Frater Acher, Mutabor: A Journey into the Goêtic Flesh, s.l.: Paralibrum Press 2024, Digital Download Edition

Review by Craig ‘VI’ Slee

Mutabor: A Journey into the Goêtic Flesh is a funny beast — or maybe that should be a queer deor? Deor, of course, is the Old English word which became replaced by the Latin-derived animal; though it exists in the depreciated form of deer. Used now to describe those creatures grouped under the family of cervids — or harts,in another nod to Old English and the hall of Heorot in Beowulf — deor is, or was, “that which breathes.”  That breathing is how we symbolise, notice life — and where we get “animism” from

Mutabor is written in English by Frater Acher (with art by Rafael Pascuale Zamora). Most know that the author is German, but has been producing works in English for a long time, some of which have been arguably regarded as seminal. It is the first (to this reviewer’s knowledge) major longform work released by Paralibrum Press, with stalwart copyediting by ever-erudite magician, translator, and thinker, Frater U∴D∴ (also German).

Perhaps you can see the German Tier, the Old English deor, and the modern English deer as strange kin, much like fleisch and flesh — goêtic and otherwise. Inextricably linked and yet full of subtle nuances and flavours, tastes and sensory experiences which engender various and sundry rich contexts. After all, Mutabor is focused on the worlds of the body, the senses and their sensuosities.

It is, at heart (or hart) a pursuit of something often forgotten, or shoved to one side in so-called Western magic — aside, perhaps, from the often-arbitrary silo of “sex-magic”. A trajectory which takes us within something taken for granted, as stable and axiomatic, as given, in shape and form.

But in taking us into, within, it provides an understanding of the Outside, the beyondness, the excess which lies beyond the confines of the standard human subject, into the realms of hive and horde, where spirits of the living and the dead penetrate, imbricate, and implicate themselves in strange kinships with humans, landscape and spirits of place and other times — that which Frater Acher calls “Radical Otherness”. As he says in the Preface:

The eclectic array of tools provided here – ranging from filthy flesh to Scythian scare, from Conan to Cthulhu – serves as an inoculation against the mundane, immersing you in Radical Otherness. (p. 8)

There is a tendency in modern mainstream publishing to “do trilogies”, and while I remain unsure if it’s deliberate, one could certainly see Mutabor as part of a “Radical Otherness Trilogy”. Beginning with Acher’s Ingenium, continuing through Goêtic Atavisms (which I co-authored) before moving into Mutabor.

While Ingenium focused on the “magical mind” and the imaginal powers and potencies which might open pathways into Radical Otherness, and his portions of Goêtic Atavisms bridge the gap between his other more “traditional works” and Radical Otherness, Mutabor-as-fleshly-meditation presents us with a less usual set of tools. Indeed, they look less like tools, and more like dosages. That’s to say, the inoculation spoken of in the Preface is less an invading Outsider coming to rewrite our DNA and render us into Frankenstein-ian monstrous offspring, and more the stranger met in-and-at the cross-roads of our flesh.

What occurs in that meeting is not something done by fiat; instead, it is accomplished by a conspiracy of Goêtic Flesh(es) and all the other powers, potencies, and presences. A sharing of breath, close and near, intimate as a lover.   

The change, the shift which occurs, cannot be accomplished alone — an inoculation requires there to be an immune system in the first place. Immunity is therefore not, as seemingly the majority believe, about being untouchable, inviolate, invincible. Rather, it works precisely by touch, and being-touched. By diffusion across membrane, hol(e)y porosity, where “balance” is constantly knocked off, modulated by feedback with-through-and-because-of myriad homeostatic systems and presences.

Each of these chapters delivers a different flavour of attack on our common perceptions of the (male) body. Over the course of each chapter, we are attempting to derail the train of our culturally conditioned body perception – so that we can get off track and discover our own sensual experience of the flesh, instead of following culturally prescribed expectations. (p. 12)

This then, is the central thesis of the 132 pages, which may certainly pack a punch, especially if one feels relevance with the sense of the personal embodiment dealt with here. The grounding in the paragraph above is well taken as a nota bene, especially for this reviewer, since my own sense of (cis)male embodiment appears to be wildly variant from that “norm” (in some senses) due to disability and my own fugitive crip-embodiments. So, in my view, the text is worthwhile — even if one does not feel oneself to fit a “male” designation.

