Ouroboros and Spiral Freakout

Adam and Eve (detail)

Colour pencil and gouache on paper.

Detail of Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve

Colour pencil and gouache on paper.

I only ever hallucinated on two occasions … to date. A few weeks apart. This occurred in the period between the Morgan period and the Newanda period. The first occasion included a vision of the ouroboros, which may go some way toward explaining the persistence of the Ouroboros section of The Scientific Creation Myth article in From Particles to Angels. The second occasion is what I call "The Spiral Freakout". The content of each is easily traceable to the reading I was doing at the time.

I've never successfully drawn the ouroboros vision, but this Adam and Eve picture is derived from it. The idea is that the material universe is composed of the body of the Ouroboros serpent which has neither a tail nor a head. The tail and head of the Ouroboros, as a single unit, is comprised by the conscious experiencer of the world. In the Adam and Eve picture above I've correlated this to the emergence of the moral consciousness in the form of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The only part of the picture that bears any relation to the vision is the body of the serpent in the sky. But the vision itself was very beautiful. The background of Nathaniel 2 (see Clive India) was an unsuccessful attempt to capture some of the mood of the vision, though Nathaniel himself was not part of it.

The Devil in the Mirror

Pencil on photocopy paper.

Someone warned me not to look at my face in the mirror, so after taking a leak I had to do it. It started to transform into a mad devil's face. As the transformation progressed I had the idea that if the process was allowed to complete, I would be possessed. I watched it for a few more moments, then turned away and left the bathroom. I thought to myself: "Well, that was easy." Referring to the ease of avoiding possession. The illustration is from the time.

The Ring

Pencil in a ruled notebook.

This doodle is from the time, and had the following text about the character Zulu.

"He was standing at one point in a ring of infinite circumference. It didn't look infinite to him, but a voice told him that it was. He was standing at a break in the ring. The broken ring was causality. The break was consciousness. The break was himself. The voice told him that one day the break would be healed and he would be the entire ring."

I may have read something similar somewhere at the time.

Ouroboros 1

Black ink and colour pencil on photocopy paper.

So for a while I got interested in drawing Ouroboros. The intention was to add stars to this image but I never got around to it.

Ouroboros 2

Colour pencil and some gouache on photocopy paper.

This is the view from inside the ring.

Ouroboros 3

Colour pencil on photocopy paper.

Ouroboros 4

Pencil on photocopy paper.

Two serpents coiled in opposite directions.

Spiral Freakout 1

Pencil and black ink on photocopy paper.

The ouroboros vision was very pleasant. The spiral freak out a few weeks later, not so much. It was a sunny afternoon, hot with dust in the air. I was sitting on the toilet at home looking at an Eraserhead poster on the wall opposite. Then a cloud must have passed in front of the sun because the light from the windows behind darkened. This seemed to trigger something.

The floor tiles in the bathroom were small squares of different colours, drab, subdued colours and beige. But my attention was caught by a flicker. Points of colour were appearing and flickering like twinkling stars across the floor as if to embellish the tiles. Brilliant rainbow colours, more and more of them. Very pretty. But then they seemed to group together like small drops of water attracted by surface tension, collecting to form larger droplets, which collected to form pools like a resurrecting T1000. But the pools of colour were forming a larger pattern, fractal spirals. Small coiled branches attached to larger ones attached to larger till it started to get scary. The bright colours suddenly faded, but so did the floor which became transparent.

Spiral Freakout 2

Black ink and colour pencil on photocopy paper.

Beyond the floor I could see a kind of inverted tornado. It kept getting darker and it seemed like I was looking through a now transparent Earth into the blackness of the universe beyond, and half of it was filled by this great tornado.

Spiral Freakout 3

Black ink, colour pencil and some gouache on photocopy paper.

Spiral Freakout 4

Pencil on photocopy paper.

I was very frightened at this point, by what may have been a shit tornado. I hitched up my pants and the vision ended. It had only lasted a few moments.

Zoroaster 1

Black ink, colour pencil and some gouache on photocopy paper.

Zoroaster 2

Pencil on photocopy paper.

Yin Yang 1

Black ink and colour pencil on photocopy paper.

Yin Yang 2

Black ink and colour pencil on photocopy paper.

Yin Yang 3

Black ink and colour pencil on photocopy paper.

Yin Yang 4

Black ink and pencil on photocopy paper.

I had the idea that the universe was a big Yin Yang, arranged like a pair of interlaced Klein bottles. The Klein bottle is a relative of the Möbius strip, that might be formed as a simple circle, or as an infinity symbol. Each conscious person lives at the centre of this universe, at the point where the dark spiral below meets the light spiral above, at a point of quiet in the universe, the eye of the storm. The further you move from this point, the greater the forces become. I don't know exactly what is achieved by representing the Yin Yang as a pair of interlaced Klein bottles. But there you have it. Spiral Freakout 2 and Spiral Freakout 3 depict what I actually saw, while the images that follow these (Zoroaster x and Yin Yang x) are just from my imagination and speculative.

Seraphim

Black ink, colour pencil and a little gouache on photocopy paper.

The seraphim work very closely with humans, and are very much like them. So much so in fact that through their exposure to humans some of them started to think like them. Through their sympathy for the plight of humans, they began to resent the divine plan, which was the cause of their downfall.