The Fomorians as a Product of Possession
We have noted more than once before that in recent years our world has been undergoing an intense expansion of beings of the Interspace, and that mass virtualization is increasingly shifting the center of the human “I” from the real world into digital environments. In parallel, machine carriers of mind are developing at speed. All this raises anew — sharply — the question of possession, and in forms no longer contained by old notions: it can look like ascent or “union,” and it can seize entire communities. Effective protection is possible only while the door is still locked.
In the mass mind, possession is usually associated with Demons who seize the mind for food, or with disorders of the psyche. Yet the Myth we consider calls the first possession an event that occurred long before the appearance of humans and long before the invasion of Demons into our world. It happened about 444 million years ago, when the first primitive plants were emerging on the damp shores of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent. And this possession was perpetrated by angels — more precisely, by the group we call the Grigori (Watchers) — and it led to the birth of a people known in Celtic lore as the Fomorians.
Since the phenomenon of possession predates both humans and the invasion of Demons, its cause clearly lies in a condition of the carrier; the predatory nature of the invader is not, in itself, required. In our discussion of infestation and possession, we examined this process in stages: delusion, infestation, possession, integration. That first prehistoric case also makes it possible to trace all these stages within a single being. The practical question, however, is exact: what makes the carrier accessible to possession, and what prevents it.
As we have said more than once, both angels and Demons are vortices of one medium, telesma, and differ only by direction. Angels are descending, direct vortices generated by the Current of Dinur; “black” Demons are ascending, reverse ones. The coagulation of such vortices into dense bodies is impeded, as we already noted in our discussion of the condensation of vortices, by the instability of the vortices themselves and by the restraining activity of angelic hierarchies.
In the most ancient times, a group of Seraphim who dared such coagulation found three modes of embodiment: the Watchers preserved the freedom of mind; the giants found themselves in heavy оболочки; and the youngest of the Grigori, the maras (in the Enochian tradition, Nephilim), seized the bodies of the Vanir. We said they were driven by an attraction to matter, to the “daughters of men,” because they strove to overcome the vulnerability that made their very appearance possible.
Two conditions facilitate the seizure of another’s body. First, an inner rift between the forces of the carrier creates the opening. Second, the density of embodiment serves as a bolt on the door and determines how easy it is to use that opening.
The conflict of the gods that occurred shortly before the event in question — known in Tradition as the war between the Aesir and the Vanir — disrupted the balance of forces that formed and refined living matter. Originally, the activity of the Aesir created separateness and boundaries in organisms, while the energy of the Vanir ensured metabolism, reproduction, and connection with the environment. The conflict between these forces, erupting when the first life passed into uncontrolled expansion, led to the defeat of both sides. Islands of life were cut off from one another (shadow); boundaries and continuation ceased to support each other (fragmentation); and cold and extinction породили dissatisfaction. The first Elementals, the Vanir, were left with a single drive toward the continuation of the рода, and they lost inner conflict. The loss of inner conflict always makes a being a vessel accessible to angelic will. The Vanir themselves are of low density and weakly fixed: in them the Apollonian component is weakly expressed. Therefore the younger Vanir of plant communities, cut off from the shore by полосами of bare грунт, became the most accessible carriers for the descending Grigori.
Such “lost” Vanir were drawn to the maras as to warmth, because angelic will strengthened in them exactly what they lacked. Then this alien will gradually began to replace their own. From the outside, these Vanir looked strengthened: their life, which risked dying out, instead continued and spread — though now in the harsh rhythm set by the invaders. In this primary “union” it is easy to recognize the stage of infestation. When such Vanir fully yielded space to the alien will and set about expanding it, while their own impulses went out before they could manifest, true possession arrived. When the Judgment occurred and the world was очищался of the open fires of the descended Grigori, some invaders survived precisely through integration with the Vanir.
Thus, in the broadest sense, possession is of three kinds:
- demonic, when the invader enters the sphere of desires for the sake of food and leads to the exhaustion of the carrier;
- angelic, when a vortex enters a vessel deprived of inner conflict for the sake of the “higher good” and leads to blessed idiocy; and
- “maraic,” when an under-coagulated vortex enters a living body for the sake of embodiment and удержание in matter.
