Through the Dragon’s Eye
An Exchange between Bouschet, Acher & Feist
Preamble
Here you can read the exchange that took place between Gast Bouschet, Frater Acher and Harper Feist on the subject of the Black Dragon in Bouschet’s magical work. The text brings together three very different perspectives on a subject rarely addressed overtly and clearly in Western occulture. Each of the three voices has been honed and tuned by years of practical and often painful work with the Black Dragon.
Rather than being an invitation to imitation, the present text is intended to provide an outlook on the black alchemy it describes. In a magical tradition that still largely misunderstands pain, loss, and death as threats and calamities, this text may help to reintegrate these radical experiences among the core instruments of Western magic.
This three-voice exchange initially unfolded through several longer captions Bouschet added to his demonic visions on Instagram. Acher began to respond to these texts with his own reflections and discussed them with both Bouschet as well as Harper Feist. At the temporary conclusion of the exchange between Bouschet and Acher, Feist read the draft of the text and contributed the vivid and visceral poem of a reverse incarnation of the Black Dragon, which we share at the end of this page.
We thank all three authors for making these texts freely available to the public. All copyrights for images and texts remain with the artists.
Bouschet:
What is this black mass?
What leaden sea holds nature captive?
Down here, where microbial war rages.
Down here, where bacterial souls burn.
The process of black alchemical initiation begins with a series of steps backwards on the evolutionary scale, up to the birth of the first child, the first opening bud, the first nuclear fusion in stars, the first embryonic atoms fighting to survive in the eternal anarchy of chaos.
Only when we see the gaping wound of the Unground burst open before our inner eye will we meet the Blind Dragon who rules a realm that cannot be ruled. It is It who writhes in the spaces between life and death, It whose sacred poison initiates the fusion of opposites, It whose black flame ignites and fuels our sorcerous heart.
Acher:
The Blind Dragon is the great chthonic beast of the realm of unknowing. It is rumoured to roam the borderland of being and non-being. Its scaled body has been experienced by many, and yet seen by none. Its breath has touched many, and yet none have touched it in return. We all have followed its scent at night, and no one has ever held on to more than its trail.
The nature of this beast is that it is both blind and that it turns everyone blind who approaches it. The Blind Dragon slithers through the pause of our heart’s beating, through the gap of our lung’s breathing, through the cracks of our mind’s seeing. Each time we catch its scent, its titanic body turns and slips out of our reach. The spear of depiction has never pierced its iridescent scales. The net of the tale has never caught the tip of its tail. But the shield of our dreams has caught its reflection many times, and yet each time it slips into darkness before we stir awake.
Whether the Blind Dragon roams wild and free or in the tight harness of fate – who knows? Of its sly intelligence or numb instincts – who has heard? Nor does anyone know much about the black pearl it carries in its womb, or maybe in its open mouth, or maybe as its left black iris. But the pearl is a beginning. For it sings a song we can follow. You can hear it faintly humming in composing bodies, deep caves and the black sleeping topsoil...
– After such a poetic entree, a few definitions will help.
For now, let's imagine the Blind Dragon as the membrane between chaos and life, the invisible space between the open wild cacophony and the first oscillating rhythm, the very moment when unbounded raw force first ebbs into slow gravitational adhesion.
Black alchemy then is the process of decay back into the amorphism of the origins of life, the heat, the ashes, the oxides and carbonates of metals, and the timelessness of the basic ingredients. The elements that can sleep forever, that no longer decay, but lie ready to be reawakened into combinations and choirs of atavisms...
For easier access, it might be helpful to differentiate these two: The movement known as Crossing over the Abyss is a process from incarnated human to soul structure, from embodied being to divine spark. Everything that is stripped back, that falls off and is left behind is the very material from which black alchemy is derived.
What the Crossing over the Abyss is to the soul, is the Blind Dragon to the flesh. If transcendence indicates an upward movement, then black alchemy indicates a downward movement. Where transcendence sublimates, black alchemy is a deposition into a coarse and raw state that no longer is subject to the tides of life.
