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.
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.
Aleister Crowley mentions three ways in which a person should prepare to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist: chastity, fasting, and continual aspiration.
With regard to the preparations for such Sacraments, the Catholic Church has maintained well enough the traditions of the true Gnostic Church in whose keeping the secrets are. Chastity is a condition; fasting for some hours previous is a condition; an earnest and continual aspiration is a condition. Without these antecedents even the Eucharist of the One and Seven is partially—though such is its intrinsic virtue that it can never be wholly—baulked of its effect.
Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter 20
Presumably these preparations should be undertaken not only by the clergy consecrating the Eucharist but also Gnostic Mass congregants.
The preconditions of fasting and aspiration are unambiguous, but chastity requires some explanation. In the same passage, Crowley goes on to mention that:
The Word Chastity is used by initiates to signify a certain state of soul and of mind determinant of a certain habit of body which is nowise identical with what is commonly understood. Chastity in the true magical sense of the word is inconceivable to those who are not wholly emancipated from the obsession of sex.
While Crowley does not further specify the meaning of chastity in this context, he likely means that the act is done for the sake of Nuit and without lust of result.
Also, take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where and with whom ye will! But always unto me. 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!
AL I.51-52
But remember, o chosen one, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word.
AL II.76
The Old Comment to the first verse of the Book of the Law states:
In Nu is Had concealed; by Had is Nu manifested. Nu being 56 and Had 9, their conjunction results in 65, Adonai, the Holy Guardian Angel.
And so another way of stating the same thing is to say that the consummation or consumption of the Eucharist ought to be done with one-pointed devotion to the Holy Guardian Angel, insofar as the aspirant is able to do this.
These three prerequisites of chastity, fasting, and continual aspiration bear a close resemblance with the principles represented by the chain, the dagger, and the scourge.
The chain represents fixity of thought. It corresponds with chastity or singular devotion to Nuit.
The dagger represents control of the appetites which would distract thought. It corresponds with fasting.
The scourge is meant to counteract the torpor of the Nephesh or animal soul. It corresponds with continual aspiration.
After applying the chain, dagger, and scourge to oneself, the magician then anoints themselves with the Holy Oil, symbolic of “that spark of the higher in the Magician which wishes to unite the lower with itself.” (Magick, Part II, Chapter V.) Once the principles represented by the chain, the dagger, and the scourge have been applied to oneself and are in balance with one another, the light of Jechidah or the Holy Guardian Angel naturally breaks through.
These three factors of magick form a close parallel with three factors of sama-samādhi or jhāna (Sanskrit: dhyāna) mentioned in the Buddhist tradition.
The first factor of concentration is mindfulness (sati). This is often interpreted nowadays as bare, non-judgmental awareness of the present moment, but in the context of the Buddha’s teachings, its meaning is much closer to the colloquial meaning of the term. It means keeping in mind what you’re doing. In the context of taking Eucharist, it could mean an appropriate attitude of reverence, knowing that the purpose of this ritual is communion with the divine. It corresponds with the chain and with chastity.
The second factor is alertness (sampajañña). This is the ability of the mind to be aware of what it is doing and to know the difference between path and not path. It is a discriminating faculty, and therefore it corresponds with the dagger and with fasting.
The third factor is ardency (atappa). It means being intent on what you are doing. It does not mean straining but rather continuously developing helpful skills and habits and (with the help of alertness) abandoning unhelpful ones. It corresponds with the scourge and with continual aspiration.
When these three factors join together in a meditation session and are more or less in balance with one another, right concentration naturally arises. This corresponds with the holy oil and the natural way in which the Jechidah or Holy Guardian Angel unites the aspirant with itself.
As we can see, these three prerequisites of chastity, fasting, and continual aspiration form a foundation for the consummation and consumption of a Eucharist, but they are derived from principles which are more general and which apply to any practice of magick or meditation.
This seems complicated, but putting it together is easier than it seems.
Know what it is that you are doing and why. Prior to showing up to the temple, know that you will attend a ritual, the purpose of which is to put you in communion with the Highest: whether you consider that to be Nuit, Babalon, Pan, Jechidah, or the Holy Guardian Angel.
