The Unity of the Three Lords

As I showed yesterday, there are three Lords mentioned in Liber XV: the one secret and ineffable Lord of the Creed (aka the Lord secret and most holy of the 2nd Collect), the Sun (the one Star in the Company of Stars of the Creed aka the Lord visible and sensible of the 1st Collect), and CHAOS (the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth of the Creed and the Lord of Life and Joy who we adore in the 5th Collect). But these aren’t three completely separate individuals. They’re actually one Lord with three aspects or faces.

I am Heaven, and there is no other God than me, and my lord Hadit.

Liber AL vel Legis, I.21

The first Lord—the one secret and ineffable Lord mentioned in the Creed and the 2nd Collect—is Hadit. Hadit is the point of view or subjectivity of each individual. It is Hadit’s union with Nuit—space and matter—which gives rise to the manifest universe, the observable universe, the experiential universe, etc. This is covered in Crowley’s Introduction to the Book of the Law.

In any experience you may have, Hadit is always that to which the experienced event occurs, never the thing experienced itself. From this, two truths immediately follow. (1) Hadit has no nature of his own (since nature is always something experienced (see Djeridensis Comment on AL II.2)); and (2) one cannot even experience let alone worship Hadit. (See New Comment to AL II.8.)

From this we may infer that (3) the first 14 lines of the Anthem are directed at Hadit (ill, presumably, because Hadit is the one delivering the lines).

From the Anthem we also learn that Hadit is the “centre and secret of the Sun”. The Sun is the second Lord (the one star of the Creed and the Lord visible and sensible of the first Collect). We also learn from the Priest’s veil speech that the Sun is “our Lord in the Universe,” i.e., the macrocosmic deity. In the context of the Mass, the Sun represents both what people have in mind when they casually think of God (i.e., the Lord of the Universe) and also the literal Sun which impacts the Earth with electromagnetic energy.

What we’re being told in the Mass is that the essence of the Sun—basically the essence of God—is identical with the essence of ourselves. That elusive subjective viewpoint within yourself which you can never quite grasp or get to the bottom of—which always manages to slip away when you turn to look at it—is actually the essence of divinity.

Now the Sun also serves other purposes in the Mass. It is also a principle of unification, a principle of sacrifice, and a principle of resurrection. But all of these are tied together in the single magical act toward which the Mass aims. That magical act is apparently one of self-sacrifice. The Priest offers his life/body and joy/blood to the Sun. What he is in essence proclaiming, performing, and realizing is that these things are not Hadit. They belong to Nuit. By giving up all that he is, was, or could be to the Lord of the Universe, he is in a certain sense annihilating himself. But at the same time, he is becoming Hadit. (See AL II.6.) He is undergoing spiritual death (within this incarnation) in order to realize who he truly is. So his act of self-sacrifice is a unification (seeing everything as part of one unified whole in Nuit) which is also a spiritual resurrection (thus fulfilling the formula of IAO, which is just another name of the Sun).

This is complex, but if you grasp this, you grasp Thelema.

Now how does our third Lord, Chaos, come in to this?

The simplest way to understand this in the context of the Mass is that Chaos is the drive within each of us toward union with Nuit. It is the Hadit within us but manifested as a drive toward completion, wholeness, and annihilation through self-sacrifice.

Chaos is the drive toward erotic liberation. It’s the unity of sex and death.

This is why when the Priest offers up his body/life and blood/joy to the Sun, he says, “Let this offering be borne upon the waves of Æthyr to our Lord and Father the Sun that travelleth over the Heavens in his name ON.”

ON is ענ. Ayin and Nun are two of the paths going up the Tree of Life into Tiphareth, the House of the Sun. Ayin is the Devil, the goat, the phallus, the perfected will. It’s life and joy on Earth, in this incarnation. Nun is Death. Both paths terminate in the Sun, the principle of unification and resurrection. Ayin (70) plus Nun (50) is 120, a number associated with resurrection in the Golden Dawn Adeptus Minor ritual. But let’s translate this out of occult-ese into something real.

What we think of as God (call it the Sun or Jehovah or Allah or whatever you want) is really something within each of us which we in some sense project on to reality or on to a transcendent author of the universe. If God in the exoteric sense really exists, His essence is Hadit, the same as our own essence, which is our subjective point of view. So God is really within us.

The reason we don’t realize we are God is because we are confused about ourselves. We identify with our bodies, our minds, our emotions, our thoughts, our plans, our wishes, our desires, our personalities, our tendencies, etc. All these things we think are us, are ours, are I/me/mine are nothing of the sort. They are actually all Nuit. (Technically, they’re the Khu.) One of the most important ways in which we can realize our own divinity is by giving all those things back to her: by sacrificing all that we think we are to Nuit. (See AL I.65 and also The Wake World.)

This sounds like we’re creating a duality or an opposition between self and other. It sounds like we’re rejecting all these things we think of as self. But that’s only apparent. Just stop and think about it for second. What does it take for you to give your body back to Nuit? Isn’t your body already in space? Aren’t your thoughts already occurring in an awareness which is space-like? Can you possibly notice your body without also noticing space? Can you possibly notice your thoughts and feelings without also noticing awareness?

Now look at it from the other side. Hadit doesn’t have any nature or any being, so there is nothing to oppose to Nuit. Hadit is just (unreflective, “foolish”) going. In an experience of something seen, there is the thing seen (Nuit), and there is the act of seeing (Hadit). In an experience of something thought, there is the thing thought (Nuit), and there is the thinking (Hadit). The confusion comes with thinking that the thing seen or thought is us. We confuse ourselves with our thoughts.