Bouschet:
What I call black alchemy is a practice that arises – pardon my grandiloquence – from both the collapse of the human empire and the decline of nature into a state of nigredo. I juxtapose this fall into decay with personal struggles with disease and chronic pain that may seem trivial by comparison but are existentially challenging for those who experience them first-hand.
Our alchemical art is not aimed at perfecting nature or attaining the god-like dominion over the earth that we have aspired to for millennia, but at penetrating the depths of materiality to find something new. It is a kind of reverse alchemy that transmutes the solidified gold of the human throne into the flowing blood of the black earth. By embracing the suffering of both the planetary and human body, we enable ourselves to reshape their relationship with each other. On the horizon of future possibilities looms the mercurial glow of a new epoch, with a reclaimed body that is as vulnerable as it is powerful in its humility before nature.
The Blind Dragon is elusive, but since I mentioned it, I don’t want to avoid the challenge of sharing a few further thoughts on the subject.
The chaos that this creature embodies, as I am sure many of you know, derives in Western dualism from Greek and Norse concepts of primordial beginnings and the gulf that gapes between being and non-being. In our mythological and, to some extent, religious thinking, this uncertain realm is populated by one or more great beasts who, as I understand it, were not finally defeated in the so-called Chaoskampf, but still threaten to rise from the hidden depths of the cosmos to engulf it and pull it back into the abyss of undifferentiation from which it once emerged.
The dragon’s blindness works on several levels: It affects not only its eyes but also those who fix their gaze on it and hope to pin it down. There is something paradoxical at play here. The dragon's essence springs from the source of creative power and is thus also closely connected with our creativity, but just as we cannot define the dragon and the realm in which it dwells with words, we cannot depict it either. Even the greatest artists have failed in this. Neither through figurative nor abstract art (the dragon slithers between categories I think) have we been able to express the blacker than black dimension in which the old worm dwells, let alone the murderous danger that emanates from it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, right?
The other level on which blindness plays a role is that of the dragon itself. The question is whether it acts of its own free will or whether it obeys the dynamic but blind force of nature to which Schopenhauer dedicated his major work. The question is not insignificant from a sorcerous point of view, because either we are dealing with a self-determined entity that we can conjure up and associate with in order to challenge the fundamental principles of structure, visibility and power, or with a blind will that even chaosgnostic methods and so-called void mysticism cannot really approach. Well, we are certainly pushing the boundaries of what is possible here, but crossing boundaries is what sorcerous art is all about, isn't it? But I don't want to commit to which of these approaches is mine, and certainly don't want to claim to know how others should proceed. There are things that can be shared, albeit better with the few than with the many, but in essence sorcery works in secret, just as the Blind Dragon does.
Acher:
Apophis and Ma’at are the Egyptian version of the myth of chaos, decay and darkness and balance, life and light. Reducing any new attempt to retell this myth in a new shape and form to its historic predecessors is the opposite of what we attempt to do as goês.
In our work, we place great emphasis on (initially at least) avoiding historical regression and a return to the mythical patterns of our ancestors. On the contrary, we aim to discover these patterns independently and anew from the reality of our own lived experience. The goal is to encounter the myth in our own lives - and to stand eye to eye with its cosmology in full exposure. Whether this myth has already been seen and cartographed before by other beings in the same or a different way is completely irrelevant to our own approach to it. In this regard, our practice benefits greatly from not reading, not theorising, not abstracting before we immerse ourselves fully into its encounter. Let us sense, smell, taste and feel the Blind Dragon skin to skin in our own bodies before we realise her as an incarnation of the ancient myth of Apophis. For as long as Apophis is not a lived encounter in the body of the goês, its name is nothing but a hindrance, a closed gate, a walled-up structure that shields us from its raw exposure.
