I feel bad because I haven’t written anything public in a month.
I have two large rituals in flight I can write about in another month when they pan out, although the larger of the two may never see the light of day unless I write a book.
Neat Idea #1 – One of the more interesting philosophical ideas from OTA discussions: “What about things which exist outside of Creation?” I like the OTA because it’s not a giant hugbox like the OTO tends to be (a show called “Everyone Loves Crowley”) and it’s rigid enough that it provides philosophical structure. Spoiler Alert: There is no official OTA answer to this problem except that the only uncreated thing is the godhead itself.
He framed up the question as “Death is the only thing which lives outside of creation but within it”. Which is sort of a new age version of creation, but he does turn a phrase as well as Crowley or Grant. But it’s a neat philosophical idea – Death by itself is the unmaking, and I personally think it sits more towards the idea of entropy than personage like The Grim Reaper. That’s a very pagan concept by itself, the Teutonic Gods directly operated against the entropy of the universe. And conversely, a lot of traditions are based around fertility. Again, not some version of “drawing down life” sort of the way a Christian Mass works but rather making babies to fight against the losses of humanity against the entropy of age and the environment. We don’t really think about things in that way in this day and age when there’s always a new mug or toaster at Walmart when these things break, but things age, they break, we fix them. (Note to self: Put maypole in toaster…)
When we think about Death this way, it’s very much like Saturn. Saturn takes forever to wander through it’s orbit, but wander it does. Saturn is depicted as leaden – soft, grey, and when it sits around long enough it turns ashen, and white. If someone were an alchemist, they would think this was decay and the salts were settling out. This is almost true, but what they were looking at was probably zinc. Zinc, once it gets into lead, is almost impossible to separate, and melts at a very similar temperature. However, let the lead/zinc sit around for 10 or 15 years and it will eventually separate, with the zinc oxide being a brilliant and hard to tarnish white. Small wonder why lead paint was a real popular item – the colors would get brighter for 10 or so years and then start to fade. When looked at from a philosophical or occult perspective, the painting is given life from the artist, or the alloy is given life by the alchemist, and then “lives” for 10 years, and then “dies”.
Anyway, in my heart of hearts and how I use the term “creation” to be “all things which are made by the Godhead” (really Valentinian Gnosticism or Middle Platonism), the answer in my mind (or how he framed the question) that that “Satan is merely the Prosecution in the Court of Heaven”. Also to quote Dee, “All things do curtsy unto God”. Although we may not understand these things, or we do really poorly and assign intent to inanimate objects, we forget that things are merely hunks of metal and as such governed by natural law. Because mankind has remade some bit of tin into a turtle does not mean its going to eat a cricket.
Neat idea #2 – I was slumming it on Vigilant Citizen and they had an “expose” on Sherlock Holmes. Of course the problem with VC is that they believe the NWO has some rules and everything is hidden in plain sight. However what particularly grabbed me was the meta-idea that not only did Doyle have access to a secret society (the masons) but that whomever made the movie was smart enough to include that symbolism in the film and expand upon it. Sort of like how Aronofsky claims he didn’t write any occult meaning into The Fountain (eyeroll), someone sure did put a whole lot of very relevant occult symbolism into Sherlock Holmes. It’s not quite as good as Rune Soup, which is my other guilty pleasure. However, ideas realizing themselves (or realizing themselves because of their opposites) is one of the staples of magic. The NWO tells you what it’s doing because then you “see” and once you “see”, the idea is in your psyche. It can be manipulated. No-one wakes up and goes, “Oh today I will be a glutton”, but rather for lack of good food dies of anorexia. The reality of the situation is that if there is an NWO (there isn’t, todays government is too large to be effective), it would have a goal, and it wouldn’t matter if you believed the message or not because the goal could be accomplished along either path. The will of the magician is simply to have a well defined goal and then use spirits to move folks along the path they want to take naturally, which is what Dee was really after I think.
(If I don’t blog again, I was totally wrong about the NWO thing, and they got me).
One of the ongoing experiments is actually testing this idea. The problem with testing magic tends to be that what you suspect is true because you have made it to be true through your will. Really I’m just thinking about tools to build tools to make tools to use tools to unmake tools… It’s tools, all the way down.
Neat Idea #3 – I’m hoping that someone who reads the blog has a better grasp of Hebrew than me. I was talking to my brother about the above ideas and life in general and I typically find it refreshing because he renounced occultism after a few oopses and returned to more conservative Christianity than we were born into. Did you know we were Presbyterians? Me neither. He’s been picking up quite a bit of Greek and looking hard at joining some Roman Catholic churches and generally being disappointed either with the engagement of the congregation or the quality of the philosophical discussion. One of the topics we were stomping on over cigars and rum was “badly translated Bibles”. I personally like the King James Version if I’m going to do English, and would use Thomas Jefferson’s bible if I were to try to subscribe to Christianity in some way, shape, or form. He is big on interlinear Bibles, but is starting to realize (*shaking fist at ThAOI guys* – you know who you are) that the translations are little better than running words through Google.
If you haven’t guessed already, the word is qliphoph – the opposite of the sephirot. The Evil-Is-Cool crowd use this sort of vulgar idea that “Qliphoph is where the demons live!” and a casual search of wikipedia would bear this out. However, a lot of my philosophy is “natural order” sorts of stuff, so it recently struck me as particularly strange that “demons” are assigned to something. In fact, the way the writing is done (grain of salt warning: I am not nearly fluent enough to make a strong case here), the word means “peel”, or “shell”, or “husk”. I’m going to break from traditional Hebrew here and make a leap into Dee’s Aethyrs, I’m hoping someone will chime in to tell me if the language supports this idea or not. The Aethyrs are not a spirit but rather where a spirit lives. The vulgar expression of a fire might be burning wood, but the spiritual expression of a fire is a quickening sulfur, and the spirit who lives in it is a salamander if we want to borrow Bardon here. The Aethyrs are very abstract but I believe it’s the same sort of idea. We have the holy temple, which we build with our hands. We fill it with things which build the idea, the astral temple, and a spirit moves into it the same way a fetus is animated in the womb. Since the sephirot are emanations from God, they can be nothing but holy. How could God not be holy?
So we ended up circling back around to the protestant reformation where folks were arguing that Hell was not a literal place of punishment except that it is the absence of the grace of God. Therefor when God goes somewhere (writing with my Christian hat on…), God emanates into that place, and the sephirot are created. When God moves from that place or when we describe the place hollowed out by the movement of God, that describes the qliphoph. It does not mean that “the demons live there” – there is nothing which is not holy in Creation – but rather these places receive the grace of God as perfectly as a husk receives the corn inside. Sephirot emit, qliphoph receive, and it’s as easy as that. All of the ridiculous Jewish mumbo jumbo are Jewish attempts to put pagans (really the Greeks) in a bad light, and that shows in the list of demons who are things like “the false duality of god” and “the burning pit” (the toilet), and “clinging mud”.
Or at least I believe so, but I haven’t run across any academic sources. Ideas?