There’s a Zen saying to the effect of, “In the seeing only the seen, in the hearing only the heard,” etc. That’s very apropos here.

The idea of erotic liberation is that, deep down, the Hadit in us wants nothing more than union with Nuit. It doesn’t want union with this or that part of her. It wants union with her, with everything. It doesn’t care about the particulars. Anything that arises for it is as good as anything else. (AL I.22) It wants to fuck the universe.

That innate drive to fuck the universe manifests itself as the sex principle in a religious or spiritual context. It’s the original nature worship. Those who realize this belong to the “true church of old time”. They understand that apotheosis or liberation depends upon self-transcendence. It requires self-abandonment. It requires an act of love so powerful, an ecstacy so intense, that it completely and permanently obliterates the sense of separateness from life and joy.

The Saints are those who “got it”. They destroyed themselves through erotic destruction and as a result got to really, truly live.

Let’s hit it from another angle: the phallus (Chaos) is the natural being or natural will perfected. By “natural will” I just mean your desire: what you want.

Thelemites are fond of saying “I will this” and “I will that”. That might be your natural will, but it’s not your true will. It can’t be, because it’s confused with some particular outcome, some particular aspect of Nuit. It’s not your pure or perfected will. It’s not Hadit. What’s the perfected or pure will? The Book of the Law tells us.

For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.

AL I.44

At the same time, the perfected will and the natural will are not separate! It’s not like you have two wills. You can think you have two wills, but that’s where suffering comes from. You have one will, but it has to be perfected through a training, through a process. That process culminates in the destruction of the separateness of that will.

Will itself must be ready to culminate in the surrender of that Will; the aspiration’s arrow that is shot against the Holy Dove must transmute itself into the Wondering Virgin that receives in her womb the quickening fire of that same Spirit of God.

Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter VIII

Notice in this passage that the will (which is masculine), upon becoming perfect, is on a trajectory which ends with it becoming female. It’s becoming “virgin” and chaste. We’ll come back to this.

This is what’s involved in the formula of ON. The O or Ayin is the perfected will. It is the will that aims at its one, true object, and therefore it wills death (N or Nun) on to itself. It is the destruction of the sense of separateness (the sense that I am imposing my will on reality from some position that transcends the universe). True will is not free will in the sense of me getting to choose this or that path. It’s the opposite. This destruction occurs through an act of erotic union with Nuit. The person who has accomplished this becomes God. They are a deified individual, the symbol of which is—again—the Sun.

Again, pretty complex, but if you get this, you get how the Mass works.

But as I said, everything depends upon the training, the process, which is really a process of learning how to aim properly.

So was it—ever the same! I have aimed at the peeled wand of my God, and I have hit; yea, I have hit.

Liber 65, I.65

The natural will becomes perfected (becomes Chaos or God in the Flesh) when it is oriented and devoted exclusively to the proper object. This is what in Thelema is called chastity. (See Little Essays Toward Truth, “Chastity,” Energized Enthusiasm (sec VI), and Magick in Theory and Practice, chapter XX, and of course AL I.52. The doctrine of chastity—which comes from the Book of the Law—is the foundation of Crowley’s sexual mysticism.)

The Priest becoming chaste is dramatized in the Ceremony of the Introit. In that ceremony, the Priestess (who, with the Children, represents the three feminine principles which balance the three Lords spoken of here) adorns the Priest with two mantles and consecrates a third.

First she robes the Priest with the robe of scarlet and gold. This robe signifies him as the Priest of the Sun, the second Lord. It means that his work in this ritual, among other things, is one of unifying, of becoming One, of “doing the Lord’s work” so to speak.

Then she places the cap of maintenance and the Uraeus crown on his head. This represents the first Lord, the Lord secret and most holy, etc., Hadit.

Finally she kneels, runs her hands gently up and down the lance eleven times, and says “Be the LORD present among us!”

That’s the third Lord, the Lord adored upon heaths and in woods, etc., Chaos. That’s the natural will of the individual which is now perfected through devotion to Nuit. We know it’s the natural will, because the Priest comes out of the tomb with it! Unlike the robe and crown, it’s on his person. It’s a natural birthright, not something bestowed upon him.

It becomes “perfected” by being devoted solely to Nuit, which is symbolized by it being stroked 11 times. (See AL I.60.) As soon as this is accomplished, the Priestess says, “Be the LORD present among us!” All give the Hailing Sign which symbolizes marriage. Why? Because the Priest is now a committed man. That devotion of his sexual energy exclusively to the All is what makes him chaste, and it is what identifies his will or his sexual potency with Chaos, the Lord Adored. And if you had any doubt about this, the Priest is nice enough to let you know what just happened:

Thee therefore whom we adore we also invoke. By the power of the lifted Lance!

Now he’s going to take that lance—representative of his perfected will—and he’s going to put it in the only place it can ever possibly go ever again: the grail. That lance (O or Ayin) is now on a one-way trip to death (N or Nun). The Priest’s will must come to an end through an act of love which unbinds (nibbana) his sense of separateness from nature. He must inevitably undergo erotic destruction.

There’s a lot here, but that’s how the three Lords fit together, and how that doctrine fits into the Mass and into Thelema generally. The Ceremony of the Introit in particular is very important for establishing the relationship of the three Lords in the person of the Priest and setting him on his trajectory. There are also three feminine principles at play here. If you have three masculine principles, you must have three feminine principles as well.

If you do anything in the North, you must put something equal and opposite to it in the South […] It is not safe to use any thought in Magick, unless that thought has been thus equilibrated and destroyed.

Magick in Theory and Practice, chapter VIII

Maybe I can go into that in a subsequent post if anyone is interested.

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