Initiation by Nightmare

Sleep paralysis, cosmic horror and Chapel Perilous

May 01, 2024

Dear Living Dark reader,

The following essay appears in my 2022 book What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy. I am reprinting it here, with a few multimedia enhancements specifically added for this online version, because I think its topic, theme, and focus—which uses my spiritually and psychologically traumatic/transformative experiences of sleep paralysis in the 1990s as a springboard to broader reflections on the nature of creativity and reality—will be of distinct interest to you. (For more on the specific nature of those sleep paralysis attacks, including a detailed description of exactly what I experienced and encountered, see this post from my old Teeming Brain blog, which for the past fourteen years has been a magnet attracting hundreds of other people’s accounts of their own SP experiences.)

Before heading into the essay itself, I will pause to note that the rest of What the Daemon Said would probably interest you as well, since it’s not just about horror fiction and film but about the crisis of creativity, worldview, and personal identity that comes to everyone who deeply interrogates his or her life. To this end, the focus on horror is complemented and enriched by an equal focus on various philosophical, metaphysical, esoteric, paranormal, and spiritual matters. Laird Barron called it “a treasure trove for fans and scholars of weird fiction,” while John Shirley described it as “a fine, wide-ranging exploration of the deepest wellsprings of nightmare and chthonic revelation; of the roots of the monstrous and mythopoetic.” J. F. Martel, co-creator and co-host of the formidable Weird Studies podcast, characterized it as “spiritual turpentine.” For more about the book, including links to order it from Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and elsewhere, click the title above or the front-and-back cover image below:

Warm regards,

Initiation by Nightmare: Cosmic Horror and Chapel Perilous

When the first of many sleep paralysis attacks happened to me in the early 1990s, I had no idea that it was the onset of a period that I would later come to regard as a spontaneous shamanic-type initiation via nightmare. I didn’t know it would shatter the psychological, spiritual, ontological, metaphysical, and interpersonal assumptions that had undergirded my worldview and daily experience for so long that I had forgotten they were assumptions instead of givens. Terence McKenna, among others, has argued that, in accordance with the same principle that keeps a fish oblivious to the existence of water, the perturbation of consciousness is necessary for us even to become aware of the reality of consciousness as such. For me this was confirmed with lasting impact by the experience of waking up one night from a profoundly deep sleep to encounter a darkly luminous, vaguely man-shaped outline of a being that stood over me at the foot of the bed, and that shone with sizzling rays of shadow, and that represented a thunderous and sui generis—intended solely for me—black hole of a negative singularity, a presence whose entire reason for being was to draw me in and annihilate me. In the manner of dreams and daemons, the experience was as much cognitive and emotional as it was perceptual. There was no separation between these usually discrete categories. Nor was there a separation between the categories of self and other, between “me” and the assaulting presence. Horror was literally all there was, all that existed, all that was real—not as a reaction to the experience but as an organic and inevitable symmetry of being. I was not horrified. The experience was purely and simply horror.

When this proved to be not an isolated episode but an ongoing crisis spanning a period of months and years, and when the psychic effects began to leak into the daylight world and contaminate my daily life with a distinct and inescapable background static of creeping nightmarishness, I knew something dire had happened. I had crossed some sort of threshold, and the most likely vocabulary for thinking and talking about it was the vocabulary of cosmic horror, which I had learned from years of obsessively reading Lovecraft, Lovecraft criticism, and a whole host of associated authors.

I had crossed some sort of threshold, and the most likely vocabulary for thinking and talking about it was the vocabulary of cosmic horror.

There was, however, another vocabulary that I could have used, and it would have complemented the cosmic horrific one in mutually illuminating fashion. It was the vocabulary of consciousness change and high paranormal weirdness encoded in the idea of Chapel Perilous as explicated by Robert Anton Wilson. But this did not occur to me until much later.

Wikipedia has a brief article on Chapel Perilous that defines the term in its psychological use as “an occult term referring to a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain if they have been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, or if what appeared to be supernatural interference was a product of their own imagination.”1 I can’t think of a better succinct summary. But it only “works,” it only carries the appropriate vibe of electrifying significance, if you are aware of the details that lie behind it, including its origin story.

