The Gnostic Mass as a Religious Rite

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When interpreting the Mass, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s a religious rite, and so it’s not possible to capture the main idea behind it simply with categories that apply to magic(k), mysticism, or the mysteries of OTO.

This is a slide from my Minerval lecture summarizing Stephen Skinner’s treatment of these categories in Introduction to Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic. I use this to show what is distinctive about initiation into a mystery school (such as M∴M∴M∴) versus attending Mass or doing private ritual at home. But it’s also useful for seeing what is distinctive about the Mass as a religious rite.

One of the main objectives of the Mass is implied by the Priest right at the start of the ritual: it’s to administer the virtues to the breathren. I think the simplest, most direct interpretation of that statement is that the ritual imparts the spirit of Thelema or the New Aeon to the public, both through its liturgy and through the eucharist itself.

To put a finer point on it, I disagree with an interpretation of the Mass according to which the Priest is exemplifying communing with his Holy Guardian Angel or Crossing the Abyss. That would be a mystical or magical interpretation. I think that renders the actions of the clergy excessively personal and private and tends to obscure the public cultic dimension. I think it also leads to the conclusion that the Priest is feeding his Holy Guardian Angel to the congregants (eww).

I have a long, detailed argument about what exactly is embodied in the eucharist. The short, simple answer is that it embodies the spirit that gave rise to the Book of the Law. So in yet another sense, the Book of the Law becomes your sustenance and comfort when you consume the bread and wine.

Now the spirit that gave rise to the Book of the Law is also the Holy Guardian Angel. (Crowley calls it Aleph, Harpocrates, and a bunch of other names.) So it’s easy to see why one would think that the Mass involves the Priest communing with his HGA. It’s actually not a stupid interpretation. And I could even accept an interpretation which said that the Priest communed with his HGA somewhere along the way in the ritual—or even that the congregants are there to do something similar. It’s not going to detract from it.

I just don’t think it’s the main objective of the ritual. It’s clear from the liturgy, from the presence of a congregation, from the ritualists taking up ecclesiastical roles, and just from things that Crowley said about the ritual when he was alive that the ritual is not meant to be simply mystical or magical, it’s meant to impart a particular kind of spirit (for lack of a better word) to the public. It’s meant to serve and help structure the self-understanding of a community.

someone checking off items in a list

Eucharistic Magick Cheatsheet

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someone checking off items in a list

I recently did a video called DIY Eucharistic Magick wherein I broke down how to create your own ritual eucharist with items you probably have at home. For those who want a reminder of that procedure without having to watch the whole video again, I present this little cheatsheet.

Step One: Preliminaries

Chastity: Keep firmly in mind before, during, and immediately after the ritual that its purpose is to bring about union between you and your Holy Guardian Angel.

Fasting: Fast for a few hours beforehand.

Aspiration: Bring a degree of seriousness or religiosity to what you are about to do.

Step Two: Construct your Altar

You will need:

  1. An altar, preferably something waist-height while standing, but any table top with also do.
  2. A candle.
  3. Some incense.
  4. Some water and salt for purification.
  5. Elements for your eucharist—something to eat and something to drink are good.

Step Three: Prepare the Temple

Keeping in mind the three preliminaries mentioned above, purify and consecrate your temple space. This can be done in the following way:

Purification: Mixing some salt and some water, say, “Let the salt of earth admonish the water to bear the virtue of the great sea. Mother, be thou adored!” Then spring the water around you and on your altar and perhaps over you. Say, “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result is every way perfect.”

Consecration: Lighting the incense, say, “Let the fire and the air make sweet the world. Father, be thou adored.” Cense around you and over you and say, “I am uplifted in thine heart, and the kisses of the stars rain hard upon thy body.”

Step Four: Declare your Intent

Take an oath before the gods, stating what you are about to do. The following is one of several ways to do this:

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. It is my will to consummate this eucharist. That I may fortify my gross and subtle bodies thereby. That I may accomplish the great work. Love is the law, love under will.”

Step Five: Consecrate the Eucharist

Declare what the eucharist is, what you are about to do with it, and what the final outcome will be. You can use the IAO formula for this.

Declare what the eucharist is (I): In some sense declare the food to be the body of God and the drink to be the blood of God. In my example in the video, I treat the bread as the body and the water as the vitality or movement of God. Use your imagination here depending on what you choose as elements.

Declare what you will do with them (A): This ritual structure requires you to transform the elements in some way, usually breaking them or perhaps burning them. This can be looked at as a sacrifice or a transmutation. Declare that you will do this. Offering them to the Sun is a good analogy, as the Sun represents both unification and destruction.

Declare what the final outcome is (O): In the IAO formula, O is resurrection or eternal life. You can think of this as union with God/the Holy Guardian Angel. Declare that this is your ultimate purpose using words of your choice.

Step Six: The General Invocation

This is the invocation of the particular being or energy you hope to unite yourself with through the consumption of the eucharist. This could be a prayer of your creation to your Angel. It could be a prayer to Ra-Hoor-Khuit, such as I use in the video. It could be the “Unity uttermost showed!” portion of Liber AL. It could be the invocation of the Secret Lord from the Anthem of the Gnostic Mass. This is an invocation of your highest idea of divinity. Be creative.

Step Seven: Destruction of the Eucharist

“Sacrifice” the eucharist somehow. This is the enactment of the “A” portion you described above. You could break the food, combine the elements somehow, maybe burn a portion, mix it with blood, bodily fluids, or smoke. Use your imagination to transform/transmute the elements, thereby releasing their spiritual potentials.

Step Eight: Consumption of the Eucharist

Again with the Preliminaries mentioned above in mind, solemnly consume the elements of the eucharist. Observe a short moment of silence after.

Step Nine: Declare your Union with God

Using words and gestures of your choice, declare your union with the God invoked in Step Six. This is the enactment of the “O” portion you described above. You can cross your arms and say, “There is no part of me that is not of the gods” or “I am clothed with the body of flesh, I am one with the eternal or omnipotent god.” Or you can create something of your own.

And that’s all there is to it! I broke it out into more steps here than in the video, so hopefully it’s a little easier to understand.

