All of my recent writings on Thelemic/OTO theology as they relate to EGC gender policy can now be found grouped under the gender series tag.
Last month I wrote a series of posts on my private Facebook exploring Thelemic and OTO theology as it bears upon the Gnostic Mass and current EGC policy regarding gender. As these posts largely represented a process of research/discovery for me rather than finished products, I initially chose not to share them on my Lapis Mercurii blog. However, in retrospect, I think the process I went through—from questioning to considered opinion—might be valuable for other researchers and individuals questioning EGC policy.
tl;dr – The theology underlying OTO mystery—solar-phallicism—to my mind does not support transgender clergy or queer mass. In other words, EGC policy is already a lot more liberal than it ought to be if we were adhering to Crowley’s original intention. That being said, the theology itself is problematic and kind of gross, and current EGC policy at least represents a move in a direction where OTO can remain relevant. The main problem with the policy is that the church now occupies a middle position—a kind of no man’s land—where they must inevitably draw fire from every side. We’ve already deviated from the Blue Equinox model of OTO in countless ways. There seems to me to be very little gained by holding the line on this particular issue. If enby people want to serve as both Priest and Priestess, church authorities should just let them.
A little while back, I wrote an article on why I thought it was important to understand Thelemic theology. (You can read it on page 10.) It was a response to an EGC Bishop who claimed that theology should “be rightly spurned and discarded by individual Thelemites, and more importantly by our Church” and that all theological matters should remain “unsettled and diverse”.
Recently I was researching the magical and theological doctrines of our church as they apply to the question of queer Gnostic Mass. Imagine my surprise when I found an article by the very same EGC Bishop, written 7 years ago, claiming that queer mass would not fulfill the “doctrinal purpose” of the Gnostic Mass.
Funny how “settled” and “undiverse” theology suddenly becomes when certain issues are raised.
So let me double down on the claim I made in my Agape article: Thelemites really do need to acquaint themselves with the theology of their church, especially if they’re ordained clergy.
One of the first times I attended Gnostic Mass, a well-intentioned person at my lodge asked me if I had any questions about the ritual.
I really didn’t. Not because I understood everything about the ritual, but because I didn’t understand the ritual well enough to even know what kind of question to ask.
One of the reasons you want to develop competence in Thelemic theology is not just so you can ANSWER questions put to you by new people, but even more importantly, so you know which questions to ASK when individuals—especially those in positions of authority—put forward their own interpretations of magical and doctrinal issues behind the Mass.
I know that for the last three generations (at least) people have been told that the intellect is bad, that it’s the opposite of spirituality, that peace and group coherence are upset when people start forming and expressing opinions on things like this. I understand that it really does seem like having less clarity around theological issues gives individuals the most freedom possible to just enjoy the ritual on their own terms.
I get all of that. I understand why it appears that way.
But that’s only one side of things.
The other side is that if you do not sharpen your own mind and acquire clarity, then you are in a position where you are going to have to trust individuals in positions of authority. And you better hope not only that they’re competent but that they also have totally unimpeachable character, not in the slightest way blemished by prejudice or selfishness (in other words superhuman), because that’s what you’re relying on now for the proper functioning of your church.
You need to start questioning the idea you’ve been fed—not just in EGC but in the culture at large—that nebulosity around key issues somehow magically creates harmony. One persons feelings pitted against another person’s feelings does not create harmony. It creates what we see today in OTO.
I understand that some people are very, very scared of conflict. I don’t like conflict either. For instance, I know that every single time I write a post like this—no matter how civil and rational I am—I’m upsetting someone, either angering them or making them scared. I also know that people screencap them and might try to find ways of using them against me. They can take out their annoyance or aggression on me, and there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
But you need to learn to tolerate the fear of conflict and the fear of being wrong. Because the opposite of persuasion is not individual freedom, it’s either coercion or self-imposed isolation.
When I first read that Polyphilus article in Agape, I laughed when I got to the part where he said such issues ought to be “reserved [and] quarantined” among IX°s. I didn’t even really address it in my rebuttal. It didn’t seem serious.
But then I encountered the identical claim in the article he wrote 7 years ago about queer mass. My jaw dropped. Why didn’t I think he really believed it when he said it? My own naivety, I guess.
Thelema is a spirituality that celebrates shameless strength. Strength isn’t just physical strength, it’s also mental strength and the strength of character you build up by having principled, even heated disagreements with others. And yet I find a lot of excuses bandied about for not developing mental strength—intellectual competence—with regard to even the basics.
