I see Dragon in pretty much every phenomenon in Nature that is terrifying and sublime. But the word sublime already suggests that certain awesome and awful effect that the Natural can have upon us when we face the awesome Power of Nature. So, I see Dragon in stratovolcanoes. In meteor impacts that cause mass extinctions, or even tear planets apart. All of this is Dragon to me. Some people say God. I say Dragon. I have had these pantheistic leanings, or, shall we say, panentheistic leanings, ever since the question, “What is (God?) Supremacy of Being?” was first posed for me, at the age of only twelve. I first figured that if there was anything like a Supreme Being (some kind of an entity), or Supreme Being (some kind of a process), it must have something to do with the phenomenon of Life, which is, when you look at it from the 30,000 foot view, something utterly astonishing and without precedent in a Newtonian, mechanistic Universe (or Multiverse). Don’t forget that at this young age I was already well steeped in both science, and… you guessed it. Science Fiction! So, anyway, from very early on, I connected my idea of Supreme Being (I leaned more toward the “some kind of a process” idea) with Life, and also, with how the physical sets the stage for Life. Now, back when this was all just blossoming for me, and for much of the rest of the young world, it was an act of faith, truly, to assert that the predominance of Life throughout the Universe (or Multiverse) is a foregone conclusion. It used to be considered crackpot science. If you professionally went down that road, your credibility, therefore, your career, went down the tubes. Dragon help you if you took it further and began to assign any kind of spiritual significance to physics and chemistry! Whacko! Occultist!

The Mythic elements came later, as I went through High School and intensely, after I graduated, as I was exposed to a plethora of new ideas. Jung, Illuminatus, Greek literature, philosophy, Castaneda. It became clear to me, following Jung’s line of thinking, that we are so caught up in our externalized, egocentric day-to-day world of personal interests that we have forgotten our Mythic, storytelling origins. Later, in the early 1990s, I was further exposed to Joseph Campbell, listening to his fascinating audio tapes for hours on end as I drove from cell site to cell site working for a local cellular phone company in Las Vegas Nevada. These adventures into the Mythos and into Bardistry were to profoundly affect me a few years later. I got it. What is uniquely “human” about us is our capacity to mythologize and we do that by telling stories. Great stories. Noble stories. Also dreadful and terrifying stories. The storytelling element of Human Nature is of such critical importance. Myths don’t just plop down in our lap. There is no direct “word of God” or Dragon commanding. It is more subtle, more nuanced, than that, involving, to a far greater extent than I had consciously realized before, the Great Work of our Imagination, not just our Thinking.

It was in the late Nineties and early 2000s that I ventured into the domain of lyric poetry. It actually started in early 1991. All of this prior work is lost. But I still remember much of it and many of the images from my original creative burst in 1991 are woven into my Dragon Mythos. It was during this period when I learned the “It’s okay to just make stuff up, DIY mythology is allowed, as is DIY religion!” lesson. Whew! I was given permission to be the heretic I always wanted to be! So I took up my Magickal name, inki (always without CAPS), created a bindrune and had that tattooed on my chest, and then, in 2003, changed my name and asserted that I was the Second Coming of Hermes Thrice Greatest, then… and then… I married my Dragon.

In order to lay an egg, you gotta put it in the incubator. Right? Well, it takes a long time to lay a Dragon egg. I incubated for a good twelve years. Now, I have laid the egg… and it is hatching! Like those eggs in the 1998 Godzilla movie, one of my favorites, it isn’t just one egg… but many. For, if the Dragon truly is that mysterious Life Force of the Universe (or Multiverse) it sure seems to be superabundant, and it sure seems to be quite literally in Love with differentiation, diversity, magnificent complexity, and that’s the way… Uh-huh! Uh-huh! I Like It!