Those with overarching Fortean, or in my case Keelian, interests will inevitably try to create a cohesive theory to explain the odd events that seem to be occurring all around them. An understandable, if potentially misguided, act that can lead to further confusion or an eventual break with base reality, it is nonetheless almost a requirement when the damned facts begin to stack so high that they defy filing away. For adepts who also work within the bounds of chaos magick this is especially pronounced, as the wider reading and hands on exploration that discipline demands pushes them further into strange territory than most.

So then, it is time for me to properly introduce the reasoning behind my own contribution to the wider debate. The Barghest Wyrd. Simple words, but hinting towards a much deeper meaning than it at first first appears. Malformed and nebulous in origin, the concept gifts me an extremely broad brush to paint with, each bristle a seemingly unrelated and yet tightly interwoven oddity collected along the twisting twilight lanes of my very strange life. And those efforts to try and force all those assumed truths, personal experience and tall tales into something approaching a recognisable hyperobject has been difficult, but cathartic.

As a thought experiment my gaunt, flash bang eyed and tentacled void canine owes much to the works of Howard Philips Lovecraft and John Keel, both of which seem to resonate with the same mythopoetic energy despite wildly differing origins. The Mothman Prophecies, Disneyland of the Gods and The Eighth Tower could all literally be considered cosmic horror after all, especially in their more esoteric moments, though the fact that all are told with something approaching the sardonic wit of the magazine columnist gives the books a material grounding that actively legitimises the words on the page.

     On Sunday, August 4, 1577, an extremely violent thunderstorm shook the church of Bungay, Suffolk, in England. A fearful black dog appeared inside the church. Two parishioners who were touched by the animal were instantly killed, and a third shriveled up like a drawn purse. On the same day, a similar hound appeared in the church at Blythburgh, seven miles away. This event resulted in the death of three people and the sudden illness of several others. Today, the Blythburgh market’s weathervane depicts the fiendish hound. [1]

On a personal level this ongoing hunt for the Barghest Wyrd is the obvious outcome of my esoteric studies up to this point, coupled with the deeply engrained archetype of the doomed scholar delving into infernal regions best left alone. Herein dwells my canine avatar of strange chaos, and just like the unmanned protagonist of Lovecraft’s The Music of Erich Zann I continue to listen closely for any hint of madness on the wind. As with any thought experiment it will inevitably reflect my own psyche, forming a mirror looking back over the many and varied disciplines that feed its ever flaming maw.

I have long spoken about being empty, and far from an attempt to cultivate a dark or edgy status it is instead a genuine description of my philosophy of magick. The ideas I work with on a daily basis are the howls that ripple through me, important during their direction of travel but rarely strong enough to drag my psyche along with them for any more than a few days at a time. Yet their echoes remain within the cells of my being once the noise has returned to silence. I am that I am because I am also them, and as a result the Barghest Wyrd is as much carved from those damned ideas as it is my own imagination.

It is no surprise that memetics plays a major role in my perhaps delirious attempts to pin the pelt on this sinewy beast. Ideas spread within culture like genes passed down through populations, they replicate in the minds of those who either champion or fear them. Religion, currency, the safety from physical harm that most feel behind a couple of painted wooden planks. None of this is real, just assumptions and schemas inherent in the zeitgeist. God will save you. Money has value. Your home is your castle. If enough people believe something they create the social scaffolding that apparently makes it so.

It is not unreasonable to consider the above to once have been hyperstitons, seemingly immanent concepts that lay the foundation of their becoming through the dreams and aspirations of those wanting them to be so. The over implementation of half formed AI is one such example, an idea that has been in the cultural birth canal since the early days of science fiction, rooting itself in the minds of every tech bro with tokens to burn until now. Of course, the Barghest Wyrd has a paw in this arena too, haunting the nightmares of cutting edge neural organoid chipsets for no other reason than to prove it could.

An antithesis to this is found in the hauntological, ideas that did not quite make the cut. A collection of unmanifested futures which failed to become real but still tug on the deep mind. Mirroring the motions of the damned facts that make up the self same strange, so easily dismissed by people who will unconsciously quicken their step as they walk through reputedly haunted halls. Because while many of the concepts that fought for their space within the zeitgeist are powerful due to the foothold they now have on a material level, those echoes of unfulfilled ideas are empowered specifically because they never did.

     What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange - not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we “enjoy what scares us”. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This fascination usually involves a certain apprehension, perhaps even dread - but it would be wrong to say that the weird and the eerie are necessarily terrifying. I am not here claiming that the outside is always beneficent. There are more than enough terrors to be found there; but such terrors are not all there is to the outside. [2]

Like many in the chaos magick community I dwell within the boundaries of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, stating as it does that truth is a personal construct arising from both language and mental activity. This is then given further weight on a broader interpersonal level when politics, religion or even folklore facilitate the spread of those once individual concepts into the group mind. Memetic transfer via pure weight of numbers, and an insidious method for controlling the values that a population will ultimately desire society to embody. Narrative is a weapon, as those in power have long realised.

The Barghest Wyrd is an anti-meme. An infohazard actively, though perhaps accidentally, resisting orchestrated control. A snarling reminder than the world is far stranger than the average man or woman in the street could ever know. Those who spend their every waking moment making all the stories about them cannot stop the bizarre news from ruining their expensively promoted Greyface agenda. Frog falls. Bigfoot. Even out of place objects and hauntings. Magick of every conceivable kind. These are the gifts which it distributes indiscriminately among those who would likely rather look away.