Brushing off every disagreement as “drama,” dismissing every claim because issues are “above my pay grade,” or “it’s all relative anyway, just do your will,” is not strength. That’s weakness.
Whatever your opinion or “feeling” on the issue of queer mass or any issue, stop hiding in nebulosity and vagueness. Stand up, put your hands up, sharpen your damn mind. Learn to ask the right questions. Toughen up.
Here’s one sociological/psychological observation about the controversy in my church over gender and clergy.
Eight years ago, Michael Effertz sat down and made a thorough, what I would describe as almost preternaturally patient argument for queer mass (i.e., no gender restrictions on who can serve in what role).
He makes the argument several different ways: dialectically by showing how arguments against queer mass contradict (what was then) current EGC policy, spiritually and religiously using the writings of Crowley as evidence, and using evidence from gender theory.
One of the really interesting things he does in that book is he tends to “steel man” his opponent’s arguments. He attempts to give his opponent’s arguments the strongest form he can think of, and he attempts to think through what their objections would be and responds to them.
He printed this book at his own cost and sent copies to all lodges in USGL as well as the three governing officers of USGL.
And it was met mostly with crickets.
The only borderline official response it got was a review written by an EGC Bishop, Tau Polyphilus. Polyphilus did not address many of the arguments in Effertz’s book, certainly not the strongest ones, and where he did attempt to address them, he committed straw man fallacies.
Straw man is a fallacy of relevance. It’s when you do not respond to your opponent’s actual argument but rather a weaker reconstruction of it. In other words, as charitable as Effertz was, that’s how uncharitable Polyphilus’s counterarguments were.
Nonetheless, Effertz responded, again, this time with a short pamphlet in which he took everything Polyphilus said completely seriously and responded to everything even resembling an argument in it.
Again, crickets.
I’m pointing this out because I was reading a thread on a friend’s wall today, and I saw someone suggesting to a person who was upset with the current policy that they suggest a new policy to EGC authorities (in lieu of being angry about it, I guess).
But this has been done already, and it was done in the most thorough, most polite way imaginable. And it was met with (on the best interpretation) sloppiness and indifference.
Now here’s the thing.
No one is under any sort of absolute obligation to be polite with anyone. If you want to get right up in someone’s face and tell them they’re a homophobic ass-kisser, that’s your right. Not sure what it accomplishes, but that’s your right as far as I’m concerned.
And no one is under any obligation to consider a polite, well-reasoned argument.
I mentioned Effertz’s book to someone recently (who hadn’t read it), and their response was that Effertz is an asshole.
Sadly this is the level of discourse in OTO I’ve become used to.
It comes from the overculture, for sure. It’s also exemplified by some leaders in the group. But I’ve learned at this point that if I expect rational discourse, I’m going to be disappointed. There’s either no will for it or no ability to engage in it.
In the past year, at least, the only serious discussions I’ve had about anything of interest regarding Thelema or OTO mysteries has been either with former members or with individuals who have one foot out the door. (And I must confess, I am in the latter category now.)
But here’s the other side of it.
If people ask you for something politely, if they protest in the most civil way imaginable, and your response is indifference (or worse), they’re eventually going to go into a fucking rage.
It’s hard for me to take moral opprobrium seriously—moreso if you were one of the people doing the brushing off in the first place. The closer you were to the issue, the more I tend to view the pearl-clutching as being in bad faith. Although I also understand if there are people who just aren’t aware of all the history around all this—I wasn’t until recently—and who, because of that, are having trouble understanding why people are so upset.
So my suggestion is that, if you don’t want people becoming impolite, if you want there to be a custom of rational discourse in your community where people give and accept reasons for things, then start by giving and accepting reasons for things.
Or better yet, start by listening carefully.
The opposite of rational discussion isn’t personal freedom (as so many Thelemites seem to think). Reasoning exists at one end of a continuum, the opposite end of which is violence. (To my best understanding, the Book of the Law confirms this idea, it doesn’t deny it.)
So if you have a serious problem with discourtesy—if that’s something you value in good faith rather than as a cudgel to use against someone when it’s convenient—then when someone is courteous and rational with you, be courteous and rational back.
And if they’re not courteous and rational with you, still be courteous and rational back. Listen carefully. The higher up you are in any hierarchy, in my opinion the more you ought to do this, only because of the negative psychological impact and loss of prestige for your organization that comes from being a powerful person who also acts aggrieved.