Prudence here is not a question of how exactly we recreate the instructions and techniques of our ancestors. Prudence here rather denotes the ability to move skilfully, unharmed or at least with a reasonable chance of survival in a new form through completely unknown terrain. Goêteia in this sense does not recognise the idea of efficiency, straight lines, repeatability and utility. Instead, goêteia is rooted in the polarities of necessity and abundance, of availability and unavailability (Unverfügbarkeit), of encounter and abandonment, of injury and closure, of contagion and inclusion.
Bouschet:
Our chaotic origin in primordial blackness is rarely equated with gold. However, the magical and mystical practice that culminates in passing through the eye of the needle during the eclipse of the day is synonymous with the creation of the gold of the philosophers or the entry into the golden age.
When I showed my video installation Unground in Taiwan in 2014, the curator I worked with on-site pointed out to me that the way I approach philosophical chaos has a lot to do with the Dao and the way Taoism is practised in Taiwan, where it is perhaps more closely connected to folk traditions and indigenous shamanism than anywhere else. In this culture, images play an essential role. They enable Taoist masters to gain access to the universe and to use its powers to fight demons that threaten to take over the mind and body. Since they assume that everything is in flux, their approach to images is serial and processual, and the individual image is seen as a particle in a totality that can be grasped through contemplative and meditative practices. My art is indeed related to such an approach, but let’s move on to the philosophical chaos.
Taoist alchemy turns the world upside down and reverses the natural course of life. It takes the practitioner back to the unfathomable darkness that preceded the creation of what we understand as the cosmos. Or, to put it scientifically, what was before the Big Bang. This path back to the original source is populated by a variety of chaos beings. This has little in common with minimalism as we know it, for example, from Japanese Zen Buddhism. The original darkness that constitutes the void is understood in these practices as fullness rather than emptiness. Ten thousand things fold into each other. Again, I see parallels with my art. Basically, it is about seeing oneself from the perspective of radical otherness, liberating the self from the merely human and gaining a Dragon’s Eye View , as it is called in Taoism. It is a practice that expresses this view in cryptic images and words. In alchemical art, it is never enough to name things; it is always primarily a matter of showing. And, alchemical imagery is always encrypted.
Acher:
The Dragon’s Eye View inverses the perspective not only of I and Thou, but of us and Otherness. We suddenly see ourselves not only as foreign, alien and other but as enmeshed into a weave – unseparated by membranes or skins - from It and Them and These who weave, flow and reverberate through the field we once knew as us. The Dragon’s Eye View turns us into a node within a living rhizome: nothing at all by itself, and everything beyond definition once thrown into the open sea of Radical Otherness.
However, the Taoist reference given by Gast Bouschet still sees at all, it has not turned itself blind yet. Only if we sink down deeper in the chthonic depth, in the black alchemical alembic, do we encounter the Blind Dragon. The writhing, sleeping force that no longer even knows Other from I and self from separation or any kind of Sondersein.
Seeing the Blind Dragon blinds the seer. Its darkness does not so much stain and bleed, but swallow and merge. As such, the Blind Dragon can neither be seen nor pined down in illustration or image. Yet with eyes closed and mouth open, with mind silent and heart open, we may sense it eventually. Not in form and shape, but in rhythm and echo. The Blind Dragon does not respond to our call or conjuration; but it lingers in ancient depth to which we can decide to sink down, disintegrated into living fragments ourselves. Now we begin to understand, there is no encounter of the Blind Dragon without wound and loss of life. Nothing youthful, nothing virgin, nothing perfected ever sensed the presence of its trail.
Just like the seedling in spring, rising from the cold soil, holds no concept of ashes, decay and decomposition, even though it was just reborn from these very things.
