Carcosa Bound

Alexandria is my favourite place in Egypt.

The sensuous curve of the long waterfront is a delightful walk; not even the starving, fornicating stray cats or the constant pestering horse-and-cart touts detract overly from this lovely seaside stroll.

The place does feel different from the more inland parts of Egypt, somehow – whether the gentle Mediterranean breezes, or the faint echoes of its legendary founding and subsequent cosmopolitanism seems unclear.

A Temple of Knowledge

The Library – Bibliotheca Alexandrina – is a magnificent building, and one of the architectural highlights. Something about the place feels deeply Archeofuturist, and not in a shitty low-resolution “despise sports, love wheatfields” kind of way. The structure realises a purity of vision. This is rare these days.

Inside – the hundreds of thousand of books, in a wide range of languages. The reading room is incredible, also, and features a series of steps leading downwards, into a well, providing progressively quieter and more secreted spots for deep thinking and inquiry.

In the more open areas, there are literacy-related treasures on display – printing presses and calendaring machines of historical or technological note; tapestries embroidered with scriptures, and calligraphy; mastheads and assorted notebooks from famous local publishing houses.

The Internet Archive has servers there, too – banks upon banks of servers on display, guarding the memory of the internet. It was a wonderful thing to see this seamless integration into this newest information age, in this special place.

Ancient Rituals

A day later, preparing to leave this city, in a moment of quiet reflection, I perform the Rite of the Headless One.

I like the early form of the ritual from The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: PGM V. 96-172, otherwise called The Stele of Jeu the hieroglyphist. A key figure in the grimoire revival, Jake Stratton Kent, called it “the single most important ritual in modern magic”, in his provocative and useful chapbook The Headless One.

Performing this short ritual here seems fitting – it was from this place, and, though in translation, the intent is there and the words still have power. The familiar feeling of momentous connection grows, as I say these beautiful words, but it hits even harder and deeper somehow.

I flap around for a while afterwards, enjoying the dis-integration and return to familiar awareness, slipping back into the usual clown costume I live in, with all its ridiculous, earnest concerns.

The Uber driver arrives – we found taking Egyptian Ubers between cities is the easiest and least-complicated way of getting around – and we begin our drive back to Cairo.

Egyptian drivers are exceptional, and have a mechanical proprioception attuned to a degree I’ve never seen before. They also drive fast, especially on the broad, straight desert roads connecting the cities.

Desert Rains

We’re out in the desert when the rain begins. Torrential – the heaviest we’ve encountered anywhere in our travels so far, and in the middle of the Egyptian desert, of all places.

Part of me questions our driver’s wet-weather driving experience. Another part immediately offers reassurance: we wanted proof, experience, knowledge. A story. You’ve got it.

The particular line from the third part of the ritual I performed earlier is booming, repeating over and over now. This is when the Magician joins with, and is empowered by, the Headless One. These words, now heavy with cosmic importance, are absolutely obvious, natural, inescapable:

“My sweat falls upon the Earth as Rain, that it may inseminate it.”

This magic is as real as it gets. And it is beautiful.