If you use this method to create your own ritual, record and post it on Youtube or let me know! Good luck!

image of a person standing next to a rushing train, unicursal hexagram over their head, radiating them

Slow down! Preparing for communion.

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image of a person standing next to a rushing train, unicursal hexagram over their head, radiating them

Aleister Crowley mentions three ways in which a person should prepare to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist: chastity, fasting, and continual aspiration.

With regard to the preparations for such Sacraments, the Catholic Church has maintained well enough the traditions of the true Gnostic Church in whose keeping the secrets are. Chastity is a condition; fasting for some hours previous is a condition; an earnest and continual aspiration is a condition. Without these antecedents even the Eucharist of the One and Seven is partially—though such is its intrinsic virtue that it can never be wholly—baulked of its effect.

Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter 20

Presumably these preparations should be undertaken not only by the clergy consecrating the Eucharist but also Gnostic Mass congregants.

The preconditions of fasting and aspiration are unambiguous, but chastity requires some explanation. In the same passage, Crowley goes on to mention that:

The Word Chastity is used by initiates to signify a certain state of soul and of mind determinant of a certain habit of body which is nowise identical with what is commonly understood. Chastity in the true magical sense of the word is inconceivable to those who are not wholly emancipated from the obsession of sex.

While Crowley does not further specify the meaning of chastity in this context, he likely means that the act is done for the sake of Nuit and without lust of result.

Also, take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where and with whom ye will! But always unto me. If this be not aright; if ye confound the space-marks, saying: They are one; or saying, They are many; if the ritual be not ever unto me: then expect the direful judgments of Ra Hoor Khuit!

AL I.51-52

But remember, o chosen one, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word.

AL II.76

The Old Comment to the first verse of the Book of the Law states:

In Nu is Had concealed; by Had is Nu manifested. Nu being 56 and Had 9, their conjunction results in 65, Adonai, the Holy Guardian Angel.

And so another way of stating the same thing is to say that the consummation or consumption of the Eucharist ought to be done with one-pointed devotion to the Holy Guardian Angel, insofar as the aspirant is able to do this.

These three prerequisites of chastity, fasting, and continual aspiration bear a close resemblance with the principles represented by the chain, the dagger, and the scourge.

The chain represents fixity of thought. It corresponds with chastity or singular devotion to Nuit.

The dagger represents control of the appetites which would distract thought. It corresponds with fasting.

The scourge is meant to counteract the torpor of the Nephesh or animal soul. It corresponds with continual aspiration.

After applying the chain, dagger, and scourge to oneself, the magician then anoints themselves with the Holy Oil, symbolic of “that spark of the higher in the Magician which wishes to unite the lower with itself.” (Magick, Part II, Chapter V.) Once the principles represented by the chain, the dagger, and the scourge have been applied to oneself and are in balance with one another, the light of Jechidah or the Holy Guardian Angel naturally breaks through.

These three factors of magick form a close parallel with three factors of sama-samādhi or jhāna (Sanskrit: dhyāna) mentioned in the Buddhist tradition.

The first factor of concentration is mindfulness (sati). This is often interpreted nowadays as bare, non-judgmental awareness of the present moment, but in the context of the Buddha’s teachings, its meaning is much closer to the colloquial meaning of the term. It means keeping in mind what you’re doing. In the context of taking Eucharist, it could mean an appropriate attitude of reverence, knowing that the purpose of this ritual is communion with the divine. It corresponds with the chain and with chastity.

The second factor is alertness (sampajañña). This is the ability of the mind to be aware of what it is doing and to know the difference between path and not path. It is a discriminating faculty, and therefore it corresponds with the dagger and with fasting.

The third factor is ardency (atappa). It means being intent on what you are doing. It does not mean straining but rather continuously developing helpful skills and habits and (with the help of alertness) abandoning unhelpful ones. It corresponds with the scourge and with continual aspiration.

When these three factors join together in a meditation session and are more or less in balance with one another, right concentration naturally arises. This corresponds with the holy oil and the natural way in which the Jechidah or Holy Guardian Angel unites the aspirant with itself.

four-sided pyramid representing the way in which chastity/mindfulness, fasting/attentiveness, and aspiration/ardency work together to support dedication/concentration.

As we can see, these three prerequisites of chastity, fasting, and continual aspiration form a foundation for the consummation and consumption of a Eucharist, but they are derived from principles which are more general and which apply to any practice of magick or meditation.

This seems complicated, but putting it together is easier than it seems.

Know what it is that you are doing and why. Prior to showing up to the temple, know that you will attend a ritual, the purpose of which is to put you in communion with the Highest: whether you consider that to be Nuit, Babalon, Pan, Jechidah, or the Holy Guardian Angel.

Know that this highest spiritual power is also the source and seed of Thelema itself. It is the power articulated in the Book of the Law, and it is the power that inspired the author of the ritual, Aleister Crowley, when he wrote the ritual.

Let fasting and continual aspiration support this knowledge. If you choose to fast beforehand, know that this action creates physical space within you where the Word embodied in the Eucharist may take root. Know that your desire to know God and your attention to the Path is the nourishment that supports the growth of this knowledge—before, during, and long after the ritual itself.

After you have consumed the Eucharist and have declared, “There is no part of me that is not of the gods!,” return to your seat and sit in silent contemplation, just as the Priest did immediately after consuming his Eucharist. Enjoy communion with this silence directly and simply as possible.

Do not worry. Do not plan. Do not strive. Simply be with the silence.

And as you go about your day—afterward during fellowship, on the drive or bus ride home, when you are going to sleep that evening, or when you are hard at work the following day—remember that silence and return to it. Know it and be with it.

And know with confidence that, “To a Magician thus renewed the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel becomes an inevitable task.”

The Power Behind the Mass

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My talk on Eucharistic magick is online now. It includes an in depth analysis of Sections VI-VIII of Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass.

The claim I make about the Mass—if I were to state it as succinctly as possible—is that the Mass was intended, in part, to bring into physical manifestation the spiritual power which was the source of the Book of the Law. So you can profitably view it as an attempt to bring the spiritual force of Thelema into the world by means of a public religious rite.