At the time when my crisis unfolded, I had already been enraptured for years by Wilson’s books, vibe, and guerilla ontological charm. Illuminatus!, the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy, The Illuminati Papers, the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, Prometheus Rising, The New Inquisition, Quantum Psychology, Cosmic Trigger, and several of his other books were canonical texts for me. So I was very well acquainted with his concept of Chapel Perilous, which was a central theme, perhaps the central theme, not just in his writing but in his life. And yet somehow I did not draw the obvious connection between this concept and my spiraling spiritual-existential crisis.

When Cosmic Trigger was published in 1977, Wilson was already associated with the idea of global occult conspiracies due to his co-authorship of the Illuminatus! trilogy, which he and Robert Shea had written with epic satirical intent. In Cosmic Trigger’s introduction, titled “Thinking about the Unthinkable,” he announced, “I no longer disbelieve in the Illuminati, but I don’t believe in them yet, either.” He then explained what he meant by this weird statement, and in doing so, he described a particular state of mind and soul that permanently established the term Chapel Perilous as a core entry in the lexicon of spiritual edge-realm exploration:

In researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions (called Chapel Perilous in the trade). You come out the other side either stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way. I came out agnostic.
Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I,” cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason, and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.
That’s what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous book. Chapel Perilous is tricky that way.2

Additional valuable explanation came two decades later in Maybe Logic, the 2003 documentary about Wilson’s life and thought, wherein Wilson explained that

Chapel Perilous is a stage in the magickal quest in which your maps turn out to be totally inadequate for the territory, and you’re completely lost. And at that point you get an ally who helps you find your way back to something you can understand. And then after that for the rest of your life you’ve got this question: Was that ally a supernatural helper, or was it just part of my own mind trying to save me from going totally bonkers with this stuff? And the people I know who’ve had that kind of experience, very few of them have come to an absolutely certain conclusion about that.3

To watch and hear Wilson saying these things in real-time, see the 1:39 mark in this clip:

He also shared some of the personal background that lay behind his discovery of the ontologically and epistemologically indeterminate nature of encounters with what seem like supernatural and/or paranormal intelligences and entities:

Around 1973 I became convinced for a while that I was receiving messages from outer space. But then a psychic reader told me I was actually channeling an ancient Chinese philosopher, and another psychic reader told me I was channeling a medieval Irish bard. And at that time I started reading neurology, and I decided it was just my right brain talking to my left brain. And then I went to Ireland and found out it was actually a six-foot-tall white rabbit. They call it the Pooka, and the Irish know all about it.4

To reiterate, in Cosmic Trigger Wilson wrote that when you enter this state—when you cross the threshold into Chapel Perilous and find that although all kinds of bizarre and seemingly impossible things are undeniably happening, you are completely unable to decide whether they are objectively real or purely imaginary—“You come out the other side either stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way.” In a sense, though, nobody ever really leaves Chapel Perilous. The memory of it becomes a living and present part of your everyday experience. When Wilson says that he personally came out as an agnostic, he’s saying he came out with a permanently altered understanding and sense of things. Most people who call themselves agnostics are really just rationalists, hedonists, scientific materialists, philosophically tone-deaf Philistines, and/or intellectually lazy. Their so-called agnosticism is purely a cerebral phenomenon, sometimes sincere, sometimes merely facile, but in either case it doesn’t reach to their cores. Wilson’s agnosticism, by contrast, was existential.

In a sense, nobody ever really leaves Chapel Perilous. The memory of it becomes a living and present part of your everyday experience.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but in the early 1990s my seeming experiences of supernatural/demonic assault represented a kind of epistemological shakedown that was calibrated to result in exactly this same realization of ontological, metaphysical, and cosmological indeterminacy. And it wasn’t until I started to recognize and own this fact some years later, thanks to a wide-focus course of reading and study combined with various online and in-person conversations and interactions, that I discovered there was an existing spiritual and philosophical counterculture—much of it directly associated with the newly minted neo-shamanism movement, as vibrating in deep concord with the reborn psychedelic movement—whose members already knew all about this type of thing. I just happened to be the last one to know.

The term “Chapel Perilous” comes from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which contains an episode in which Sir Lancelot visits said chapel and successfully resists the seduction attempts of a sorceress named Hellawes. Although Malory’s story is apparently the first time that Chapel Perilous, or the Perilous Chapel, is explicitly so-named, this type of setting—a mysterious chapel where a hero undergoes a trial or temptation while on a sacred quest—was already a staple of Grail legends by the time Malory wrote and compiled his now-classic collection of Arthurian romance tales in the late fifteenth century.