Name one person who enjoys seeing a winner cry. Are we hard-wired against that?
You only have control over your own actions, but those actions end up influencing the culture around you. Straw man and ad hominem are not just mere logical fallacies. Those fallacies also send out a signal about how willing you are to listen to people and carefully consider their ideas.
Crowley’s reduction of the religious instinct to the sex drive was part of a broader countercultural movement in the early 20th century inspired by Nietzsche and earlier phallicists like Richard Payne Knight. Thelema is not the only or even the more famous representative of this movement. That place of pride probably goes to Carl Jung.
While biological reductionism was initially a tool of sexual liberation in the face of the accretions of Christian morality, the idea that God or spirit lives in “the blood” or other bodily fluids was also an essential component in the Aryan racialist revival of the late-19th and early 20th centuries that led to Nazism. The religious version of this idea lives on in Thelema, but for those who study gender, biological reductionism is better known in the form of gender essentialism, or the idea that there are certain universal, innate, biologically- or psychologically-based features of gender that are at the root of observed differences in the behavior of men and women.
The irony is that Christian churches are now in a much better theological position to support transgender clergy than EGC is, because their religious doctrine never included biological reductionism. Neither Christ nor any of the church fathers ever said, “Semen is God,” but Crowley did.
This is why I keep saying that the issue of transgender clergy in EGC is not “drama,” nor is it merely a social justice issue. It has to do with the core doctrine.
A voluptuous statement on what liberation looks like from a Thelemic perspective, as it relates to sexual freedom and a eucharistic rite:
The supreme and absolute injunction, the crux of your knightly oath, is that you lay your lance in rest to the glory of your Lady, the Queen of the Stars, Nuit.
Your knighthood depends upon your refusal to fight in any lesser cause. That is what distinguishes you from the brigand and the bully. You give your life on Her altar. You make yourself worthy of Her by your readiness to fight at any time, in any place, with any weapon, and at any odds.
For her, from Whom you come, of Whom you are, to Whom you go, your life is no more and no less than one continuous sacrament. You have no word but Her praise, no thought but love of Her. You have only one cry, of inarticulate ecstasy, the intense spasm, possession of Her, and Death, to Her.
You have no act but the priest’s gesture that makes your body Hers. The wafer is the disk of the Sun, the star in Her body. Your blood is split from your heart with every beat of your pulse into her cup. It is the wine of Her life crushed from the grapes of your sun-ripened vine. On this wine you are drunk. It washes your corpse that is as the fragment of the Host, broken by you, the Priest, into Her golden chalice. “You, Knight and Priest of the Order of the Temple, saying Her mass, become god in Her, by love and death. This act of love, though in its form it be with a horse like Caligula, with a mob like Messalina, with a giant like Heliogabalus, with a pollard like Nero, with a monster like Baudelaire, though with de Sade it gloat on blood, with Sacher-Masoch crave for whips and furs, with Yvette Guilbert crave the glove, or dote on babes like E.T. Reed of ‘Punch’; whether one love oneself, disdaining every other like Narcissus, offer oneself loveless to every love like Catherine, or find the body so vain as to enclose one’s lust in the soul and make one lifelong spinthria unassuaged in the imagination like Aubrey Beardsley, the means matter no whit.
Bach takes one way, Keats one, Goya one.
The end is everything: that by the act, whatever it is, one worships, loves, possesses, and becomes Nuit.
As far as I can tell, the issue of gender queer clergy is not “drama,” nor is it merely a social justice issue. It has to do with what the Gnostic Mass is fundamentally about and how it relates to core Thelemic spiritual principles. I would hope that anyone in OTO would be curious about that.
My position on the gender requirements for Gnostic Mass in EGC is that I don’t understand them. The only explanation that has ever been offered to me by someone who affected the policy (not talking about some random OTO member offering a rationalization) doesn’t make sense to me.
To the best of my knowledge, these policies do not reflect a correct understanding of Thelema, the mysteries of OTO, or Crowley’s views on sex. Obviously the magical/spiritual/metaphysical side of this is huge. But like so much else in Thelema and OTO mysteries, I’ve never seen anything like an even halfway-convincing argument from core principles to defend OTO USA’s position.
Draw what conclusions you will from that. Suffice to say, if someone at least felt as confused as I do about it, I would understand.
