The Church of the Great Abyss was founded by our Mother Tiamat at 9.00 pm on the 26th. of October (according to the Rev. James Lightfoot, a notable Hebraist) in the year 4004 BC (if you accept the calculations of Bishop Ussher).

At that moment our Mother received the Word in a virulent form and went completely to pieces.

The Father could have been Ophion
(according to the Pelasgians)
or Elohim
(according to the Hebrews)
or Ialdebaoth
(according to the Gnostics)
or Eros
(according to Hesiod)
or any one of a posse of playboy demiurges
who hovered
menacingly
over the deeps,
dangling their dongles in the primordial abyss.

He did not wait around.
Protoplasm does not jive with the purity of the Logos.

"I never saw his face." she sighed.
"He breathed sweet nothings in my ear, saying
'Let there be....'
And I didn't catch the end of it."

Our Mother, the Great She-Toad, filled the deeps with her spawn.
In each egg,
A world fertilised by the drifting semen of the Word.

The world-spawn drifted in the deeps.
The oldest hatched, each from its world-egg,
No two alike, no two different.
The ministry of our Great Mother
was begat by the monstrous firstborn,
apostles to the world-spawn.

"Believe in the Mother," they murmered,
"Or we will surely devour you."
"Believe in the Mother," they murmered,
"And we will certainly devour you."
"Believe in doubly-valued logic," they slavered,
"And you deserve what you get."

Our Mother is the mother of chaos.
No two of her children are alike.
Identity is an abstraction,
and abstractions lead to unity,
to a deus absconditus
who wandered off,
parting the veils of the Unmanifest
Like a virgin's bloody flower.

Our Mother is the mother of chaos. No two of her children are different.
Difference presumes identity,
identity is an abstraction,
and abstractions lead to the House of God.

La Maison Dieu -
a folly
of towering
proportions.

To be something is an identification.
To be something is an abstraction.
Abstractions are the disease of a mind dreaming in a world-egg
drifting in the Deep.

Noisy pots cannot comprehend their emptiness.
Those who know what they are,
are anathema to our Mother.
Swim with the firstborn.
Embrace the Deep.

Let go of the something - become everything and nothing.
To be nothing, you must sacrifice everything.

There is a way.
I, Miranda Raven, am that way.
Not the means, but certainly the way...

I will take your everything.

I will take your gold rings, and your silver chains.
Your crowns and your crosses.
Your teeth.
(I don't particularly want your teeth,
but there might be gold in them, and it will do you
no harm to undergo the indignity of losing them.)

I will take your wet dreams.
The loose change in your pocket.
Your pension.
Your lustrous hair.
Your fine muscles (which will wither in any case, so
give them now while you can - there is no use in wailing
at the gates of Hell).

I will smoke your ambition in my bubble pipe,
and become intoxicated with your dreams.
I will saddle your nightmares and visit my kin.

You owe me your living.
Strew my path with furs,
That I may tread barefoot through your soul.
Carve a throne of black obsidian in your heart
That I might be seated in the midst of your desires.
Shower me with gold and jewels for no reason at all
(but it seems like an excellent idea).
For the more literal, dollar bills will do.
Give me your equities - less lyrical than ermine,
But spreadsheets have their own splendour,
And accountants serve me better than temple eunuchs.

I am a grasping and greedy woman who loves luxury.
Mother Tiamat grants her priestess this indulgence:
to revel in the riches others have discarded.
Only an impeccable and undiscerning greed
can consume your everything and set you free.

Give me your pride, your ambition, your loose change,
And whatever teeth remain,
And I will walk you to the edge of the deep,
Where the old ones wait for noisy pots
Bearing the banners of this-or-that,
Red-crossed banners of bisection
Marching on their new Jerusalem.

Into the maws. Into the maws.

I will show you the Gates (fifty),
And Paths (thirty-two),
And the world-spawn (beyond the artifice of gematria).

And now to my discipline....

Like a hand outstretched in the sun,
each thing evokes its shadow.

Our Mother wants
no pallid unification,
each thing with its opposite,
dancing a stately minuet into the Ark,
(as if that could preserve the world from a rising tide).

You must become your shadow. Your shadows. Devolve.

Metamorphosis. Transformation.

Transmogrification. Umbrification.

Mother Chaos is a fine masseur,
kneading the knots of self-importance
and belief,
blurring the bisections and the boundaries
between this-or-that.
Let our Mother take your form
for feeding to her kin..

You won't be needing it.

Scorn the fishers of men -
acquire the manners of fish.
Devolve.
Back to the slime, back to the ooze.

You could be kelp, swaying in the ocean swell.
A sea-slug, corpulent on the sandy floor.
A swimming supper for phosphorescent jaws.
A spiny horror fast to a rock.

And stranger still in the coal-scuttle deeps,
tossed and swirled in the anthracite wake of Leviathon,
bobbing with the world spawn in the briny murk
twixt this-or-that.

Consume yourself,
lest the vacant jaws that trawl the deep
find you first,
a cowering worm god curled in a world egg,
the deus absconditus revealed,
the father of your lie.

The Church of the Great Abyss copyright © Miranda Raven 1994

This version released on the Internet on 17/10/95. Permission is granted to make personal copies of this material, and it may be freely circulated in electronic form so long as this trailer remains intact. Publication or sale of this material without the written permission of the author is expressely forbidden.