Since its inception back in the summer of 2023 I have used The Accelerated Chaote to not only republish my professional writing but also blog on a variety of occult and paranormal topics which may be too personal or divisive to submit for a paying audience. More so than just an exercise in generating page views, this enforced creativity has allowed me a much needed place to reflect on how I got here and what it means to be on this journey into the weird. Opinion, reflection, education, my online portfolio has created a space for all of these and more. A pathworking by any other name as the always over used saying goes.

On a personal level one of the most hotly debated aspects of my practice, a question which I find myself looping back to over and over again, revolves around what put me upon this road to self realisation in the first place. And why I chose magick over sane reality when the time came. Considering that my long term memory fades pretty sharply back before my teens, it is intriguing to note that one of the few scenes from my childhood that I vividly remember revolves around going to see Labyrinth at the cinema when I was seven. Yes, I am actually old enough to have gone along to the original release, or at least the UK one at any rate.

The venue was no doubt a dingy little East End picture house replete with chewing gum under the seats and dandruff in the popcorn, yet for an hour and a half I was transported to a world where the unreal was made starkly manifest. And more importantly, that unreality made more sense than the hellhole I grew up in. Even as a young child I saw the world of the Goblin King as a better option than the slums and ghettos I was forced to inhabit. For years afterwards I would spend many hours looking wistfully out of the window, trying to call Jareth and his kin to take me away.

Not that anyone would bother wasting thirteen hours to find me of course. Sadly, I was too young at the time to realise that Labyrinth was just a film. Cursed with a sharp intellect, an education dogged by dyslexia and an inability to fit in with the rest of the brain dead dross that lived in one of the poorest areas of London, I could not understand why I was not worthy to be free. I roamed inside my own head for many years, playing games with imaginary friends, summoning entire universes into existence in the blink of an eye before dismissing them again just as easily.

And all the while I remembered the world that was said to exist just to the left of our own, hidden in the spaces between what should and should not be. A place where I fit in. A real home. In my dreams I walked barefoot on the cobbles of the Labyrinth, wondered freely through the enchanted forest, avoided the goblin guards. Those nocturnal sojourns feel like a lifetime ago now in their innocence, before my dreams were taken from me entirely. Before I watched my whole world fall down around my ears. Bad mojo best forgotten I suppose, though the memories most definitely remain.

So I drifted through a very different labyrinth, one made of asphalt and concrete, the supposedly real world of low paid jobs and failed friendships. I played Dungeons and Dragons, read comic books, became interested in heavy metal music and grunge culture. I was still an awkward and lonely teen, yet I tried my best to fit in with people who had little interest in either my motivations or desires. But Sarah’s all too eventful hike to find her half brother remained a rallying cry in my despair, an ideal world just barely out of my imaginative reach but close enough to taste.

This is not just a love letter to a classic movie though. My writing carries far more weight than mere review. Yes, of course it would be disingenuous to say that Labyrinth was ultimately responsible for getting me into magick. It takes very little effort to see that a folklore and urban legend obsessed misfit would try to mythologise their own world no matter the consequences. Disassociation from reality taking the form of gutter goblins, smog sylphs, broken dryads and ghostforms. Personification as living fiction, mysticism made real through the desire to be free coursing through my veins.

There are so many reasons why I do what I do, why the dead crowd around me and the mother of all demons finds a place in my rituals. Pacts made, blood spilled, pain as currency. Yet as I struggle to make sense of my earliest memories, back before I picked up my first book on ghosts or collection of folklore, I see Jareth and Sarah, Hoggle and the worm. I see the denizens of the Labyrinth, the forgotten children who would go on to become the goblin army. And part of me still aches to join them, even as I crawl through middle age stuck in a world that was never supposed to be all there is.