We should get clearer about what problems spirituality ought to address.
No, you do not “need to get your Malkuth in order” to do magick
I often encounter this meme that “you need to get your Malkuth in order” before pursuing magick. Here’s a recent example I heard of it:
In order to work on more subtle planes than Malkuth, you really need to have your Malkuth together. You need to be able to manifest yourself well and appropriately in Malkuth. If you’re having problems, if you’re struggling with your physical fitness or illness, emotional disregulation, anxiety, any of this, that needs to be reigned in and addressed, because it’s going to hamstring your ability to do anything more subtle than here on Malkuth.
This meme has a kernel of truth to it. If your life is in utter chaos, it’s going to be difficult having a spiritual practice of any kind. You don’t want to be a “magus” living in your mom’s garage.
But the problem is that it can be taken to imply a kind of perfectionism, where if I don’t have stability in my external environment, I don’t have a chance of doing anything meaningful with spirituality. Consider the following counterexamples:
(1) Aleister Crowley achieved Knowledge and Conversation by practicing the Bornless Ritual every day, in his astral temple, while traveling on horse through SE Asia, with his wive and infant daughter in tow, while sick with malaria.
(2) Karl Germer achieved Knowledge and Conversation by reciting the Holy Books from memory every day while in a Nazi concentration camp.
(3) Damien Echols achieved Knowledge and Conversation while on death row and getting his ass kicked by prison guards.
These were situations where individuals had either little or no control over their external environments, and yet they were not only able to do serious spiritual work, but the spiritual work probably helped them endure their material circumstances with more dignity and hope than they would have had otherwise.
My own experience tells me you can accomplish quite a bit with one hour of intense spiritual practice a day. More is better, but one hour will do. You need enough organization in your life that you can set aside that hour, and you need your emotional state stable enough that you can use that hour productively (i.e., achieve “good enough” concentration in it).
It’s relative to the individual. Crowley knew this. It’s why he rejected traditional yama and niyama or Buddhist sila.
Another angle to consider is that having a goal—really any goal, it doesn’t have to be spiritual—tends to “pull” the rest of your life into order. Wanting to climb a tall mountain is a stronger incentive to get into shape than doing it just because your doctor told you to.
Spirituality isn’t very different in kind. It’s why I rarely tell beginners to do the LBRP or Resh every day.
First of all, there are 20 books that already say that; no one needs me to repeat it. Secondly, I tell people set a high goal, like Knowledge and Conversation, and then figure out all the things you have to do to get there.
The best motivator is to think about the type of person you want to become and then figure out the atomic habits—the little things you must do every day—that will get you there.
If you think of yourself as someone who needs to “get their Malkuth in order,” you’re highly unlike to do it. If you think of yourself as someone becoming an Adept, then you’ll start thinking like an Adept. You’ll start performing those actions that an Adept would carry out, and little by little, you will make your way there.
Aim high, and live for the day.
Children shouldn’t play with dead things
It used to be that few people bothered with the underworld. They recognized its existence, but they feared it, revered it, respectfully steered clear of it.
Nowadays it’s different. We haven’t simply neglected the existence of the underworld. We recognize it but treat it like we do any other dimension of human experience. We “make use of it.” We “make of it what we will.”
We go on little weekend or afternoon tours of the underworld. We take some drugs. We buy a book that teaches us some “techniques”. We “open doors” for ourselves. We read a little philosophy and learn to say clever things about what lies on the Earth and under the Earth.
What’s conspicuously absent from all this is a sense of reverence. Reverence is passé. Everything is ultimately subject to us. Meaning is relative to our ends. The gods are what we need them to be at any moment.
The Adept must accept every “spirit”, every “spell”, every “scourge”, as part of his environment, and make them all “subject to” himself; that is, consider them as contributory causes of himself … He must therefore realize that every event is subject to him. It occurs because he had need of it … All experiences contribute to make us complete in ourselves. We feel ourselves subject to them so long as we fail to recognise this; when we do, we perceive that they are subject to us.
Journeys to the underworld used to be rare and were undertaken for the benefit of the gods, the benefit of the cosmos, even the benefit of human generations. Now it’s all about me: getting something—knowledge, power, experience—for my own sake, “my growth,” for my own entertainment.