I also don’t understand the policy of relaxing these gender requirements for private masses. Private masses are still official masses. They are still supposed to be working the same magical formula (a formula, YHVH, which is ALSO applied in a IX degree sex magick operation). Any sexual metaphysics governing public masses ought to govern private masses as well; otherwise they don’t make a spicy meatball (or whatever word you feel like using for something that doesn’t magically have the same effect).
I’ve seen people draw some very unkind conclusions from this about the motivations of those who crafted this policy about the private masses. I haven’t drawn those conclusions. I genuinely do not have even the foggiest idea what motivates this policy. There’s at least been an explanation offered for the gender requirements in public mass, but I’ve never even seen an explanation of the private mass policy.
From what I’ve witnessed, the effect of relaxing the policy for private masses is actually worse than having one policy across both private and public masses. If that was done with the intention of appeasing some people (my shot in the dark attempt to understand why they did it), it had the opposite effect. It’s easy to see why. It looks like “separate but equal.”
In my opinion, it would probably be better in the long run to have one policy governing all masses and to be very up front about that and the reasoning for it. That will risk alienating some people at the outset—and maybe those in charge will be made to feel like fools by some people—but it will also prevent a lot of hurt down the line.
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.
One way to understand Thelema is as an account of the interplay between the upward path and the downward path.
The path up is variously described as waking up, the union of the individual with God, Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, and Crossing the Abyss. This process is described in The Wake World and in One Star In Sight.
The path down is the path whereby a god incarnates in order to live a life in this world. This process is described in detail in Crowley’s commentaries on the Book of the Law. This process is also the main theme of the Man of Earth degrees of O.T.O.
In its most general sense, the path up is the movement from the Many back to the One and ultimately the None, while the path down is the movement from the None out into the Many.
While it appears briefly at the end of The Wake World with the birth of the new Fairy Prince, and while it is implied by the 0=2 theorem, the path down only seems to have become a major theme of Crowley’s spirituality after his experience of crossing the Abyss. This shift in emphasis coincides with and is reflected not only in The Book of Lies and in The Gnostic Mass, but also in Crowley’s decision to make Thelema the overarching framework of his whole spiritual approach.
You can think of the upward path as a process of dying. There is a movement from speech to silence, from motion to stillness, from the real to the ideal, from time to eternity. As one writer has expressed it, the death that others call “life” is rejected in favor of the life that others call “death”. Thus the ordeal of the second order of A∴A∴ is death.
On the other hand, the path downward is a process of birth, which is the ordeal of the third order of A∴A∴. There is a movement from silence to speech, from stillness to motion; there is the transformation of the real in light of the ideal, and there is a view of time as a moving image of eternity. The Magister Templi teaches. The Magus fecundates the world with a Word. We witness the movement from One back to Many.
The implication seems clear. Awakening is neither an escape from this world nor merely an individual process. The world—this world, right here—is regenerated through the awakening of individuals which Crowley calls “Saints”. Their spiritual community—the Communion of Saints—is the invisible church behind all outward manifestation or appearance which is responsible for the regeneration of appearances.
Both trajectories are represented in the Gnostic Mass. Section IV is the upward path, and Section VIII is the downward path. It is often supposed that the climax of Section VIII (and of the ritual itself), the point at which the Priest and Priestess depress the lance point and the particle into the cup, somehow represents the destruction or annihilation of the Priest or of his ego in Babalon or in the All. But this represents a misunderstanding both of the narrative structure of the ritual itself as well as of what is involved in spiritual awakening from a Thelemic perspective.
First, if there is any “annihilation” of the personality of the Priest represented in the Gnostic Mass, it occurred at the parting of the veil, when the Priest (the microcosm) united himself with the Priestess (the macrocosm). Many details of the ritual support this interpretation. The Priestess speaks in the voice of Nuit or Heaven, and the Priest adores her as such. He isolates the secret flame or essence within himself and offers it up to her, who he addresses as “One,” the “Sun,” “Pan,” and “IAO” among other names. He then kneels before her and adores her while the Collects are read by the Deacon. These Collects number 11 in total, a number signifying the union of the microcosm (5) with the macrocosm (6). All signs point toward the parting of the veil being the culmination of the upward path and the raising up of the individual to the divine.
Now if we were Theravada Buddhists or Gnostic Christians, we would call it a day. The Children would blow out the candles, close the veil, and send everyone on their merry way. But the Thelemic version of awakening does not terminate in the alleged destruction of the personality in the One or in Nibbana. The point of Thelemic awakening is not to achieve something for the individual, not even his or her own destruction, but rather to complete the cosmological process which gave rise to that individual by in turn re-seeding and regenerating the Earth.
