THE STAR AND THE BEAST

This small archive gathers images and texts of those who took part in the rite on 29 March 2025, which aimed to follow the Star of Night into the Underworld and associate with the transformative power of the Black Dragon at work there.

Since I assume that those who visit my website do so to find out about my work, I have been rude enough to put my images first. This does not in any way imply that they should be considered a priority. The order of images and text could just as easily be constructed differently.

The impulse came from Sharon Moyal and myself, and then Konrad Kruse joined us, and together we engaged in intense preparation. Later, C. Scorpius, ภค๏, Arianna Arya and Marta Heberle joined in, inspired by what we had set out to do, and performed their own rites at that moment. We worked in different geographical locations (Belgium, Israel, Germany, France, Italy, Poland) and created a connection that crossed boundaries in more ways than one. Ultimately, however, such rites are embodied experiences to which each person must give their own testimony.

Marta Heberle pointed out to me that my bindu point in the photo would look like a hole in my head burned by a meteorite. And that’s how the ritual work that night felt to me, like a hole being drilled. After the visual meditation I felt the emptiness it had left for several days. Such work takes something from you. But it also gives something back, and now the hole is filled with new energy.

From the conversations I had I realised that I was not the only one who felt this way. Some had used the rite as a way of releasing themselves from a period of closeness to death and the experience of grief. But even if it wasn’t so existential for everybody, everyone I spoke to told me that the experience was ultimately empowering for them. And that is what sorcery is all about.

The dynamic force of dragonness will continue its revolutionary work, sometimes deep in the ground of existence, sometimes breaking through human systems. What if we turned it into a guerrilla performativity capable of corroding the configurations that prevent the elaboration of a bioontology that is urgently needed to confront the global threats that lie ahead?

Seven was the number of us. Seven steps down the ladder to the otherworld.
This is only a beginning.

***

Gast Bouschet

Part One. The Black Dragon at the centre of the Cosmic Wheel.

These images were created in preparation for a rite I will be performing with Sharon Moyal and Konrad Kruse on 29 March, the day of the solar eclipse, in conjunction with Saturn’s new synodic cycle. As the sun sets, we will follow the journey of the star of the night into the underworld to see through the eyes of the dragon dreaming there. The aim is to participate in what could be called ‘dragon-ness’. We will also try to keep the Dragon Gate open during the rite so that we and others can pass through it later to share in its pharmakonic powers and use them to initiate change.

We are experiencing a deep civilisational and perceptual crisis in which everything that comes our way is perceived as an apocalyptic threat. From this perspective, the image of the dragon takes on a new relevance as it embodies the great forces of nature. Dragons are closely associated with storms that become stronger and intensify faster in times of climate change. In my practice I also draw on a vision of dragons as the terrain of the underworld itself. They are the bones of the earth and I see them associated with geological phenomena. Their bodies are covered with overlapping tectonic plates, and spikes grow on their backs that rise from the earth as mountain ranges. Their low frequency roar drones during earthquakes, and their volcanic breath spews poisonous gases and ash into the atmosphere. Nothing about them resembles the digital fantasy creatures marketed as dragons by the capitalist entertainment industry.

My primitive drawings and sculptures do not do justice to what dragons are either. What working with them does for me, however, is to move myself out of everyday consciousness in order to connect with another dimension of time that runs simultaneously underneath. Biological and geological time run simultaneously, even if our short lives are only an infinitesimal part of it. The shrine of which they are part acts as a gateway into deep time, even into eternity, which is not somewhere far away in the past or future, but is always present.

Part Two.

Corroded throne of light above
The depths of embryonic night.

Part Three. The way through things.

The drawing was made during the partial eclipse of the sun on 29 March and is an attempt to give form to a hypnagogic vision I recently had while falling asleep. In it I saw the Ardennes Forest, which is often divided into parcels, mutating into the shape of a dragon. A setting black sun crowned the scene, both vanishing point and gateway to the chthonic depths of the universe.

As the eclipse coincided with Saturn’s escape into the unmanifest, Sharon, Konrad and I had agreed to project the lead that weighed on us into the drawings we would make during the eclipse. And then we would burn them and mix the ashes with bone charcoal (in my case from a goat’s skull) to mark our foreheads with a bindu, the seed point and star gate into the creative and regenerative power of the primordial universe. In a second cup I prepared a turmeric paste to create the surrounding halo, ‘the solar fire that frames the darkness’, as Sharon put it.