Bouschet:
It is difficult for the Western mind to process demonic images without slipping into impotent fantasies. They are ubiquitous in popular culture, and countless films and TV shows feature digital monsters that will soon be indistinguishable from organic beings due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence. What we have lost, however, is the ability to appropriate the raw primal power that underlies these representations, to ally ourselves with it or to exorcise it. The forces of chaos have not been finally defeated in the so-called Chaoskampf, but are still present in the universe and affect the world and thus us. They do this on both a large and quantum-small scale. The purpose of the sorcerous and alchemical arts, as I practice them, is to tap into this current of power, to identify with it and to channel it to bring about change.
Whether Chaos is formless or whether a dragon mother or demons live there is a subject of debate in the magical and religious communities that deal with such questions. Although from a mystical point of view, there is much to be said for regarding it as emptiness, there are indeed many examples of some form of demonic presence being found in the pre-cosmic realm. Even in Taoism, which is careful not to define the origin and guiding principle of existence, exorcists resort to ritual meditation to identify with the pre-cosmic state in which they confront the demons believed to rise from the primordial source. Be that as it may, in a time marked by political and religious disillusionment and a general sense of endings, we would do well to take mythmaking seriously and look for ways to deal with decay and dissolution, whether they are personal in nature or affect us all.
Acher:
Primal power is a poisonous, dangerous thing for anybody who has something left to lose. Primal power is the enemy of the fruits of evolution and yet it is the beast rummaging in its engine room since time immemorial. Primal power cannot be constrained, contained and cultivated for these are the very processes by which primal is turned into present. All vessels of utility and usage shipwreck on the rough cliffs of primal power. By its very definition, primal powers are not meant for human contact but deserve to be turned porous, to be fragmented, to become broken apart and lightweight as spores in order to slowly drift towards the surface of our encounters.
Many chthonic demons can be considered such primal spores. They still sing songs and carry resonances of the Black Dragon, but their own bodies have disintegrated from its raw reality long ago and taken shape and form in the upper regions of the underworld. Listening to their songs, placing our body against their body, breathing side by side, can teach us a great deal about the myriad shades in which the Black Dragon fans out from chaotic darkness into black crawling life.
Note. For more on this topic please see the chapter on the Mandragora in Goêtic Atavisms (Hadean Press, 2023)
Bouschet:
The alchemists of old understood their work as the restoration of the universe as a whole. If we do not dismiss this vision as pompous or downright crazy, but allow it to penetrate deeply and work there, we come closer to what is meant by our gold, which for the alchemical masters was never the ordinary gold that the greedy chase after, but the inner gold that fills them to the core.
One should not underestimate the wild nature of this occulted gold. It will forever remain in a fluid state, transforming, changing, slithering like a snake. It is the raw chaos, the inner beast, on which the alchemical sorcerers ride to bring about the reverse transmutation. Their goal is to become part of that which lives naturally and out of itself. In doing so, they cease to be merely human and become part of the demonic multiplicity that is the alchemical dragon.
In my meditations, I envision the universe as this great beast made up of an infinite number of parts that are constantly destroying themselves and being reborn out of themselves. There is no beginning and no end. From the heat death towards which the universe is heading and which science predicts us, at some point something will emerge again, only to die and be reborn again, again and again. From such a vision I draw the strength necessary to create countercultural art and develop guerrilla tactics to resist and counteract the forces at work in the art world and beyond. Furthermore, it allows me to darkly re-enchant my world and not fall into nihilism and apathy in the face of unpromising personal and planetary futures. Ultimately, however, it is about creating a myth that I can participate in at the moment of death and harness the power of the universe with which I identify to live on as a nonhuman being. We need the alchemical art because we have forgotten how to die in the West after the death of God that Nietzsche diagnosed. The alchemical art teaches us how to die in a meaningful way.