Know that this highest spiritual power is also the source and seed of Thelema itself. It is the power articulated in the Book of the Law, and it is the power that inspired the author of the ritual, Aleister Crowley, when he wrote the ritual.
Let fasting and continual aspiration support this knowledge. If you choose to fast beforehand, know that this action creates physical space within you where the Word embodied in the Eucharist may take root. Know that your desire to know God and your attention to the Path is the nourishment that supports the growth of this knowledge—before, during, and long after the ritual itself.
After you have consumed the Eucharist and have declared, “There is no part of me that is not of the gods!,” return to your seat and sit in silent contemplation, just as the Priest did immediately after consuming his Eucharist. Enjoy communion with this silence directly and simply as possible.
Do not worry. Do not plan. Do not strive. Simply be with the silence.
And as you go about your day—afterward during fellowship, on the drive or bus ride home, when you are going to sleep that evening, or when you are hard at work the following day—remember that silence and return to it. Know it and be with it.
And know with confidence that, “To a Magician thus renewed the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel becomes an inevitable task.”
My talk on Eucharistic magick is online now. It includes an in depth analysis of Sections VI-VIII of Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass.
The claim I make about the Mass—if I were to state it as succinctly as possible—is that the Mass was intended, in part, to bring into physical manifestation the spiritual power which was the source of the Book of the Law. So you can profitably view it as an attempt to bring the spiritual force of Thelema into the world by means of a public religious rite.
On the one hand, there’s nothing new or terribly controversial in such a statement. The Gnostic Mass is clearly a religious rite, and the purpose of a religious rite is for clergy to administer certain ideas, values, or virtues to a congregation. It would be rather odd to make the opposite argument, that Aleister Crowley created a religious service that administered the virtues of some spirituality other than Thelema.
I think what’s bound to make my argument controversial is the specificity of it. I don’t treat the power or spiritual potency from an abstract point of view. I show how Crowley specified it, put names to it, and even described its nature. If you accept the premises and the inferences to the conclusions from those premises, this creates a backstop for what is going to count as a good interpretation of the Mass. (Or it brings whatever existing backstop there is closer to the home plate.)
Considering the Mass alone, Crowley has many names for this spiritual potency or power considered in and of itself:
“one secret and ineffable LORD”
“our Lord …”
“the LORD” (symbolized by the priest’s serpent crown)
“O secret of secrets that art hidden in the being of all that lives”
“the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star”
“Life, and the giver of Life”
“Lord secret and most holy, source of light, source of life, source of love, source of liberty”
“force of energy, fire of motion”
“Thou who art I, beyond all I am, Who hast no nature and no name”
“center and secret of the Sun”
“hidden spring of all things known and unknown, Thou aloof, alone”
“true fire within the reed”
“source and seed of life, love, liberty, and light, thou beyond speech and beyond sight”
“One in Three … Three in One”
What we can gather from these terms is that there is a divinity or a portion of divinity that is secret, ineffable, withdrawn, unmanifest, and completely transcendent. It is beyond our ability to describe or understand it. It is characterized by silence, but it is the source of speech and motion. And this divinity or some aspect of this divinity is concealed “within us” in some sense, and it is responsibility for our vitality.
Now one thing you may want to ponder from a theological or metaphysical perspective is this: If something is truly transcendent and unmanifest—if it is really “aloof, alone”—then how does it enter into manifestation? How does it have anything to do with the visible or manifest universe at all?
Crowley’s phrase for this in the context of the Mass, exemplified in the Creed, is the “Miracle of Incarnation”. He claims it is accomplished by means of the “Baptism of Wisdom”. As Sabazius has pointed out, this comes from Van Hammer’s elucidation of the name Baphomet as Baphe-Metis, the Baptism of Wisdom. One of the arguments I make in the talk is that, in the context of the Mass, Baphomet is the name given to this pure, transcendent spiritual potency when it is embodied or incarnated. This means that we can understand the Epiklesis of the Gnostic Mass on analogy with the transubstantiation of the Eucharist in the Roman Mass into the body and blood of Christ. This helps make sense of why the elements of the Eucharist are consecrated into a resurrection structure in Section VI. As Christ is the principle of resurrection in Christianity, Baphomet is the principle of resurrection in Thelema. At that point, the doctrines diverge, and I spend a lot of time in the talk examining exactly what resurrection means in a Thelemic context.
