It used to be that few people bothered with the underworld. They recognized its existence, but they feared it, revered it, respectfully steered clear of it.
Nowadays it’s different. We haven’t simply neglected the existence of the underworld. We recognize it but treat it like we do any other dimension of human experience. We “make use of it.” We “make of it what we will.”
We go on little weekend or afternoon tours of the underworld. We take some drugs. We buy a book that teaches us some “techniques”. We “open doors” for ourselves. We read a little philosophy and learn to say clever things about what lies on the Earth and under the Earth.
What’s conspicuously absent from all this is a sense of reverence. Reverence is passé. Everything is ultimately subject to us. Meaning is relative to our ends. The gods are what we need them to be at any moment.
The Adept must accept every “spirit”, every “spell”, every “scourge”, as part of his environment, and make them all “subject to” himself; that is, consider them as contributory causes of himself … He must therefore realize that every event is subject to him. It occurs because he had need of it … All experiences contribute to make us complete in ourselves. We feel ourselves subject to them so long as we fail to recognise this; when we do, we perceive that they are subject to us.
Journeys to the underworld used to be rare and were undertaken for the benefit of the gods, the benefit of the cosmos, even the benefit of human generations. Now it’s all about me: getting something—knowledge, power, experience—for my own sake, “my growth,” for my own entertainment.
“It’s Friday. You guys wanna call down some spirits or maybe just hit the bar?”
To say that modern people have become materialistic is not strong enough of a criticism; nor is it entirely accurate. There are probably more people on the planet interested in “spirituality” than at any other point in human history. No, we haven’t simply denied the dimension of the spiritual, the world of shadow. That would be far less of a crime than what we’ve actually done.
Instead, we do with it what we do with everything else. We degrade it. We flatten it. We “democratize” it. We cheapen it. We disrespect it. We parade it. We use it for our entertainment.
We turn the dark into just another mode of the light. We “have preferences.” And we conveniently forget what magicians and prophets of nearly all time have tried to remind us, which is that what we call “light” is in and of itself the darkest void of all.
And then so we can sleep, so we can look at ourselves in the mirror, so we can look at anything at all without screaming in horror, we sprinkle a little rationalization on top.
“But what really is the difference between the sacred and the profane?”
“It really does depend how you look at it. “
“Yes, but…”
Meanwhile, the gods wait.
They do not wait in judgment. They do not even wait patiently. They wait as they always do.
One of the things that took me awhile to grasp is that the main object of spirituality—the base matter you’re working to transubstantiate—is your own sense of spiritual longing.
If you think about it, what was there before you encountered spiritual traditions and spiritual practices? There was the sense of something missing, something absent. There was a vague sense of dissatisfaction, not with one thing or another, but rather with conditioned existence itself. This is what drove us to seek spiritual traditions and practices. This is what made them appealing in the first place: that they seemed like solutions to this sense of disconnect from something higher.
Spiritual traditions and practices do not fulfill that desire for transcendence. For that matter, neither do peak spiritual experiences, no matter how profound, at least not for long. For every peak spiritual experience, the dryness returns like thunder following lightning. For each new spiritual plateau you hit, the sense of absence returns in a new, vaster form.
What happens for some people is that, after pursuing these spiritual experiences for a long time, they eventually turn around and bring their attention to the desire or sense of separateness itself. They manage to look at it a certain way. I don’t know exactly how to explain how to do this or even describe it. I just know it happens. And then there’s kind of a duck-rabbit flip that happens. The sense of separation itself is seen as presence.
That’s the moment of realization.
Imagine you’re aspiring fervently to union with your Holy Guardian Angel. You’ve experienced samadhi with your HGA on occasion, but there’s still something “missing”. There’s still the sense of a gulf between you and the divine. But then at some point, this “flip” occurs.
The “flip” is not suddenly thinking that your HGA is inside of you. That’s an extremely tempting interpretation, since we’re constantly told that God is inside of you. That’s not it. There’s something far more profound than that.
It’s more like the distance between you and God is God.
You realize that what you thought was God or your Angel is just a thought-form. It’s conditioned. It comes and it goes. But there’s something that doesn’t.
And then you look around the room or out your window and realize that God is everywhere and in everything. Basically wherever the sense of separateness is—me here, the object there—that’s oneness, unity, God. That’s the Vision of Pan.
But this is why if you don’t trigger a profound Dark Night of the Soul, it’s very difficult, maybe impossible, to achieve spiritual realization. Spiritual realization is the transformation of the sense of separateness—the darkness—into presence or gold.
But—and this is the part that’s difficult to grasp—it’s not overcome by replacing it with a presence. The Holy Guardian Angel isn’t going to show up and fill an HGA-shaped hole in your heart. If that happened, that would be just another experience. It would come, hang out for a bit, and then it would go. As profound as that experience might be, it would not be different in kind from eating a sandwich.
It’s more like the HGA-shaped hole in your heart will in and of itself be seen to be the presence of the divine. But that HGA-shaped hole is not special. It’s just a catalyst. Because every absence you look at after that will be seen as a type of presence.
This is another reason non-duality is a non-starter. Non-duality is the philosophical idea that separation (“duality”) is “just an illusion” and can be safely ignored.
Bullshit!
Yes, everything is an illusion. This world we think we exist in is about as thick and sturdy as a wet piece of toilet paper. You could put your little finger right through it if only your little finger weren’t also made of wet toilet paper.
And that’s the problem right there. “Non-duality” is just another thought-form. It’s just another concept. As such, it is made of the same flimsy material as everything else. The problem is that it surreptitiously sets itself up as something different, as being a concept which—unlike all those other concepts that posit dualisms—is somehow superior, somehow has a unique grasp on truth. As such, it establishes an even more insidious duality!
The proper response to the illusion of duality is not to reject the illusion of duality. It’s to respect the illusion of duality. To slowly draw close to it—closer than the overwhelming majority of human beings ever have—and to see it for what it truly is in and of itself.
The method of respecting the illusion in order to understand its true nature is magic.
The compiler of The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts [A.E. Waite] is not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble. I cannot dig over the dreary deserts of his drivel in search of the passage which made me write to him. But it was an oracular obscurity which hinted that he knew of a Hidden Church withdrawn from the world in whose sanctuaries were preserved the true mysteries of initiation. This was one better than the Celtic Church; I immediately asked him for an introduction. He replied kindly and intelligibly, suggesting that I should read The Cloud upon the Sanctuary by Councillor von Eckartshausen. With this book I retired to Wastdale Head for the Easter vacation of 1898.
Aleister Crowley, Confessions, Ch 14
[During Easter 1898] I was absorbed in The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, reading it again and again without being put off by the pharisaical, priggish and pithecanthropoid notes of its translator, Madame de Steiger. I appealed with the whole force of my will to the adepts of the Hidden Church to prepare me as postulant for their august company. As will be seen later, acts of will, performed by the proper person, never fall to the ground, impossible as it is (at present) to understand by what means the energy is transmitted.Ibid, Ch 14
I caught up with him [Julian Baker] some ten miles below Zermatt. I told him of my search for the Secret Sanctuary of the Saints and convinced him of my desperate earnestness. He hinted that he knew of an Assembly which might be that for which I was looking. He spoke of a Sacrament where the elements were four instead of two. This meant nothing to me; but I felt that I was on the right track. I got him to promise to meet me in London. He added, ‘I will introduce you to a man who is much more of a Magician than I am.’