On the one hand, there’s nothing new or terribly controversial in such a statement. The Gnostic Mass is clearly a religious rite, and the purpose of a religious rite is for clergy to administer certain ideas, values, or virtues to a congregation. It would be rather odd to make the opposite argument, that Aleister Crowley created a religious service that administered the virtues of some spirituality other than Thelema.

I think what’s bound to make my argument controversial is the specificity of it. I don’t treat the power or spiritual potency from an abstract point of view. I show how Crowley specified it, put names to it, and even described its nature. If you accept the premises and the inferences to the conclusions from those premises, this creates a backstop for what is going to count as a good interpretation of the Mass. (Or it brings whatever existing backstop there is closer to the home plate.)

Considering the Mass alone, Crowley has many names for this spiritual potency or power considered in and of itself:

  • “one secret and ineffable LORD”
  • “our Lord …”
  • “the LORD” (symbolized by the priest’s serpent crown)
  • “O secret of secrets that art hidden in the being of all that lives”
  • “the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star”
  • “Life, and the giver of Life”
  • “Lord secret and most holy, source of light, source of life, source of love, source of liberty”
  • “force of energy, fire of motion”
  • “Thou who art I, beyond all I am, Who hast no nature and no name”
  • “center and secret of the Sun”
  • “hidden spring of all things known and unknown, Thou aloof, alone”
  • “true fire within the reed”
  • “source and seed of life, love, liberty, and light, thou beyond speech and beyond sight”
  • “One in Three … Three in One”

What we can gather from these terms is that there is a divinity or a portion of divinity that is secret, ineffable, withdrawn, unmanifest, and completely transcendent. It is beyond our ability to describe or understand it. It is characterized by silence, but it is the source of speech and motion. And this divinity or some aspect of this divinity is concealed “within us” in some sense, and it is responsibility for our vitality.

Now one thing you may want to ponder from a theological or metaphysical perspective is this: If something is truly transcendent and unmanifest—if it is really “aloof, alone”—then how does it enter into manifestation? How does it have anything to do with the visible or manifest universe at all?

Crowley’s phrase for this in the context of the Mass, exemplified in the Creed, is the “Miracle of Incarnation”. He claims it is accomplished by means of the “Baptism of Wisdom”. As Sabazius has pointed out, this comes from Van Hammer’s elucidation of the name Baphomet as Baphe-Metis, the Baptism of Wisdom. One of the arguments I make in the talk is that, in the context of the Mass, Baphomet is the name given to this pure, transcendent spiritual potency when it is embodied or incarnated. This means that we can understand the Epiklesis of the Gnostic Mass on analogy with the transubstantiation of the Eucharist in the Roman Mass into the body and blood of Christ. This helps make sense of why the elements of the Eucharist are consecrated into a resurrection structure in Section VI. As Christ is the principle of resurrection in Christianity, Baphomet is the principle of resurrection in Thelema. At that point, the doctrines diverge, and I spend a lot of time in the talk examining exactly what resurrection means in a Thelemic context.

One angle I did not explore very much at all in my talk is how this transcendent spiritual potency is made manifest by the sex instinct. The only reference I made to this extraordinarily complex and interesting subject was to point out that the Priest, by virtue of the Lance and the scarlet robe, represents the microcosmic deity in the context of the Mass. This microcosmic deity is called “CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth.” It is also called phallus. It is the “Lord of Life and Joy, that art the might of man, that art the essence of every true god that is upon the surface of the Earth, continuing knowledge from generation unto generation”. The magick of the Mass is almost certainly intended to parallel an analogous sex magick working. The seed (sperma) the Priest isolates from the Cake (consecrated to his body) is meant to be analogous with the spermatazoon produced by his literal body. The cup is magically linked with the Priestess’s body by means of the five crosses. The wine within it could be viewed as either his “blood” (which Crowley usually intends to represent semen) or her menstruum. I pointed out, as many have, that HRILIU represents the cry of orgasm.

Another thing I would point out—which I didn’t bother to touch on in the talk—is that Crowley believed sexual reproduction was a form of resurrection. Orgasm itself is a moment of subject-object union or samadhi, if only for a moment. The individuality of the man is not preserved, but his life-force continues in the child. The Mass Eucharist is explicitly referred to as a child both in the Anthem and during the Fractio. The solve or Aleph-phase of the operation reduces his seed to a kind of magical stem-cell state. By consuming this metaphorical “child,” the Priest is nourishing himself with the power of his resurrected or reborn life-force. It’s a simple way to look at the Mass, but it’s also perfectly valid and illuminating. The problem is that it’s not the only doctrine of resurrection Crowley had.

While I do not think it is wrong to point out that the Mass is the IX° sex magick operation under a different form, I think it very quickly leads to misunderstanding. One could start to believe that the spiritual reality of the Mass—and maybe of Thelema itself—is exhausted in fucking. Crowley himself makes reductionistic claims to this effect, e.g., “Semen is God.” Instead I wanted to focus on the structure shared both by the Mass and by the IX° Mass of the Holy Ghost in order to indicate the spiritual reality they are both aiming at, and which is reducible to neither of them. In the language of Eucharistic magick Crowley uses, both the Eucharist of two elements and the Eucharist of one element serve a common spiritual purpose. It is that purpose that I wanted to elucidate.

The argument I make in the talk—and which I have not seen made before—is that the spiritual purpose is the physical manifestation of this spiritual principle or potency represented by Hoor-Paar-Kraat, the God of Silence. This is the deity that Aiwass declares himself to be the “minister” of in the first chapter of The Book of the Law. As such, Aiwass’s speech is the speech of the god of silence. The Book of the Law itself is the “speech of silence” as Crowley says. And since this is the same spiritual potency we are embodying in the Gnostic Mass Eucharist, when we participate in the Mass, either as clergy or as congregants, we are in effect consuming the word. We’re being nourished by it. In yet one more way, the Book of the Law is becoming our sustenance and comfort.