“It’s Friday. You guys wanna call down some spirits or maybe just hit the bar?”
To say that modern people have become materialistic is not strong enough of a criticism; nor is it entirely accurate. There are probably more people on the planet interested in “spirituality” than at any other point in human history. No, we haven’t simply denied the dimension of the spiritual, the world of shadow. That would be far less of a crime than what we’ve actually done.
Instead, we do with it what we do with everything else. We degrade it. We flatten it. We “democratize” it. We cheapen it. We disrespect it. We parade it. We use it for our entertainment.
We turn the dark into just another mode of the light. We “have preferences.” And we conveniently forget what magicians and prophets of nearly all time have tried to remind us, which is that what we call “light” is in and of itself the darkest void of all.
And then so we can sleep, so we can look at ourselves in the mirror, so we can look at anything at all without screaming in horror, we sprinkle a little rationalization on top.
“But what really is the difference between the sacred and the profane?”
“It really does depend how you look at it. 
“
“Yes, but…”
Meanwhile, the gods wait.
They do not wait in judgment. They do not even wait patiently. They wait as they always do.
Nihilism and spirituality
A friend of mine was recently telling me that he did not think beliefs were important to his spirituality. I think he meant that he was doing his best to take his experiences on their own terms without jumping to conclusions about how the world works.
Damien Echols recently said something similar on his youtube channel: that magick isn’t about beliefs. This is a common sentiment, and I’ve said similar things along the way.
I replied that I attributed most of my “success” (if you can call it that) in spirituality to my nihilism. Then I had to spend a little time figuring out what I even meant by that.
There’s a man who lived a very long time ago—about 2,500 years ago in fact—in Italy. He was a priest of Apollo and a prophet-healer—what in Greek was called an iatromantis—and his name was Parmenides. While he was in a state of trance, he went on what we might call an “astral journey” to the underworld. There he encountered a goddess who taught him about the world. When he came back from his journey, he wrote it all down in a poem which we now have only in fragments.
One of the first things the goddess tells him is that there are only two paths you can follow in life: the path of being and the path of non-being. What she meant is that something either is, or it isn’t. This seems like the simplest thing in the world, but she points out that most people live their lives acting as though things simultaneously are and aren’t.
Take for example secular humanism.
Secular humanism embraces reason, ethics, and naturalism without belief in religious dogma, supernaturalism, and the like. Mere humans are incapable of the God’s eye view on reality, and this belief gives rise to skepticism and tolerance of differing points of view.
This is all fine and good, but there’s only one problem. And that’s that secular humanism is itself a religious, even supernatural point of view.
There was a German philosopher in the 19th century named Hegel who pointed this out. He said quite rightly that it was absurd to judge the capacity of human cognition in relation to something which you yourself say doesn’t exist—in other words a mere figment of imagination.
Peter Kingsley makes a similar point in the context of Jungian depth psychology. Jungians insist that Jung restricted himself to the perspective of a mere observer of the archetypes. In other words he insisted on his own humble humanity in relation to divinity. Jung was certainly no “prophet,” let alone a magician!
The only problem with this, Kingsley points out, is that “humanity” is itself an archetype. And it’s a rather insidious archetype, as it tends to cover its own tracks. Nothing seems more humble than to restrict oneself to the perspective of a mere human. We wouldn’t want to engage in “ego inflation”. And yet this apparent self-restriction is the greatest inflation of all, since it is turned into the first and last word on any possible experience.
In a long series of talks on what he calls the meaning crisis, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has pointed out that most of the structures by means of which we define our humanity themselves have a religious substrate or simply are religious in nature.
Basic notions like progress require a particular relationship to time and narrative that have their origins in the Old Testament. I would add that this isn’t just progress in the collective sense of humanity. Any notion of personal self-discovery or personal growth you have—the sort of learning-story that might make for an interesting autobiography—also depend upon the same structures.
In other words, the ways in which we understand our humanity, individually and collectively, is itself religious in nature. Insofar as secular humanism leans on a set of religious substructures to define knowledge and ethics abstracted from religious substructures, it is a self-contradiction.
For that matter, consensus Thelema falls into a similar if not the same trap. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard Thelemites try to argue to me that human beings ought to treat one another according to such and such ethical principles—usually the ones enumerated in Liber Oz—because we are morally obligated to recognize one another as “stars”.