One angle I did not explore very much at all in my talk is how this transcendent spiritual potency is made manifest by the sex instinct. The only reference I made to this extraordinarily complex and interesting subject was to point out that the Priest, by virtue of the Lance and the scarlet robe, represents the microcosmic deity in the context of the Mass. This microcosmic deity is called “CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth.” It is also called phallus. It is the “Lord of Life and Joy, that art the might of man, that art the essence of every true god that is upon the surface of the Earth, continuing knowledge from generation unto generation”. The magick of the Mass is almost certainly intended to parallel an analogous sex magick working. The seed (sperma) the Priest isolates from the Cake (consecrated to his body) is meant to be analogous with the spermatazoon produced by his literal body. The cup is magically linked with the Priestess’s body by means of the five crosses. The wine within it could be viewed as either his “blood” (which Crowley usually intends to represent semen) or her menstruum. I pointed out, as many have, that HRILIU represents the cry of orgasm.
Another thing I would point out—which I didn’t bother to touch on in the talk—is that Crowley believed sexual reproduction was a form of resurrection. Orgasm itself is a moment of subject-object union or samadhi, if only for a moment. The individuality of the man is not preserved, but his life-force continues in the child. The Mass Eucharist is explicitly referred to as a child both in the Anthem and during the Fractio. The solve or Aleph-phase of the operation reduces his seed to a kind of magical stem-cell state. By consuming this metaphorical “child,” the Priest is nourishing himself with the power of his resurrected or reborn life-force. It’s a simple way to look at the Mass, but it’s also perfectly valid and illuminating. The problem is that it’s not the only doctrine of resurrection Crowley had.
While I do not think it is wrong to point out that the Mass is the IX° sex magick operation under a different form, I think it very quickly leads to misunderstanding. One could start to believe that the spiritual reality of the Mass—and maybe of Thelema itself—is exhausted in fucking. Crowley himself makes reductionistic claims to this effect, e.g., “Semen is God.” Instead I wanted to focus on the structure shared both by the Mass and by the IX° Mass of the Holy Ghost in order to indicate the spiritual reality they are both aiming at, and which is reducible to neither of them. In the language of Eucharistic magick Crowley uses, both the Eucharist of two elements and the Eucharist of one element serve a common spiritual purpose. It is that purpose that I wanted to elucidate.
The argument I make in the talk—and which I have not seen made before—is that the spiritual purpose is the physical manifestation of this spiritual principle or potency represented by Hoor-Paar-Kraat, the God of Silence. This is the deity that Aiwass declares himself to be the “minister” of in the first chapter of The Book of the Law. As such, Aiwass’s speech is the speech of the god of silence. The Book of the Law itself is the “speech of silence” as Crowley says. And since this is the same spiritual potency we are embodying in the Gnostic Mass Eucharist, when we participate in the Mass, either as clergy or as congregants, we are in effect consuming the word. We’re being nourished by it. In yet one more way, the Book of the Law is becoming our sustenance and comfort.
As it turns out, the same principle is elastic and can manifest itself in many other ways. I already mentioned that it manifests as a sex-generative principle. In the talk I make a big deal out of showing how, in the context of an individual’s gnosis or spiritual experience, Harpocrates is also the Silent Self or the Holy Guardian Angel. From an alchemical perspective, I show how it is also the Philosopher’s Stone and connected with the IX° Elixir of Life. Crowley uses a lot of words to label this spiritual principle—Aleph, Fool, God of Silence, Holy Guardian Angel, Heru-Ra-Ha, Lord Most Secret, etc.—but the fact that it shows up in so many different places and is linked with the central spiritual concerns of Thelema I think justifies calling it out as the central organizing principle of Crowley’s spirituality. It is the point around which everything else is rotating. So I spend a lot of time in the talk laying out its structure. That structure—whether we’re talking about Eucharistic magick, alchemy, or initiation—is invariably tripartite and is represented by the formula IAO.
