No current of power remains pure in the vessel of one who is inwardly divided. No hand can bear the blade of the Dragon if the gaze of the Dragon, upon falling into the marrow of that soul, finds only vanity, mimicry, and fracture.

They reach for the abyss in entitlement, forgetting that before the great eye of the cosmic beast we all are laid bare: prey before predator, a brief and trembling insignificance before the vast machinery of the cosmos and the terrible infinitude of worlds. They descend. A katabasis of the soul. They open only into the maddening abyss, but what happens to those who cannot return? They linger in their inner madness. Where their inner demons feast on the flesh of their own perispirit.

No one ascends who mistakes the pedestal for the summit. No one evolves who imagines themselves as infallible. They forget the Gods speak for themselves for the Gods are the Womb and the Tomb; and your Magick that weaves both your path, your wealth and your fateful end cannot be separated from your very life. Did you not ask for Death and swore to pay the holy Sacrifice?

Most pitiful of all are the self-proclaimed Masters, Gods, and Demigods. Hear this, friends and foes alike: before the vast and primordial powers, you are but a grain of sand. And yet, even as you are small, you are also a fragment and expression of those same powers, cast for a fleeting hour into this illusory world. The sacred earth gave forth the clay of your body so that you might walk this realm in borrowed form. You were fashioned, too, in the image of the divine, and still you squander that inheritance, breaking your vows again and again through your pride…

Those who name themselves masters of veneficium before their mouths have once been silvered by its nocturnal sweetness, before the lunar sap has entered the blood and taught the tongue its double edge, reveal the hollowness of their claim in the very act of utterance. The underworld is not a place once entered and left behind, but a law of inward turning, an eternal recurrence of dissolution by which the spirit is unmade, re-steeped, and taught to distinguish venom from sacrament, annihilation from initiation, and vain lustful hunger from the elixir of true becoming.

O foul lustful beasts of appetite, bound by the tongue, governed by repression of longing, shrunk by the poverty of your own being: the Feminine was never made for hands such as yours. You dream of power while remaining inwardly small, ridiculed by your own insufficiency, reaching with profane hands toward a shadowed crown. Her womb shall not exalt you but consume you. It shall become your doom: the skull of your possession, the cauldron of the void, the vessel that strips you bare and drinks you down to the bone.

Sadder still is the one who carries the flame of devotion and yet forget that priesthood, before all else, is Service. One must first learn to serve before daring to lead, to guide, or to wrap oneself in any mantle of sacred authority.

Deluded are those who cannot recognize the seal and hand of an adept in subtle and silent work, in the labor of one who would gladly live and die in service to the Gods. Miserable are those who have not learned. Miserable and pitiable are those who cast petty malice against those who stand behind the impenetrable walls of consecrated Service.

Such souls do not fail to see because no light was offered them, but because what is rootless cannot long endure the gravity of a true path, and what is inwardly uncentered mistakes motion for arrival. The Goddess may place the thread in their hands, yet they still choose the house of vapors, preferring the mirror that multiplies them to the gate that would undo them. Thus they wander among reflections and name it vision, and pace the coiling chambers of their own unexamined glamour and call that circling power.

Yet I have learned, under my Goddess, to become an instrument of Her hand and to care for those who still walk Her path, even when they themselves cannot yet see. But I do grieve the sacred souls who lose themselves in mazes of glamour and distortion, who forget the truth buried in their own shadow, who do not understand that no path truly advances without the sacrifice of vanity.

I grieve for the bright souls, the children of Gaia, who have forgotten the heart of the matter. We swore to guard Her forevermore, and yet we came again into the world of men only to forget that unity in Service is the path. We serve Her in many names, many faces, many masks of divinity, yet we war against our own and perish in the prison of our own reflections.

We do not see beyond the mirror until ruin teaches us what devotion should have taught us sooner.

So remember why you came here before your soul descended into this world. Witches, sorcerers, cunning folk: Your vow is not of this world, yet it is through this world that you must fulfill it. We made this world our field of oath, our temple of ordeal, our ground of remembrance. We are the bearers of the torch in Her name, in the eternal now and the eternal return…