Thursday, November 30, 2017

The Life Magickal - Gods


In The Life Magickal I talked about how my metaphysical adventures were always superior when I was under the auspices of one of the two Gods that I have devoted myself to and I want to reflect on some specifics about their influences and consider the possibility of new partnerships as I renew the aim and spirit of my work. 

Looking through the Blogos I think you would consider me a disciple of Thoth or Hermes but my experiences with the Gods have been, at first glance, quite out of that character. After I finished university I returned home to the Midlands as I had nowhere else to go, my girlfriend at the time, who was Spanish, returned to Madrid.  Our relationship could not last the long distance and the breakup devastated me.  In the aftermath I took a long hard look at where I was in the grand scheme of ''initiation'', felt that I was ''in Hod'' and accepted that I still had a lot to learn.  In the thinking of that time I opened the ''Sphere of Netzach'' with an evocation of Aphrodite and began what was to become seven years of work with her, where she was the only deity in my life.*  I've discussed the details of these experiences before but, to reiterate, one of the most important lessons I learned was how to devote - it was this devotion that allowed me to complete my 5 year study of the Sefer Yetzirah and not flake out.  Its a lesson that I have applied to many areas of my life since then and the perfect remedy for ''Mercurial'' procrastination - she teaches you to love, to desire, to obsess, to be present, to commit, to serve and to control - all of these capacities Aphrodite brought into my life, whilst purging me of jealousy, and bound them to the arts magickal.  When I began working with her, she appeared in very classical form but as I got to know her and saw past my preconceptions, she was revealed to be much more ancient and more alien than I first imagined.  Now seeing her as the daughter of Cronos' assault on Uranus her impact on the direction of my work in time travel can't be understated - why do you have to castrate block time in order to create linear time?   What does it mean to be the personification of that castration?  During the 231 Gates Project one of the (Venus) rituals involved opening a conduit through time to return/restore a ''lost love'' but unfortunately the details of these rituals had to removed from the blog for safety**.''The Venus Current'', if you like, has been psychically clamouring for more attention and currently I am torn between deities - Hathor and Inanna - or perhaps she is torn between forms (? - if the fanatics in my audience will excuse my soft polytheism), but regardless, the choice will be important as I move on, whoever has to finally make it.

Enlil, on the other hand, chose me.  I had been invited to join the group Gentlemen for Jupiter, a set of magicians who were all working prosperity magic together, the so-called ''Jupiter Current'', and after my first ritual toast I decided to astrally project to scout things out on that giant gas planet.  I found myself heading towards the great storm on Jupiter and was sucked into the eye whereupon I passed out.  When I woke a voice in my head was saying ''Kish, Kish, Kish...'' and then once ''Sargon.'' This started some research that lead me to Enlil and his direction of the Jupiter current (as opposed to other members who were more involved with Jupiter/Zeus) has had a huge impact on my life.  Considering how his qualities dovetail with a renewed aim and purpose, he is the Master of the Tablets of Destiny, whose commands are unalterable and therefore his assistance in understanding myself as a time traveller within block time is probably going to be highly advantageous.

Together the ''currents'' of Venus and Jupiter under the stewardship of Aphrodite and Enlil and their corresponding influence on my magic (devotion and prosperity) have bound me to what used to be known as the Right Hand Path or the Pillar of Mercy in QBL - the forces of expansion, bliss, abundance and expression.  We can understand both of them in the way they relate to Cronos - Aphrodite as the product of his assault on Uranus, Zeus as Cronos' own conqueror. I began this post, or at least the thinking behind it, assuming that moving forward would automatically necessitate a relationship with a God of Magic or a God of Time but as I air these thoughts and dwell on how much pressure I have been under from ''Venus'' I begin to doubt this necessity.  Perhaps, with Love and Lightning, I have all the allies I need.

I know, I alone,
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law,
Nor melody nor thought.
Only I, only I
And none of this can I say,
Because feeling is like the sky -
Seen, nothing in it to see.

I know, I alone, Fernando Pessoa



*I worked extensively with Angels (therefore of Enlil, Ellil, El, etc - so technically the other God was involved already) and letter-spirits.
**The love that I had known in the Tower was restored though, the ritual suceeded.

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Stranger Things 2 - Hermes/Mercury


Like Twin Peaks - The Return, Stranger Things 2 is also saturated by very specific obvious esoteric references and is using an identical method of execution i.e. painting by numbers.  As the Secret Sun blog pointed out the whole show is dripping in orange (backdrops, costumes, lighting design, our new Max character, etc) which to me immediately suggests the number 8 (in Ep. 1 we meet a character marked as Eight), Hod (in Ep. 7 a giant orange 8 appears) and the God Hermes/Mercury.


Watching fairly closely the entire show is a ritual to Hermes/ Mercury - alchemically speaking the quicksilver will be extracted from its orange ore.  Hermes/Mercury is the Patron of athletes, boysherdsmen, hospitality, thieves, tricksters, gamescommunicationscientists, doctors, magicians and although we see all of these themes explored in the show the primary focus is on his role as the Guardian of the Soul through the Underworld, Crossroads, Thresholds/Boundaries and the Promethean aspects of Fire.  Scenes which may have seemed extraneous to the less Qabalistically inclined are there to feather the God and are used in the same way that someone might put Mercurial related objects on a Mercurial altar.