To sum the matter in brief, he kept his word. The Secret Assembly materialized as the ‘Hermetic Order of the G∴ D∴,’ and the Magician as one George Cecil Jones.
Ibid, Ch 19
This encounter with the ideas of a Hidden Church and a prisca philosophia did not only motivate Crowley in his youth. It informed his life’s work.
When Crowley sat down ten years later to write “An Account of A.·.A.·. sub figura XXXIII”—the first article in the first number of the first volume of The Equinox—he merely edited Steiger’s translation of Chapter 2 of “The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary”. Apart from redacting long passages glorifying the patriarchs and the Christian Church, the following substitutions occur from Eckhartshausen’s version to Crowley’s:
church → Order Interior Sanctuary or Church → Axle of the R.O.T.A regeneration of humanity → evolution of humanity God → L.V.X. or masters Jesus Christ → V.V.V.V.V. service → revel
A friend of mine was recently telling me that he did not think beliefs were important to his spirituality. I think he meant that he was doing his best to take his experiences on their own terms without jumping to conclusions about how the world works.
Damien Echols recently said something similar on his youtube channel: that magick isn’t about beliefs. This is a common sentiment, and I’ve said similar things along the way.
I replied that I attributed most of my “success” (if you can call it that) in spirituality to my nihilism. Then I had to spend a little time figuring out what I even meant by that.
There’s a man who lived a very long time ago—about 2,500 years ago in fact—in Italy. He was a priest of Apollo and a prophet-healer—what in Greek was called an iatromantis—and his name was Parmenides. While he was in a state of trance, he went on what we might call an “astral journey” to the underworld. There he encountered a goddess who taught him about the world. When he came back from his journey, he wrote it all down in a poem which we now have only in fragments.
One of the first things the goddess tells him is that there are only two paths you can follow in life: the path of being and the path of non-being. What she meant is that something either is, or it isn’t. This seems like the simplest thing in the world, but she points out that most people live their lives acting as though things simultaneously are and aren’t.
Take for example secular humanism.
Secular humanism embraces reason, ethics, and naturalism without belief in religious dogma, supernaturalism, and the like. Mere humans are incapable of the God’s eye view on reality, and this belief gives rise to skepticism and tolerance of differing points of view.
This is all fine and good, but there’s only one problem. And that’s that secular humanism is itself a religious, even supernatural point of view.
There was a German philosopher in the 19th century named Hegel who pointed this out. He said quite rightly that it was absurd to judge the capacity of human cognition in relation to something which you yourself say doesn’t exist—in other words a mere figment of imagination.
Peter Kingsley makes a similar point in the context of Jungian depth psychology. Jungians insist that Jung restricted himself to the perspective of a mere observer of the archetypes. In other words he insisted on his own humble humanity in relation to divinity. Jung was certainly no “prophet,” let alone a magician!
The only problem with this, Kingsley points out, is that “humanity” is itself an archetype. And it’s a rather insidious archetype, as it tends to cover its own tracks. Nothing seems more humble than to restrict oneself to the perspective of a mere human. We wouldn’t want to engage in “ego inflation”. And yet this apparent self-restriction is the greatest inflation of all, since it is turned into the first and last word on any possible experience.
In a long series of talks on what he calls the meaning crisis, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has pointed out that most of the structures by means of which we define our humanity themselves have a religious substrate or simply are religious in nature.
Basic notions like progress require a particular relationship to time and narrative that have their origins in the Old Testament. I would add that this isn’t just progress in the collective sense of humanity. Any notion of personal self-discovery or personal growth you have—the sort of learning-story that might make for an interesting autobiography—also depend upon the same structures.
In other words, the ways in which we understand our humanity, individually and collectively, is itself religious in nature. Insofar as secular humanism leans on a set of religious substructures to define knowledge and ethics abstracted from religious substructures, it is a self-contradiction.
For that matter, consensus Thelema falls into a similar if not the same trap. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard Thelemites try to argue to me that human beings ought to treat one another according to such and such ethical principles—usually the ones enumerated in Liber Oz—because we are morally obligated to recognize one another as “stars”.
But there is no moral obligation beyond doing your will. Full stop. The imposition of any moral obligation beyond that just is religion in the Old Aeonic sense. And in fact the particular grounds on which this is justified—the obligation to recognize the divinity of another—is no different in spirit or in letter from Christian morality specifically!
That’s one helluva mistake to make!
If your interpretation of Liber Oz leads you to contradict the ethical core of Thelema—Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law—then you need to stop and figure out where your interpretation of Oz went wrong.
But again, this is just another, even more obvious example of attempting to have your cake and eat it too—or what the goddess in Parmenides’s poem refers to as the “wandering in two minds,” the behavior typical of “undiscerning crowds, in whose eyes the same thing and not the same is and is not, all things travel in opposite directions.”
But the situation is even worse than that. The goddess goes on to tell Parmenides that the choice between the path of being and the path of non-being is no choice at all, because there is only one path: the path of being.
I remember being a student and reading this and thinking, “My goodness! We have come so much further than this! Thank heavens we’ve learned to be more nuanced in our thinking since poor old Parmenides! We know now from so much more sophisticated thinkers that you can never step in the same river twice! We’ve learned from no less a genius than Aristotle to have moderation in all things! A little of this, a little of that, I say! All the world’s most sophisticated spiritual and religious teachers taught what, conveniently for me, accords with my own common sense! Something something modern studies show!”
But at some point I learned what all this really was. Not only is it delusional to think you can stake out a claim between these two opposed points of view of being and non-being.
It’s delusional to think there are opposed points of view in the first place.
This is bound to confuse and even upset people on more than one level.
To start, I did not follow a “heart-centered path” to my realization. I didn’t fall back upon my emotions or what I “intuited” that “the universe” wanted for me.
No, I simply followed logic.
My realization didn’t come while I was sitting in meditation (although I did spend a lot of time meditating up until that point). It came while I was thinking.
But I was not thinking the way people normally think. I was thinking in a completely uncompromising way. And as a result, for the first time in my life, I realized I couldn’t have it both ways. First I was forced into a choice, and then having made the choice, I realized there was never any choice in the first place.
And then the second bit that irritates people is that I did this shamelessly. I didn’t do what people normally do, which is to fuss endlessly with a teaching—making reason my master—and then pretending as though everything is a matter of “intuition” or feeling.
What I realized is that I was not going to “change my beliefs”. This was logically impossible. Beliefs aren’t changed into other beliefs, nor are they transformed into nothing. If you want to get rid of a belief, you need to drive it out with another belief.
And then it dawned on me that beliefs weren’t special. What I was realizing about beliefs applied to everything whatsoever, because change itself is an illusion.
Again, I could believe in everything, or I could believe in nothing. It didn’t matter which I chose, just that I was consistent. And then as soon as I was consistent, I realized I didn’t have a choice in the first place.
That was it. That was the moment I crossed the Abyss. I crossed from this world into the other world. I was freed from the limitations of the “merely human”. I became an immortal god.
