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What we can gather from these terms is that there is a divinity or a portion of divinity that is secret, ineffable, withdrawn, unmanifest, and completely transcendent.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.

photo of a church ceiling depicting interlocking patterns

Two Essential Patterns in Crowley’s Spirituality

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photo of a church ceiling depicting interlocking patterns

Two of the most important patterns in Crowley’s spirituality are the relationship between speech and silence and the relationship between the word and life and death.

You see the speech-silence pattern crop up everywhere. The Book of the Law itself is delivered by Aiwass, who announces himself as the minister of Hoor-Paar-Kraat, the god of silence. So the Book of the Law could be understood as the speech of the god of silence.

The god of silence is absent, unmanifest. Any attempt to objectify the god of silence inevitably fails. So the issue of speech and silence is simultaneously the issue of presence versus absence. Absence can only be manifest through presence by means of various detours or blinds—basically illusions. Magic deals principally in illusions, the magician being a Master of Illusions. This is why all the powers of the magician revolve around silence.

Absence is also worked with through Crowley’s pseudonyms: Perdurabo, To Mega Therion, V.V.V.V.V., Chioa Khan, etc. (I’ve never actually seen anyone attempt this analysis for some reason…)

The speech-silence pattern shows up in the Mass. “Silence” is indicated at two crucial points in the script. Also, if you’ve read any of my stuff on the Mass, I’ve indicated how essential Hoor-paar-kraat is to that ritual. The Mass itself is a ceremony of implantation of the god of silence into the soil of the Earth.

The drama of the Mass moves from the silence of the tomb, out into manifestation, and then back into the silence of the tomb.

AUMGN—the formula most often vibrated through the Mass—is itself a formula representing the movement of the silent seed into manifest speech and back out into non-existence.

The neophyte formula of A∴A∴ encapsulates exactly the same idea in slightly different form. In Pyramidos, it is described as the path of HUA or IAΩ—in other words of the Holy Guardian Angel itself.

The Man of Earth degrees form a cycle which expresses the same idea. In the Minerval degree, the candidate manifests out of silence or nothingness, is brought into manifestation in the 1st and 2nd degrees, passes out of existence in the 3rd, and passes back into silence or nothingness as a Perfect Initiate.

If you’ve read my stuff, you know I think the MoE candidate is actually the HGA for pretty much exactly this reason. If you’ve read my stuff on the Mass, you know I think it involves the HGA in exactly this way.

“Oh so what? You think everything Crowley ever did was about the HGA, huh?”

How many times did he himself say that? He couldn’t have been kidding all those times.

And then the other pattern has to do with the word—which is the HGA in manifestation—as it relates to life and death.

So the first thing to notice is that the word uses life and death to manifest itself down the generations. It’s how it gets spoken in the first place.

So the word in the macrocosmic sense is the Sun and basically all the things the Sun represents. In the Mass, we refer to the Sun as ON, which represents the Beast 666 who is also the Logos (word) of the current Aeon. And since most magical formulae represent not only a thing but also a process of attainment, ON also represents two paths of deification of the individual, one corresponding with Ayin, the other with Nun. (I’ve written about this elsewhere.)

But the word in the microcosmic sense—where it relates directly to life and death—is the phallus. This is the word utilizing the process of life and death or incarnation or becoming or suffering or what have you in order to manifest itself. This is the 5th collect of the Mass. This is the Anthem. This is the production of the seed which goes into the soil which becomes Baphomet. It’s the whole magic of the Mass, really: manifestation of the macrocosm in the microcosm.

Now when it manifests, it also transcends those conditions or reveals itself as transcending those conditions. Hence, Baphomet “destroys the destroyer”. This is the redemptive aspect of the word. This is why you would want to hear the word. This is why you would want to know God or to experience Knowledge and Conversation. It’s because it’s that within you which is using you or using your conditioned existence in order to be. It’s that for the sake of which all this is happening. It’s the impersonal vibration left over at the end of AUMGN from which existence will once again spring forth.

You find the same issue at work in the 3rd degree of M∴M∴M∴.

You see it in the IAO formula.

You see it in the Neophyte ritual of A∴A∴.

So if you ever find yourself lost in the weeds of Crowley’s writings, these are the two patterns I would try to focus on. One pattern has to do with how speech and silence relate. This is the life-cycle of the Word, the Logos, the HGA. The other pattern has to do with the life of the Word. This is how the Word uses life-death to manifest itself and how in the process it redeems becoming.

The Food of the Gods

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Ever since I had the insight that led me to write the short post on Harpocrates, the implications of it have spread like an invasive weed throughout all the rest of my thinking and perception.

It made its way into my post on the upward and downward paths in the Mass. It showed up in my NOTOCON talk. It’s lurking in the background of my recent article on healing and magic.

It really is just taking over.

The idea is quite simple. Each of us has been implanted with a divine seed. The seed consists in almost nothing more than remembrance of the Light we knew before incarnating. This seed lies dormant and silent within each of us, so that most people are not even aware of its existence. If it speaks to us at all, it is subtle and cryptic. It will speak to us seemingly from without, by guiding us into certain areas of life. It will speak to us seemingly from within, in the form of dreams. But most people take no notice of it.

But when we do take notice of it, a miracle occurs. It begins to grow. And so by seed and root and stem and bud and leaf and flower and fruit it will unfold and articulate itself into the light.

And I’ve come to the realization that the life-cycle of this seed is really the major theme of the spiritual path called Thelema—although the exact same phenomenon shows up in other forms of spirituality as well.

Crowley refers to this phenomenon under various names: secret self, silent self, seed, Aleph, Harpocrates, Hoor-paar-kraat, Virgin, the Fool who impregnates the King’s Daughter, etc. He always associates it with Malkuth, which is the soil in which it is implanted. He refers to its characteristic way of growth or development as true will.