As it turns out, the same principle is elastic and can manifest itself in many other ways. I already mentioned that it manifests as a sex-generative principle. In the talk I make a big deal out of showing how, in the context of an individual’s gnosis or spiritual experience, Harpocrates is also the Silent Self or the Holy Guardian Angel. From an alchemical perspective, I show how it is also the Philosopher’s Stone and connected with the IX° Elixir of Life. Crowley uses a lot of words to label this spiritual principle—Aleph, Fool, God of Silence, Holy Guardian Angel, Heru-Ra-Ha, Lord Most Secret, etc.—but the fact that it shows up in so many different places and is linked with the central spiritual concerns of Thelema I think justifies calling it out as the central organizing principle of Crowley’s spirituality. It is the point around which everything else is rotating. So I spend a lot of time in the talk laying out its structure. That structure—whether we’re talking about Eucharistic magick, alchemy, or initiation—is invariably tripartite and is represented by the formula IAO.

So what I was attempting to do in this talk was not only to show how to do Eucharistic magick or just parrot things Crowley says about the Eucharist. I also wanted to explain how it was he could make such extraordinary claims about Eucharistic magick, such that doing it would inevitably lead to Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, or that a particular version of it (identical with the IX° secret) would produce the Elixir of Life and grant immortality. So in this one phenomenon of Eucharistic magick, we find a menagerie of traditional and specifically Crowleyan spiritual concerns tied to the central mystery of Crowley’s spirituality, namely, Knowledge and Conversation. But rather than attempt to reduce the Gnostic Mass to sex magick, or to attempt to reduce both of those to Knowledge and Conversation, I attempted to explain all three in terms of the structure of the underlying spiritual reality motivating Thelema as a whole. And I suppose my assumption is that, because this underlying spiritual reality has vitality, an individual who understands how to make contact with that reality will become empowered by it.

The Upward and Downward Paths in the Gnostic Mass

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The way up and the way down is one and the same.

— Heraclitus, Fragment 60

One way to understand Thelema is as an account of the interplay between the upward path and the downward path.

The path up is variously described as waking up, the union of the individual with God, Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, and Crossing the Abyss. This process is described in The Wake World and in One Star In Sight.

The path down is the path whereby a god incarnates in order to live a life in this world. This process is described in detail in Crowley’s commentaries on the Book of the Law. This process is also the main theme of the Man of Earth degrees of O.T.O.

In its most general sense, the path up is the movement from the Many back to the One and ultimately the None, while the path down is the movement from the None out into the Many.

While it appears briefly at the end of The Wake World with the birth of the new Fairy Prince, and while it is implied by the 0=2 theorem, the path down only seems to have become a major theme of Crowley’s spirituality after his experience of crossing the Abyss. This shift in emphasis coincides with and is reflected not only in The Book of Lies and in The Gnostic Mass, but also in Crowley’s decision to make Thelema the overarching framework of his whole spiritual approach.

You can think of the upward path as a process of dying. There is a movement from speech to silence, from motion to stillness, from the real to the ideal, from time to eternity. As one writer has expressed it, the death that others call “life” is rejected in favor of the life that others call “death”. Thus the ordeal of the second order of A∴A∴ is death.

On the other hand, the path downward is a process of birth, which is the ordeal of the third order of A∴A∴. There is a movement from silence to speech, from stillness to motion; there is the transformation of the real in light of the ideal, and there is a view of time as a moving image of eternity. The Magister Templi teaches. The Magus fecundates the world with a Word. We witness the movement from One back to Many.

The implication seems clear. Awakening is neither an escape from this world nor merely an individual process. The world—this world, right here—is regenerated through the awakening of individuals which Crowley calls “Saints”. Their spiritual community—the Communion of Saints—is the invisible church behind all outward manifestation or appearance which is responsible for the regeneration of appearances.

Both trajectories are represented in the Gnostic Mass. Section IV is the upward path, and Section VIII is the downward path. It is often supposed that the climax of Section VIII (and of the ritual itself), the point at which the Priest and Priestess depress the lance point and the particle into the cup, somehow represents the destruction or annihilation of the Priest or of his ego in Babalon or in the All. But this represents a misunderstanding both of the narrative structure of the ritual itself as well as of what is involved in spiritual awakening from a Thelemic perspective.

First, if there is any “annihilation” of the personality of the Priest represented in the Gnostic Mass, it occurred at the parting of the veil, when the Priest (the microcosm) united himself with the Priestess (the macrocosm). Many details of the ritual support this interpretation. The Priestess speaks in the voice of Nuit or Heaven, and the Priest adores her as such. He isolates the secret flame or essence within himself and offers it up to her, who he addresses as “One,” the “Sun,” “Pan,” and “IAO” among other names. He then kneels before her and adores her while the Collects are read by the Deacon. These Collects number 11 in total, a number signifying the union of the microcosm (5) with the macrocosm (6). All signs point toward the parting of the veil being the culmination of the upward path and the raising up of the individual to the divine.

Now if we were Theravada Buddhists or Gnostic Christians, we would call it a day. The Children would blow out the candles, close the veil, and send everyone on their merry way. But the Thelemic version of awakening does not terminate in the alleged destruction of the personality in the One or in Nibbana. The point of Thelemic awakening is not to achieve something for the individual, not even his or her own destruction, but rather to complete the cosmological process which gave rise to that individual by in turn re-seeding and regenerating the Earth.

Thus we witness a clear trajectory of the Priest. He begins in the darkness of the tomb. The Virgin/Priestess opens this tomb, purifies and consecrates him, and leads him to unfold himself into her light. In this light, he produces a “fruit of labor”. In Section VIII of the ritual, the Priest breaks open this fruit, and from it, he produces his seed. He then vibrates “AUMGN” three times. AUMGN of course is a formula representing the entire cosmological process from silence into manifestation and back into silence again. It is precisely this process which is ritualized throughout the course of the Gnostic Mass, and as such, AUMGN is the word vibrated most often throughout the ritual.

Much has been made of the “seed” of the Priest being his sperm, and people debate to what extent the Gnostic Mass is a sublimated sex magic operation. This is the wrong question to ask. The question is not whether one type of magical act is an instance of another but rather, what is the genus of which both are species? Whether the eucharistic talisman in question is a spermatazoon or a particle of bread, what is it a talisman or vehicle of?