And then I turned around to look back the way I came, and I realized the world I just crossed into was the world I had come from.
I spent some time recently looking closely at Liber V vel Reguli along with the commentary and the early draft notes, and feel like I have come to a few insights which could be of use to others.
As I’ve shown before, one of the main themes of Crowley’s spirituality is the movement from speech to silence and back again. This could also be viewed as the expression of nullity (Ain of Kabbalah) into manifestation (the Tree of Life itself) and the individual’s path of return back to nullity. The first part of this equation expresses Thelemic cosmology, the latter Thelemic soteriology.
In Reguli these movements are dramatized and expressed in the formula LAShTAL. LA means “not,” while AL means “God”. LA and AL represent nullity in concealment and manifestation respectively, while ShT is the process that mediates between them.
In order for ShT to mediate between LA and AL, they have to conjointly share something in common between LA and AL while also adding new information.
LA and AL both add to 31 by gematria. ShT also adds to 31 by way of the tarot cards these letters are attributed to. Sh or Shin is the Hebrew letter assigned to The Aeon, Atu XX, and T or Teth is assigned to Lust, Atu XI.
As someone recently pointed out to me, there is a tradition in the Golden Dawn, recorded in the Z1 document, of ST denoting an influence from Kether. ST is the Coptic letter ⲋ (“ⲥⲟⲟⲩ” or “soou”). Crowley continues this tradition by assigning this letter to Kether in 777, Column LI.
So by means of its association with 31 and Kether, ShT is identical with the (N)One at the foundation of Thelemic ontology and theology.
But ShT has an additional function. It also indicates the Beast and Babalon conjoined. It is a sexual formula. This sexual formula is indicated by how it is represented in Reguli on the human body and on the Tree of Life.
In the ritual, Aiwass, Therion, and Babalon are attributed to the cross paths of the Tree of Life: Daleth, Teth, and Pe respectively. The cross paths are important as they mediate between the Pillar of Severity and the Pillar of Mercy.
As taught in the Golden Dawn 4°=7□ ritual, the left pillar, the Pillar of Severity, is associated with the letter Shin, which is assigned to elemental fire, while the right pillar, the Pillar of Mercy, is Mem or elemental water. The Middle Pillar is then Aleph, which is elemental air. Fire is archetypally masculine, water feminine, and air androgyne.
However, these sexual characteristics are not assigned to the pillars in a straightforward way. While the Pillar of Severity is fiery and masculine, the topmost sephira, Binah, is archetypally feminine. She is the supernal Mother. And opposite her, on the Pillar of Mercy, we find Chokmah, which is archetypally masculine, the supernal Father. They are “reflected” in Netzach (masculine-feminine) and Hod (feminine-masculine) respectively, as Kether is reflected in Tiphareth. This reflection occurs both horizontally across the Tree (Binah and Netzach and Chokmah and Hod are opposite each other across the Middle Pillar) and vertically down the Tree (they are opposite Tiphareth). The vertical and horizontal “components” of Liber V vel Reguli work with this double-reflection of sexual energy.
One can view this double-reflection of magical sexual polarity taking place on the Tree as a movement of energy down the Tree of Life from Kether into the subsequent Sephiroth along the paths. One androgyne current emerging from Kether, represented by the path of Aleph, becomes masculine upon reaching Chokmah. There it progresses down the tree along the archetypally masculine paths of Vau, Yod, Ayin, and Resh, into Yesod. In Yesod it is met by a complementary feminine path, originating with Beth’s entry into Binah, and progressing down the Tree along the paths of Cheth, Lamed, Nun, and Tzaddi.
This exchange and “mixing in Yesod” is represented on the Art card, Atu XIV. Art is a hieroglyph of the path of Samekh, which links Yesod with Tiphareth. Here we see the Lion and the Eagle which have exchanged their colors as represented earlier on the Lovers card, Atu VI. If the paths on the Tree represent these essences or potencies, then they were exchanged at Tiphareth, a sphere which, among other things, is the site in which the Rose (Kteis) and Cross (phallus) are conjoined. The caldron is Yesod, which is linked with the sexual organs and the Muladhara cakra. We see spiritual air—presumably the Medicine of Metals—rising out of the caldron, represented by the arrow, as the Caput Mortuum (skull) drops to the bottom.
The cross paths are important to this process, because they are mediating the exchange of energies down the Tree. They are in a sense guiding and determining the separation and mixing of these sexual polarities. That these paths add up to 93 is significant. It tells us that the 93 magical current has something essential to do with the production of sexual polarity from out of androgyny and back again. It has to do with the movement of 0 to 2 (magick) and from 2 to 0 (mysticism), both as a personal spiritual journey and as a cosmological process. Aiwass, Therion, and Babalon are personages representing these governing principles.
For me personally, this is not simply theory. When I’m serving as Priest in the Gnostic Mass, I picture this exchange of energy occurring—moving down and wrapping around and joining mine and the Priestess’s hearts—at the consummation of the eucharist. We are linked energetically at the levels of mind (Daleth and Kether), heart (Teth and Tiphareth), and body (Peh and Yesod). The Tree of Life with the cross-paths can also be used as scaffolding for visualizations during sex magick workings.
If the horizontal component is governed by Aiwass, Therion, and Babalon, the vertical component is governed by Nuit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit, and Hadit. Nuit is associated with the Sahasrara cakra/Kether/the Three Negative Veils; Ra-Hoor-Khuit is linked specifically with the Anahata cakra and the paths of Teth, Yod, and Lamed (which add to 49), but also arguably with the entirety of the Tree in manifestation (hence Microprosopus); and Hadit is linked with the Muladhara cakra and Yesod and/or Malkuth (Crowley refers to this as the “seed” in his commentary).
The conjunction of Nuit and Hadit produces the godhead, Ra-Hoor-Khuit (or Heru-Ra-Ha, so as to include Hoor-paar-kraat). Hadit, as the consciousness or point of view of the individual, is implanted in Malkuth as a seed represented by Heh-final, the Virgin Daughter whose destiny is to be seated upon the Throne of the Mother (Binah). Crowley consistently related the three deities of the Book of the Law to the Tree of Life this way.
So one thing to take note of when attempting to understand LAShTAL is that it shares the same form or structure taken by these three personages in relation to the Tree of Life. You have two simple extremes mediated by a complex third thing sharing characteristics with both of the extremes. Indeed, the entire Tree of Life itself—or Ra-Hoor-Khuit—could be seen as a means of mediating between these oppositions.
But how does the introduction of the horizontal component modify or inform this cosmological and theological process of the implantation, germination, and return of Hadit to the source?
The cross-paths enter into this as they are involved in the drawing of the Hexagram of Nature on the Tree of Life. Generally speaking, the hexagram is the symbol of the union of the individual with the divine, with the mirroring in the microcosm of the structure of the macrocosm. As such it is symbolic of the individual who has become divine. The cross-paths of Teth and Pe are involved in this hexagram—in fact are the only actual paths involved—as they form bases of the two interlocking triangles.
Typically the upward-pointing triangle represents fire and is therefore masculine, while the downward-pointing triangle is water and feminine. But a different connotation is suggested in Reguli where the base of the upward-pointing triangle is assigned to Babalon, and the base of the downward-pointing triangle is Therion. The polarities are reversed.