All this then forms the seed bed necessary for some very strange times. As for what my shaggy furred, flash bang eyed godform actually is remains another question entirely. While dwelling outside of our base reality its form in language space arises from two seemingly unrelated words which suited better than most. The Barghest is a black dog from Northern English folklore, haunting the muddy rural trackways after dark and either harming or helping travellers as it sees fit. And the Wyrd is a somewhat open Anglo-Saxon term that loosely translates to fate or destiny. This I can offer, and nothing more.

Of course, obfuscation is a core concept in how it functions. Those passively observing the influx of poltergeist cases, Mothman sightings, magnetic children and supposedly Atlantean architecture will only be able to see are the moonlight tinged tentacles on the beast’s back as it slinks down the trash choked alleyways of culture, its super massive husk obscured by both street light and shadow. Exploration of the reports at hand must go deeper than simply cataloguing and repeating those visible events. Comparisons, contrasts, leaps of logic and pattern recognition. That is the future of the once Fortean arts.

The final point of note is that of cosmicism, the idea that humans are inconsequential within the bounds of a cold and impersonal universe. This nihilism actively feeds into the above paragraphs, finally gifting something of an unforgiving personality to the black dog the heart of the strange itself. An uncertain mix between universal process and sentient entity, this seeming interest in the lives of those who draw its gaze is purely mechanical. It cannot be bargained with, nor worshipped for gain. And no, naming it does not grant the person who voiced those words any control over how it chooses to act within the material realm.

Of course historically neither the Forteans, Keelians nor magickians have been the only groups to fish in those subconscious waters, and the advent of the internet allowed for a slow but now total democratisation of folklore via BBS posts and forum flash fiction. Suddenly campus cannibals or backwoods bunnyman were free to roam the world, albeit as reported sightings and friend of a friend morality tales. Local rumour had become global mythology, and fictions would lead to real world consequences. The Barghest Wyrd’s canine form seems to denote something playful. But no, the force at the heart of this theory has teeth.

     The tulpa has been absorbed into modern magical theory via the Chaos Magic school - the inveterate pack-rat nature of Chaos practitioners means that few if any of the world’s occult and mystical concepts have gone untapped … and the possibility of making imagination manifest in such a direct form meshes nicely with their concepts of Servitor and Egregore, and with the memetic transmission of occult ideas and powers. So, the possibility of constructing a tulpa is relatively well-known in modern magical praxis - which may or may not have influenced its appearance as an integral part of the Slenderman mythos. [3]

The role of the internet in the spread of those tallest of stories cannot be understated, nor should the idea of the online space as synthetic subconscious be discounted when trying to understand the memetic forces at play in the wider cultural landscape. Creepypasta creatures have a long reach. Slenderman inspired children to violence in his name, while Jeff the Killer would rise above the atrocious tale that birthed him to become a heartthrob in all the wrong circles. The SCP Foundation hosted an entire mythos of potentially world ending monsters before falling headlong into The Backrooms. And yes, Ben definitely drowned too.

Ultimately, the response is the key to unlocking the true nature of this thought experiment. While the Barghest Wyrd itself may be a vast and unknowable cosmic process that only seems to have a roguish sense of humour due to the perception of those who are witness to the chaotic events that spread in its wake, the more the concept is engaged with the more it changes you. A self seeding infestation, repeated exposure to the stranger aspects of the world either reinforces those already damned ideas within the psyche of the individual or causes a knee-jerk rejection against it. In that latter case the hardcore Skeptics are born.

Also, it should be noted that the explanations which those sour voices of assumed reason champion when seeking to demystify strange events have very little effect on how that flame mawed canine infests their world. Believe or disbelieve. Signal or noise. Truth or dare. It revels in the reaction to the unnatural, not the air inversions or pareidolia that it fell back on to snarl those Keelian oddities into existence in the first place. Above all it must be remembered that while base reality is its playground, this avatar of relativism and chaos exists somewhere else entirely. And it does not care what you think you know.

So what the observer chooses to do when faced with the burning maw of the Barghest Wyrd is ultimately up to them. On one hand it offers a uniquely passive method of culture deprogramming, wherein slow immersion into stranger and stranger concepts gives the freedom to realise that life lacks core truths outside of those imposed upon the individual by the majority. On the other, madness and disassociation are both distinct possibilities. This is especially true when the memes being absorbed are the result of conspiratorial groups with political or social axes to grind. Never underestimate the power of hate.

Mileage will vary of course, and not everyone will fall for the outlandish claims of others. For some, the purity of exploring the strange for its own sake will win out over more knowingly constructed and in some ways farmed narratives, which is how it should be. Regardless, if the backdoor to the cultural psyche is left open this force of canine chaos happily pads into its new home, creating havoc until it is satisfied. Magick is its melody, folklore its apocrypha. Better to watch it snore quietly by your fireside than try to shoo it out of the house, because now you know it exists it definitely sees you too.

[1] Bob Trubshaw, Black Dogs, Storytelling: An Encyclopedia Of Mythology And Folklore, M. E. Sharpe Inc, Page 67.
[2] Mark Fisher, The Weird And The Eerie, Repeater, 2017, Pages 8 - 9.
[3] Ian Vincent, The Slenderman, Darklore Volume 6, Daily Grail Publishing, 2011, Page 27.