse theses, though got a lot out of his “World Without Sin” writing, and loved the All Red Line. I liked a lot of the stuff in Chaos Protocols, but couldn't really make the operations work for me, to the extent I'd become used to with other methods. I liked that he referenced source materials – and deeply enjoyed reading Witzel's The Origin of the World's Mythologies, which inspired so much of Star.Ships.

I appreciated White's journalistic flair and sense of adventure. His blog posts inspired my own appreciation and, later, significant collection, of rum. This led to cocktail making, then distilling spirits – and my own small experiment, Elixir Arborvitae.

An offhand mention in in one of his blog posts led to tiki culture, and through this, to many drunken, delightful nights recreating forgotten and recovered cocktail recipes, originating from now-long-closed bars. The respective revivals of the Grimoire tradition and Tiki mixology have some curious similarities, that become even more apparent after communing with strong spirits. Missionary's Downfall, indeed.

The Wake

So we met, on a hilltop, where we could see the harbour mouth, and the sea, and the point where the water merged into the horizon. The sun was in our faces and the jagged ridgeline of hills at our backs on cold, clear Saturday Winter Wellington morning.

We burned incense, drank coffee and rum, and talked about our beautiful, brave new world, that has such people in it. A persistent squawking bush parrot hung around, even as dogwalkers gave the animated, daydrinking characters in the park a wider berth. Those weird kids? Hell, the weird adults were hanging out, getting louche that particular morning.

With this man's death, something significant and special has ended. A most strange and transitional time. He called the changes, and spun good yarns.
The Sons of Hermes raised and drained dry our glasses to the mighty wizard and adventurer, Gordon White.

Fair winds and following seas, traveller.