It’s already been made clear that the particle of bread is a vehicle of Harpocrates, the God of Silence. We know from earlier in the Mass that the wine in the cup is the “Vehicle of the joy of Man upon earth”. We might therefore consider the placement of the bread particle in the cup of wine as the seeding of the Earth with something silent, secret, and divine. This seed shall germinate in the black soil and push its shoot through the darkness, out into the light. What will the seed of the God of Silence grow into?

Of course it expands into the Babe in the Egg and ultimately into Baphomet, the Lion-Serpent. You know this if you’ve attended the ritual. And if you’ve read my previous posts, you know I consider Baphomet to be a type of the Holy Guardian Angel. But what is the significance of that outcome? What is its spiritual meaning?

According to Aristotle, the being of anything is given by its outward, perfected form, i.e., by its characteristic appearance when it is fully-grown. The destiny of the seed planted in the Earth in the Gnostic Mass is to become “the Devil,” Ayin, the letter “O”.

[The Devil] is also the vowel O, proper to roar, to boom, and to command, being a forcible breath controlled by the firm circle of the mouth. He is the Open Eye of the exalted Sun, before whom all shadows flee away: also that Secret Eye which makes an image of its God, the Light, and gives it power to utter oracles, enlightening the mind. Thus, he is Man made God, exalted, eager; he has come consciously to his full stature, and so is ready to set out on his journey to redeem the world.

—Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter V

Paradoxically, the path naturally taken by the seed of the god of silence leads it to become a kind of speech. It is the speech which drives away the shadows, which utters in an oracular fashion, which enlightens the minds of those that hear it, and which redeems the world.

Thus having adored the Lion-Serpent:

The PRIEST joins hands upon the breast of the PRIESTESS, and takes back his Lance. He turns to the People, lowers and raises the Lance, and makes ☩ upon them.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Which god is the Book of the Law the speech of? Who in particular does Thelema come from? We’re given a name, and it’s not “Aleister Crowley” or even “Aiwass”. There is one particular deity governing this spiritual revelation, and the Gnostic Mass is the ritualistic implanation of his seed in the black soil of the Earth. But to what end?

If this be not aright; if ye confound the space-marks, saying: They are one; or saying, They are many; if the ritual be not ever unto me: then expect the direful judgments of Ra Hoor Khuit! This shall regenerate the world, the little world my sister, my heart & my tongue, unto whom I send this kiss.

—Liber AL vel Legis, I.52-53

I fly and I alight as an hawk: of mother-of-emerald are my mighty-sweeping wings. I swoop down upon the black earth; and it gladdens into green at my coming. Children of Earth! rejoice! rejoice exceedingly; for your salvation is at hand.

—Liber Tzaddi, 0-3

Now and again Travellers cross the desert; they come from the Great Sea, and to the Great Sea they go. As they go they spill water; one day they will irrigate the desert, till it flower.

—The Book of Lies, Chapter 42, “Dust Devils”
lamen of OTO depicting a dove descending into a flaming cup from an eye in the triangle

The fruit of the silent seed ritualistically implanted every time we celebrate the Gnostic Mass is a word, and that word is Thelema. The destiny of this word is to regenerate the world to such a radical degree that not only is the Minutum Mundum fertilized, but the entire Tree of Life itself transformed, so that even the Abyss itself turns green—but only if we truly listen to that word.

My child, he who listens must perceive the same as he who speaks, share his awareness; he must breathe together with him, share the same spirit; his hearing must be sharper than the voice of him who speaks.

—Corpus Hermeticum, X.17

If we listened even more intensely than we spoke, we would hear not only the word but also the silence concealed within the word. When we don’t attend, when we don’t open ourselves, when we don’t make ourselves vulnerable to the silence in the speech, the word goes in one ear and out the other. We end up considering the Gnostic Mass to be a performance put on by a club. We think of Thelema as just one current among other magical currents, maybe in need of a little “supplementation” here and a little “balancing” over there. We think we know better than Aleister Crowley—and we do!—but do we know better than the gods? Or more to the point: are we so sure we have sufficiently attuned ourselves to the silence each of us carries within ourselves? Probably not. We’re too busy proving how much smarter we are than Crowley to have bothered truly listening. Because if we truly listened—and most people are lucky if they listen even once in their lives for something they don’t already know—then we would realize that the divine at the center and origin of Thelema is not peculiar to Thelema but instead is the source and seed of all true religion. It is the germ of the process which has renewed the cosmos since its beginning. It is the source of wisdom and of meaning which we are desperately starved for in our technologically advanced culture.

And what is Thelema’s role in all of this? To bring these seeds to the Earth in a shower. To deluge the Earth with light, life, love and liberty.

Thelema represents radical fecundity.

When we set out upon any spiritual path, we are usually looking for strategies to fulfill some absence in our lives. We are looking to get something for ourselves. Thelema has a great deal to offer individuals. Indeed, individuals are the focus of Thelema. Unfortunately, so many people come to Thelema (and spirituality generally) looking for confirmation for what they already believe. They want something which will pander to their egos. And so they say “my will is this” and “my angel told me that”.

But if we listened and attuned ourselves to what is true in Thelema—not true in the sense of just being another true fact about the world, but true in the sense of being eternal and transpersonal—then we would open ourselves to something epic in scope and cosmological in significance. From the point of view of cultic practice, the Gnostic Mass is the occasion to do this. It represents the regeneration of the world by means of Thelema in a way people can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, eat, and drink—such that each of us, crossing our arms in an attitude of resurrection, may say with real understanding this time:

There is no part of me that is not of the Gods!

lamen of OTO depicting a dove descending into a flaming cup from an eye in the triangle

The Symbolism of the O.T.O. Lamen

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lamen of OTO depicting a dove descending into a flaming cup from an eye in the triangle

I spent a lot of time this weekend contemplating the lamen of O.T.O. (I was at a Kaaba Colloquium and seated much of the time in front of the podium.) It gave me some time to think about the symbols that appear in it.