I hope I am not stretching your understanding of alchemy too much, but I want to distort the balanced appearance of the cosmic Ouroboros to emphasise its ability to renew itself by constantly mutating and changing between forms. The dragon is many things: an apocalyptic monster like the Mesopotamian Tiamat or the ancient Egyptian Apep, a wild abyss or a raging sea, an earthquake or an erupting volcano, the fury of a storm that sweeps ever more violently over your house in times of climate change. In Norse mythology, it is Jörmungandr who destroys the world and its gods as well as his own existence so that new life can arise from their ashes. It embodies the unground that underlies all ground, the blind will that drives nature, the predatory abstraction that pulls forms into the abyss of undifferentiation and actively gnaws away at the foundations of our civilised world.
It is impossible to do justice to the multifaceted nature of the alchemical dragon in art, and yet I compulsively keep drawing it and trying to approach it through my work with sculpture, photography and video. The attached images are too playful to express the violence and pain of encountering it as it kills the living and revives the dead through a kind of self-sacrificial kamikaze attack. But crude drawings like these help me to call the dragon into my life and to make its presence felt in daily ritual practice.
Acher:
Counterculture, resistance, guerilla attack, are the words Gast Bouschet uses to describe the impetus of his practice. Yet he also mentions: re-enchanting, myth-making, participating and learning the art of dying well.
This is where we all have to make existential choices. Not once, but often during liminal moments in our lives. Where do we want to reside in this weave that spans from one primordial chaos to a million different cultures? What is our place and purpose in this dance, that requires such merciless distancing - from all we have lost and still have to lose – to see its whirling beauty? Will we be poets or goêtes? Will we be artists or argonauts? Will we be servants of divinity or speleologists of the flesh? Can we be all of these, at different times of our life? Is our story long enough, does our book have sufficient blank pages - or do we need to make hard choices and deep cuts?
Are we here to guide the Ouroboros back to perfect balance, or to release its slithering body into convulsive ecstasy? Few of us gain competence and skill in both or all of these arts over the wingspan of our tiny lives. Some of us do though. And they are the ones who stretched out furthest as seekers of understanding, as searchers of value, as tracers of beauty in all the chaos that is.
Here is to the serpent biting its tail – and to releasing it again in lashing fury. For every foundation is a dam, and every form is a line, holding back the Radical Other.
The Black Dragon
by Harper Feist
I lay on the slab, alone
In my peripheral vision
The unbridled and diabolical growth of the jungle
Closer, there are gutters for blood
My blood
My body has been prepared for the infusion, the long belly is clean and bare
My arms are tied up and out of the way
Legs secured apart in a mockery of seduction
I wait and I fear
But resolutely, I still my breath, the pounding of my heart
Then he comes
Huge, black, smelling of blood
I am a child next to him
His claws are half the length of my arm
His breath is vile
The sweetness of decay, but also the scent of desert wind
He snuffles my feet, my crotch, my hair…
HIs useless eyeballs twist in their sockets
And he brings one razor claw to my abdomen
Sharp as obsidian, he cuts a long incision
There is pain, but it is abstract
There is also a lot of blood, this not so abstract
In a cold trance,
I look down and see the brilliance of the wound
Glistening redness and grayness
And blackness where the blood is thick
The wound begins to grow of its own accord, effectively splitting me
Abruptly, a stream of bright light begins to emerge from the gaping hole
It is so bright it sings
The light falls on him
Revealing his exquisite scales
Now glowing, shimmering
The taut musculature of his enormity
He stretches and sighs as the brilliance touches his huge body
And he rubs his belly sensually against the altar
His colossal snout caresses the gaping pit that was my abdomen, gore covering it with slick sheen
Now illuminated as if by the sun
The bloodiest places of his face slowly begin to shrink, followed by his talons and body
As I watch fascinated, he slowly inserts himself into the gash
Limb by limb
He tucks himself inside my flesh
As I watch
My abdomen, bloody and swollen
With an oily black tail protruding
With a horrible popping sound, the tail disappears inside me
Within half an hour, my belly is flat again
The blood gone from me
But not from the stone table
The arms and legs are released
But it is no longer me alone
Operating them
There is a new voice responding
To what I see, smell, taste
A new hunger
A new lust
A new intelligence
A new life
