I write when I fall. It’s a defence mechanism. Like putting out a hand to catch myself. 

I write because writing has saved me and I believe my writing might help others.

But putting out a hand doesn’t always work when one is falling into the Abyss…

*

I cried out to the philosophers, “Philosophers save me!”

When I was 21 and in the second year of my philosophy degree I sat on the edge of the Abyss at the nadir of a quasi-initiatory period during which I’d been foolishly been mixing phenomenology (1) with copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, some unknown part of me striving, reaching for… what?

My ‘friends’ had deserted me because I’d ‘gone west’ and I was sitting on the boot of a car, at the end of the world, staring into the Abyss, feeling I couldn’t go on living but not really, truly, wanting to die either. I couldn’t choose.

I was presented with three gateways but didn’t have the courage to take any.

I moved into the front seat of the car and, as dawn arrived, pinking the front  windows of my friend’s house, with it came three alienesque beings who I now understand in the Brythonic tradition to be ellyllon ‘elves’. They took me into the heavens in what I saw at the time as an alien aduction experience and performed an intricate operation on my brain with silver instruments. 

After that I decided to give up drugs entirely and apply myself to my studies. Not easy. There were after effects. Anxiety. Panic attacks. I ended up on medication but also got subscribed what I really needed – exercise. These things helped me to get my head straight enough to write myself out of the Abyss. 

My philosophy studies gave me the tools I needed. I saw my inability to choose life or death as akin to Kant’s antimonies (2) which stem from the use of reason to comprehend sensible phenomena beyond its application. I wrote my dissertation on the concept of the sublime in Burke, Kant, and Lyotard, focusing on how experiences of the sublime depose the rational mind (3).

This helped me to understand the breakdown of my rational faculties but not the visions I encountered as the flip side. It was only when I was studying for my MA in European Philosophy and writing my dissertation on Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy I found the clues. Dionysian ecstasy gives way to Apollonian visions. But I wasn’t seeing Dionysus or satyrs. I realised, like Greece, Britain, must have its Gods and spirits, finally met my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, a King of Annwn, realised my visions had been of His realm.

Nietzsche, a philosopher, who also stared into the Abyss (4), saved me.

*

The medieval Welsh term Annwn stems from an ‘very’ and dwfn ‘deep’. I believe it shares similarities with the Hebrew term tehom which means ‘deep’ and was translated as abyssos, ‘abyss’, ‘bottomless depth’, in the Septugaint, the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible in 285–247 BCE.

The Mesopotamian Goddess of the primordial waters, Tiamat, has been linked to tehom. Several years ago myself and other awenyddion found a Goddess named Anrhuna who takes dragon form and is the mother of Gwyn. She plays a similar role as the personification of Annwn. In my visions She, Gwyn, and Nodens/Nudd are associated with the Abyss and its mysteries.

Gwyn was the God who taught me how to fall. He’s fallen too. And I’ve fallen with Him. I’ve crawled out of the Abyss with Him, claw by claw, word by word.

That damned book. It came first when I was falling during the first covid pandemic. I’d given up my supermarket job to volunteer my way into paid work in conservation and my volunteering had been cancelled leaving me with no paid or voluntary role. Utterly unpublishable but writing it got me through.

It came again when I realised I couldn’t cope in a career in the environmental sector. For the last year and a half I’ve worked on it full time, realised it is no good. 

That crutch has gone but I’m still putting my hand out – writing whilst falling.

*

I’m back in another antinomy – I love writing but can’t make a living from it. 

When I first met Gwyn He asked me to promise to give up my ambition to be a professional author in return for journeying with Him to Annwn. I did it for a while. I took various jobs, cleaning, packing, supermarket, wrote as service for my Gods.

But, sneakily, oh so sneakily, in the back of my mind, I never got rid of the treacherous hope that promise would only be temporary. If I worked hard well enough the veto might come off, I might be able to have my cake and eat it.

I published three books. Sold more copies than I hoped for such niche work. Even got professionally published. Not enough to make a living of course but enough to convince me I might be able to write something that did better. 

Ten years after my initial dedication to Gwyn I asked Him by divination about whether that promise still holds and got 1. The Wanderer and thought I was free of it. It’s notable here I asked through the tarot rather than asking Him directly. Consciously I did this because I feared my discernment might be off. Maybe unconsciously, I feared, knew, he’d say, ‘No’. I read the card wrong. In the traditional tarot The Wanderer is the The Fool. I was fooling myself. As I write these words I hear the laughter of my God and realise what a fool I was.

At one point I hoped In the Deep might not only sell to my small Polytheist and Pagan audience but might also appeal to fantasy readers, taking the stories of Gwyn and the other Brythonic Gods into the mainstream.

Hubris. It didn’t work. An individual can’t write myth. And I’m not that good a writer.

A difficult lesson learnt. My ambition to be a professional writer given up for good, vomited up, committed to the Abyss, I’m falling again, writing whilst falling.

I’m remembering my vision of the three gates. I can’t make a living as a writer. I don’t want to die either. I’m asking what lies beyond the third gate.

In the next part I will be writing about the ‘Abyss Mystics’ who, unlike me did not try to cling on, to write themselves out of the Abyss, were not afraid of falling.

(1) In particular using Husserl’s epoche (setting aside all assumptions of existence) as an experiential practice.
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant’s_antinomies
(3) In ‘Scapeland’ Lyotard writes of the ‘The Thing’ as sublime – ‘the mind draws itself up when it draws a landscape, but that landscape has already drawn its forces up against the mind, and that in drawing them up, it has broken and deposed the mind (as one deposes a sovereign), made it vomit itself up towards the nothingness of being-there.’
(4) In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche wrote, ‘Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster; and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you.’