But there is no moral obligation beyond doing your will. Full stop. The imposition of any moral obligation beyond that just is religion in the Old Aeonic sense. And in fact the particular grounds on which this is justified—the obligation to recognize the divinity of another—is no different in spirit or in letter from Christian morality specifically!
That’s one helluva mistake to make!
If your interpretation of Liber Oz leads you to contradict the ethical core of Thelema—Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law—then you need to stop and figure out where your interpretation of Oz went wrong.
But again, this is just another, even more obvious example of attempting to have your cake and eat it too—or what the goddess in Parmenides’s poem refers to as the “wandering in two minds,” the behavior typical of “undiscerning crowds, in whose eyes the same thing and not the same is and is not, all things travel in opposite directions.”
But the situation is even worse than that. The goddess goes on to tell Parmenides that the choice between the path of being and the path of non-being is no choice at all, because there is only one path: the path of being.
I remember being a student and reading this and thinking, “My goodness! We have come so much further than this! Thank heavens we’ve learned to be more nuanced in our thinking since poor old Parmenides! We know now from so much more sophisticated thinkers that you can never step in the same river twice! We’ve learned from no less a genius than Aristotle to have moderation in all things! A little of this, a little of that, I say! All the world’s most sophisticated spiritual and religious teachers taught what, conveniently for me, accords with my own common sense! Something something modern studies show!”
But at some point I learned what all this really was. Not only is it delusional to think you can stake out a claim between these two opposed points of view of being and non-being.
It’s delusional to think there are opposed points of view in the first place.
This is bound to confuse and even upset people on more than one level.
To start, I did not follow a “heart-centered path” to my realization. I didn’t fall back upon my emotions or what I “intuited” that “the universe” wanted for me.
No, I simply followed logic.
My realization didn’t come while I was sitting in meditation (although I did spend a lot of time meditating up until that point). It came while I was thinking.
But I was not thinking the way people normally think. I was thinking in a completely uncompromising way. And as a result, for the first time in my life, I realized I couldn’t have it both ways. First I was forced into a choice, and then having made the choice, I realized there was never any choice in the first place.
And then the second bit that irritates people is that I did this shamelessly. I didn’t do what people normally do, which is to fuss endlessly with a teaching—making reason my master—and then pretending as though everything is a matter of “intuition” or feeling.
What I realized is that I was not going to “change my beliefs”. This was logically impossible. Beliefs aren’t changed into other beliefs, nor are they transformed into nothing. If you want to get rid of a belief, you need to drive it out with another belief.
And then it dawned on me that beliefs weren’t special. What I was realizing about beliefs applied to everything whatsoever, because change itself is an illusion.
Again, I could believe in everything, or I could believe in nothing. It didn’t matter which I chose, just that I was consistent. And then as soon as I was consistent, I realized I didn’t have a choice in the first place.
That was it. That was the moment I crossed the Abyss. I crossed from this world into the other world. I was freed from the limitations of the “merely human”. I became an immortal god.
And then I turned around to look back the way I came, and I realized the world I just crossed into was the world I had come from.
I had been there the entire time.
Yoga and eroticism in the Platonic tradition
The Good and the One in Proclus
The highest principle in Platonism is the Good. The identity between the Good and the One is established by Proclus in the 13th proposition of his Elements of Theology.
All that is good is the unifying principle of its participants, and all union is good, and the Good is the same with the One.
For if the Good is the preserving principle of all beings (for which reason it is also the object of desire for all), but that which is preservative and connective of the essential being of every being is the One (for all are preserved by the One and dispersion removes every being from its essential being).
For the Good completes and contains those, in which it is present, according to one union.
And if the One is collective and connective of beings, then it will perfect every being by its own presence.
Accordingly then, it is also Good for all these to be united.
Proclus, Elements of Theology, Proposition 13
The argument is extraordinarily terse, so it merits unpacking. But the unpacking will not only tell us why the Good is also the One but also what the characteristic function of the One is such that it is good.
Starting with the second paragraph, Proclus argues from the Good to the One by means of the way in which the Good preserves and connects the “essential being of every being” that participates in it.
So to the extent to which something participates in the Good, it is moving—through time—toward a state in which it is more exactly what it in essence is. In other words it is moving toward perfection. And the extent to which it is moving away from the Good, then over time it is decaying or falling away from what it is.