Nonetheless, these personal reflections of Acher’s are not mere attempts to transpose his lived experience into a universality. In his own words:

[Mutabor] is deliberately positioned at the crossroads of historic- anthropological observation and the resonances of deep ritual practice. (p. 8f.)

The chapters themselves serve unmistakably within the strands of multiple philosophical and exegetic lineages. Whether that lineage be the Conan/Cthulhu oeuvre so skillfully unearthed by scholars like S. T. Joshi, Houellebecq and others, or the weirdness of the Scythian so obviously threading through Jake Stratton-Kent’s Geosophia: An Argo of Magic  (a work of goêtic synthesis and tracing which draws on the work of other scholars) — there is no doubt that these various streams flow into a rich, swampy, fermentation which belies the idea of conventional “Voidness.”

This latter concept has often proven a stickling point for this reviewer in Frater Acher’s other work. I have always had to look at my own magical experiences and wonder where discomfort and distaste might be down to personal interpretation of an author’s concepts and/or contexts. We all carry our own meanings, baggages and interpretations. Yet within the framing of Mutabor, there is something of a shift which brings clarity. “Void”, while only mentioned once, in the preface, is revealed as profusional, almost pleromatic. Yet its revealing is indirect; openness not as empty space but space as thick with possibility — space as overflowing with Radically Other-bodies and bodyness.

Here then is the “filthy fat” which overlays and conceals in rolls and revels, crevices and cracks; that sweats and breathes and stinks and generates its own atmosphere — long regarded as vile and miasmic by societies and cultures our own looks back to with a fondness for a manufactured bodily ideal that borders on the fanatical.

Here then, is the opaque illegible softness where sharp planes and lines are blurred; the obscurant darknesses which render the fluid, yielding, pulsing nature of the viscera and organ, in all their fierce and terrible vulnerability — as visibly external.

The sensoriums of goêtic flesh are first encountered in the blacknesses of the Night, in the veritable darknesses within. As goêtes, within the rubrics of Frater Acher’s writings:

We [then] find ourselves surrounded by the light and wonder of creation. Awakening from these nocturnal journeys, we recognise the impetuous beauty of the bulky fat body as well as that of the gaunt and aged one. We sense vibrant life behind perfectly tamed hair just as much as underneath bristly beards and wild manes. We inhale, chew and swallow, filling our bodies with alien life-forms and toxins. We eat and breathe filth. Deep in our blood and down to our bones we are filth: boundlessly interwoven in a world that does not tolerate isolation. All identity is but a strand in the rhizomatic web of embodiment, nothing in and of itself, and yet vibrating with intent when viewed in the context of its environment. (p. 27)

This is Geosophic relatability and relationality — Earth (Geo) + Sophia (wisdom, personification of). If we be “golems” as Acher suggests, it is because we are earthlings-that-breathe-and-were-breathed-into. Notice that, given the paragraph above, this does not even have to be some transcendent Platonic ideal that is breathed into-us from on-high. As part of the rhizomatic web, matter itself breathes. That is, it all participates in the winds of this planet and the solar winds which blow in the starry cavern of night, the vaulted heavens — in a living, dying, breathing, ever-shifting kosmos.

Matter is Mater is Mother, is Matrix.

In this, any gnostic-goêtic comprehension is not about denial of the world, denial of matter — but that the standard notions of our society deny matter as living and animate in favour of some transcendental ideal.

The standard notions of the world are as dumb, unspeaking, passive, dead matter which we may shape into an ideal by force of “will”, just as our bodies exist to be disciplined, shaped, and commanded. For the goês however — those whose name comes from goáō, “to groan, wail, to howl, to lament” — the kosmos is all-speaking, all-singing; even and especially in the depths of darkness and silence.

Grief, gravity, grave — all these share a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “heavy.” We all know what it is to feel an inevitable centripetal force drawing us downwards, the pull of every piece of matter on each other piece. This trajectory towards inevitable descent, inexorable katabasis, far from being trap, may be seen as a kind of release from the prison of the “ideal”. Such agnostic gnostic defiance, the embrace of not-knowing, embracing what Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant called: “right to opacity”, may free us from the tyranny of “performance”.