Thus we witness a clear trajectory of the Priest. He begins in the darkness of the tomb. The Virgin/Priestess opens this tomb, purifies and consecrates him, and leads him to unfold himself into her light. In this light, he produces a “fruit of labor”. In Section VIII of the ritual, the Priest breaks open this fruit, and from it, he produces his seed. He then vibrates “AUMGN” three times. AUMGN of course is a formula representing the entire cosmological process from silence into manifestation and back into silence again. It is precisely this process which is ritualized throughout the course of the Gnostic Mass, and as such, AUMGN is the word vibrated most often throughout the ritual.
Much has been made of the “seed” of the Priest being his sperm, and people debate to what extent the Gnostic Mass is a sublimated sex magic operation. This is the wrong question to ask. The question is not whether one type of magical act is an instance of another but rather, what is the genus of which both are species? Whether the eucharistic talisman in question is a spermatazoon or a particle of bread, what is it a talisman or vehicle of?
It’s already been made clear that the particle of bread is a vehicle of Harpocrates, the God of Silence. We know from earlier in the Mass that the wine in the cup is the “Vehicle of the joy of Man upon earth”. We might therefore consider the placement of the bread particle in the cup of wine as the seeding of the Earth with something silent, secret, and divine. This seed shall germinate in the black soil and push its shoot through the darkness, out into the light. What will the seed of the God of Silence grow into?
Of course it expands into the Babe in the Egg and ultimately into Baphomet, the Lion-Serpent. You know this if you’ve attended the ritual. And if you’ve read my previous posts, you know I consider Baphomet to be a type of the Holy Guardian Angel. But what is the significance of that outcome? What is its spiritual meaning?
According to Aristotle, the being of anything is given by its outward, perfected form, i.e., by its characteristic appearance when it is fully-grown. The destiny of the seed planted in the Earth in the Gnostic Mass is to become “the Devil,” Ayin, the letter “O”.
[The Devil] is also the vowel O, proper to roar, to boom, and to command, being a forcible breath controlled by the firm circle of the mouth. He is the Open Eye of the exalted Sun, before whom all shadows flee away: also that Secret Eye which makes an image of its God, the Light, and gives it power to utter oracles, enlightening the mind. Thus, he is Man made God, exalted, eager; he has come consciously to his full stature, and so is ready to set out on his journey to redeem the world. —Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter V
Paradoxically, the path naturally taken by the seed of the god of silence leads it to become a kind of speech. It is the speech which drives away the shadows, which utters in an oracular fashion, which enlightens the minds of those that hear it, and which redeems the world.
Thus having adored the Lion-Serpent:
The PRIEST joins hands upon the breast of the PRIESTESS, and takes back his Lance. He turns to the People, lowers and raises the Lance, and makes ☩ upon them.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Which god is the Book of the Law the speech of? Who in particular does Thelema come from? We’re given a name, and it’s not “Aleister Crowley” or even “Aiwass”. There is one particular deity governing this spiritual revelation, and the Gnostic Mass is the ritualistic implanation of his seed in the black soil of the Earth. But to what end?
If this be not aright; if ye confound the space-marks, saying: They are one; or saying, They are many; if the ritual be not ever unto me: then expect the direful judgments of Ra Hoor Khuit! This shall regenerate the world, the little world my sister, my heart & my tongue, unto whom I send this kiss.
—Liber AL vel Legis, I.52-53
I fly and I alight as an hawk: of mother-of-emerald are my mighty-sweeping wings. I swoop down upon the black earth; and it gladdens into green at my coming. Children of Earth! rejoice! rejoice exceedingly; for your salvation is at hand.
—Liber Tzaddi, 0-3
Now and again Travellers cross the desert; they come from the Great Sea, and to the Great Sea they go. As they go they spill water; one day they will irrigate the desert, till it flower.
—The Book of Lies, Chapter 42, “Dust Devils”
The fruit of the silent seed ritualistically implanted every time we celebrate the Gnostic Mass is a word, and that word is Thelema. The destiny of this word is to regenerate the world to such a radical degree that not only is the Minutum Mundum fertilized, but the entire Tree of Life itself transformed, so that even the Abyss itself turns green—but only if we truly listen to that word.
My child, he who listens must perceive the same as he who speaks, share his awareness; he must breathe together with him, share the same spirit; his hearing must be sharper than the voice of him who speaks.