The principle way in which the Good allows beings to be what they essentially are is through its “preservative and connective” function. In other words, it accomplishes this by making and keeping them whole over time.
To put it another way, all material things are composite and subject to change. If the component parts of something fly off in all directions, the thing is destroyed. But to the extent to which the parts maintain their proper connections with one another, the being of which they are parts maintains its unity, its wholeness. But wholeness or unity as such is the One, and therefore the Good is also the One.
And then he runs the argument the other way in the fourth paragraph. The function of the One is “collective and connective”. To participate in the One is to experience greater unification with oneself, a greater degree of wholeness, and so one moves toward perfection or being what one in fact truly is. But we already know that this is what participation in the Good rewards one with, and so the One is also the Good.
Proclus’s argument relies upon the preservative and the connective functions of the Good and the One.
He assumes that the Good is the preserving principle (sostikon—from sozo meaning salvation) of all beings, and that the One is the preservative (sostikon) and connective (sunektikon) principle of the essential being (ousia) of every being. By virtue of the preserving and connecting, all are preserved (sozetai—again, “saved”) by the One.
This is important not only because it is the fulcrum around which Proclus’s argument turns, but it also gives us insight into the essential nature of the One and how it functions. We might say the highest ontological principle in Platonism is a principle whose main function is to bring about preservation or “salvation” (sostikon) by keeping together (suntereo) or by synthesis (suntithenai).
Logos and Synthesis
Probably the most famous modern proponent of a “synthetic” ontology is the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant famously declared all principles of metaphysics (of which ontology is a part) to be synthetic a priori. This means that such propositions must be justified independently of empirical experience, but that they also cannot be justified solely by the meaning of the terms involved. An example of such a synthetic a priori statement for Kant would be, “Every event has an antecedent cause.” There is no way to prove such a statement on the basis of examining particular occurrences, but it is also not possible to derive the term “antecedent cause” from analysis of the dictionary definition of “event” which just means “change from one thing to another.”
The way in which Kant proposes to justify synthetic a priori propositions—and hence provide a secure foundation for metaphysics—is by grounding them in subjective processes of the mind which are nevertheless necessary for having any empirical experience at all. Kant argues that there are certain rules of experience which are not derived from experience but which the mind structures experience in accordance with. In other words, the underlying logical architecture of the mind necessitates that sensations be connected with one another in certain ways, and one of these ways in which the mind connects things is according to the rule of cause and effect.
To put it another way, logic projects semantics on to the world. And the way Kant argues the mind projects its meaning on to the world is through a process he terms synthesis.
(At this point, with the subjectivizing of synthesis and the world-building function, we are closer to the Thelemic understanding of these categories than the Platonic understanding.)
Our English word logic derives from the Greek word lógos, which means “speech, oration, discourse, quote, story, study, ratio, word, calculation, or reason.” The Greek word for “I speak” is légō. Both terms are derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *leg- which means “to collect, gather.”
So in the Greek word for speech we have the idea of collecting or of synthesis—the same function Kant assigned to the underlying architecture of the human mind and the same function which is so crucial for understanding the One in the Platonic tradition.
So we might go a step further in our explication of the One and say that, while its essential functions are connecting, keeping together, and preserving/saving, this essential function is carried out, or is in fact identical with, a kind of speech.
To put it somewhat differently, the One projects a “logic” on to beings—let’s call it an invariant cosmological structure or set of laws—but rather than this logic subsuming beings or somehow fixing them into place, it has the seemingly paradoxical effect of “saving” them (from decay) in such a way that they are allowed to go on to be precisely what they are in their essence (ousia).
To say it yet another way, this time in more explicitly theological language, divine logos—a power which the Hermetic tradition assigned to Thoth-Hermes and called the Second God or the Son of God—frees things to be what they are in themselves.
Eros and Divine Logos
In the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite, we find the Greek goddess of beauty and love described as “she who causes beings to mate” (zeukteira—from zeuktēr, “one who yokes”). A couple of lines later, she is described in the same way, this time with regard to the cosmos itself: “and you have caused the cosmos (kosmon) to couple (upezeuxo)”—literally, you have “yoked” the cosmos.
The Greek word for yoke is zugós, which comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *yugóm, which means to join. This is the same root from which derives the Sanskrit word yoga, which also means yoke or union and which eventually acquired the connotation of union with the divine.
So in the poem we see Aphrodite described according to two functions. She “yokes” mortal lovers together—i.e., she causes them to fall in love and to mate—and she also causes the cosmos itself to couple or to join. And it’s clear from the play on words in the Greek that the author intended for the mind to associate the one function with the other.
But we have already seen that joining and connecting—especially when looked at from the cosmological or metaphysical perspective—is the function of the One. Not only that. It is the essential function of the One and also that which makes it the Good. To speak of Aphrodite as serving as cosmological matchmaker, therefore, is to endow her with the power of the One, the highest ontological principle. In fact it is to say that she is identical with the One.
Looked at from the other side, we might say that in addition to its ontological and “logical” functions, the One also has an erotic function. In other words, our account of the way in which the One “connects and preserves” through “speech” is incomplete unless we also understand this connecting and joining from an erotic and conjugal perspective.
To be clear, I am not saying that the One is in fact Aphrodite. I’m claiming two things. (1) There is an erotic dimension to the characteristic activity of the One. As a mnemonic, one might represent that function by the Greek goddess Aphrodite in the same way one might represent the logical function of the One by the Greek god Hermes. And (2) we should be careful forcing a separation between erotic love and spiritual love. Eroticism is not mere carnality but has a hieratic potential. We will explore this potential in depth in the next section.
Finally, when we speak of something being something, we can say this in many different ways. For example, we can say that it is, i.e., that it exists, but we can also assign a predicate to it, e.g., “The horse is fast.” The predicate is fast is not identical with that which is identified by The horse—it is different—but it is joined with it through the function of the verb to be. But by joining this general concept fast with the particular horse, we are in fact revealing something essential about the horse itself, viz., that it is fast. So again, somewhat paradoxically, by going away from the horse itself to something other than the horse, we do not turn away from or cover over the horse but instead reveal something true about the horse itself.
This function of the verb to be, when it joins a predicate with a subject, is called the copula. It comes from the same root from which we get the English word copulate. Something of the erotic dimension of logic and ontology is captured in our using that particular word to describe predication.
Love and Liberation
One of the things we were at pains to emphasize earlier is that participation in the One does not efface beings. To realize that “all is one” is not to see all things as the same thing. In fact the One is not a thing at all, and so participating in the form of the One does not reduce all things to the same thing. Rather, it frees beings—saves them in the language of Proclus—to be what they essentially are in themselves as self-unified beings. Insofar as it makes sense to speak of the One projecting a kind of logical structure on to beings, the purpose of this structure is not to ensnare or enclose them but paradoxically to release them into their ownmost being. They are released to the world, but more importantly, they are released to themselves and in a sense to their own care. We can now refine this conception in light of the teaching of “Orpheus” by saying that this joining-freeing is also divine loving.
From the perspective of ontology and cosmology we might say that the Platonic doctrine of the One as developed by Proclus is in some ways quite similar to “eastern” cosmologies, particularly yogic or “tantric” conceptions according to which the phenomenal universe is the result of the sexual union of Shiva and Shakti, or lingam and yoni.
From a soteriological point of view we might say that there must be a tight association between (a) knowing oneself, (b) that direct knowing of God which the Greeks called gnosis, and (c) eroticism. The One joins disparate things together to become whole beings in what we might term cosmological marriage or coitus. But in the case of a human being, knowledge forms part of that whole. So to achieve perfection or union entails the power of the individual not only to turn back on their self but to also know that they are turning back and to know precisely what it is they are turning back on. In the case of a conscious being, the reflection is explicit, willed, and clear. So the perfection of the individual entails what Hegel may have termed the satisfaction of self-consciousness. But as we saw at the beginning, to move toward perfection and to participate in the Good are identical. Hence, knowing oneself and knowing God are identical.
The erotic dimension of salvation enters when we recognize the yogic dimension of self-unification. To gather oneself together into a singular awareness is what is termed in the Pali Buddhist tradition ekaggatā or one-pointedness. It is one of the factors of samādhi or meditative absorption. Other factors include píti (rapture or joy) and sukha (happiness). The joy and happiness attendant upon samādhi are subtler than “gross pleasures” but they are more enduring and more reliable, and hence in the context of Theravada Buddhism, samādhi is considered to be an important intermediary set of experiences between ordinary consciousness and complete awakening.
