Read Online Cedilla by Adam Mars-Jones - Free Book Online

but to half-sit at a jaunty sideways angle. Sitting with a bit of leaning built into it. This was a welcome change.
    Walking was also mildly transformed. I needed a stick to help my balance, but as long as I had that I could get about fairly smartly. Still at a snail’s pace, but a limber, youthful snail, impatient to find what was round the corner.
    To beguile the tedium of healing the Platonic Librarian of Bourne End worked hard on my behalf. She cast her net widely. Mum had been filling Mrs Pavey in about my foibles and fascinations. She must have mentioned my interest in the occult and mystical, and so various books came along that were attuned to those vibrations. I remember Psychic Self-Defence by Dion Fortune, which made me want to join some sort of esoteric Order. But how to find one, and how to know it was the right one? Through Mum I ordered a monthly journal called Prediction from the stationer’s in Bourne End and pored over the cryptic small advertisements. Of course the occult wave-lengths are jammed with trash. I needed the equivalent of Mum’s indispensable consumer guide to pick and choose among the hundreds on offer, a sort of Which Cult? The desire to retreat from the world was fierce inme, perhaps because the world seemed to care so little whether I was in it or not. It was the same they’ll-miss-me-when-I’m-gone motivation as lay behind my ‘suicide attempt’ at school.
    Mrs Pavey also unearthed books on astral projection and the Tarot. I read the astral projection one first. Hardly surprising that I was drawn to an occult practice that promises so much. I needed no convincing that the physical body was a rubbishy contraption, hopelessly inefficient and outmoded. The book gave instructions for travel in another dimension, no ticket required.
Autofellation
    You needed neither driving licence nor working hips. All you needed was ‘a dream of knowledge’ – a lucid dream, to wit a dream in which you knew you were dreaming. I had plenty of those. It’s just that I was accustomed to using them in a rather vulgar way. It turned out I was already an old hand at astral projection, I just didn’t project myself very far. To be exact, I projected myself just far enough away from the physical body to get astral cock into astral mouth. Autofellation. On the astral plane I turned out to be remarkably limber. In lucid dreams I became Ouroboros, mystical worm swallowing its own tail. If my tail was good enough for Luke Squires at Vulcan School it was good enough for me. It had never occurred to me before I read the book from Mrs Pavey’s library that I could use the same technique to leave the room.
    Now, armed with new knowledge, I was ready for some proper exploring. I learned to drift away from the physical envelope through the escape hatch of a dream of knowledge. One night I found myself in a sort of astral maze, opening doors which just led to grey corridors full of other doors, which led to more of the same. An esoteric labyrinth from which there seemed to be no exit, a dreadful place.
    Another time I made better progress. I remember leaving the body and venturing forth into the æther. The night sky received me warmly. I looked back, and I could see myself sleeping. The book said I would see a glowing cord linking the astral body and the gross bundle back in the bed, a sort of mystical umbilical, but there was no sign of anything like that. I was untethered. I was a kite withouta string. Undeterred I started off into the welcoming void, waiting to feel the astral breeze on my face, to gaze on the placid features of eternity, when suddenly I had a rush of panic. It wasn’t a feeling that seemed to belong to me but (of course) a disembodied panic. Then I had the sensation of returning, actually twanging back to the physical plane with great force. There was an almost audible snapping of the spiritual elastic. I woke up with a start, re-identified with the gross, inefficient, outmoded body. This