—Corpus Hermeticum, X.17
If we listened even more intensely than we spoke, we would hear not only the word but also the silence concealed within the word. When we don’t attend, when we don’t open ourselves, when we don’t make ourselves vulnerable to the silence in the speech, the word goes in one ear and out the other. We end up considering the Gnostic Mass to be a performance put on by a club. We think of Thelema as just one current among other magical currents, maybe in need of a little “supplementation” here and a little “balancing” over there. We think we know better than Aleister Crowley—and we do!—but do we know better than the gods? Or more to the point: are we so sure we have sufficiently attuned ourselves to the silence each of us carries within ourselves? Probably not. We’re too busy proving how much smarter we are than Crowley to have bothered truly listening. Because if we truly listened—and most people are lucky if they listen even once in their lives for something they don’t already know—then we would realize that the divine at the center and origin of Thelema is not peculiar to Thelema but instead is the source and seed of all true religion. It is the germ of the process which has renewed the cosmos since its beginning. It is the source of wisdom and of meaning which we are desperately starved for in our technologically advanced culture.
And what is Thelema’s role in all of this? To bring these seeds to the Earth in a shower. To deluge the Earth with light, life, love and liberty.
Thelema represents radical fecundity.
When we set out upon any spiritual path, we are usually looking for strategies to fulfill some absence in our lives. We are looking to get something for ourselves. Thelema has a great deal to offer individuals. Indeed, individuals are the focus of Thelema. Unfortunately, so many people come to Thelema (and spirituality generally) looking for confirmation for what they already believe. They want something which will pander to their egos. And so they say “my will is this” and “my angel told me that”.
But if we listened and attuned ourselves to what is true in Thelema—not true in the sense of just being another true fact about the world, but true in the sense of being eternal and transpersonal—then we would open ourselves to something epic in scope and cosmological in significance. From the point of view of cultic practice, the Gnostic Mass is the occasion to do this. It represents the regeneration of the world by means of Thelema in a way people can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, eat, and drink—such that each of us, crossing our arms in an attitude of resurrection, may say with real understanding this time:
ABSTRACT
The Lord Secret and Most Holy in the Gnostic Mass is the Secret Root of the self, symbolized in the Mass by the serpent crown and the particle broken off the host. It is represented by I/Yod in the magical formula VIAOV. By being depressed into the cup of wine (the priest’s “blood”), it passes into pure potentiality or spirit, represented by the letter A in VIAOV. This is identical with it becoming Harpocrates or the Holy Guardian Angel. From there it moves back into manifestation, now with an added solar character. This is represented by O in VIAOV and is called the Lion-Serpent or BAPHOMET. BAPHOMET is therefore an eidolon of the Holy Guardian Angel of each, having an extroverted, solar nature and an introverted, serpentine nature. While the introverted aspect, the Lord Secret and Most Holy, reflects the Secret Self of the individual, the extroverted aspect, the Lord Visible and Sensible, represents that very same principle in manifestation, utilizing the process of life and death for its expression down the generations. It is by virtue of the Priest embodying both of these aspects (as symbolized by the mantles granted him by the Priestess) that he is able to transform a symbolic part of his own body into this eidolon for public use.
One of the curious features of Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass is the mention and invocation of two Lords. One of these two Lords corresponds with the Sun.
By the power of ☩ Iron, I say unto thee, Arise. In the name of our Lord the ☩ Sun
Thou that art One, our Lord in the Universe the Sun
Lord visible and sensible of whom this earth is but a frozen spark turning about thee with annual and diurnal motion
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.
Alongside this Lord Visible and Sensible, sometimes in the same passage, we find reference made to a Secret and Ineffable Lord.
I believe in one secret and ineffable LORD
By the power of ☩ Iron, I say unto thee, Arise. In the name of our Lord the ☩ Sun, and of our Lord ☩ …
Lord secret and most holy, source of light, source of life, source of love, source of liberty
Lord most secret, bless this spiritual food unto our bodies
The Priest of the Gnostic Mass represents both of these Lords and acts on behalf of both of them in the ceremony. We know this, because the Priestess bequeaths two mantles to the Priest at the beginning of the ceremony: the robe and the crown. Donning him with the robe, she says, “Be the flame of the Sun thine ambience, O thou PRIEST of the SUN!” Then placing the crown upon his forehead she says, “Be the Serpent thy crown, O thou PRIEST of the LORD!” By making him the Priest of the Sun, the Priestess is arguably also placing him in the role of CHAOS, who we learn from the first article of the Creed is “the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth”. By making him Priest of the Lord (Ineffable), the Priestess now also associates the Priest with those qualities of the Lord mentioned in the second Collect: “Lord secret and most holy, source of Light, source of Life, source of Love, source of Liberty”.
In chapter V of Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley indirectly associates this Lord Secret and Most Holy with the I of the VIAOV formula by means of these four attributes, and by extension with Yod .
Iota is the secret Life ………….. Serpent
— Light …………. Lamp
— Love ………….. Wand
— Liberty ……….. Wings
— Silence ……….. Cloak”
These symbols are all shewn in the Atu “The Hermit”.
They are the powers of the Yod, whose extension is the Vau.
Yod is the Hand wherewith man does his Will.
Crowley expands on the relationship between this Secret and Ineffable Lord and the individual later in the same chapter:
The first process is to find the I in the V—initiation, purification, finding the Secret Root of oneself, the epicene Virgin who is 10 (Malkuth) but spelt in full 20 (Jupiter).
This can be understood as a brief description of the process of initiation in the context of A∴ A∴ whereby one attains to the Knowledge and Conversation of one’s Holy Guardian Angel. But this formula also has special significance for the Mass. In Part VI of the Mass, the Priest had declared the host to be his own body with the words “TOUTO ESTI TO SÔMA MOU” (“this is my body”). Then in Part VIII of the Mass, he breaks off a piece of this host and declares it to be his “seed”: “TOUTO ESTI TO SPERMA MOU” (“this is my seed”). This should be understood as an example of the Priest (V) isolating the Secret Root of himself (I) as symbolized by the bread particle. But this Secret Root or sperma of the Priest is identical with the Lord Secret and Most Holy. It is by virtue of his office of Priest of the (Ineffable) Lord that the Priest is able to perform this function in the ceremony. The symbol of this office further strengthens this association, as the serpent is in the shape of a spermatozoon.
The particle is placed on the tip of the lance, and, the Priest clasping the cup, the Priest and Priestess together depress the tip of the lance with the particle into the wine in the cup. Shortly thereafter, the Priest says, “O Lion and O Serpent that destroy the destroyer, be mighty among us.” From the third article of the Creed, we know that the Lion-Serpent invoked here is none other than BAPHOMET. Crowley’s commentary on the formula of VIAOV sheds light on this section of the Mass as well:
This Yod in the “Virgin” expands to the Babe in the Egg by formulating the Secret Wisdom of Truth of Hermes in the Silence of the Fool. He acquires the Eye-Wand, beholding the acting and being adored. The Inverted Pentagram—Baphomet—the Hermaphrodite fully grown—begets himself on himself as V again.
The bread particle or sperma—the Lord Secret and Most Holy—upon being depressed into the “blood” of the Priest in the cup “expands to the Babe in the Egg,” which earlier in this chapter Crowley associates with Harpocrates. In the New Comment on AL I.7, Crowley states:
Hoor-paar-Kraat or Harpocrates, the “Babe in the Egg of Blue”, is not merely the God of Silence in a conventional sense. He represents the Higher Self, the Holy Guardian Angel. The connexion is with the symbolism of the Dwarf in Mythology. He contains everything in Himself, but is unmanifested
In other words, the isolated “Secret Root” of the Priest—his sperma—has become a Holy Guardian Angel. This was accomplished “by formulating the Secret Wisdom of Truth of Hermes in the Silence of the Fool”. Hermes or Thoth is associated with the path of Beth on the Tree of Life, whereas the Fool is associated with the path of Aleph. Both extend from/lead into Kether. Crowley explains the connection between Harpocrates, Aleph, Beth, and Kether in a passage from the Book of Thoth:
Arriving at highly sophisticated theogony, there appears a perfectly clear and concrete symbol of this doctrine. Harpocrates is the God of Silence; and this silence has a very special meaning. (See attached essay, Appendix.) The first is Kether, the pure Being invented as an aspect of pure Nothing. In his manifestation, he is not One, but Two; he is only One because he is 0. He exists; Eheieh, his divine name, which signifies “I Am” or “I shall Be”, is merely another way of saying that he Is Not; because One leads to nowhere, which is where it came from. So the only possible manifestation is in Two, and that manifestation must be in silence, because the number 3, the number of Binah-Understanding-has not yet been formulated. In other words, there is no Mother. All one has is the impulse of this manifestation; and that must take place in silence. That is to say, there is as yet no more than the impulse, which is unformulated; it is only when it is interpreted that it becomes the Word, the Logos. (See Atu I.)