At sunset, the second part of our ritual work began, which consisted of entering into a meditative state and following the sun into the underworld. Our journey was preceded by a period of intense preparation, during which we discussed how we could use liminal spaces to mediate between stellar and chthonic energies, and how we could create a collective vision beyond what we had been able to imagine individually. But when it comes to visceral experiences, you are always thrown back into your own body, and ultimately I can only testify to what I myself went through.

This is my account.

There is a shaft into which the yolk falls. It wobbles as only suns and eggs wobble. It expands when it inhales and contracts and holds its breath when it has to to squeeze through chokepoints.

I feel the ground down here, icy and slippery, and scry for prophecies of ancient wisdom in the walls and ceiling, all of which are made of black volcanic glass. How they layer and move, like geological plates or the scales of our black dragon. In the centre of the cave lies the exit of the mine shaft through which the sun is pushing.

Part Four. That what is difficult to endure can still be endured.

The yolk has made its way inside, slowly, like a child pushing through the birth canal. The crowning moment has come, the contractions have pushed it far enough to stretch its head through the opening. During the birth, its membrane rubs against a sharp edge of the obsidian wall and bursts open. Liquid gold spreads throughout the cave, fusing with the volcanic glass and illuminating it from within with a dark glow.

Survival means adapting and requires the ability to act. The Grotto knows this, and has taken advantage of the contamination with the sun essence to undergo its metamorphosis from larva to volcanic snail. The iron mass of its shell exerts a gravitational pull that draws us into its body. Loose clusters of cells form a porous structure that expands in all directions. Each cell it’s own creature, bound together by a common force.

Day’s been long for me. The chronic pain lights a fire that intensifies to an annoyingly high level tonight. The alchemical treatises hide the pain the salamander suffers in the fire. A new wave of labour sets in, pushing us towards the light pulsating in the eastern corner of the cave.

Suddenly! Out there! A vision straight out of the Hadean Eon*. A molten planet, battered by asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions. Rocks hurled into the air by the dragon’s breath. Look up, up, up. A universe bathed in red and black. My eyes, no longer human, see an infinite number of suns pulsating in black light. An infinite number of dragon cells, each imbued with autonomous agency. An ouroboric cycle of pain and power, feeding on itself to sustain itself. Burn, burn, burn.

*Named after Hades, the ‘invisible’, the Hadean is the oldest geological age on Earth.

Here ends the report.

What this means for my future individual and collective work remains to be seen. Perhaps I will share further insights on this later, or take inspiration from Saturn, water the seeds of transmutation in the dark and wait patiently for them to bear fruit.

Notes from the Dragon’s Lair. April 2025.

***

Sharon Moyal

The Star and the Beast: Part 1
And The Sol Niger Rite We Performed on Saturnday

“It’s still only a small halo, nobody sees it, but he knows that out of it will come the fire, a tremendous fire will come, and him smack in the middle of it, he’s going to have to adjust, to keep on living as before (How you doing? O.K., and yourself?), ravaged by the conscientious devouring fire.” -Henri Michaux

The eclipse stalked me through oneiric visions about bearing the sun underground. Its weight seared my hands as I descended. No questions, only the drive to carry that burning sphere. In the chamber below, it convulsed and split, golden horns erupting from its core. It birthed something bestial. This a-spiralling dream had consumed me, though the time said otherwise when I woke up sweating.

The ritual took place in Israel in an abandoned Arab house from 1948, a space heavy with traumatic history. I marked them twice with hypersigils, during the eclipse and after sunset. My offerings was red, black & gold spray paint, tobacco leaves from my garden, sand from a nearby cemetery, and red poppy petals gathered at this doubled crossroads ruined house.

Among the hypersigils, DOG IS DEAD emerged as a magic square, a transmutation of grief for my dog crossing into Plutonian realms. Wrapped in an iron.ic-volcanic cloak, I wiped my tears, reinforcing this brute cycle of inversion and return. When square is mapped to Hebrew (ד, ו, ג), each row and column sum to 13, a number woven with magic, lunar cycles and menstrual tides.