As Acher comments in his critique of Julius Evola and fascist hard-body aesthetics:

Performance then becomes the freely available antidote to the omnipresent venom of filth. [...] Evola’s distorted hermetic art and the beginnings of body building in the early 20th century are characterised by a performative compulsion i.e. an obsession with performance at will. (p. 21, 75)

Whether or not Evola’s version of the “hermetic art” is “distorted”, one must be careful not to get caught up in a “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Much as we might wish otherwise, Evolan physics and metaphysics has its adherents — and even those who go beyond that.

There is a kind of occult and practical metaphysical practitioner that does seek both the Absolute Ideal and Absolute Wilful Discipline — indeed, Acher’s whole critique speaks towards this impulse within modernity: a kind of technocratic urge towards insulation and mastery which, paradoxically, is also found within so-called Traditionalism (certainly within its so-called “Radical” stream) and its exultation of perfected primitivism and begone “golden ages”.

That these seemingly opposed ideologies and ontologies contain an almost identical root impulse is extraordinarily telling as regards their reification of the status quo of modernity.

Compared to that, the Radical Otherness which Acher speaks of appears to move beyond notions of either exclusivity or inclusivity precisely because the goêtic flesh extends beyond the personal single body. This is despite the fact that our sensory experience of the world is sited and embedded within one instantiation of a human body. It is the relation of and with body and others which must necessarily include all the fleshes, materia, and spirits within the world in which we live.

In his discussion of the Scythian vs the Greek, the author makes the point that the cultural differences and assumptions around the body necessitates a conversation, a back and forth. Highlighting Pliny’s discussion of Scythian tattoos, he writes:

“Their bodies are inscribed”. We would like to propose this simple epithet as a statement about the goêtic condition of man as such: our bodies are inscribed with meaning from the inside and the outside, by the blood below our skin and by the glances of the people around us. Our bodies are vessels of significance, whether they be filled with blood or carved out of marble. Our bodies are filled with language. (p. 40)

Language requires others. Mere vocalisation, utterance, or gesture, is meaningless without context and relation. A singular sound cannot actually exist: in an animist kosmos, there is always something else present.

Here then, is the queer deor mentioned at the beginning of this review. For the fact is that the linguistic history and etymology buried in any given language shows traces of hybridity, shifts in meaning and context, borrowings, loanings, and transactions. Similarly then, the hybridity makes clear that no entity can exist alone, let alone intact. When discussing the Scythian “forms of relation” (as it were) Acher makes this position quite clear:

The bodies of familiar daemons and tutelary deities were brought in as witnesses to the ritual act. More than mere observers, however, their flesh was invited to participate and physically alter and affect the wine that was transformed into a daemonic hive-body. This hybrid body, in the form of wine, blood and the presence of daemonically charged metals, was then imbibed and incorporated into the humans’ flesh. In this way, the flesh of the gods was mixed with their own in the oath and an indissoluble bond was forged. (p. 50)

Furthermore, this shifting hybridity is, it seems, tantamount to perceiving ourselves as relational beings — as members of daemonic hives (or hordes, as this reviewer also called them in  Goêtic Atavisms). That is to say, we are not alone in our existences, but the world itself is the material, carnal, and carnival manifestation, of a world of living phenomena, as are we.

This brings me to the primary critique/enquiry I have of Mutabor.

In a relational kosmos such as Frater Acher presents here, in all its material multiplicities, this book is written for practitioners. As guide and toolkit, it attempts to give us various analyses and theoretical frameworks in order to perhaps transform our assumptions about embodiment.

The late Jake Stratton-Kent put to bed the idea that the name Goetia was the name for the spirits — which had previously been dominant in occulture. Via Geosophia (and other works) Jake opened minds to the idea that the goês was the practitioner.

It is difficult to underestimate how earthshaking (pun intended) this was at the time, both individually, and culturally, for many practitioners. For some, it necessitated a complete shift in worldview, while for others, it provided a backing for their own magical experiences and practices which had always been at odds with the transcendental norms inherited from the previous centuries.

Rather than the practitioner as a human “controlling” another order of beings, à la Prospero, this shift threw open the door, allowing the notion that the magician was, in some sense related to-and-with those beings, not in the sense of hierarchy, but at a more “flat” level. This, of course, enabled a re-evaluation of who and what the magician was, within a goêtic worldview. As central figure, assumptions about that figure had to be reconsidered and re-evaluated.