This suggests not so much the familiar Hexagram of Nature but rather the Magical Hexagram as described by Crowley in the Book of Lies, where fire points down and water up.
In the ordinary Hexagram, the Hexagram of nature, the red triangle is upwards, like fire, and the blue triangle downwards, like water. In the magical hexagram this is reversed; the descending red triangle is that of Horus, a sign specially revealed by him personally, at the Equinox of the Gods. (It is the flame desending upon the altar, and licking up the burnt offering.) The blue triangle represents the aspiration, since blue is the colour of devotion, and the triangle, kinetically considered, is the symbol of directed force.
Book of Lies, Chapter 69
Crowley explicitly associates force with the path of Teth in Reguli, as he associates fire with Shin. Hence ShT represents “force and fire”. In the context of the ritual, these triangles would interlock and interpenetrate around Tiphareth, representative of the Anahata cakra, Ra-Hoor-Khuit, and, as we saw earlier, Kteis-Phallus or the Rose-Cross.
As the upward-pointing blue triangle represents Babalon, the Mother, we could attribute the three Mother Letters (Aleph, Mem, and Shin) to its three points, as we might attribute the masculine trinity, IAO, to the three points of the downward-pointing red triangle. Their conjunction gives us the word AShIAVM, which has the same value as MShICh (Messiah) and NChSh (Nechesh, Serpent).
The Messiah or Anointed One affects the union between the individual and the divine. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden is the initiator of mankind into knowledge or gnosis. In Thelemic soteriology, this saving, initiating power is not one individual but rather the conjoining of two individuals, Therion (666) and Babalon (156). And the way in which this union between the divine and the individual is affected is sexual in nature.
In this formula AShIAVM, the three mother letters are concealed by the letter Heh, giving us AHIHVH, the Great Name which is the conjunction of AHIH and IHVH.
AHIH is the godname of Kether. It represents existence in is most abstract quality or Macroprosopus. In the context of Reguli, it is LA, Nuit and Hadit conjoined.
IHVH represents god in manifestation or Microprosopus. It enumerates to 26 by gematria, which is 13 x 2. 13 is the enumeration of AChD or unity. IHVH therefore expresses unity (AL) by means of duality (ShT or Beast and Babalon conjoined). It is the way in which nullity expresses itself in manifestation or as the Tree of Life or 0=2.
The conclusion would be that all the points of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram (32) on the whole create another Hexagram that symbolizes the Qabalistic Zero, radiating from the center of the Column and flooding the whole Circle with the Limitless Light of Ain Soph Aur. And the Hexagram is the formula of unifying opposites (positive and negative, active and passive, male and female), by the 0=2 Equation.
This sheds light on what it means that Reguli is meant to “invoke the energies of the Aeon of Horus.” The “first gesture” of the ritual—the drawing of the Elevenfold Seal—is depicting the unfolding process leading to the creation of the cosmos. It is also establishing the scaffolding—the cross-paths—that allow for the process of return. The “second gesture”—in which the Son raises the Daughter to the Throne of the Mother—is the familiar process of Tetragrammaton which, by means of sexual interaction between Son and Daughter, the process of return takes place. What Reguli adds to this conception is the idea that Nuit and Hadit (Daughter and Son) must become “sexually mature” as Babalon and Therion on their way of return.
AHIHVH is important for other aspects of Crowley’s spirituality. He relates it to the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. By means of the LRP it is indirectly connected with the production of the Medicine of Metals. The connection with the Medicine of Metals is made explicit through Crowley’s discussion of the production of the Eucharist of Six Elements in Magick in Theory and Practice Chapter 20. The production of this medicine is a secret guarded by the Sanctuary of the Gnosis of O.T.O. This formula is also the guiding structure behind Liber HHH, which describes some of the work of the Outer College of A∴A∴. At least one Thelemic author, J. Daniel Gunther, has made an extensive case for the AHIHVH formula being essential to a comprehension of Thelemic initiation in general. (See Initiation in the Aeon of the Child and The Angel and the Abyss.)
As I said in my recent talk on art and magick, when a magical formula is involved in so many disparate aspects of Crowley’s magick—especially when it illuminates mysteries of both A∴A∴ and O.T.O.—you can bet it is essential to an understanding of Thelemic spirituality generally. I hope to deal with this formula in greater depth in subsequent writings, exploring more fully its importance for Thelemic magick generally.
As for Reguli, my treatment of it here is not exhaustive. I have hardly dealt with the function of the cross-path of Daleth or how Aiwass figures into all of this. (There’s another hexagram that uses the path of Daleth as the base of a triangle.) I didn’t even touch on the elemental attributions of the deities/quarters, and I barely dealt with the significance of the cakras. But hopefully this shows the way in which Reguli is expressive of the underlying ontology and theology of Thelema and how the sex magick implicit in it relates to Crowley’s broader spiritual concern as expressed in the AHIHVH formula.
There’s this ancient temple in Rome called the Pantheon. It has a giant domed ceiling with a hole right in the center of it. I visited it in my 20s. I think “grand” is the right word to describe it. It’s not easy to capture in a photo.
When I think about the relationship between magick (especially theurgy) and mysticism, I recall what it was like looking up at the ceiling of the Pantheon from inside. I imagine the flower of the rose-cross painted on the ceiling, the opening in the middle being where the central cross would be. The multi-colored petals would be painted around the hole.
Whether you’re practicing theurgy or yoga, you’re aiming up in both cases. It’s just a question of how you aim. When you unite yourself with some particular god or goddess—or if you’re just working with some particular path—that’s aiming toward one of the petals off to the side of the central opening. But yoga is like aiming in a direct, vertical line through the hole in the roof.
Of course that’s exactly how Crowley thought of Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel as well. The Holy Guardian Angel is on the middle pillar of the Tree of Life.
The magician devotes himself entirely to the invocation of a God, and as soon as his balance approaches Perfection he ceases to invoke any partial God; only that God vertically above him is in his path. And so a man who perhaps took up magic merely with the idea of acquiring knowledge, love, or wealth, finds himself irrevocably committed to the performance of the great work.
Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter 15
I shoot up vertically like an arrow, and become that Above. But it is death, and the flame of the pyre. Ascend in the flame of the pyre, O my soul! Thy God is like the cold emptiness of the utmost heaven, into which thou radiatest thy little light. When Thou shall know me, O empty God, my flame shall utterly expire in Thy great N. O. X.
Liber VII, I.37-40
The O.T.O. IX° working is also a middle pillar working. It is attributed to the path of Samekh, the path uniting the Sun (Tiphareth) with the Moon (Yesod). Its hieroglyph depicts a Lion and an Eagle exchanging their essences into a cauldron. The Caput Mortuum drops to the bottom of the cauldron as spiritual air (Aleph, Baphomet) rises. This rising spiritual current is the “Rashith-ha-Gilgalim of the new Universe created of the Quintessence of the Substance of the Unity of the Angel and the Adept, expressed therefrom by virtue of ‘love under will’ at the moment of Rapture.” (Commentary on LXV V.1) This is the spiritual essence unlocked from the Eucharist of One Element, the Medicine of Metals. It is like a cosmic stem cell which can be molded into any physically possible state of affairs by the magician.
In other words this issue of working the middle pillar applies both to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel as well as the IX° magick. It applies to the mysteries of both A∴A∴ and O.T.O.
This mystery is represented analogously in the Gnostic Mass. Here it is depicted using a eucharist of two elements rather than one. The Priestess is like the Angel of the Priest, and the “moment of rapture” is symbolized when they cry HRILIU.
Another way to put it is that in the case of yoga, one aspires up the middle pillar, but in this particular kind of magick, one manifests a current down the middle pillar (into the organs of generation, which are represented on the Tree of Life by Yesod). Generally speaking, magick is a movement of energy “down the Tree”. The impulse originates with the Will in Chokmah and is given form on the astral at Yesod before manifesting in Malkuth. Yoga, theurgy, and path workings tend to be ascensions “up the Tree”. Both operations (yoga and magick) require mastery of the subtle energetic currents represented by the entire Tree of Life, though.
It’s a commonplace to talk up “balance” in relation to Crowley and Thelema, but it really is an essential theme. “Balance” will mean different things to you at different points of your spiritual development. There’s balance of the elements within your conscious experience. There’s a balance point or borderline between conscious and unconscious which has to be worked with more or less interminably. There’s contrasexual balance points.
What happens typically is that you experience a “calling” into some terra incognita. This might be an entirely new calling, or it might be some perennial difficulty in your life. But it will draw out what Jung called a complex. The easiest way to describe a complex is that you just don’t feel like yourself anymore. You feel like you’ve temporarily become a different person. If you are usually self-controlled, you’re suddenly impulsive. If you’re usually strong, you’re suddenly clingy and weak. If you’re usually kind, you’re suddenly sadistic. And then you have to work with that imbalance in order to get yourself back to a place of balance.
God is above sex; and therefore neither man nor woman as such can be said fully to understand, much less to represent, God. It is therefore incumbent on the male magician to cultivate those female virtues in which he is deficient, and this task he must of course accomplish without in any way impairing his virility. It will then be lawful for a magician to invoke Isis, and identify himself with her; if he fail to do this, his apprehension of the Universe when he attains Samadhi will lack the conception of maternity.
Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter 1
In my opinion, Crowley’s description of this process here is perfunctory, even blithe.
In any case, there’s really no formula for this. I’m not even going to try to offer “helpful hints” on it. But generally speaking, that’s the work of magick or going “off-center” as I described above.
Breath work is important in both eastern and western spiritual traditions. Breathing can be manipulated to bring about physical relaxation or excitation or altered states of consciousness. Working with the breath is also considered a means of accessing prana, qi, ki, ruh, ruach, pneuma, anima, or astral light.
Here’s a quick summary of some easy and useful breath techniques.
Fourfold Breath
This is not really my favorite or one I work with very much, but it’s commonly taught in magical traditions. Four counts on the inhalation, hold for four counts, exhale for four counts, hold for four, repeat.
5 x 5
This is my preferred alternative to fourfold breath: five second inhalation, five second exhalation, no pause between. This has an immediate calming effect. I use this to control stage fright, to tolerate high heat in the sauna, or just to warm up for ritual. I’ll also do energy circulations/visualizations at this rhythm. Really useful and portable.
Candle Breathing
Another one of my preferred ways to warm up for ritual. Light a candle, and as you inhale, imagine pulling the energy from the flame into your body at every pore. As you exhale, picture the fire within you burning even brighter. Do this a few times until you are incandescent. I find this a good launching off point for Qabalistic Cross.
Good Ol’ Anapanasati
This is the breathing technique the Buddha taught. My interpretation of this practice comes from Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Just work with the breath so that it’s soothing and calming. If long, deep breaths feel good, do those. If you need shorter, shallower breaths, do that. Tune into your body. Feel into what it needs and adjust the breath accordingly. Work progressively through each part of the body doing this, and then just experience the entire body breathing this way all at once. It helps to visualize the breath energy going in and out of the body as light, through the pores.
3 x 6
Inhale for 3 seconds, exhale for 6. Fill the bottom of your lungs, then the middle of your lungs, then the top of your lungs. Empty in reverse order. If you experience light-headedness or tingling, sloooooow the breath down. When this is easy to do for 30 minutes, try a 4/8 pattern. Then a 5/10 pattern. If you can do 10/20 for 30 minutes, you’re ready for Crowley’s instructions in Liber E.
There are plenty more variations besides these, especially when you bring mixing them with visualizations of various kinds. But these are my favorite portable/basic practices.
Those who regard this ritual as a mere device to invoke or banish spirits, are unworthy to possess it. Properly understood, it is the Medicine of Metals and the Stone of the Wise.
—Aleister Crowley, The Palace of the World
This is a visual representation of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram.
In the center is the Kabbalistic Cross with the Hebrew words Ateh, Malkuth, ve-Geburah, ve-Gedulah, le-Olahm, Amen. Ateh is white to represent Kether, Malkuth is yellow to represent Malkuth, ve-Geburah is orange to represent Geburah, ve-Gedulah is deep violet to represent Chesed, and le-Olahm/Amen is clear pink rose to represent Tiphareth.
Around the center are four orange scarlet pentagrams, one drawn in each quarter.
Arranged around that are the godnames, beginning at the top in the east and moving clockwise: YHVH, ADNI, AHIH, and AGLA.
Around that are the names of the Archangels invoked in each quarter: Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, and Auriel.
Each quarter is colored according to the element associated with it: air, fire, water, and earth.
[The six-rayed star] flames both above and beneath the magus, who is thus in a cube of 4 pentagrams and 2 hexagrams, 32 points in all. And 32 is [AHIHVH], the sacred word that expresses the Unity of the Highest and the Human.
For more on the significance of this hexagram, see Sepher Sephiroth, entries for 32 and 358, as well as Crowley’s introduction to Liber HHH in Magick.
Is the Holy Guardian Angel part of ourselves? Is it outside of ourselves? Is it outside of ourselves but still part of ourselves? Is it the whole universe? Is it just the higher part of my soul? These sorts of questions come up all the time.
In one respect the question is very easy to answer, in another extraordinarily difficult. It’s difficult because Crowley’s idea of the Holy Guardian Angel—he gets the term from Abramelin but gives it legs and makes it the center of his spirituality—is a contribution to a larger discussion about the divine individual which has been going on in Europe and the Near East for over two thousand years. It’s easy because, as far as formulations of the phenomenon go, Crowley’s was pretty straightforward.
The quickest way to understand this doctrine is to just take a look at reality. Are you a spiritual seeker? If you are reading this, odds are extraordinarily high that you are. You are responding to some inchoate prompting from within yourself, a prompting which you probably became acutely aware of during adolescence, which you began to attempt to satisfy through spirituality, philosophy, psychedelic drugs, or other devices that would allow you to experience other worlds.
All of that movement toward some other world of light or secrets, all that spiritual practice toward a state of illumination in the future, is driven by a sense of something lacking or being absent in the present.
There are a lot of different ways you can think about what that something is, and there are different names you can choose for it. You can think of it as Buddha. You can think of it as Jesus Christ. You can think of it as a dead ancestor. You can think of it as God. You can think of it as a nebulous spirit. You can think of it as a Secret Chief of A∴A∴. You can think of it as your yoga teacher.
Crowley’s term for this something is Holy Guardian Angel. He chose that term because he felt it was sufficiently vague but also that a child could understand it. But there are really only two things you need to understand about it:
Whether you call it Holy Guardian Angel, Jesus, Buddha, God, the Divine, the Universe, or whatever other name, you are dealing only with a name, a concept, an appearance, an illusion—not reality. You need to understand the concept well enough to use it, but understanding the concept perfectly is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that you are effectively seduced by the image.
When I say “seduced,” I mean that you are sufficiently attracted to the image such that you are willing to pursue it, to go all in for it. In other words, it matters less what the image is, just that it matches closely enough the shape of the absence in your heart.
When I say “image,” I don’t just mean the particular object you are pursuing, be it “union with the divine,” “samadhi” or whatever. I also mean the entire system of practices and beliefs you submit yourself to. This is probably the most difficult part of this to grasp. Practices like meditation and magic are also “images” in the sense that I’m using the term, and it is important that you are seduced by them as well. Theories like Kabbalah or systems like A∴A∴ are also images.
What I’m saying is, you don’t need to pick the right system, and you don’t need to pick the right set of practices, at least not in any abstract sense. You just need to find one and fall in love with it.
Am I implying that you will eventually become disillusioned and fall out of love with it? Not necessarily. That depends on more factors than I can cover here.
The first responsibility of any spiritual teaching is to honor the illusion of separateness between you and the divine. It’s to begin from who and where the student is: a seeker seeking spiritual experience, illumination, realization, wisdom, what have you.
Even if the system you’re working in says that everyone is already divine, and even if you already believe that on some abstract, philosophical level, you don’t really believe it, not in the core of your being. Otherwise why would you be seeking? There is some still absence working on you, and your actions show this even if your words do not.
So in that sense, it’s very easy to answer whether the Holy Guardian Angel is you or part of you, etc. It is not.
Even if you believe on a theoretical or philosophical level that the Holy Guardian Angel is part of you—your Jechidah or True Self or whatever—the actual experience to go along with that concept still lies somewhere in the future for you. So it is still “other”.
You may get to a point where you realize that the Holy Guardian Angel was with you at certain moments in the past, but you just weren’t aware. But that retrospective experience still lies for you somewhere in the future. So it is still other.
Some people have gotten upset because there is a particular Thelemic teacher and author who has said that not everyone automatically has a Holy Guardian Angel, and that they must first prove themselves worthy of one. They reference some remarks Crowley made about the Angel being an “objective being,” perhaps a dead adept of A∴A∴.
Here’s the truth about that idea: there is nothing in principle wrong with it. The idea of spiritual ancestors as teachers is an idea that goes back thousands of years. It’s even arguably at the root of shamanism. People have achieved realization using that idea for a very long time—much longer than the idea du jour that everyone is equally divine and great the way they are.
There is a truth indicated in that idea: the acknowledgment of the appearance of separateness. It is an idea which attempts to reflect the reality that the student starts with, which is that divinity is outside of them spatially, temporally, or both. The experience they are seeking is yet to be—otherwise why use a strategy (teachings, practices, etc.) to attempt to bring it about?
The falsity of the idea lies, not in the fact that it doesn’t represent reality, but that it is an idea or an image at all.
You might think it is so much less absurd to think things like “consciousness is God,” “the universe is divine,” “every person is born with an HGA in their heart,” “the HGA is the Higher Self,” “my sexuality is divine,” “everyone is already enlightened,” “God is all around me,” “I am God,” or even “Every man and every woman is a star.” But I assure you, those notions are just as deluded as the idea that Marcelo Motta is one’s Holy Guardian Angel. And actually the more quickly you realize that, the more quickly you will make spiritual progress.
In fact, my first spiritual awakening happened shortly after having almost that exact thought.
If you don’t like an image, if you’re not sufficiently seduced by it, then just move on to a different metaphor. Find something that better reflects the sense of longing in your heart. But time spent trying to refute some idea or make fun of it is time wasted—which ultimately says more about you than the idea itself.
Crowley honors the appearance of separateness by supplying you with the idea of the Holy Guardian Angel, the idea of an experience that lies in your future called Sacred Marriage or Knowledge and Conversation, and a structure—like a ladder, a mountain, or a bridge—that gets you from here to there through stages.
In a certain sense it is very structured. You’ve got the sephiroth on the Tree of Life with tasks you have to complete at each grade. In another sense it is very vague. The idea of the HGA itself is vague. The idea of exactly how to get there—i.e., the particular act that will bring about the Marriage—is undefined and left up to each person. This reflects Crowley’s realization that, although the term Holy Guardian Angel comes from the western occult tradition, the ultimate aim of spiritual practice is non-secular.
Once one achieves Knowledge and Conversation—which is basically samadhi—the metaphor shifts. The Angel is still separate, but one is now also “pregnant” by the Angel. This is illustrated in The Wake World where Lola becomes pregnant in the house of Netzach which Crowley associates with ananda or bliss. The idea of the soul becoming pregnant through bliss is an old one. See Plato’s Symposium.
At the risk of putting too fine a point on this: The aspirant is Heh-final, the Virgin Daughter, whose spiritual longing—which I am speaking of as a heart with a hole in it—is presented as an empty womb in Crowley’s version of Tetragrammaton. The Angel—Vau of Tetragrammaton—fulfills that emptiness, penetrates it, puts a child in it, which it is now the Adeptus’s destiny to deliver.
Crossing the Abyss requires, among other things, clearly seeing the nature of the aggregates or skandhas. One sees that body, mind, thoughts, feelings, habits, and even consciousness are not self and are impermanent. There is the symbolic “delivery” of the pregnancy at Binah. In The Wake World there is now a new “fairy prince” (Holy Guardian Angel) in Tiphareth.
There is a lot of doctrine packed into this symbolism, but here are a few ideas to help work through it.
With the pregnancy, the divine is now “within”. However, with Crossing the Abyss, the idea of “within” and “without” is permanently complicated—which is the same as saying it is completely simplified. Whether the Angel is part of the self, other than the self, was part of the self but not realized, was sometimes part of the self or not—all seen as the wrong questions.
This also permanently changes the meaning of awakening or realization. Crowley uses the metaphor of the self being destroyed as it crosses the Abyss. This makes it sound more dramatic or histrionic than it needs to be. It’s enough to say that awakening does not belong to an individual—maybe in the same way it makes sense to say that pregnancy does not belong to a mother but is rather a moment in the process of the generation of the species. One is not getting something for oneself by waking up but rather completing part of the cosmological cycle. It’s this understanding of the cosmological process which defines Thelema, not “doing my will” or getting anything else for myself.
Therefore the idea of my Angel, my illumination, my Knowledge and Conversation was never part of fundamental reality. That was actually a misunderstanding that had to be worked through. Why? Because reality is such that truth is only ever found in and through falsehood. This is why the notion of the “Angel” as “other” is as necessary as it is false.