One of the things that really struck me is how much symbolism of the Anahata chakra there is in the cup at the bottom of the sigil. The rose in the cup has two rows of six petals. The Anahata chakra is often represented as a lotus flower with twelve petals.

depiction of the anahata chakra as a lotus of 12 petals

In the center of the rose is a flaming heart. The Anahata chakra is located in the center of the chest and is referred to the heart.

In Liber 777 column CXVIII, “Anahata (Heart)” is assigned to keys 4, 5, and 6, the Sephiroth Chesed, Geburah, and Tiphareth. Tiphareth is the 6th Sephira, and there are two rows of six petals each in the cup. In the center of the heart in the center of the rose, we see the cross. The mysteries of the Rose and the Cross are also associated with Tiphareth.

These three Sephiroth—Chesed, Geburah, and Tiphareth—form a downward pointing triangle, the interconnecting paths of which (Teth, Lamed, and Yod) add up to 49. The number 49 has a few occult meanings in Thelema. For example 49 is 72. Seven 7s appear in the sigil of A∴A∴. See also The Book of Lies, Chapter 49, where it is associated directly with Babalon.

This triad is also called “The Second Triad which is GOD” in Book of Lies chapter 0. The Tiphareth portion in particular is God in manifestation or Microprosopus, which we will return to later.

It’s also in this connection worth pointing out that the triangle formed by connecting Chesed, Geburah, and Tiphareth has the shape of a cup. This further strengthens its connection with Babalon and by extension the Priestess in the Gnostic Mass who fulfills the office of Babalon.

This grail of Babalon is also associated with Cheth, Cancer, and the number 69. In chapter 69 of The Book of Lies, we see this number associated with the Heavenly Hexagram, which we will return to shortly.

Switching focus to the Eye in the Triangle, we might associate it with the supernal triad of Kether, Chokmah, and Binah. They form a triangle whose interconnecting paths (Aleph, Beth, and Daleth) also add up to 7.

The eye itself can be thought of as the Eye of the Father, Horus. So while the lower portion of the lamen might be referred to the Priestess (by means of Babalon and the cup), the upper portion may be referred to the Priest.

The eye is also linked to the path of Ayin (which means “eye”). Like Cheth, Ayin also contains masculine and feminine archetypes, being associated with the hermaphroditic Baphomet. Neither the lamen of O.T.O. nor the offices of the Gnostic Mass imply strict gender dualities. This is in keeping with Crowley’s assertion in The Book of Thoth that

At first sight it would appear that the formula [of tetragrammaton] is the union of the extremely masculine, the big blond beast, with the extremely feminine, the princess who could not sleep if there was a pea beneath her seven feather beds. But all such symbolism defeats itself; the soft becomes the hard, the rough the smooth. The deeper one goes into the formula, the closer becomes the identification of the Opposites. The Dove is the bird of Venus, but the dove is also a symbol of the Holy Ghost; that is, of the Phallus in its most sublimated form. There is therefore no reason for surprise in observing the identification of the father with the mother.

We will return to his passage and the symbolism of the dove shortly.

The addition of Ayin (70) to the triangle itself (7) gives us 77, which has some significance in the context of O.T.O. being the enumeration of OZ, a goat.

So what we see in the two extremes of the lamen are the supernal triad of Kether, Chokmah, and Binah opposed to the triad of Chesed, Geburah, and Tiphareth. While the upper triangle refers to an active masculine-feminine (Ayin, OZ, the goat), the bottom triad refers to a passive masculine-feminine (Babalon, who receives every drop of blood in her cup). What about the dove between the two of them, seen descending from the Eye in the Triangle into the cup?

The dove has lots of significance loaded into it. By column XXXVIII in Liber 777, it is associated with the path of Daleth. The dove would then signify the divine love uniting the active masculine-feminine magical pole of the Priest (in his role as Chaos or Yod tetragrammaton) with the passive masculine-feminine magical extreme of the Priestess (in her role as Babalon or Heh tetragramaton). This unification occurs at the HRILIU moment of the Gnostic Mass. According to Liber 418, HRILIU is the “shrill scream of orgasm”. In The Heart of the Master it is described as “The Voice of the Dove”.

The dove is also symbolic of the Holy Spirit. (See Matthew 3:16, Mark 1:10, Luke 3:22, and John 1:32.) This same equation between the dove and the Holy Spirit shows up in the Anthem of the Mass. (“Glory and worship in the highest, Thou Dove, mankind that deifiest”) (This analysis is extended here.) Like the two extremes of the lamen, it is a symbol containing both male and female aspects.

For of the Father and the Son
The Holy Spirit is the norm;
Male-female, quintessential, one,
Man-being veiled in Woman-form.

Crowley extends the analysis in the passage from the Book of Thoth quoted above when he says, “The Dove is the bird of Venus, but the dove is also a symbol of the Holy Ghost; that is, of the Phallus in its most sublimated form.”

So we can think of the dove not only as the divine love uniting the supernal father with the supernal mother, but also as the male-female creative force or word of the Father—his seed or sperma—transmitted into the womb of the Mother. This is reflected in the Mass when, breaking a particle off of the host and elevating it, the Priest declares, “TOUTO ESTI TO SPERMA MOU. HO PATÊR ESTIN HO HUIOS DIA TO PNEUMA HAGION.” (“This is my Seed. The Father is the Son through the Holy Spirit.”)

As I have shown previously, the particle of bread represents the Iota, Yod, or “Secret Seed” of the Priest himself. It is identical with the Lord Secret and Most Holy of the Mass, whose office is represented by the serpent crown. When this seed is depressed into the cup, it becomes the Holy Spirit, Harpocrates, the Babe in the Egg, the creative breath, all of which are captured in the symbol of the dove. But just as importantly, Harpocrates or the Secret Self is also the Holy Guardian Angel.

This is an important point of doctrine for our Church, as the Holy Spirit of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica is not the Holy Spirit of Christianity. Rather, it is a symbol of the Holy Guardian Angel of each person.