Ingenium, Goêtic Atavisms, and Mutabor are all about that re-evaluation on a practical and theoretical level. It is necessary work, and the work continues — as practitioners. I doubt very much that most of us are even half-done working through the very real ontological shift that this gestures towards. The transformation of assumptions is ongoing, which is why I believe Mutabor is an important and useful work that Paralibrum Press has thankfully made available to everyone, with, or without, donation.

However: In our quest to re-evaluate and transform assumptions, we should always take note of the fact of wider contexts. In our re-evaluation of the practitioner in a relational context, perhaps we should also ask ourselves: in what way, in spite of these transformations, am I reifying certain aspects of the status quo without even meaning to?

Perhaps it’s this reviewer’s philosophical background which makes him inclined to worry about such things, and if so, mea culpa. What I am about to write next should, perhaps, be taken as an open question — I certainly have no fixed answers, only instinct and intimations. So, in the spirit of enquiry, I find myself wondering, in what ways are the bodies of practitioners, the bodies of myself, of you the reader, not actually ours?

That’s to say, even in his discussion of Scythian hybridity, a distinction of ownership is made between the bodies of the gods and the blood and the wine, and the “theirs” of the Scythians.

While some of this is linguistic convenience in order to get a point across in a section about Scythians, it set me to wondering: in an animist kosmos, can we say truly that our bodies are solely “owned” by us?

As “We” thickens, can we truly talk of “our” bodies, “our” senses?

This may seem like philosophical and linguistic quibbling, since of course, any given text seeking to reach people should at least attempt to reach them where they lie. Yet, when we consider the insulatory properties of the “I”, issues of the “wilfulness” of the self in establishing a sense of identity and agency, and even the a priori assumption of their existence as given by modernity, what then?

My query is not one which suggests “dissolution of the ego” or even embrace of “no self”. Rather, what I’m attempting here is to ask in what ways Mutabor may inadvertently produce its own stumbling blocks to its own message. To be sure, as Acher says, this exploration of goêtic flesh originates in his own exploration of embodiment — everything is perceived and received through that. Yet, when discussing “Becoming All Flesh” in chapter VIII, he borrows the voice of Marshall McLuhan in order to articulate:

The human intention within any particular magical act has about as much importance as the stencilling on the casing of an atomic bomb. (p. 100)

He then leads us through a series of exercises to allow us to realise that “human flesh” is far broader than we might at first think, and that in fact, the medium (that is the way by which a given phenomenon comes to be, its embodiment or manifestation) of magic is “spirit contact”. Then he makes the extremely valid point that while a human may be performing a ritual for a particular purpose:

The eyes of the Others, however, are not fixated on the ostensible human message but on the establishment of a new channel in the ubiquitous medium. They don’t gaze at the centre of the circle but towards the dance at its periphery. […] The impact of the unintended collateral fertilisation by far outshines in relevance and impact the puny human’s agenda. (p. 104f.)

It is this decentralisation and defamiliarisation of the human which to me is key, and frankly, while I understand a run-up is required, I do wish Mutabor had framed this a little earlier, rather than towards the end.

To this reviewer, there is much left unsaid — even in Heorot, the hart-hall, the jaws of which Grendel rips open in Beowulf, Grendel (and his mother) are aglaeca, which is usually glossed as “monster”. Yet the term is applied to Beowulf himself too! The queering of modern ideas of hero and monster lies buried in the oldest English text we have. It is there in its materiality. Likewise, countless myths tell of hunter and hunted changing position, shape and form. Hunter may become hunted and vice versa again and again. A cosmogonic and cosmically erotic interrelation that has little to do with sex, and more generative kosmic forces.

Mutabor touches on this, teases even.

Right at the end Acher meets this reviewer’s enquiry with a hint, a beckoning. Whether or not that beckoning will lead to another book where Acher fleshes out (pun intended) the ontological and magical implications of what it might mean to operate, not as a practitioner but as a living-dead goês where the human is not at the centre? Only time will tell.

Some things exceed books, after all. But, as ever a lot is hidden in the language of embodiment so I look forward to what comes next. May it exceed the human’s parochialisms as much as possible.