Children of the Law of One
The Story Behind my Spiritually Dystopian Hip-Hop Epic
The legend begins like this: In the middle of a secluded woods in upstate New York, Justin K Prim found himself on top of a hill, down on his knees in prayer for the first time in his life. For the first time in his earthly experience he was humbled by the sheer awe and amazement of the AllThatIs. It called to him and he responded in the only way he could think of.
From that moment on, he was not ever going to be the same. His path would quickly become solidified before him, no longer the abstract spiritual longing of his youth. He was marked and set for a specific and special journey. He had tasted the ecstasy of direct contact with the One and he was transformed.
He had been initiated into an unnamed lineage of mystical seekers and his training would begin immediately. He befriended healers, mediums, shamans, magicians, psychics, yogis, and other fellow seekers. He absorbed knowledge from whomever he could and his heart led him further down the path of Truth.
Once back in regular society, he spent a year with fellow lightworkers and brothers touring the country, spreading the Love through music and energy healing. As a group they meditated together, they prayed together, they travelled together and they performed together. Eventually though, the brotherhood would fall apart and Justin, now Justinus Primitive, would resume his solo path of Love, Knowledge and Service.
In his new home of Chicago, Justinus had finally moved into the role that a Sufi in the Netherlands had dubbed him: City Dervish. He was truly balancing between the two worlds; the fast-paced modern city and the timeless and eternal world of the spirits.
. . .
The above is a condensed narration of two years of my life, the series of events that lead me to dedicate the following two years to creating Children of the Law of One. If you haven’t heard the record, I won’t be surprised. There was no promotion and no supporting tour. It was released on cassette only. Only a few publication reviewed it and it definitely never came anywhere close to the radio. It was a sleepy release and I was happy with that. The cassettes sold out in the first year and I only performed the material live a handful of times after the album release party at the beginning of 2012. The album could not be considered a success by any unit of measurement except personal. As a testament to my ability to construct beats, write hooks, rap, and create a cohesive, slightly exaggerated, mystical hip-hop story, it was a total success.
I dedicated two solid years to waking up early, working on the record, going to work for six hours, and then coming home and working on it some more. After 24 months of this routine, I was completely immersed in the mythology that I had pieced together. That narrative takes is roots from so many sources that I felt like it was worth a reflection on the process that created the record and it’s far-flung influences.
The Creation of a Worldview
The world that Children of the Law of One exists in is fantastical and possibly fanatical but surely based in human creation stories and world-views from throughout time. Let me construct for you the world that I was existing in at that time:
At the beginning of time there was the One. At some point the One wanted to experience otherness and divided into two. This can loosely be considered as masculine and feminine halves as is symbolized by the yin-yang. The feminine half is referred to as Sophia (wisdom). Some time later, Sophia wants to have a child and for some reason she gets it in her head to try and make a child without the male aspect of the creative force. Keep in mind we aren’t talking about people, but non-physical aspects of reality in the early, early days of the physical universe.
Somehow, Sophia gives birth to a child in secret, but since it is not properly created in harmony with the masculine and feminine halves of the universe, it’s a sort of monstrous, mutant thing, referred to as the Demiurge. Sophia is ashamed and hides the thing away so that the masculine creative force won’t see it. She hides it inside a cloud that has a solar system inside it, trying to occupy her tyrannical toddler by giving it planets to play with.
The demiurge grows up alone, hidden in this cloud, never knowing its parent or others of its kind. Because it cant’t see outside cloud, it thinks that it created itself and the universe and that it’s alone, yet some part of it knows that it’s not, causing unexplained feelings of jealousy and anger. The demiurge wants to be worshipped so he creates a race of entities on one of the planets, starting with the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. Because the demiurge is not in balance with the universe, because he was not created with harmony between the masculine and feminine sides, everything he creates will be flawed and tainted. The flawed humans that he created grow into a society and he reveals himself to the occupants of this planet that he rules in his cloud and the people on the planet worship the mutant as if he is the creator of the universe, not knowing any better.
As some point, the real Creator finds out about what Sophia has done but for some reason can’t destroy the demiurge or change the situation that has been set in motion. He tries to send aspects of his own universal wholeness (and goodness) down to the people on Earth to save them from worshipping the demiurge.