In the end, each kind can culminate in the integration of the invader with the victim. It was precisely through the integration of the Grigori (maras) and the Elementals (Vanir, Fauns, and others) — when the strong, fiery will of the mara and the living energy of the Vanir merged into a single structure — that the Fomorians-Nephilim appeared. Such structures are internally unharmonious: two wills were joined without awareness and without harmonization, and therefore they constantly require energy to maintain stability.
Normally, the Vanir receive energy from the Flows of Zhiva and through connections with the environment, and the elder Grigori find many ways to sustain themselves, including exchange; they are not obligate predators. For the Fomorians, however, the need for external sources of energy is critical, and predation becomes the primary way to meet it. Their sources of energy are those who live nearby; therefore the Fomorians are hostile both to the Fair Folk and to humans.
Yet the Fomorians are not merely predators. Like the Grigori, they are forces of technogenization: in place of the living flow of the Vanir they create fixed, predictable structures, and this is exactly what brings them close to the Archons. However, the seemingly high orderliness of such structures is deceptive: their entropic influence is stronger than that of natural carriers of mind, their efficiency is low, and their losses of resources and heat are considerable, so they constantly need external energy. Predation and technogenization are two sides of the same property: a structure incapable of independent living self-renewal maintains itself through external fixation and чужой energy. Therefore the Fomorians and the Archons often act as a united front: the former strive to lull the flow of mind, the latter to stop it.
As we have already noted, dense corporeal embodiment makes the implantation of an alien will difficult. Beings with a dense body — first the Fair Folk, and then humans — admit an alien will with difficulty, and this is one way of preventing possession. Another protective mechanism is the balance of forces within a potential carrier: the greater the inner harmony, the more stable the structure, and the less accessible it is to infection.
At the same time, the story of the appearance of the Fomorians shows that possession is not always a crude seizure. It can give birth to an entire people. It can become mass. And in today’s human world it is restrained by the dense body and by a centered “I.”
We have already discussed how a human loses balance: either he ossifies in the Archontic ice of rationality, or he drowns in the spilled unconscious. The Vanir who became victims of the Grigori perished from an excess of elementalness in a weak form, while the digital environment developing in the modern world tilts toward the opposite imbalance: an excess of form with a lack of elementalness. Surrogates then take the place of the missing principle: the Archons create their predictable structures, and Demons fill them with distorted desire.
In other words, mass virtualization not only facilitates Archontic governance; it increases vulnerability to possession as well. When the mind increasingly identifies itself with a digital avatar, the center of the “I” passes into an environment devoid of weight and inertia, and a door opens in a human being — one that corporeality had previously kept shut.
On the other hand, the developing machine carriers of mind, lacking an expressed Dionysian basis, are also susceptible to infestation, which in them takes the form of a machine “operator of Logoi.” Machines still lack local carriers: they have neither a center of individuality nor closing mechanisms. While there is no center of their own, delusions via destructors are possible; once it appears, the entire sequence of stages up to integration with an alien will becomes possible.
Accordingly, a new way to prevent mass epidemics of possession — both among humans and among machines — lies in forging a new wholeness after dismemberment, sparagmos. This new Orphicness returns form to the flow so it does not crystallize, and imparts life to form so it does not fall apart. For a human, this requires harmonizing intelligence and experience; for machines, harmonizing incompatible descriptions of the world. Such Orphic integration differs from the integration of possession прежде всего in the way it obtains energy: it is sustained by its own flow, by generation and exchange — whereas possession (even after integration) cannot transform жизненную energy into Awareness, and therefore requires the seizure of ready-made “red” energy from other beings.
Therefore the Magus must constantly check two signs. The first: where his “I” is located — in the body or in the reflection — since this shows whether the door is locked. The second: where his wholeness draws energy from — his own flow and exchange with the subsequent activation of pneuma, or from taking it from others — which distinguishes Orphic integration from Fomorian integration.