There is a similar intermediate experience described in the Platonic tradition between ordinary consciousness and direct knowledge of the One, which Plato in the Symposium describes as the idea or the form of beauty. In the experience of the form of beauty, it is linked with justice and goodness, and—most importantly—it is apprehended as the principle of unity itself.
I don’t think that Plato means to reduce the One to the experience of beauty. More likely he intends the idea of the beautiful to be an apophantic quality of the One: something like the closest correlate to the One that one may encounter by means of sensation. (The Greek word for sensation is aisthēsis from which we get our word aesthetics.) It is possible that by the apprehension of the idea of the beautiful Plato has in mind an experience not very different from that of samādhi in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions.
If that is the case, then the Platonic spiritual path might be said to consist in the pursuit of deeper and more profound experiences of beauty until apotheosis occurs. The path described in Symposium is one in which the soul progresses from coarse beauty to ever more refined forms of beauty, until one moves from loving beautiful things to craving Beauty itself. The Platonic spiritual path is therefore equally an erotic and aesthetic path of liberation.
Implied in the Platonic spiritual path is a challenge to the idea that we can cleanly separate erotic love and spiritual love. As Plato illustrates in Symposium, the first pursued deeply enough leads to the second.
It is now clear that adequately understanding erotic love can lead us to a direct experience of Beauty and then the One. But is there anything that our experience of Beauty and the One can teach us about erotic love? In other words, how should spirituality inform our romantic and sexual relationships?
Between the Romantic and the Divine
It seems to me one might construct a “Platonic” approach to sexual and romantic relationships along the following lines.
Normally when we use the phrase “Platonic love,” we mean mere friendship. While much of what I will say applies to friendship, I don’t mean friendship exclusively. I also and primarily mean romantic and sexual love relationships. With that in mind, I would suggest the following principles:
- We don’t necessarily fall in love with people who are good for us. We just tend to fall in love with people who are familiar. If your upbringing was wonderful, you’re one of the lucky few who are perhaps attracted to people who are also good for you. For the rest of us, read on!
- Look for someone you admire. Find someone with admirable qualities, someone you can look up to. Find someone who at least some of the time models what you consider to be good in the world. This applies to all relationships, not just romances.
- Find someone who wants what is best for you and in you. You want a person who is happy for you when you’ve achieved something meaningful and who will be there for you when you’re going through a rough time. Avoid people who are envious of you or who are resentful of your happiness as much as possible.
- Understand that the relationship itself is prior to the individuals composing it. What I mean is that you are not in charge in the relationship, and your partner is not in charge in the relationship. The relationship itself is in charge. When you have a difference with your partner, the “winner” is the person who wants to do what is best for the relationship. This is because:
- A relationship is more than the sum of its parts. It has to be, otherwise we wouldn’t bother with them. If we could get what we needed by ourselves, for ourselves, we wouldn’t bother with relationships. The whole point of a relationship is that it can provide for you in a way you cannot immediately provide for yourself. You ruin this power of a relationship when you just try to get things for yourself. Make the relationship healthy, and you can get so much more than either of you could get just trying to be selfish.
- At its deepest level, a relationship is a spiritual entity. It is a logos. It has a certain intelligibility and wholeness all its own. It is a living being. Like the One itself, the purpose of the relationship is to unite its component parts (the individuals in the relationship) through love and to bring them to fulfillment and wholeness in themselves. So do not consciously devote yourself to your partner. Consciously devote yourself to the partnership, and by its divine power it will unite the two of you.
- Investing in the third entity, the partnership, can mean a lot of things, but much of it comes down to fairness and reciprocity. You give freely of yourself to your partner because you know they will do the same thing for you. This frees you of self-obsession and brings freedom and well-being. This isn’t just based on Platonic theory; it also seems to be based on biology. Stan Tatkin has written a few books about this which you may want to check out. The “spiritualizing” of it is mostly mine, though.
The Upward and Downward Paths in the Gnostic Mass
The way up and the way down is one and the same.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 60
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:
There is no part of me that is not of the Gods!
Babalon and the Mass
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.