This planet is Earth and the people are us, so now you have to reconsider everything you know about Abrahamic religious history. What if the angry and jealous god of the Jews is angry and jealous because a part of him knows that he’s not the real god and only a monstrous imposter? This is what some of the Gnostics believed 2000 years ago. They lived around the Dead Sea in small communities and thought that Christ was a personified aspect of the True Creator that was trying to save them from the angry, jealous mutant god that was the Demiurge, Yahweh(YHVH).
The Fall of Atlantis and the Sons of the Law of One
That’s one aspect of the story of Earth’s early history but there is more. Let’s go back to an earlier age before the development of the modern human culture that started with the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians and then spread to Greece and Rome and eventually to Britain and Europe during the Renaissance, from where it then spread to all corners of the globe. Legendary stories tell us that about 8000 years before the coming of Christ, an advanced civilization lived on a series of islands in the Mediterranean sea, one of which is called Atlantis.
Imagine this: The demiurge, Yahweh, has created Adam and Eve but there were already humans living on the planet at the time. As time goes on and the creatures evolve, they grow apart. They are known as Adamic and pre-Adamic races. Even though the Adamic race contains the flaw from the demiurge that created them, they are still a manifestation of Sophia and contain a divine spark of wisdom.
Over time, with the advent of civilization and technology in the Atlantean society, the divisions between the Adamic and pre-Adamic races became increasingly more apparent. Whereas the Adamic race held on to the belief in the One God who had specially created them, the pre-Adamic race refuted the belief in the existence of God, instead focusing on the acquisition of wealth and power — worshipping the creature rather than the Creator.
As these differences became more and more clear, the world came to be divided into two basic divisions: the Sons of the Law of One, those who held to the belief in the one God as the Creator of the universe and of mankind, and the Sons of Belial, those who denied the existence of God and instead worshipped themselves. In the 1920s, medium Edgar Cayce explained it like this: “In Atlantean land during those periods of early rise of Sons of Belial as oppositions that became more and more materialized as the powers were applied for self-aggrandizement.” This “self-aggrandizement” took the form of the accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of a very few, with the result being extreme social stratification, where perhaps only a few dozens or hundreds of beings ruled over millions of slaves. This situation, of course, was unacceptable to the Sons of the Law of One.
The Sons of the Law of One could be viewed by us as a group of spiritual warriors who tried to live in harmony with the Universe despite their innate flaw. They tried to understand the universe by listening to it and following its teachings, hence this simple spiritual dialog:
Question: “What is the Law?”
Answer: “The Law is One.”
Question: “Why are we here?”
Answer: “We seek the Law of One.”
Of course, we know from legends what happened to Atlantis. The two factions of mankind battled over their differences. They had technology much more advanced, or at least different, than what we have today. They had harnessed the power of crystals and could resonate them in a way to turn them into weapons. They fought but eventually their weapons caused their entire island civilization to sink into the sea. Before this happened, they sent their knowledge out via emissaries in different directions to preserve their wisdom. Some of these messengers ended up in Ancient Egypt where their advanced knowledge was incorporated into the society at the time, allowing them to understand and spread higher mathematical and philosophical concepts among other things. The wisdom also spread to Central and South America and the knowledge helped the people there to evolve and build more advanced societies. This is why we see similar pyramids in both South American and Egypt: There was also a pyramid in the center of the capital of Atlantis.
Modern Times
Fast forward several thousand years. Atlantis fell. Jesus fell. Rome fell. The British Empire fell, more or less. One thing remains, which is the ageless battle between the Sons of the Law of One and the Sons of Belial. Even though the people involved in that original battle died with Atlantis, their souls have been continuously reincarnating and perpetuating their ideology in subtle ways throughout human history. We can see it very clearly in our own societies. There are some people in all aspects of society who are fixated on understanding the Truth, those that want to listen to the flow of the Universe and try to live in harmony with it. Then there are those that would prefer to consider themselves as self-made creators. Those that wish to self-aggrandize and accumulate wealth and power. Those that wish to make government policies that support the same kind of extreme social stratification that the Sons of Belial wanted for Atlantis. If we look, we can see these trends throughout the history of mankind.