In 1922, T. S. Eliot incorporated Chapel Perilous into the apocalyptic-cosmic doomscape of The Waste Land. In the poem’s accompanying notes, he explicitly referred the reader to another book for explanation and commentary on his central use of the Grail motif, stating that “not only the title but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance.”5

Published in 1920, From Ritual to Romance is a landmark work of anthropological and mythological scholarship in which Weston, an independent scholar and folklorist specializing in medieval Arthurian texts, uncovers ostensible links between the various components of the grail legends and the myths, beliefs, and rituals of Europe’s ancient, pre-Christian mystery cults. She focuses especially on the tale of the Fisher King, which in its primal/archetypal form involves a monarch whose kingdom becomes desolate when he falls gravely ill or becomes impotent and therefore sends out a brave knight—Perceval in some versions, Gawain in others, or sometimes somebody else—to find the Holy Grail, which will restore himself and his kingdom to health. At the far end of the quest, the knight stumbles into the nightmarish Chapel Perilous—which, as noted above, is not always named such, and occasionally is not a chapel at all but a Perilous Cemetery—where he undergoes a severe trial and eventually emerges to bring home the Grail.

Galahad in Chapel Perilous. Illustration by Lancelot Speed. From James Knowles, *The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights*, 1862. Public domain.

Weston’s commentaries and analyses to accompany her summaries of such matters are darkly evocative. She devotes her energies to developing the idea that the ancient roots of the Grail legend in general and the Chapel Perilous experience in particular reside in older stories of a dreadful initiation involving a plunge into the otherworld, with possibly dire consequences extending into the physical realm:

[T]his is the story of an initiation (or perhaps it would be more correct to say the test of fitness for an initiation) carried out on the astral plane, and reacting with fatal results upon the physical. . . . [T]he Mystery ritual comprised a double initiation, the Lower, into the mysteries of generation, i.e., of physical Life; the higher, into the Spiritual Divine Life, where man is made one with God.
[I suggest] that the test for the primary initiation, that into the sources of physical life, would probably consist in a contact with the horrors of physical death, and that the tradition of the Perilous Chapel, which survives in the Grail romances in confused and contaminated form, was a reminiscence of the test for this lower initiation.6

At one point Weston chides some of her fellow scholars for focusing exclusively on the supposed Celtic roots of the tradition in question. Weston argues that this tradition has a far deeper and wider pedigree, both historically and spiritually, than many were accustomed to imagining:

Visits to the Otherworld are not always derivations from Celtic Fairy-lore. Unless I am mistaken the root of this theme is far more deeply imbedded than in the shifting sands of Folk and Fairy tale. I believe it to be essentially a Mystery tradition; the Otherworld is not a myth, but a reality, and in all ages there have been souls who have been willing to brave the great adventure, and to risk all for the chance of bringing back with them some assurance of the future life. Naturally these ventures passed into tradition with the men who risked them. The early races of men became semi-mythic, their beliefs, their experiences, receded into a land of mist, where their figures assumed fantastic outlines, and the record of their deeds departed more and more widely from historic accuracy.
The poets and dreamers wove their magic webs, and a world apart from the world of actual experience came to life. But it was not all myth, nor all fantasy; there was a basis of truth and reality at the foundation of the mystic growth, and a true criticism will not rest content with wandering in these enchanted lands, and holding all it meets with for the outcome of human imagination. . . . The Grail romances repose eventually, not upon a poet’s imagination, but upon the ruins of an august and ancient ritual, a ritual which once claimed to be the accredited guardian of the deepest secrets of Life. Driven from its high estate by the relentless force of religious evolution—for after all Adonis, Attis, and their congeners, were but the “half-gods” who must needs yield place when “the Gods” themselves arrive—it yet lingered on; openly, in Folk practice, in Fast and Feast, whereby the well-being of the land might be assured; secretly, in cave or mountain-fastness, or island isolation, where those who craved for a more sensible (not necessarily sensuous) contact with the unseen Spiritual forces of Life than the orthodox development of Christianity afforded, might, and did, find satisfaction.7

The entire Grail legend, then, at least according to this analysis, can be read as an encoded story about a sometimes dreadful initiation into otherworldly realities with implications extending into the physical world. Chapel Perilous is the primary symbolic site of this defining trial and transition.