4 6 3
6 3 4
6 4 3

Hypersigils from Gast & Konrad accompanied mine:

TRANSFIX YOUR GAZE UNTO MINE (Konrad)

THE STAR AND THE BEAST (Gast)

VESSEL OF SHARED SIGHT (Me, speaking of dragons and egregors with Gast & Konrad)

When the sol niger sank into her chamber, we burned our drawings, mixed the ashes with bone charcoal (mine’s from three raven feathers), and marked a bindu on our foreheads, a star gate into primordial fire.

Though fire has already begun, the ash of approaching corpses is already pressing upon the foreheads of the world. Saturn does not offer the fire of his higher octave without the embrace of the Abyssal Mother below.

The Star and the Beast: PART 2

UNDER THE OBSESSIVE BEACON OF SATURN

What we created transcends physical distance, binding us beyond the limits of geography. Like shamans and political operatives, we attuned ourselves to moments of flux, when reality turns plastic and transformation inevitable. Ambiguity carves space for the unpredictable, and yes, the map is not the territory, Yet we still needed shared anchor points, symbols that spoke the same tongue. Time zones meant little. Beyond seeking dragon sight, we each had personal motives, places within where decay met the fertile hum of sorcery. The Sol Niger had withdrawn, but its heat lingered in the bones of the earth and fire took root.

Liberation, if it exists, is not a final state but a continuous disruption. Biopolitics had already taught us that the real battle is not waged in streets alone but within perception itself. Gast’s Anarch spoke of this as a sort of consciousness warfare – an internal and external struggle against mental bondage. This, too, was no different. The egregore we had raised was an engine of rupture and response. In this post-truth era, where liberation from mental slavery is only the beginning, freedom is not a one-time achievement. It’s a process you have to keep choosing.

Our ritual work is a creation story.

Stories are how we process a world that refuses to be neatly contained, and they are also a sign that we cannot bear a world without containment. The very act of creating, of weaving new myths, of giving form to chaos, is an act of survival. It is unbearable that things simply happen. without reason, without resolution, without a cure. So, we seek patterns in the stars, in playing cards, in fortunes cookies told over dinner. Or, in an equally magical form of thinking, we turn to stories, to narratives that impose order upon chaos, that make sense of the unbearable.

Creation myths are among the most potent of these stories. They do not simply recount beginnings, they generate them. Though common usage dismisses myth as falsehood, within its cultural context, myth carries truth, whether metaphorical, symbolic, historical, or literal. As Mircea Eliade describes, such myths exist in illo tempore, a time beyond time, an ambiguous and primordial past. Born of oral traditions, they resist singularity, fracturing into countless versions across human cultures. But breaking myths is not like disproving simple errors. Myths are not mere misconceptions to be corrected, they are architectures of understanding, the frameworks through which we construct reality itself. To dismantle them is to challenge simplicity, to resist the gravitational pull of common sense, and enter the chaotic details of our human existence.

This is where our ritual work takes hold. To create new myths is to engage in an act of inner world-building; to break old ones is to enact a fundamental reimagining of human potential. The stories we shape do not remain confined to words. they imprint themselves upon space, upon bodies, upon the structures that house them. They alter the landscape, leaving behind echoes of the luminous voices that vibrated them into being.

And so, we left our marks. In ink, in ash, in whispered incantations. The story does not precede the ritual. it emerges from it.

***

Konrad Kruse

A Rosary Spell
Rather than starting at the cross then working the circle, this spell first draws the circle then follows
the beads extending from it. It ends on the cross which is the intersection of two lines in a single
central point. X marks the spot. On treasure maps, the shovel is always implied.

A mantra, spoken 5×10 times is alternated with pleas to Saturn to draw the circle.

The mantra:

‘Not grace flows from you unto me but relentless pressure to build a stable foundation of living
roots.’

10x Mantra
‘Saturn, guide me where I need to go!’
10x Mantra
‘Saturn, guide me down the winded path!’
10x Mantra
‘Saturn, guide me to the blackest black!’
10x Mantra
‘Saturn, grant me the strength to withstand its gaze!’
10x Mantra
‘Saturn, grant me passage into the underworld!’

The fifth and final plea to Saturn is spoken on the centrepiece. The circle has been drawn.
A line extends outwards, five more beads to reach the cross. 1-3-1

1x Mantra

‘You, ever coiled
whose scales evade the eyes of men
perceive my call!