This is the world where the Children of the Law of One exist. They are the reincarnated descendents of The Sons of the Law of One, who died in the battle of Atlantis. Their cause lives on in new generations of seekers and warriors. Those who seek harmony with the universe have always been fringe groups on the edge of society; Mystics, Monks, Desert Fathers, Alchemists, Yogis, Occultists, Sufis, Gnostics, Kabbalists, Magicians.
In the 1950s, there was a group of French mystics, who lived as artists, intellectuals, and political theorists called Situationist International, who came up with this idea of dérive, or the “drift”. They would go for long aimless walks around their towns and cities, reimagining the concrete tower blocks, cenotaphs and public fountains as castles of wisdom, wishing spikes, and ponds of eternal youth. The purpose of the drift was to see beauty in the urban landscape and to conquer the tyranny of grim, oppressive town planning through the transformational power of imagination. Through the techniques of the drift, the Situationists could radically change their experience of the city and turn drab stretches of urban decay into a magical landscape of limitless wonder and enchantment. This is an example of tuning into the universe and trying to harmonize in it, trying to see the world behind the world.
The character that we meet as the narrator of the album Children of the Law of One is one of these mystics who is attempting to look between the cracks of the universe and see the world behind the world. A scholar warrior. A city dervish. One that wishes to live in harmony with the natural flow of the universe. This is a modern day monk and magician. Someone who has been trained in the arts of energy healing for the mind and the body, in divination techniques to help find that natural flow of our individual life path and follow it, someone trained in shamanic techniques to travel into other worlds to consult spirit guides, someone who knows about portals, the inter-dimensional doors that lead into several realities, including the Astral realms.
The Reality
The story I have just told you sounds like a fantasy novel, but I assure you that it is an amalgamation of real-world human beliefs from various ages, cobbled together to form a working worldview for a modern-day magician that was my self. It is here, in reality, where we return to the initial legend:
In the middle of a secluded woods in upstate New York, Justin K Prim found himself on top of a hill, down on his knees in prayer for the first time in his life. For the first time in his earthly experience he was humbled by the sheer awe and amazement of the AllThatIs. It called to him and he responded in the only way he could think of.
The AllThatIs is another name for the One and the reason that I was in New York is because I was living at a spiritual retreat center, undergoing a 6 month long spiritual healers training. From there, I went to Georgia for 8 days to do a spiritual mediumship training, and from there I went to Chicago where I did a 3 year shamanic training apprenticeship and also began work on the album Children of the Law of One. The album is the expression of all my spiritual experiences up to that point. It’s influenced heavily by semi-fictional works such as the Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, Promethea by Alan Moore, the Atlantis writings by Edward Caye, Chaos Magic, the cult of the Great God Pan, and more.
The Music
During the year that I was living in the retreat center, I started to experiment with new types of music. I had read The Mysticism of Sound and Music by Sufi master Hazrat Inyat Khan a few years earlier and become obsessed with the healing power of the voice. Khan’s book had convinced me that the human voice is the sound that our ears are most programmed to hear, the sound that our bodies are most strongly attuned to, and therefore the tool which is most enabled to create healing in the human organism.
I had already released two hip-hop albums by that point but once I internalized Khan’s ideas, I became exclusively focused on the voice and forgot about hip-hop and forgot about beats. I had transformed myself into a spiritual singer who was inspired by the stories of William S. Burroughs using home-made tape loops to enact his Magical Will upon the world around him. I released my first loop-based, vocal-only album that year, 2008, called Spells.
By the time I was ready to start working on Children of the Law of One, I was still obsessed with the voice but I had come around to making beats again. What I wanted to do was try to combine the magical, long-form, vocal loop work I did with Spells and its sequel, Spells II, with the kind of world-music inspired, urban beat-oriented music I had been doing on previous hip-hop material.
I started recording the same sort of vocal loops that I had been using to craft magical spells a few years earlier but then I would add in samples and beats to build up a framework for a song to exist in. Where the vocal loops had been the focal point of Spells, they were now more of a backing track for my hip-hop narrative to go over. I considered this to be extremely powerful because when you listened to the finished song, you would listen to the story that I was telling but simultaneously you would be hearing the song-spell that was part of the beat underneath, whether you were consciously listening to it or not.