But—and this is crucial—is Chapel Perilous necessarily somewhere that you go, even in a symbolic, metaphorical, and/or psychological sense? Or can it perhaps be something that comes to you? In Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur writes provocatively about various types of initiation into daimonic/liminal/otherworldly things, including not just the customary (but shattering) visionary death-and-rebirth experiences of shamans, but the spontaneous initiatory power of dreaming that is open to everyone. Then he suddenly moves on to consider a separate type of initiation, one that is qualitatively different from the rest. He illustrates by referring to the life and work of John Keel, author of, most famously, The Mothman Prophecies. Harpur’s words and what they point to are arresting:

I am led to consider another form of initiation. It is difficult to describe—indeed it may not be appropriate to call it initiation at all since it does not apparently involve the death and rebirth experience of the shaman’s subterranean and celestial journeys. But it does involve a change, sometimes dramatic, in the recipient, usually in the form of an expanded awareness of the Otherworld and a greater degree of wisdom in encountering it.
Unlike the Shaman’s experience of the Otherworld as a daimonic realm entered during altered states of consciousness, this different kind of initiation happens the other way around: the Otherworld enters this world. Our everyday reality becomes heightened, full of extraordinary synchronicities, significances, and paranormal events. People who investigate the daimonic are particularly prone to these—although they can happen to anyone who is engaged on a search for some sort of knowledge or truth (every scholar, for instance, knows how the very book he requires can fall off a library shelf at his feet!).8

He finishes with a capstone statement that resounds and resonates all the way back to the Grail legends with their dreadful daimonic initiatory setting of Chapel Perilous: “In other words, it is a goal-oriented kind of initiation and, as such, might be called a quest.”9

Is Chapel Perilous necessarily somewhere that you go? Or can it perhaps be something that comes to you?

This is riveting. This is revolutionary. However, based on my own experience, and also that of a handful of friends and acquaintances, as well as the testimony of cosmic horror fiction with its vibrant and venerable trope of unexpected and unpleasant liftings and rendings of reality’s veil—as in, for example, Blackwood’s “The Willows” and “The Wendigo,” Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Music of Erich Zann,” Ligotti’s “The Sect of the Idiot” and “Nethescurial,” Klein’s “The Events at Poroth Farm” and “Black Man with a Horn”—based on all of this, I have to wonder whether the kind of initiation Harpur describes, in which the Otherworld breaks through into this one, might happen not because someone has sought it out, but simply because it wants to happen. Spontaneously. Unexpectedly. Inevitably. Unavoidably.

Put differently, I have to wonder whether this initiation might sometimes take place not as the result of a quest, not because you have been pursuing it, but as the result of what we might call a “reversed” or “inverted” quest, because it has been pursuing you.

Terence McKenna, in talking about the psychedelic undermining and transmutation of a person’s experience of reality (as was his lifelong wont and mission), once gave a really able exposition of Chapel Perilous:

Robert Anton Wilson . . . coined the term Chapel Perilous. This is when something happens in your life and it all begins to fit together and make sense, too much sense. Because it’s coming from the exterior and it seems to either mean that you’re losing your mind or you are somehow the central focus of a universal conspiracy that is leading you toward some unimaginable breakthrough. Along the way to the mystery lie the realms of loving everybody, moving fields of geometric color, past lives, you name it. But these are just milestones on the way. When you finally get to “the thing,” the way you will know that you’ve arrived is that you will be struck dumb with wonder. That you will say, “My God, this is impossible. This is inherently impossible. This is what impossible was invented to talk about. This cannot be!” Then we’re in the ballpark. Then we’re in the presence of the true coincidentia oppositorum.10

You can listen to McKenna’s original verbal articulation of these points in this video:

In July 2012 it was revealed, via a public reading of a portion of Dennis McKenna’s then-forthcoming memoir The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna, that his brother Terence suffered a horrific experience during a psychedelic mushroom trip in 1988 or 1989 that proved so traumatic, it put him off taking psychedelics, except for tiny doses on infrequent occasions, for the rest of his life. This came as a bombshell in the sizable community that pays attention to such things, since Terence was known for advocating “heroic” doses of psychedelics for many years after that in his books and talks, and since Dennis claimed in the book excerpt that many of the things Terence continued to espouse in his later years, including most of his wilder speculations about 2012, Timewave Zero, the alien intelligences of the psychedelic hyperrealm, and the future spontaneous organization of organic intelligence through the global Internet—in other words, the things for which he was most popular—were just show business, just philosophical performance art that paid the bills. The excerpt was read aloud by Bruce Damer to an audience at the Esalen Institute, at an event organized by Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty—host and creator of the Psychedelic Salon podcast—under the title “A Deep Dive into the Mind of Terence McKenna.” It also went out as a Psychedelic Salon episode. But then, rather shockingly, the episode was pulled, and Hagerty put up a note at the podcast’s website explaining that this had been done at the request of Dennis McKenna and the McKenna family, and that the excerpts in question were from a portion of an early draft of the memoir that would not appear in the final book.