This interpretation is supported if we extend the Tree of Life symbolism implicit in the lamen. If the Eye in the Triangle represents the supernal triad of Kether, Chokmah, and Binah, and if the flaming cup represents the triangle of Chesed, Geburah, and Tiphareth, then the path connecting the two of them, by means of which the dove descends, would be Gimel. Of this path, Crowley, in The Book of Lies chapter 42, says:

The Masters of the Temple … come from the Great Sea, Binah, the City of the Pyramids. V.V.V.V.V. is indicated as one of these travelers; He is described as a camel … because “camel” is in Hebrew Gimel, and Gimel is the path leading from Tiphareth to Kether, uniting Microprosopus and Macroprosopus, i.e., performing the Great Work. The card Gimel in the Tarot is the High Priestess, the Lady of Initiation; one might even say, the Holy Guardian Angel.

upper portion of the tree of life showing gimel connecting the supernal triad with the triad of god-man

In this passage we have Crowley linking the path of Gimel not only with V.V.V.V.V. but also with the Holy Guardian Angel and the initiator. S/he (again, we see the masculine and feminine combined) is the One who mediates between the divine individual (microprosopus) and the supernal divine (macroprosopus), thereby enabling the candidate to perform the Great Work. This is the upward path, the Path of Return described in “One Star in Sight,” whereby the Son (the Angel) sets the Daughter (the aspirant) on the throne of the Mother (Binah).

But in the symbolism of the O.T.O. lamen, we do not see a journey upward. Instead, we see a journey downward. We see the dove of the Holy Spirit or the Holy Guardian Angel descending from the supernal triad of the Father into the cup, which is symbolic of microprosopus, God in manifestation. And again, this mirrors the symbolism of the Holy Hexagram we see described in The Book of Lies chapter 69: “Plunge from the height, O God, and interlock with Man!” The whole figure is described as a glyph of “the Great Work”.

So in other words, in the lamen of the O.T.O., we are witnessing a symbol of the Great Work, this time not from the point of view of the candidate aspiring to Binah, but rather from the point of view of macroprosopus incarnating by means of the Holy Guardian Angel. Again, “This is my Seed. The Father is the Son through the Holy Spirit.”

This symbolism further reflects and reinforces my interpretation of Part VIII of the Gnostic Mass. Assuming the O.T.O. lamen has any connection with the central private and public rite of O.T.O., then the lamen indicates the same process at play in the Gnostic Mass where, by isolating the Secret Seed of himself, the Priest, in his role as Chaos, is incarnating his own Holy Guardian Angel. By consuming it, he is uniting himself with his HGA. The congregants are doing the same thing except perhaps in a more attentuated way. This seems to me the best way to make sense of Crowley’s claim in Magick in Theory and Practice chapter XX that:

[By doing eucharistic magick t]he magician becomes filled with God, fed upon God, intoxicated with God. Little by little his body will become purified by the internal lustration of God; day by day his mortal frame, shedding its earthly elements, will become in very truth the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Day by day matter is replaced by Spirit, the human by the divine; ultimately the change will be complete; God manifest in flesh will be his name.

This is the most important of all magical secrets that ever were or are or can be. To a Magician thus renewed the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel becomes an inevitable task; every force of his nature, unhindered, tends to that aim and goal of whose nature neither man nor god may speak, for that it is infinitely beyond speech or thought or ecstasy or silence. Samadhi and Nibbana are but its shadows cast upon the universe.

But then if this same process is also reflected in the O.T.O. lamen, then it stands to reason that the central secret of O.T.O. probably also involves this same mystery of the incarnation of the Angel.

Babalon and the Mass

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In the Gnostic Mass, the Priest takes up the role of CHAOS, who is associated with Chokmah. He serves the function of the logos or the word, which is also the phallus or the creative aspect of the Father. From his own body, he produces the seed (sperma). By means of an alchemical process, this seed will be transformed into the Mercurial Serpent, the Baphomet or Christos, the Philosopher’s Stone, etc. This product of the first operation is strongly associated with the Sun, with the path of Ayin, with Hod, but also with Kether and even the entire Tree of Life (if you draw the number 8 on it). But before diving deeper into the nature of the product, I’d like to first examine the process itself, in particular the role played by the Priestess.

If the Priest is taking up the work of CHAOS and the spiritual significance of Chokmah, then his counterpart the Priestess takes up the role of BABALON and the spiritual significance of Binah. What is her contribution, and what does that contribution imply about the nature of the God-Man produced by the operation?

In the Creed we recite, “And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON.”

As compared with the treatment BABALON gets in The Vision and the Voice, this is rather terse and tends to understate her importance in the spiritual system of Thelema. But I think that has less to do with the importance of BABALON herself than the context. In The Vision and the Voice, Crowley was documenting his ascent across the Abyss to the grade of Magister Templi. There, BABALON is considered initiator. In the Gnostic Mass, by contrast, she serves as a cosmological or metaphysical principle which is relied upon in the context of a discrete alchemical operation.

This remark will make no sense to those who think the Gnostic Mass is a crossing-the-Abyss allegory culminating in the candidate (the bread particle) merging with the all-mother (the wine in the cup). But it will make perfect sense if you accept that, by at least Part VI of the Mass, the Priest is not a candidate aspiring to Binah but rather the representative of CHAOS performing a magical operation with the Priestess in her role as BABALON, with the desired effect being the production of a Divine Being at Tiphareth. In other words, the operation of the Mass is meant to move the Word down the Tree of Life from Chokmah to Tiphareth where it becomes incarnated as God Manifest. If the particle is consciousness as such, then it is consciousness-in-time (the Sun) in its finished state in the cup. But then what is it about the cup—the symbol of Our Lady—that allows this to take place?

From the article of the Creed, we find BABALON identified with Earth, Mother, and Womb. The wording suggests she is the sub-lunary context into which we are born, wherein we live, and which we eventually pass away into. In other words, she is nature.