As a musical device it was interesting, and something that I had never heard done before but as a magical device it was potent. The song-spells were feeding the unconscious parts of your brain and body while the rap gave your conscious mind food for thought. The beat was focused on the physical body, whether for dancing or whatever. I also very consciously intended this to be trance-inducing music. For years, I’ve been inspired by the music of the band Lungfish, who are musical mystics in their own right. Their unique style of hardcore rock has often been described as “locomotive.” It moves with its own rhythm, its own natural pulse, that is steady and constant. This was my goal when constructing the beats. They needed to be big, heavy, steady things that could give a strong foundation to the vocal loop song-spells that were pulsing underneath my narrative stream of raps.
As I said, I consider the final result to be a complete personal success. The album came out exactly the way I had envisioned it; heavy, trance-inducing, magical, personal, and full of narrative tales of modern urban mysticism that reflected the lifestyle I was living at the time and the worldview I was seeing it through. I saw myself as a warrior-magician who was doing battle with the forces of darkness, the Sons of Belial. My weapon was magical music. My guiding force was my Heart. As I was finishing up the recording of the album, I pulled in producer Tyler Watkins to help me define the vocal sound that I had recorded through my friends homemade analog preamp. Around the same time Justin from I Had an Accident Records contacted me and told me he wanted to do a limited release of the album on cassette and that he would cover all the costs. This was perfect to me because after two years of work, the energy that I had for this project was nearly spent.
I finished mixing the record in November 2011 and sent it to the label to start the production for a Jan 1, 2012 release. Around the time, everyone was talking about how the Mayan calendar was predicting the end of the world in 2012, so it seemed perfect that I would kick off the last year of the world with this record. As I listened to the final creation before it was released, I was surprised by how dark it was. I thought I was creating something that was positive and optimistic, something that was focused on the Light, the One, and the salvation of our species as a whole. When I listened to what form that message had taken, I was a bit shocked to realize how dystopian it was in message and in music. I shouldn’t have been surprised though because these are dark times we are living in
Once the record was finished, I knew it was time to drift. I had dedicated two years to creating this thing and once I set it off into the world, I no longer needed to be bound to one place. I sold all my possessions including all the recording gear I used to produce the album and I let myself flow with the universe. As Daniel Higgs of Lungfish once sang “I am everywhere, all the time, you will know me by my smell. East, West, on the Greyhound line, chasing invisible trails.”
I let myself drift, attempting to see the world behind the world and I took a few of my tapes with me. I hit San Francisco before flowing to Europe where I left tapes in Berlin and Madrid. After two years, it was a pure joy to be free of the burden of creation and to rejoice in the sense of accomplishment of a project well done.
I came back to the Midwest and did one proper release show for the album in Indianapolis before relocating permanently to San Francisco. The tapes eventually sold out and I put music behind me for a long time. Eventually, the bug hit me again and I started working on the follow-up record called PORTAL which I recorded in natural caves around the San Francisco bay area, but that is another story that is not finished being written…
Listen
Download Children of the Law of One on Bandcamp
Credits
Children of the Law of One was written, assembled, and recorded over the course of two and a half years, 2009–2011, in Chicago by Justin K Prim. Children of the Law of One was produced by Justin K Prim and Tyler Watkins. Mixed by Tyler Watkins and Justin K Prim. Mastered by Tyler Watkins.
The Barbelith/Forest photo was taken by Andy Milford and edited by Justin K Prim.
Thanks to Rob Roy at Electronaut for the preamp.
Thanks to Justin at I Had an Accident for the opportunity.
Thanks to Karl Hofstetter & Tyler Watkins for the trades.
The album is encoded with a spiritual healing system called Magical Awakening. As you listen to the record, intend to receive the healing and you will. For more information, visit: www.magicalawakening.org
About the Author
Justin K Prim is an American gem cutter, artist, and musician living and working in Bangkok, Thailand. He has travelled all over the world, studying various types of meditation techniques and psycho-spiritual healing therapies, as well as his trade skills of audio engineering and gemcutting. He is in the process of publishing two books, the first is about a spiritual quest through the UK to find the hidden heart of Merlin the wizard, and the second is a book about the worldwide history of gemstone faceting. He spent over 10 years as a touring and recording musician while exploring careers in spiritual counseling and energy healing, but now works as a Gemstone Faceting Instructor in Bangkok as well as writing articles, producing videos, and giving talks about gem cutting history.
If you enjoyed this article, check out my other related articles:
