Large Fierce Mammal

“If you know something, you know something. If you do not know something, it does not exist in your world.” ~ Musashi, What You Don’t Know

Whether you’ve spryly hopped the hedge to get here, crawled, or were dragged through it backwards, welcome back, Goode Reader, to this seventh season of Dark Sentiments!

Research for this acclaimed October event is a perpetual work in progress, even as its gleanings are in the very throes of their revelation on each of these 31 darksome days. Darkness has many flavours, and more than a few subtle shades; things you’ll learn as the banquet commences.

This season is unique as it is the first time we’ve introduced any kind of an underlying theme (beyond darkness I mean, and however loosely applied) to what you will find here. What’s on the menu this October is, for at least a significant part, “Forbidden Knowledge”, and in our quest for it ourselves all these long years, we’ve come to find it in as wide a variety of expressions as could be encountered in even the most earnestly pursued, globe spanning distillery tour.

Forbidden knowledge, which is different from secret knowledge, is used to describe forbidden books or other information to which access is restricted or deprecated for political or religious reasons. Forbidden knowledge is commonly not secret, rather a society or various institutions will use repressive mechanisms to either completely prevent the publication of information they find objectionable or dangerous (censorship), or failing that, to try to reduce the public’s trust in such information (propaganda). Public repression can create paradoxical situation where the proscribed information is generally common knowledge but publicly citing it is disallowed.

There have been times and places where everyone lived life under an alias, and one’s True birth name was never released into the wild, for to do so was to offer an enemy an easy avenue of magickal attack. The continuum of forbidden knowledge runs the scale from the banality of the simply private, as in it’s none of your business, through “need to know”, to the iron fist and bloody sword of absolute draconian control.

And let it never be forgotten, Goode Reader, the most dangerous and insidious kind of forbidden knowledge — that which is self-forbidden and willfully eschewed.

Simply put, the acquisition of forbidden knowledge is always dangerous because it inevitably changes your world forever. Its value to you will depend on who denied it and why, and whether or not you wield it will usually be determined by your own willingness to accept that Life is all about change, and risk. If down that one way road you go, you must either be in possession of yourself, choose your travelling companions very wisely, or preferably both.  Of course, then there are those times when the mere possession of forbidden knowledge unleashes the avalanche that obliterates every aspect of the comfortable, the understandable, and chaos reigns.

Obviously, and as you’ve come to expect, we’ll veer off the forbidden path onto worse ones now and again, but please do try to keep up. And again, welcome back.