We might say that the Holy Spirit or Holy Guardian Angel—represented here by Aleph—is released from the sperma—represented by I or Yod—upon its dissolution in the “blood” or wine. This resultant Holy Spirit is identical with Kether, which itself represents All (Ain Sof) = None (Ain). It is pure potentiality which can only be turned into some state of affairs by means of the utterance of the Word. To put the same thing another way, the Holy Spirit has been created by the movement from 2 to 0, which we might call the process of mysticism. It can now be turned into a state of affairs by the opposite movement from 0 to 2, which is called magick. The first process is comprehended in the path of Aleph (the Fool), the second in the path of Beth (the Magus). The first requires silence, the second incantation or the Word.
In connection with the same passage from The Book of Thoth we read:
The Fool is also, evidently, an aspect of Pan; but this idea is shewn in his fullest development by Atu XV, whose letter is the semi-vowel A’ain, cognate with Aleph.
This is mirrored in the passage from MITAP we were just considering:
He acquires the Eye-Wand, beholding the acting and being adored. The Inverted Pentagram—Baphomet—the Hermaphrodite fully grown—begets himself on himself as V again.
That the Gnostic Mass is aimed at the production of such a being is given in its title of Liber XV, XV being the Roman numeral associated with the Devil card depicting Baphomet. Baphomet is described in the Creed and in Part VIII of the Mass as the Lion-Serpent. In his commentary to AL II.8, Crowley says, “Harpocrates is also the Dwarf-Soul, the Secret Self of every man, the Serpent with the Lion’s Head.” Again, we see the close association between the Holy Guardian Angel and the Eucharist of the Mass, but rather than being in its unmanifest form as Aleph, it has now developed into its manifest form of Baphomet or the Lion-Serpent. The original serpent or spermatozoon of the Priest dissolved into (N)one, only to reemerge with an added leonine (solar) aspect. It was reduced to 1 (the particle), then to none (at HRILIU becoming Aleph), now to reemerge as 2 with the dual form of Lion-Serpent.
The Lion is associated with Leo, which is ruled by the Sun (Lord Visible and Sensible). This is Horus or the extroverted aspect of Heru-Ra-Ha or the Holy Guardian Angel. The serpent is one of three emblems associated with Scorpio (the others being the eagle and the scorpion). Scorpio is attributed to the path of Nun, to which is assigned Atu XIII, Death. Death is the ordeal of the Second Grade of A∴ A∴, Adeptus, wherein Knowledge & Conversation occurs. The serpentine aspect of the Eucharist therefore represents the destructive or corrosive influence of the Holy Guardian Angel on the aspirant. “Serpent” is also the meaning of “Teth,” the path on the Tree of Life associated with Leo and Atu XI which depicts Beast and Babalon conjoined. This is the introverted or Harpocrates aspect of Heru-Ra-Ha. The union of these two symbols in the path of Teth strongly implies that we are not dealing here with two separate individuals (Lords) but rather with the same principle under two descriptions.
Notice how the dual character of the Eucharist as Lion-Serpent reflects the dual roles of the Priest as Priest of the Sun and Priest of the Lord. It is only by virtue of serving both of these roles that the Priest is able to create a Eucharist embodying both of these principles.
I would like to suggest that while the Lord Secret and Most Holy is the Secret Self or Secret Root of each individual, the Lord Visible and Sensible is the outward, visible, characteristic effect of that very same Self as it utilizes life and death for its own continuance “from generation to generation”. From the other side, while the Sun represents the Word Made Flesh, consciousness in time, or God manifest as sexual generation, the Secret Lord represents the utterly transcendent aspect of that process, that which maintains and promotes its self-identity paradoxically through the very same power of death which nullifies its vehicle of manifestation.
As we have seen previously, that BAPHOMET is an eight-lettered name is significant, as 8 is the number associated with Hod on the Tree of Life. This associates the Eucharist of the Mass with Mercury or Christ. This Mercurial Eucharist is a reflection of the original Mercury which served as the seed or sperma of the operation. It is precisely by virtue of its mercurial function that the Lord Secret and Most Holy is able to “continue knowledge from generation unto generation” as described in the fifth Collect. Since each one of us exists by virtue of such a transmission, the Eucharist is able to serve as an eidolon of the saving power of the Holy Spirit within each of us. Hence BAPHOMET as Lion-Serpent or God Made Flesh serves as an appropriate Christ figure for our cult.