So what I was attempting to do in this talk was not only to show how to do Eucharistic magick or just parrot things Crowley says about the Eucharist. I also wanted to explain how it was he could make such extraordinary claims about Eucharistic magick, such that doing it would inevitably lead to Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, or that a particular version of it (identical with the IX° secret) would produce the Elixir of Life and grant immortality. So in this one phenomenon of Eucharistic magick, we find a menagerie of traditional and specifically Crowleyan spiritual concerns tied to the central mystery of Crowley’s spirituality, namely, Knowledge and Conversation. But rather than attempt to reduce the Gnostic Mass to sex magick, or to attempt to reduce both of those to Knowledge and Conversation, I attempted to explain all three in terms of the structure of the underlying spiritual reality motivating Thelema as a whole. And I suppose my assumption is that, because this underlying spiritual reality has vitality, an individual who understands how to make contact with that reality will become empowered by it.
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.
Ever since I had the insight that led me to write the short post on Harpocrates, the implications of it have spread like an invasive weed throughout all the rest of my thinking and perception.
The idea is quite simple. Each of us has been implanted with a divine seed. The seed consists in almost nothing more than remembrance of the Light we knew before incarnating. This seed lies dormant and silent within each of us, so that most people are not even aware of its existence. If it speaks to us at all, it is subtle and cryptic. It will speak to us seemingly from without, by guiding us into certain areas of life. It will speak to us seemingly from within, in the form of dreams. But most people take no notice of it.
But when we do take notice of it, a miracle occurs. It begins to grow. And so by seed and root and stem and bud and leaf and flower and fruit it will unfold and articulate itself into the light.
And I’ve come to the realization that the life-cycle of this seed is really the major theme of the spiritual path called Thelema—although the exact same phenomenon shows up in other forms of spirituality as well.
Crowley refers to this phenomenon under various names: secret self, silent self, seed, Aleph, Harpocrates, Hoor-paar-kraat, Virgin, the Fool who impregnates the King’s Daughter, etc. He always associates it with Malkuth, which is the soil in which it is implanted. He refers to its characteristic way of growth or development as true will.
Everything we do spiritually is not for our own sake but rather for the sake of this divine seed implanted within us.
But as we make the cultivation of this god within the theme and focus of our lives, something very odd happens. It begins to eat us. It consumes us.
Normally we understand the events of our lives to constitute a self. Ideas, thoughts, sense impressions, images, desires, words spoken, emotions felt, people loved, events remembered, events hoped for, actions carried out, paths chosen—we consider all of it to be mine. We think it is for a self, in a self, that it belongs to a self, that it is attached to a self, etc.
But as the divine seed sprouts and grows and unfolds within us, all of these happenings become food for, and become incorporated into, the growing body of this god. None of them—not even a simple sense impression or perception—happens for its own sake anymore. None of it—not even the simplest decision—can be said to be mine in the conventional sense of the term. Instead it is another element in the unfolding, developing image of this divine being.
We are the food of the gods.
What I describe may sound alien, even horrifying. But it only seems this way when we think we have something to lose through the process. This comes from the delusion that any of these thoughts, feelings, desires, or actions constitute a unity on their own. They don’t. But by becoming part of the metabolism and life cycle of the god, they acquire unity for the first time, the way the soup of molecules in the atmosphere becomes metabolized and structured into the outward form of a leaf.
At last, saying “I” can mean something.
It also gives new meaning to the expression, “There is no part of me that is not of the gods!”
The turning point for any person spiritually is when they realize that all the pain in their lives, all the difficulty and struggle and hardship, has never come from allowing this process to happen but has always arisen from resisting it. And that all the peace, happiness, and well-being lies in serving the divine within ourselves so it can fruit and release its seed into the world.
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:
In the Gnostic Mass, the Priest takes up the role of CHAOS, who is associated with Chokmah. He serves the function of the logos or the word, which is also the phallus or the creative aspect of the Father. From his own body, he produces the seed (sperma). By means of an alchemical process, this seed will be transformed into the Mercurial Serpent, the Baphomet or Christos, the Philosopher’s Stone, etc. This product of the first operation is strongly associated with the Sun, with the path of Ayin, with Hod, but also with Kether and even the entire Tree of Life (if you draw the number 8 on it). But before diving deeper into the nature of the product, I’d like to first examine the process itself, in particular the role played by the Priestess.
