Memory, Continuity and Magical Time

Love-making and Weeping, Secret-telling and Laughter:
these Four Excellences I would place in the Quarters of my final hour.

—Andrew D. Chumbley, Khiazmos (1993–9)

At the twentieth anniversary of the death of Andrew D. Chumbley, it is with honour that the Cultus Sabbati, the brethren and sorors of the Sabbatic Tradition, celebrate his life and work. The labour he accomplished in his short life is astounding, both in private and in the public sphere; the high standards to which he held himself were driven by his knowledge of early mortality. This truncated incarnative cord re-cast his understanding of time, emphasizing its limited and precious nature—but also its powers in repose and activation. As he wrote in The Azoëtia:

‘The Great Sorcerer draws Power from his own Death. Now!’

These are not simply words in a book, they were lived practice.

Unique apprehension of magical time infuses the closed circle of the Sabbatic Cultus, and unites its brethren. Progressing from one magical event to the next, one sensation to the next, one realisation to the next, one is willfully cast though time in a Pilgrimage of Rememberings. The purpose is not only recollection, but resurrection: the embodiment of all that has gone before, within the Circle of the Present Moment. Because time is ever-being-born and ever-dying, each moment possesses unique, magical potential, if one chooses to acknowledge it.

In the great enfleshing of Now, it is not mere Memory which is brought forth. It is also Continuity, drawing together the blood of our past, and the blood of our future. Inscribing a circle upon the land, our steps become as links in a chain, each of which marks a time and place of our magical becoming, and whose unique power may be called forth into awakening in any subsequent moment. Such is the work of the Field-Remembrancer, the slaying and re-making of the World.

As a tree rooted in the underworld, the work of Alogos Dhul’Qarnen Khidir, as well as the ancestral retinue of brethren past, continues to bear fruit within the Cultus Sabbati. Though much of this work occurs in the private conclave of our Blessed Community, XOANON reiterates its commitment as the sole harbinger and light-bearer of the Sabbatic Craft, making the magical works of our brethren available to the public. In this, our sacred act of re-membrance, we shall soon forge new vessels for the Current, the living and future brethren, and of course, the Ingenium of Alogos.