Everything we do spiritually is not for our own sake but rather for the sake of this divine seed implanted within us.

But as we make the cultivation of this god within the theme and focus of our lives, something very odd happens. It begins to eat us. It consumes us.

Normally we understand the events of our lives to constitute a self. Ideas, thoughts, sense impressions, images, desires, words spoken, emotions felt, people loved, events remembered, events hoped for, actions carried out, paths chosen—we consider all of it to be mine. We think it is for a self, in a self, that it belongs to a self, that it is attached to a self, etc.

But as the divine seed sprouts and grows and unfolds within us, all of these happenings become food for, and become incorporated into, the growing body of this god. None of them—not even a simple sense impression or perception—happens for its own sake anymore. None of it—not even the simplest decision—can be said to be mine in the conventional sense of the term. Instead it is another element in the unfolding, developing image of this divine being.

We are the food of the gods.

What I describe may sound alien, even horrifying. But it only seems this way when we think we have something to lose through the process. This comes from the delusion that any of these thoughts, feelings, desires, or actions constitute a unity on their own. They don’t. But by becoming part of the metabolism and life cycle of the god, they acquire unity for the first time, the way the soup of molecules in the atmosphere becomes metabolized and structured into the outward form of a leaf.

At last, saying “I” can mean something.

It also gives new meaning to the expression, “There is no part of me that is not of the gods!”

The turning point for any person spiritually is when they realize that all the pain in their lives, all the difficulty and struggle and hardship, has never come from allowing this process to happen but has always arisen from resisting it. And that all the peace, happiness, and well-being lies in serving the divine within ourselves so it can fruit and release its seed into the world.

This is the means by which one becomes a god.

The Concept of “God” in Thelema

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Now the multiplying of the infinitely great by the infinitely small results in SOME UNKNOWN FINITE NUMBER EXTENDED IN AN UNKNOWN NUMBER OF CATEGORIES. It happened, when this our Great inversion took place, from the essence of all nothingness to finity extended in innumerable categories, that an incalculably vast system was produced. Merely by chance, chance in the truest sense of the term, we are found with gods, men, stars, planets, devils, colors, forces, and all the materials of the Cosmos: and with time, space, and causality, the conditions limiting and involving them all.

— Berashith: An Essay in Ontology

Infinite space is called the goddess NUIT, while the infinitely small and atomic yet omnipresent point is called HADIT. These are unmanifest. One conjunction of these infinites is called RA-HOOR-KHUIT (more correctly, HERU-RA-HA, to include HOOR-PAAR-KRAAT), a unity which includes and heads all things.

—Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter 0

In the Ontology of the New Aeon, whose prime theorem is 0 = 2, Kether exists only as the Child of any Marriage of one particular Hadit with one particular aspect of Nuit. There are thus as many Kethers as there are positive possibilities. More, Kether is not in any case a sole Unity, for each Marriage produces a Twin, ה + י = ה + ו. There is a positive “Third Being”, a Kether; and there is an Ecstasy, or dissolution into Nothing, by the same Event. One is the Magical, the other the Mystical, Result of an Act of Love under Will.

—The Vision and the Voice, Cry of the 21st Aethyr

So then, if Nothing is to be really the absolute Nothing, we mean that Nothing does not enter into the category of existence. To say that absolute Nothing exists is equivalent to saying that everything exists which exists, and the great Hebrew sages of old time noted this fact by giving it the title of the supreme idea of reality (behind their tribal God, Jehovah, who, as we have previously shown, is merely the Yoga of the 4 Elements, even at his highest,—the Demiourgos) Eheieh-Asher-Eheieh,—I am that I am … But all these go back to the still older cosmogony of the ancient Egyptians, where we have Nuit, Space, Hadit, the point of view; these experience congress, and so produce Heru-Ra-Ha, who combines the ideas of Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Hoor-paar-Kraat. These are the same twin Vau and He’ final which we know. Here is evidently the origin of the system of the Tree of Life.

—Eight Lectures on Yoga, Yoga for Yellowbellies, Second Lecture

Finality; things as they are in their totality. AHYHWH, the combined AHYH and YHVH, Macroprosopus and Microprosopus, is here. If we supposed the 3 female letters H to conceal the 3 mothers A, M, Sh, we obtain the number 358, Messiach.

—An Essay Upon Number

But IHVH, the Tetragrammaton, as we shall presently see, contains all the Sephiroth with the exception of Kether, and specially signifies the Lesser Countenance, Microprosopus, the King of the qabalistical Sephirotic greatest Trinity, and the Son in His human incarnation, in the Christian acceptation of the Trinity. Therefore, as the Son reveals the Father, so does IHVH, Jehovah, reveal AHIH, Eheieh.

—The Temple of Solomon the King, Part V

I am God, I very God of very God; I go upon my way to work my Will; I have made Matter and Motion for my mirror; I have decreed for my delight that Nothingness should figure itself as twain, that I might dream a dance of names and natures, and enjoy the substance of simplicity by watching the wanderings of my shadows. I am not that which is not; I know not that which knows not; I love not that which loves not. For I am Love, whereby division dies in delight; I am Knowledge, whereby all parts, plunged in the whole, perish and pass into perfection; and I am that I am, the being wherein Being is lost in Nothing, nor designs to be but its Will to unfold its nature, its need to express its perfection in all possibilities, each phase a partial phantasm, and yet inevitable and absolute.

—Liber V vel Reguli

He identifies his Angel with the Ain Soph, and the Kether thereof; one formulation of Hadit in the boundless Body of Nuith.

—Liber Samekh, Point II, Section A