Another
key period of altered perception in my childhood is an illness I experienced
at the age of nine. I had pneumonia for a period of about four weeks, three
of which I was bedridden, able to console myself psychically, again, only with
my books, records and my precious AM radio. The only visual portholes onto the
outside world I had at this time were through the TV screen, and out my bedroom
window. I was steeped in what was then my favorite book, Edith Hamilton's venerable
classic "Mythology". I had begun to read this book sporadically at the age of
six, and by the time this illness rolled around, I was totally absorbed. I knew
that the Greeks had a much better handle on god than the Baptists did. I had,
once again, gained secret knowledge I had to keep to myself.
On TV one night, during this particular illness, I saw the classic old Ray Harryhausen flick "Jason and the Argonauts", which I had just been reading about in the Edith Hamilton book, I had also recently seen "Mysterious Island", "Journey to the Center of the Earth" and "The Time Machine". I was really pushed into an altered state by getting to see all these (for the time) state-of-the-art fantasy movies, and through the power of my obsession with the mythological. After "Jason & the Argonauts" was over, I was again banished to my bed. Still seething on the inside from all the mythos I'd just seen (and now, when I look back on it, excited, too, by all the half-naked men who filled the screen through most of the movie) I was unable to sleep, and had an erection (I had begun to masturbate a couple of years before, at around the age of seven). I heard the neighbor's dog bark, and sat up in my bed to look out the window. I was transfixed by the light of the full moon, lighting up everything I saw--it was almost like daylight, I couldn't see the moon itself, it was behind my house, so all I could see were the effects of its light, shining onto the neighbor's yard like some sort of surrealistic reading light.
I had never really perceived moonlight as a powerful thing, until that moment, sitting up in bed, sick, with an erection. It was a moment of connection with real power: a truly pivotal instant for me. I instantly "grokked" that the moon was immensely powerful, and that I was connected to it through my own power, the power that lay stiff and pulsing in my hand. . . the power I knew had to be kept secret. There was nothing overtly erotic about the experience, other than the inherent eroticism that dwells in places of power--I realized I'd had another transcendent encounter with nature. I knew then that the energy I felt between my legs was, indeed, something powerful, not "dirty and bad" as I had been told, and that it was, indeed, magickal, and irrevocably tied to the energy and power of the moon. Thus my secret life became even more secret, with the realization of this new power I had to hide,
I remember looking out the window eagerly the next night, hoping that the light would be the same, and it essentially was. I spent the next several nights enraptured by the quality of the stark moonlight making the scene outside my window into something from another world. Superimposing the mythological adventures in my mind over this super-illuminated landscape, I explored the power this brought me. Unconsciously raising my energy level by masturbating as I "moon-dreamed", I transported myself to a much more palatable place than I physically was, a place that seemed much more "real".
I suppose I was practicing a simple form of sex-magick even then, at the age of nine. Using the altered state provided by the pleasure from masturbating, combined with the visual disorientation of the moonlight and the power of the mythological morpho-genic fields invoked by my mind, I transported myself to a place that proved to me I could use this power to leave the misery of my stinking life behind for awhile. My absorption into this sanctified world would become greater and greater over the next few years.