What Dennis revealed in that now-lost portion of his memoir was Terence’s horrific mushroom experience. The details were hazy, said Dennis, but apparently the episode involved Terence being introduced to the formerly wise and benevolent mushroom spirit, which he had related to for years as a nurturing teacher, in a nightmarish new guise as it “turned on him” and precipitated a kind of negative enlightenment. He saw the cosmos or multiverse in the stark, horrifying light of “a lack of all meaning”—a phrase he kept repeating over and over. According to Dennis, among the most deeply and transformatively disturbing aspects of the experience was its utter unexpectedness. It caught Terence, a seasoned psychedelic traveler, completely off-guard.

I find this to be extraordinarily fascinating, not just because it offers a revelatory look at a previously unknown side of Terence McKenna, whose life and wisdom have become important to me in recent years, but because it dovetails with a kind of galling perfection with what I described in my horror story “Teeth” as the all-encompassing psychological/spiritual effect on the narrator when he is forcibly initiated into an experience of cosmic supernatural horror. Several days after this inciting event, which occurs when the narrator looks at a mandala and sees it open onto a hellish abyss of devouring teeth, he becomes aware of a catastrophic change in his psyche that involves a vision of his future as

nothing but an endless black tunnel lined with painful and meaningless experiences. . . . Was my life, was existence itself, truly what I now perceived it to be: nothing more than a short interlude in an otherwise unbroken continuum of horror, a sometimes distracting but ultimately vain dream that was destined to end with a terrible awakening to the abiding reality of chaos, of madness, of nightmare?11

That this essentially describes my own real-world internal state when I wrote the words—a state that had evolved inexorably out of those soul-draining nocturnal, supernatural(-seeming) assaults—and that it is now known that Terence McKenna, figurehead of the newly mature and hopeful psychedelic renaissance, and an increasingly important figure in my own intellectual pantheon, may have had a life-changing encounter with just such a soul-sucking vacuum of total, horrific meaninglessness while communing with his beloved plant teacher—that this could happen not only startles me but reinforces a suspicion that has grown on me over time, even as I’ve lived my way out of that mental-emotional-philosophical hellhole.

We’re all playing with fire, those of us who actively perturb consciousness, and also those of us who have such perturbations forced upon us by powers outside our ken or control. In the words of the weekly closing narration from a classic horror television series that I enjoyed in my youth, “The dark side is always there, waiting for us to enter, waiting to enter us.” What I didn’t understand as an adolescent was that this is not mere poetic speech, nor is it mere aesthetic or intellectual entertainment for those drawn to the dark side of fiction, film, philosophy, and spirituality. This is deadly truth.

We’re all playing with fire, those of us who actively perturb consciousness, and also those of us who have such perturbations forced upon us by powers outside our ken or control.

Wilson spoke of Chapel Perilous in terms of the perceived arrival of a spiritual ally that helps one through a crisis. But there’s another corridor of the chapel where the ally’s aspect is decidedly darker, and it’s damned difficult to see him, her, or it as an ally at all. The fact that the classic ally in the Western esoteric and occult traditions is one’s daemon, one’s genius, one’s Holy Guardian Angel, makes this darker aspect of the experience all the more disturbing. For what does it mean when your own “higher self,” the daemon or daimon who, according to the ancient Western understanding, represents the divine template and design for your life—and which in a modern-day context we can metaphorize as the “unconscious mind,” especially in a Jungian sense—what does it mean when this, the most intimate and personal-to-you of all possible psychological/spiritual realities, appears in the form of a demonic, assaulting presence?

Initiation by Nightmare

Sleep paralysis, cosmic horror and Chapel Perilous

Initiation by Nightmare: Cosmic Horror and Chapel Perilous

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