If the Priest is taking up the work of CHAOS and the spiritual significance of Chokmah, then his counterpart the Priestess takes up the role of BABALON and the spiritual significance of Binah. What is her contribution, and what does that contribution imply about the nature of the God-Man produced by the operation?
In the Creed we recite, “And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON.”
As compared with the treatment BABALON gets in The Vision and the Voice, this is rather terse and tends to understate her importance in the spiritual system of Thelema. But I think that has less to do with the importance of BABALON herself than the context. In The Vision and the Voice, Crowley was documenting his ascent across the Abyss to the grade of Magister Templi. There, BABALON is considered initiator. In the Gnostic Mass, by contrast, she serves as a cosmological or metaphysical principle which is relied upon in the context of a discrete alchemical operation.
This remark will make no sense to those who think the Gnostic Mass is a crossing-the-Abyss allegory culminating in the candidate (the bread particle) merging with the all-mother (the wine in the cup). But it will make perfect sense if you accept that, by at least Part VI of the Mass, the Priest is not a candidate aspiring to Binah but rather the representative of CHAOS performing a magical operation with the Priestess in her role as BABALON, with the desired effect being the production of a Divine Being at Tiphareth. In other words, the operation of the Mass is meant to move the Word down the Tree of Life from Chokmah to Tiphareth where it becomes incarnated as God Manifest. If the particle is consciousness as such, then it is consciousness-in-time (the Sun) in its finished state in the cup. But then what is it about the cup—the symbol of Our Lady—that allows this to take place?
From the article of the Creed, we find BABALON identified with Earth, Mother, and Womb. The wording suggests she is the sub-lunary context into which we are born, wherein we live, and which we eventually pass away into. In other words, she is nature.
But what is nature from a Thelemic perspective? I would like to suggest that it is neither the object studied in the field of physics, nor is it merely inert matter. Neither of these designations fits with the spiritual function of Binah, which BABALON is also associated with. The function of Binah in Kabbalah is to transform pure thinking as such (associated with Chokmah) into something like a determinate set of concepts of creation. So if we think of Chokmah as corresponding with the neoplatonic idea of nous or of pure mind, then Binah corresponds with the concept of the world-soul, nature inwardly considered as a hierarchical system of ideas or categories of existence.
Importantly, Binah represents the first point in the movement from out of Ain/Ain Soph where limitation and hence form are introduced. Ain, Ain Soph, and Kether are words for a formless All or One or None. Chokmah is this pure (N)one reflected in thinking. Binah is where differentiation is first introduced. The thought of creation (which is something like a mere urge at Kether and Chokmah) now receives articulation. It is presumably for this reason that Crowley associates Binah with the Vissudha chakra which is at the throat. It is at the throat that thoughts are articulated into speech.
So in the figure of BABALON, we see the union of the concept of nature with the concept of form or formation. While this appears to be an odd pairing, it in fact harkens back to the ancient Greek concept of nature which Aristotle articulated in the Physics, particularly in Book B.
The ancient Greek word for nature was phusis, from which we get our word physics. While we tend to think of nature as various stuff (natural things, things of nature, etc.), Aristotle said that phusis is first and foremost a principle of development (arche kineseus). The function of this principle in each natural thing (phusei onta) was to cause it to change in such a way that it comes into its end (telos). This end or finished state was understood as a particular kind of appearance (eidos) or form (morphe).
So for example, the function of the nature of an oak tree is to guide the development of an acorn into a full-grown oak by way of its intermediate stages. The nature of the oak (the image or form of the full-grown oak) serves as a kind of blueprint (paradigma) for change, so that the change is not chaotic but is rather orderly and results in the proper end (the full-grown tree). To put it another way, the nature of the tree is responsible for delivering it into its final form or appearance, which is the full expression of its being as an oak. This makes natural growth a circular process from form (implicit) to form (explicit) back to form (implicit) again in the appearance of the new acorn.
