germinating seed

The Work of Silence

At the root of Thelemic theology are what Crowley refers to as two “incommensurables and absolutes,” Nuit and Hadit, what I refer to as unfathomable, sacred, inexhaustible exterior and interior depths. They are unsuitable as objects of religious worship, because they are not even objects. They are “[marvels] beyond imagination […] before whom Time is Ashamed, the mind bewildered, and the understanding dark” which can only be approached indirectly by means of images and metaphors such as love, organic growth, etc.

The interior depth or Hadit is referred to in the Gnostic Mass as the Secret and Ineffable Lord, the Lord without a name, Lord Most Secret, Lord Secret and Most Holy, and “Thou who art I, beyond all I am / who hast no nature and no name.”

Elsewhere it is referred to as the Holy Spirit Within, Secret Self, Silent Self, Dwarf Self, Harpocrates/Hoor-Paar-Kraat, Aleph, Fool, the Babe in the Egg of Blue, Apophis, Holy Guardian Angel, and many other names besides, etc. There are more names for it than almost anything else in Thelema. It’s all of these but none of them.

This is one reason you need to be careful when you say—as some have—that we’re communing with our Holy Guardian Angels or something like that in the Gnostic Mass. That’s not false, but it is easy to reduce an ineffable reality to a subjective abstraction.

This sublime interior depth is also the origin of the Book of the Law, Aiwass being the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat. AL is the speech of the silence, the speech of unfathomable depth and reality. All such speech—what we may term prophetic speech—is beyond criticism, because it is not a verbal representation or picture of reality so much as the forth-speaking of reality itself.

In the context of a Thelemic religious ceremony such as Liber XV, it makes as much sense to say all of us are communing with that ineffable silence from which emerges the Book of the Law. When we take communion, AL is our sustenance and comfort after yet another manner. I addressed this interpretation in my lecture on Lectio Divina a few summers ago.

This is why I think the Thelemic theology should be understood as apophatic theology and the Gnostic Mass as embodying that. And this is why, among other things, I believe Liber XV ought to be treated as an object of contemplation: we are meant to look at it, but more importantly than that, we are meant to look through it toward that transcendent reality which has many names but which is reducible to none of them.

By gazing upon that exterior depth adumbrated through love, the interior depth within us naturally opens and unfolds as if “by seed and root and stem and bud and leaf and flower and fruit”.

As Thelemic magicians, we are often hungry for something to do. We want to do our wills and manifest our desires. We want to be agents of change, to do magick. This masculine, active impulse at the heart of Thelema receives amplification in our pragmatic, rational culture.

On the other hand, Thelema is largely silent on many of the most important things we must really accomplish in life. I think this is because Crowley assumed that Thelema would naturally attract those already possessed of excellent character and committed already to values such as honesty, courage, and justice. The real problem then is to figure out how to remove the restrictions to let these excellent natures unfold from within.

That hunger to do, to direct, to control, and to manifest can blind us to that side of reality which is better captured by a metaphor of a seed naturally germinating and like a miracle finding its way through the darkness to the Sun. We can become hard soil, which makes it difficult for the seed of silence to find purchase.

But when we allow ourselves to listen to what is being said, we can perhaps begin to hear the silence behind the speech. We become like soft soil, and the seed of silence can penetrate more deeply. There, in the darkness, “beyond speech and beyond sight,” it can do the work of really transforming us.

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