Make shelter of my shaded skull
make windows of my blackened eye
so that you see what I see.

Transfix your gaze unto mine,
and allow my eyes to see
what no eyes may see.’

1x Mantra

The cross, now reached remains unspoken. With the final ‘roots’ it is rammed into the ground,
marking a point around which the circle is placed. The veil has been pierced.

On Black Flame
To follow desire is a daunting task. It requires a steady gaze
to not be burnt to crisp within the ever shifting tongues of flame.

It is a different task all together to do what the flame cares little for. A car desires movement.
The flames within it, propel it forward. All it has to do, and it does so expertly, is to move.
What the car does not desire, what its flame does not account for is the maintenance of its parts.
The flame cares little for rust, for brittle joints, for skeletons of steel.
To take care of something, to maintain the stability of its parts is a flameless work.

The exception proves the rule:
Once, I actually desired to brush my teeth. The flame did it for me.
Apart from such exceptions, taking care of the body is a prime example of flameless work.
I don’t desire it. It needs to be done.
Maintenance follows Necessity.

Necessity is relentless. It is blind to even the loftiest of dreams, the holiest of intentions.
A falling body is crushed in accordance with law. Necessity dictates it.
Lack of sleep hinders the labours of the day. Necessity dictates it.
A plant uprooted perishes. Necessity dictates it.

I heard whispers within the woods, of a black flame.
The trees told me about it. It is their grounding myth.
If you put your ear to the ground, you can hear the song of their roots.

Rootlessness
There once was a man
with the vision of a most glorious tower.
Oh, what a tower it was meant to be!

Passionate was he,
oh how he burnt for that most glorious tower.
Oh, what a tower it was meant to be!

It would reach the heavens, touch the sun,
this most glorious tower.
Oh, what a tower it was meant to be!

Of course, you might suspect,
there was a problem.
Oh, what a problem it would come to be.

The man cared little for foundation work,
he only cared for gilded roofs
he didn’t dig to give his monument its base.

He built his tower and it truly was most glorious.
A single gust of wind came by and tore it to the ground.
Gilded roof tiles on black soil

Roots
There is little glory in the blind descent of roots.
If the sun touches them
they know they’ve gone astray.

I dig not for light
but for stability
for nourishment.

A strange warmth engulfs the digging hand.
Beneath the soil
a centre radiates.

***

C. Scorpius

Starting on the day of the disappearance of the Saturnian rings, which was a gloomy and rainy day, I took a walk up the hill in the Schlucht where we live, a geologically magical place where the sediments of three different geological eras meet and can be seen.

My daughter wanted to puff the puffball mushroom. On the ground in front of the tree where they grow, there was a large number of feathers, some bloody and part of a wing. I gathered them, along with two smaller pieces of mossy wood that looked dragon-like. I tied them together and meditated, the images rising from the tiny black dot (see picture).

A week later, on the new moon and the Saturn eclipse, I used a magic wand to set up a new meditation. With the crooked shapes of the wand I made a cross to mark ‘the centre’ where I drew a black dot to represent the black sun.

I made a protective wall in some directions where I felt it was needed – and then I looked up at the sun, and to my surprise it moved quite quickly and the room (which is painted black) turned yellow and it looked like I was on psilocybin. The sun turned into a tiny little eye, wandering and looking around. For a brief moment it was encircled by a triangle and light blue figures in a somewhat Angelesque manner, covering the black sun in places. The magnetism was quite strong.

***

ภค๏

***

Arianna Arya

The Dragon’s Eye – Ritual of the 29 of March 2025.

It is quite challenging to write about these experiences, which are basically ineffable. I am glad that I participated and that I had the honour of participating with serious and experienced practitioners. For that I am grateful.

At the beginning, I played a musical background that would bring me into a suitable state of consciousness for the ritual. I centred myself as the sunset approached with its liminal zone. Then I lit a black candle, expressing the intention for the rite. Breathing deeply, I continued by applying the yellow-red paste and the black mixture of ashes to my forehead. That was already a rather powerful moment, very shamanic in the sense that I felt the beginning of a connection with something very ancient.