The reason there is a new Fairy Prince or HGA down in Tiphareth is because the person who has crossed the Abyss is now a divinely realized being who must teach others. They must now become the image for a student. They must now honor the appearance of separateness for someone else. This is how they continue to serve the cosmological process, which is now understood as impersonal and not about them. But there is another reason they do this which you can guess if you carefully read the paragraph before this.
The student looks with longing at the teacher. They think the teacher is someone who can help them fulfill the absence in their heart. They want to feel God’s heart in theirs, and the teacher is the one who can help them do this, because the teacher has accomplished this for themselves. (The last two words here are delusional—they didn’t do anything for themselves.)
And when the teacher looks at the student, they see the hole in the student’s heart. So they are able to acknowledge the student’s sense of loss. They are able to honor the student’s sense of separation in a way which makes sense to the student, which seduces them. These are the teachings and practices the teacher offers the student to satisfy the longing.
But there is something the teacher sees in the student’s heart which the student cannot.
The hole in the student’s heart is letting through the most brilliant light they have ever seen.
The highest principle in Platonism is the Good. The identity between the Good and the One is established by Proclus in the 13th proposition of his Elements of Theology.
All that is good is the unifying principle of its participants, and all union is good, and the Good is the same with the One.
For if the Good is the preserving principle of all beings (for which reason it is also the object of desire for all), but that which is preservative and connective of the essential being of every being is the One (for all are preserved by the One and dispersion removes every being from its essential being).
For the Good completes and contains those, in which it is present, according to one union.
And if the One is collective and connective of beings, then it will perfect every being by its own presence.
Accordingly then, it is also Good for all these to be united.
Proclus, Elements of Theology, Proposition 13
The argument is extraordinarily terse, so it merits unpacking. But the unpacking will not only tell us why the Good is also the One but also what the characteristic function of the One is such that it is good.
Starting with the second paragraph, Proclus argues from the Good to the One by means of the way in which the Good preserves and connects the “essential being of every being” that participates in it.
So to the extent to which something participates in the Good, it is moving—through time—toward a state in which it is more exactly what it in essence is. In other words it is moving toward perfection. And the extent to which it is moving away from the Good, then over time it is decaying or falling away from what it is.
The principle way in which the Good allows beings to be what they essentially are is through its “preservative and connective” function. In other words, it accomplishes this by making and keeping them whole over time.
To put it another way, all material things are composite and subject to change. If the component parts of something fly off in all directions, the thing is destroyed. But to the extent to which the parts maintain their proper connections with one another, the being of which they are parts maintains its unity, its wholeness. But wholeness or unity as such is the One, and therefore the Good is also the One.
And then he runs the argument the other way in the fourth paragraph. The function of the One is “collective and connective”. To participate in the One is to experience greater unification with oneself, a greater degree of wholeness, and so one moves toward perfection or being what one in fact truly is. But we already know that this is what participation in the Good rewards one with, and so the One is also the Good.
Proclus’s argument relies upon the preservative and the connective functions of the Good and the One.
He assumes that the Good is the preserving principle (sostikon—from sozo meaning salvation) of all beings, and that the One is the preservative (sostikon) and connective (sunektikon) principle of the essential being (ousia) of every being. By virtue of the preserving and connecting, all are preserved (sozetai—again, “saved”) by the One.
This is important not only because it is the fulcrum around which Proclus’s argument turns, but it also gives us insight into the essential nature of the One and how it functions. We might say the highest ontological principle in Platonism is a principle whose main function is to bring about preservation or “salvation” (sostikon) by keeping together (suntereo) or by synthesis (suntithenai).
Logos and Synthesis
Probably the most famous modern proponent of a “synthetic” ontology is the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant famously declared all principles of metaphysics (of which ontology is a part) to be synthetic a priori. This means that such propositions must be justified independently of empirical experience, but that they also cannot be justified solely by the meaning of the terms involved. An example of such a synthetic a priori statement for Kant would be, “Every event has an antecedent cause.” There is no way to prove such a statement on the basis of examining particular occurrences, but it is also not possible to derive the term “antecedent cause” from analysis of the dictionary definition of “event” which just means “change from one thing to another.”
The way in which Kant proposes to justify synthetic a priori propositions—and hence provide a secure foundation for metaphysics—is by grounding them in subjective processes of the mind which are nevertheless necessary for having any empirical experience at all. Kant argues that there are certain rules of experience which are not derived from experience but which the mind structures experience in accordance with. In other words, the underlying logical architecture of the mind necessitates that sensations be connected with one another in certain ways, and one of these ways in which the mind connects things is according to the rule of cause and effect.
To put it another way, logic projects semantics on to the world. And the way Kant argues the mind projects its meaning on to the world is through a process he terms synthesis.
(At this point, with the subjectivizing of synthesis and the world-building function, we are closer to the Thelemic understanding of these categories than the Platonic understanding.)
Our English word logic derives from the Greek word lógos, which means “speech, oration, discourse, quote, story, study, ratio, word, calculation, or reason.” The Greek word for “I speak” is légō. Both terms are derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *leg- which means “to collect, gather.”
So in the Greek word for speech we have the idea of collecting or of synthesis—the same function Kant assigned to the underlying architecture of the human mind and the same function which is so crucial for understanding the One in the Platonic tradition.
So we might go a step further in our explication of the One and say that, while its essential functions are connecting, keeping together, and preserving/saving, this essential function is carried out, or is in fact identical with, a kind of speech.
To put it somewhat differently, the One projects a “logic” on to beings—let’s call it an invariant cosmological structure or set of laws—but rather than this logic subsuming beings or somehow fixing them into place, it has the seemingly paradoxical effect of “saving” them (from decay) in such a way that they are allowed to go on to be precisely what they are in their essence (ousia).
To say it yet another way, this time in more explicitly theological language, divine logos—a power which the Hermetic tradition assigned to Thoth-Hermes and called the Second God or the Son of God—frees things to be what they are in themselves.
Eros and Divine Logos
In the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite, we find the Greek goddess of beauty and love described as “she who causes beings to mate” (zeukteira—from zeuktēr, “one who yokes”). A couple of lines later, she is described in the same way, this time with regard to the cosmos itself: “and you have caused the cosmos (kosmon) to couple (upezeuxo)”—literally, you have “yoked” the cosmos.
The Greek word for yoke is zugós, which comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *yugóm, which means to join. This is the same root from which derives the Sanskrit word yoga, which also means yoke or union and which eventually acquired the connotation of union with the divine.
So in the poem we see Aphrodite described according to two functions. She “yokes” mortal lovers together—i.e., she causes them to fall in love and to mate—and she also causes the cosmos itself to couple or to join. And it’s clear from the play on words in the Greek that the author intended for the mind to associate the one function with the other.
But we have already seen that joining and connecting—especially when looked at from the cosmological or metaphysical perspective—is the function of the One. Not only that. It is the essential function of the One and also that which makes it the Good. To speak of Aphrodite as serving as cosmological matchmaker, therefore, is to endow her with the power of the One, the highest ontological principle. In fact it is to say that she is identical with the One.
Looked at from the other side, we might say that in addition to its ontological and “logical” functions, the One also has an erotic function. In other words, our account of the way in which the One “connects and preserves” through “speech” is incomplete unless we also understand this connecting and joining from an erotic and conjugal perspective.