But what is nature from a Thelemic perspective? I would like to suggest that it is neither the object studied in the field of physics, nor is it merely inert matter. Neither of these designations fits with the spiritual function of Binah, which BABALON is also associated with. The function of Binah in Kabbalah is to transform pure thinking as such (associated with Chokmah) into something like a determinate set of concepts of creation. So if we think of Chokmah as corresponding with the neoplatonic idea of nous or of pure mind, then Binah corresponds with the concept of the world-soul, nature inwardly considered as a hierarchical system of ideas or categories of existence.

Importantly, Binah represents the first point in the movement from out of Ain/Ain Soph where limitation and hence form are introduced. Ain, Ain Soph, and Kether are words for a formless All or One or None. Chokmah is this pure (N)one reflected in thinking. Binah is where differentiation is first introduced. The thought of creation (which is something like a mere urge at Kether and Chokmah) now receives articulation. It is presumably for this reason that Crowley associates Binah with the Vissudha chakra which is at the throat. It is at the throat that thoughts are articulated into speech.

So in the figure of BABALON, we see the union of the concept of nature with the concept of form or formation. While this appears to be an odd pairing, it in fact harkens back to the ancient Greek concept of nature which Aristotle articulated in the Physics, particularly in Book B.

The ancient Greek word for nature was phusis, from which we get our word physics. While we tend to think of nature as various stuff (natural things, things of nature, etc.), Aristotle said that phusis is first and foremost a principle of development (arche kineseus). The function of this principle in each natural thing (phusei onta) was to cause it to change in such a way that it comes into its end (telos). This end or finished state was understood as a particular kind of appearance (eidos) or form (morphe).

So for example, the function of the nature of an oak tree is to guide the development of an acorn into a full-grown oak by way of its intermediate stages. The nature of the oak (the image or form of the full-grown oak) serves as a kind of blueprint (paradigma) for change, so that the change is not chaotic but is rather orderly and results in the proper end (the full-grown tree). To put it another way, the nature of the tree is responsible for delivering it into its final form or appearance, which is the full expression of its being as an oak. This makes natural growth a circular process from form (implicit) to form (explicit) back to form (implicit) again in the appearance of the new acorn.

This explains why Aristotle said that the being of a natural thing is its form or appearance (morphe) and not the matter (hule) composing it. Things are intelligible to us by virtue of their ends. What differentiates an action such as running from another action such as rhetoric is the end it aims at. The same thing goes for growing things. They’re differentiated by the final form or appearance they aim at in their growth. Matter is only of secondary importance here. The delivery of the thing into its final form requires the presence of things like food, air, water, and sunlight, but these are merely enabling conditions. The essence or being of the thing is always its form or final, outward, full-grown appearance. It is that image “lurking in the background” which drives change in a particular direction and hence constitutes the characteristic movement or development of the thing which differentiates it from other things.

Incidentally, this is why Aristotle makes the rather odd proclamation that actuality precedes potentiality. On the face of it, the statement is false. It makes more sense when you realize that the word Aristotle uses for actuality (energeia or entelecheia) actually means something like “being in the work [ergon]” or “being in the end [telos],” whereas the word for potentiality—dunamis—has the connotation of matter (hule) or the workshop that something is made in where there are tools and raw materials laying around. Placing something into its end always takes priority (ontologically) over the means or circumstances under which it is done, and therefore “actuality precedes potentiality”.

Now we’re in a position to understand much better the spiritual function served by the Priestess in the Gnostic Mass—as well as “the feminine” in any magical operation.

While the Priest provides the material (hule) for the operation in the form of the seed or particle, it is the function of the Priestess to give that seed form (morphe)—to in-form it—in the “womb”. She is responsible for taking the seed and “delivering” it (like a mother or midwife) into appearance (eidos). In the context of the Mass, that which is delivered into manifestation is the God-Man, which is associated with Tiphareth, the point on the Tree of Life where God is manifest for the first time. So while the Priest is responsible for the potentiality or potency of the Christos, it is the Priestess who delivers Him into appearance or form, and therefore she is responsible for His being.

You can see this on a very concrete level in the Mass itself. The particle is crumbly. It lacks integrity. The cup has definite borders. It provides integrity.

(For that matter, compare the oaths of the Minerval and I°s, which correspond with Chokmah and Binah respectively by their chakra attributions. It’s the exact same thing, only now the candidate is the crumbly particle being supplied with integrity and therefore with the possibility of fulfilling an end.)

But by delivering the seed into manifestation, BABALON or the Priestess also delivers it to death. This is because there is no way to deliver into manifestation without also introducing becoming as a condition. A beginning (genesis) is a change from one thing into another. While things abide in beingness, they also keep changing. This change tends toward decay and ultimately death or passing back out of existence. As the German philosophers Hegel said in his Science of Logic, for finite beings “the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.” Due to the conditions that must be put into place for the introduction of something into the world, to enter the world is to immediately incur the penalty of death. This is captured in the nature of BABALON herself as feminine creator-destructor. It is also captured in the two-sided nature of the “sword” leading from Tiphareth up to Binah.

What this means is that the product of the Mass—the eucharist—has both the qualities of life and death, as these are unified in every manifest being. But it is more than this. For while Christ comes from blood and water, there is also the Holy Spirit, the third witness on Earth. This dove-serpent which deifieth man is subject to conditions of life and death. But by means of gross generation (biological reproduction), this spirit is able to utilize the process of life-death for the purpose of its own self-expression and manifestation down through the ages, thereby transcending those very same conditions. Like the example of the eidos of the oak tree moving from implicit to explicit and back again, we are witnessing here another circular process. The Holy Spirit separates from itself in its transmission, yet this separation is the very act by which it maintains its transcendental integrity. “The secret of generation is death.”

And while the blood is a reflection or image of the Father, and the water is a reflection or image of the Mother, the Holy Spirit is a reflection or image of God. It is an image or eidos which, just like the image or eidos of an oak tree, has paradigmatic power over the being it stands in relationship to. It calls it forth into its full-blown, most true configuration. While for an oak tree, that image is merely the fully grown oak, for an individual it is their true self. In other words, the serpent-Christ emerging from the Eucharistic operation is the Augoeides. By consuming the eucharist, you unite yourself with your genius or Angel. This is why Crowley says continually doing Eucharistic magic will inevitably lead toward Knowledge and Conversation.