After a few minutes the forehead became very warm, I suppose this warmth was the activation of subtle energies. As I began the inner journey through visualisation, I soon felt that I was going into dark and deep spaces. All this was accompanied by shivering and erotic awakening, to some extent sexual. The depth of the meditation also increased an unsettling emotion.

The erotic elements that I find there are linked to the fact that the senses became more powerful, perhaps because at a certain point the ‘territory’ became more and more undifferentiated, so my whole body became strongly activated. From then on everything took a very subjective line. I was also moved by an intense power and the feeling that there was an untamed energy there.

Immediately after the rite I still had some of the yellow paste and black mixture and feeling that it was somehow charged (and it was because of the whole preparation) I used it and spread it all over my body, feeling strongly all my parts, flesh, bones and blood.

The body is such a potent vehicle, a “tool” that can become a symbol of the unification of opposites: pain and pleasure, suffering and joy, ecstasy and depression. All this leads to a deeply transforming inner alchemy.

***

Marta Heberle

The weeks preceding the eclipse have brought a dark landscape of dying and decomposition. Just when everyone would greet spring, I felt like I was sucked into a rotting swamp. There was this strong pull into disintegration, dissolution and chaos that medical jargon would describe as decompensation. It was a pull into the underworld, the realm of the dead and hungry spirits. So when a friend invited me to join the rite on the 29th of March, I did not think twice.

***

A bitter yellow tear on the forehead

for the pituitary eye to unfold

A bitter yellow tear on the tongue

to make it forked

to search for the beastly kin down below

***

Sitting on the forest floor, I stare into a piece of wood carved by woodworms. The longer I look, the more it turns into a viper-like iris with rays radiating from it in a labyrinthine tangle of corridors I crawl into. As if a black sun opened a strait tunnel within one of its rays, for me to be sucked into. It’s a passage that pushes me under several rocky archways, but it does not lead into light, or is it a black light? An explosion of blackness? I am blinded. My forehead eye does not see any more. My senses are reduced to touch, smell, and hearing. I am reset to an infant, yet this pre-conceptual comprehension still lingers. When you cannot see, is what you experience still a vision?

***

I am crawled up in a foetal position. My bones ache, and bones link to ancestors. I think of the recent weeks. A throwback to the helplessness that comes from choosing to watch what you cannot change: a body in its passing, tormented and fearful in its transition and journey to the unknown. The veins cracking uncontrollably lead through the tunnels of a purple congested maze. It smells sulphuric and sick. As it morphs, everything falls off of it, eaten by visceral shutdown and darkness. I sense a planet, horns on both hemispheres. It is boiling in a soup of bile and crying yellow tears. I am on a seesaw, thrown into the realm of the dead and then back into earthy sunrise, into an eclipsed sun that grows horns. When you stare for longer, the sun turns tar black and gets reflected in a hundred copies under the kaleidoscope of your eyelids. Does one need all these vessels to exist? Maybe in this landscape that I know is black, but that I can only touch and smell but not see, one can be a vessel-less consciousness?

***

The pain within the pelvis is becoming unbearable. Since I followed the dying body into the underworld, have I become a tomb myself? I feel bodies pressing against me, they’re all over me, heavy, suffocating. These are dead bodies and they smell bitter-sweet, mouldy and rotten. My sensing repertoire is still reduced to the primary senses. I can’t move, and I am barely breathing. And before I free myself from the dark slimy corridor of corpses wrapping their tentacles around me, before I am birthed back to the surface and find myself painfully alive, I sense a dark presence. It speaks in echo, it speaks in death rattle, chanting the following:

***

Thou shalt open all orifices
and invite the darkness from below
to enter

Thou shalt open thy mouth
and fill it with dirt
the earthy contamination
to feel as the beasts of the field feel
they that burrow and tunnel beneath the earth

Thou shalt open thy navel
and let a thousand roots take hold
growing into thee as an umbilical cord
of the earthy womb and tomb
to which thou dost belong

Thou shalt open thy vulva
and rub soil therein
that thou may conceive the offspring of chaos
to be borne into the world
upon a river of tar-black blood

Thou shalt open thy nostrils
to the sulphuric reek
of an earthy bile boiling
in a bulging cauldron deep below

Thou shalt open thy anus
to be fused with
the subterranean spine
of a dragon
submerged in slumber
dreaming the tale thou takest for reality

***