To be clear, I am not saying that the One is in fact Aphrodite. I’m claiming two things. (1) There is an erotic dimension to the characteristic activity of the One. As a mnemonic, one might represent that function by the Greek goddess Aphrodite in the same way one might represent the logical function of the One by the Greek god Hermes. And (2) we should be careful forcing a separation between erotic love and spiritual love. Eroticism is not mere carnality but has a hieratic potential. We will explore this potential in depth in the next section.
Finally, when we speak of something being something, we can say this in many different ways. For example, we can say that it is, i.e., that it exists, but we can also assign a predicate to it, e.g., “The horse is fast.” The predicate is fast is not identical with that which is identified by The horse—it is different—but it is joined with it through the function of the verb to be. But by joining this general concept fast with the particular horse, we are in fact revealing something essential about the horse itself, viz., that it is fast. So again, somewhat paradoxically, by going away from the horse itself to something other than the horse, we do not turn away from or cover over the horse but instead reveal something true about the horse itself.
This function of the verb to be, when it joins a predicate with a subject, is called the copula. It comes from the same root from which we get the English word copulate. Something of the erotic dimension of logic and ontology is captured in our using that particular word to describe predication.
Love and Liberation
One of the things we were at pains to emphasize earlier is that participation in the One does not efface beings. To realize that “all is one” is not to see all things as the same thing. In fact the One is not a thing at all, and so participating in the form of the One does not reduce all things to the same thing. Rather, it frees beings—saves them in the language of Proclus—to be what they essentially are in themselves as self-unified beings. Insofar as it makes sense to speak of the One projecting a kind of logical structure on to beings, the purpose of this structure is not to ensnare or enclose them but paradoxically to release them into their ownmost being. They are released to the world, but more importantly, they are released to themselves and in a sense to their own care. We can now refine this conception in light of the teaching of “Orpheus” by saying that this joining-freeing is also divine loving.
From the perspective of ontology and cosmology we might say that the Platonic doctrine of the One as developed by Proclus is in some ways quite similar to “eastern” cosmologies, particularly yogic or “tantric” conceptions according to which the phenomenal universe is the result of the sexual union of Shiva and Shakti, or lingam and yoni.
From a soteriological point of view we might say that there must be a tight association between (a) knowing oneself, (b) that direct knowing of God which the Greeks called gnosis, and (c) eroticism. The One joins disparate things together to become whole beings in what we might term cosmological marriage or coitus. But in the case of a human being, knowledge forms part of that whole. So to achieve perfection or union entails the power of the individual not only to turn back on their self but to also know that they are turning back and to know precisely what it is they are turning back on. In the case of a conscious being, the reflection is explicit, willed, and clear. So the perfection of the individual entails what Hegel may have termed the satisfaction of self-consciousness. But as we saw at the beginning, to move toward perfection and to participate in the Good are identical. Hence, knowing oneself and knowing God are identical.
The erotic dimension of salvation enters when we recognize the yogic dimension of self-unification. To gather oneself together into a singular awareness is what is termed in the Pali Buddhist tradition ekaggatā or one-pointedness. It is one of the factors of samādhi or meditative absorption. Other factors include píti (rapture or joy) and sukha (happiness). The joy and happiness attendant upon samādhi are subtler than “gross pleasures” but they are more enduring and more reliable, and hence in the context of Theravada Buddhism, samādhi is considered to be an important intermediary set of experiences between ordinary consciousness and complete awakening.
There is a similar intermediate experience described in the Platonic tradition between ordinary consciousness and direct knowledge of the One, which Plato in the Symposium describes as the idea or the form of beauty. In the experience of the form of beauty, it is linked with justice and goodness, and—most importantly—it is apprehended as the principle of unity itself.
I don’t think that Plato means to reduce the One to the experience of beauty. More likely he intends the idea of the beautiful to be an apophantic quality of the One: something like the closest correlate to the One that one may encounter by means of sensation. (The Greek word for sensation is aisthēsisfrom which we get our word aesthetics.) It is possible that by the apprehension of the idea of the beautiful Plato has in mind an experience not very different from that of samādhi in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions.
If that is the case, then the Platonic spiritual path might be said to consist in the pursuit of deeper and more profound experiences of beauty until apotheosis occurs. The path described in Symposium is one in which the soul progresses from coarse beauty to ever more refined forms of beauty, until one moves from loving beautiful things to craving Beauty itself. The Platonic spiritual path is therefore equally an erotic and aesthetic path of liberation.
Implied in the Platonic spiritual path is a challenge to the idea that we can cleanly separate erotic love and spiritual love. As Plato illustrates in Symposium, the first pursued deeply enough leads to the second.
It is now clear that adequately understanding erotic love can lead us to a direct experience of Beauty and then the One. But is there anything that our experience of Beauty and the One can teach us about erotic love? In other words, how should spirituality inform our romantic and sexual relationships?
Between the Romantic and the Divine
It seems to me one might construct a “Platonic” approach to sexual and romantic relationships along the following lines.
Normally when we use the phrase “Platonic love,” we mean mere friendship. While much of what I will say applies to friendship, I don’t mean friendship exclusively. I also and primarily mean romantic and sexual love relationships. With that in mind, I would suggest the following principles:
We don’t necessarily fall in love with people who are good for us. We just tend to fall in love with people who are familiar. If your upbringing was wonderful, you’re one of the lucky few who are perhaps attracted to people who are also good for you. For the rest of us, read on!
Look for someone you admire. Find someone with admirable qualities, someone you can look up to. Find someone who at least some of the time models what you consider to be good in the world. This applies to all relationships, not just romances.
Find someone who wants what is best for you and in you. You want a person who is happy for you when you’ve achieved something meaningful and who will be there for you when you’re going through a rough time. Avoid people who are envious of you or who are resentful of your happiness as much as possible.
Understand that the relationship itself is prior to the individuals composing it. What I mean is that you are not in charge in the relationship, and your partner is not in charge in the relationship. The relationship itself is in charge. When you have a difference with your partner, the “winner” is the person who wants to do what is best for the relationship. This is because:
A relationship is more than the sum of its parts. It has to be, otherwise we wouldn’t bother with them. If we could get what we needed by ourselves, for ourselves, we wouldn’t bother with relationships. The whole point of a relationship is that it can provide for you in a way you cannot immediately provide for yourself. You ruin this power of a relationship when you just try to get things for yourself. Make the relationship healthy, and you can get so much more than either of you could get just trying to be selfish.
At its deepest level, a relationship is a spiritual entity. It is a logos. It has a certain intelligibility and wholeness all its own. It is a living being. Like the One itself, the purpose of the relationship is to unite its component parts (the individuals in the relationship) through love and to bring them to fulfillment and wholeness in themselves. So do not consciously devote yourself to your partner. Consciously devote yourself to the partnership, and by its divine power it will unite the two of you.
Investing in the third entity, the partnership, can mean a lot of things, but much of it comes down to fairness and reciprocity. You give freely of yourself to your partner because you know they will do the same thing for you. This frees you of self-obsession and brings freedom and well-being. This isn’t just based on Platonic theory; it also seems to be based on biology. Stan Tatkin has written a few books about this which you may want to check out. The “spiritualizing” of it is mostly mine, though.
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