This explains why Aristotle said that the being of a natural thing is its form or appearance (morphe) and not the matter (hule) composing it. Things are intelligible to us by virtue of their ends. What differentiates an action such as running from another action such as rhetoric is the end it aims at. The same thing goes for growing things. They’re differentiated by the final form or appearance they aim at in their growth. Matter is only of secondary importance here. The delivery of the thing into its final form requires the presence of things like food, air, water, and sunlight, but these are merely enabling conditions. The essence or being of the thing is always its form or final, outward, full-grown appearance. It is that image “lurking in the background” which drives change in a particular direction and hence constitutes the characteristic movement or development of the thing which differentiates it from other things.
Incidentally, this is why Aristotle makes the rather odd proclamation that actuality precedes potentiality. On the face of it, the statement is false. It makes more sense when you realize that the word Aristotle uses for actuality (energeia or entelecheia) actually means something like “being in the work [ergon]” or “being in the end [telos],” whereas the word for potentiality—dunamis—has the connotation of matter (hule) or the workshop that something is made in where there are tools and raw materials laying around. Placing something into its end always takes priority (ontologically) over the means or circumstances under which it is done, and therefore “actuality precedes potentiality”.
Now we’re in a position to understand much better the spiritual function served by the Priestess in the Gnostic Mass—as well as “the feminine” in any magical operation.
While the Priest provides the material (hule) for the operation in the form of the seed or particle, it is the function of the Priestess to give that seed form (morphe)—to in-form it—in the “womb”. She is responsible for taking the seed and “delivering” it (like a mother or midwife) into appearance (eidos). In the context of the Mass, that which is delivered into manifestation is the God-Man, which is associated with Tiphareth, the point on the Tree of Life where God is manifest for the first time. So while the Priest is responsible for the potentiality or potency of the Christos, it is the Priestess who delivers Him into appearance or form, and therefore she is responsible for His being.
You can see this on a very concrete level in the Mass itself. The particle is crumbly. It lacks integrity. The cup has definite borders. It provides integrity.
(For that matter, compare the oaths of the Minerval and I°s, which correspond with Chokmah and Binah respectively by their chakra attributions. It’s the exact same thing, only now the candidate is the crumbly particle being supplied with integrity and therefore with the possibility of fulfilling an end.)
But by delivering the seed into manifestation, BABALON or the Priestess also delivers it to death. This is because there is no way to deliver into manifestation without also introducing becoming as a condition. A beginning (genesis) is a change from one thing into another. While things abide in beingness, they also keep changing. This change tends toward decay and ultimately death or passing back out of existence. As the German philosophers Hegel said in his Science of Logic, for finite beings “the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.” Due to the conditions that must be put into place for the introduction of something into the world, to enter the world is to immediately incur the penalty of death. This is captured in the nature of BABALON herself as feminine creator-destructor. It is also captured in the two-sided nature of the “sword” leading from Tiphareth up to Binah.
What this means is that the product of the Mass—the eucharist—has both the qualities of life and death, as these are unified in every manifest being. But it is more than this. For while Christ comes from blood and water, there is also the Holy Spirit, the third witness on Earth. This dove-serpent which deifieth man is subject to conditions of life and death. But by means of gross generation (biological reproduction), this spirit is able to utilize the process of life-death for the purpose of its own self-expression and manifestation down through the ages, thereby transcending those very same conditions. Like the example of the eidos of the oak tree moving from implicit to explicit and back again, we are witnessing here another circular process. The Holy Spirit separates from itself in its transmission, yet this separation is the very act by which it maintains its transcendental integrity. “The secret of generation is death.”
And while the blood is a reflection or image of the Father, and the water is a reflection or image of the Mother, the Holy Spirit is a reflection or image of God. It is an image or eidos which, just like the image or eidos of an oak tree, has paradigmatic power over the being it stands in relationship to. It calls it forth into its full-blown, most true configuration. While for an oak tree, that image is merely the fully grown oak, for an individual it is their true self. In other words, the serpent-Christ emerging from the Eucharistic operation is the Augoeides. By consuming the eucharist, you unite yourself with your genius or Angel. This is why Crowley says continually doing Eucharistic magic will inevitably lead toward Knowledge and Conversation.