MERCURY OXIDE

Below is a list of specific examples of where we see these features:

  • Athletics - there are a number of athletic scenes, the basketball playing and the shower room scene
  • Hospitality - we see the theme of hospitality twice a) the motel room and b) the conspiracy theorist's house
  • Theft - Explored in the faintly ridiculous punk robbers ensemble; stealing money from sister to play arcade games; stealing car of older brother
  • Trickery - When Nancy and Jonathan use their guile to trick the head doctor to revealing himself on tape
  • Games - the arcade scenes
  • Communication - the endless use of walkie talkies
  • Magic - in the psychic powers of Eight and Eleven
  • Herdsmen - the way in which Dustin attempts/suceeds to train/domesticate Dart
  • Science - in the laboratory scenes
  • Medicine - all the doctor scenes
  • Underworld - Will's journey into the underworld through his psychic link with the shadow monster, the way he locates Hopper in the underworld facilitating his rescue
  • Crossroads - the various branches and intersections of the vine system of the shadow monster that are mapped on the walls of Will's house 
  • Fire - fire is used repeatedly as a means of controlling the shadow monster by pretty much everyone


The show essentially concludes the ritual to conjure Mercury from the ore with the kids making their way through a field of broken orange vessels (the pumpkins) to perform a fire ritual at a crossroads on the threshold between the underworld and the world of the living.  Their final escape is secured by our ''herdsman'' Dustin.  The orange veil is then lifted from the show and we are drenched in blue, silver and white symbolising the loving kindness of Chesed or perhaps more likely the quicksilver metal acquired from the oxide.  If you are going to understand how they paint by numbers, you kind of have to understand the numbers. 

Qabalah is the New Black.

Monday, November 6, 2017

Cabbages and Kings II - Stoics

Diane - What did you say your name was again?
Tammy - Tammy.
Diane - Fuck you Tammy.

Twin Peaks the Return, Lynch and Frost

The Stoics believed that the universe was a single pantheistic material God and that the soul must be corporeal otherwise it would have no real existence.  Logos operates within the material substance therefore it is better to understand that material as pure mind and that various chunks of matter are thoughts (words of the word) - the soul then, fine and subtle as it is, is also of this mental material.  In this interpretation I can see no reason why the soul cannot literally be DNA - a time travelling reincarnating information spiral which probably stores all memory of that particular branch of the Tree of unfolding Life.  Within our tradition there are some nebulous definitions of terms like soul and spirit, but for me the soul is the genetic material incarnation (not the physical body persay which is the ''Guph'') and spirit is the time-traveller consciousness (logos being a kind of superconscious spark that permeates the mental material) that can become aware of its various ''incarnations''.  This spirit finds it easier to travel along soul lines (back through the history of your current incarnation) that are connected but with more difficulty you can go down one line of DNA, change at various junctions in the Tree of Life, and spring out in another person's perception. Just for clarity in my back and forth with Io, the soul as I define it is similar, a playground of time and anti-time that allows spirit to manifest in the first place.  The interplay of spirit (Neschamah) and soul (Nephesch) are what we experience as consciousness (Ruach).


After discovering the Astrogenetic associations back in 2001 I have oscillated between explaining astrological synchronicity as either the action of remote spatial influences on the subtle genetic material via gravity or light (reflected or otherwise and ultimately forms of this mental material) or whether they are markers for various positions in the cell cycle and have no direct physical influence simply mirroring each other.  When Kabbalists talk about scales and fractals like we do with terms/concepts like Hod of Netzach or Tifereth of Tifereth we can do so in such a way that diminishes various levels, a kind of ''top down'' view of Kabbalah a la primum mobile that champions the fixed stars and then the central galactic black holes as the crown of the hierarchy - but to my mind we ''descend'' to the Merkavah (Yordei Merkabah), Atziluth is not ''up'' it is within, i.e. the mathematics that underwrites reality which you can find the same in cell or star - the number one as the true primum mobile.

When we see the whole of the galaxy as an organism, similar to our own but on a much greater scale, it makes sense that there would be guardians set against us for different celestial levels, in the same way there are all kinds of immune functions that are targeted against our own cells - the body kills a lot of its own cells and defends against them getting lary.  When I am teaching astral projection I talk about how your own Outer Mind (Neschamah) has to guard against the action of your Inner Mind (Ruach) because it is not responsible to manage such things as sweating, blinking, peristalsis and so on and will therefore block the entry of yourself into yourself - if we are not responsible enough to manage our own sweating then we are clearly not responsible enough to mess around with the gravity settings of distant stars!  ''Refining'' the Ruach allows it greater glimpses of spirit - the Neschamah which experiences such things as simultaneous multiple incarnation across time (and where magick really happens), etc - the less ''refined'' the Ruach the more likely your experience is to be only in line with the DNA of your current incarnation.   I feel like refined is the wrong term implying too much judgement for my liking,(it lends itself to top down thinking) but being close to one's initial* soul is a different experience than that of leaving or distancing oneself from it and it seems that being close is the default and the other requires more work - like swimming against the current.  Unlike the Gnostic (closer to spirit) or the ''Sorceror'' (closer to soul), the Kabbalist attempts to walk the middle path.  In my own work these two competing drives have often been reflected by two different ''animas'' blonde and brunette - Alice for the Gnostic, and Red Riding Hood for the Soul** - with the third way some unspecified redhead, which for now can be Agent Tammy Preston.

Gordon Cole - Agent Tammy Preston has the stuff Denise.

Twin Peaks the Return, Lynch/Frost
*All souls are initial from the perspective of the Neschamah which experiences simultaneous incarnation.  Accessing that simultaneity from within the confines of a specific incarnation can be disorientating.
**Blondes are not confined to metaphysics nor are brunettes confined to the cthonic.  Beth Gibbons is a great example of a Blonde Red Riding Hood.

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Cabbages and Kings - Letters, Powers and Time

The time has come the Walrus said
To talk of many things:
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax
Of cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings

Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

It is my understanding that the relationship between a letter and its kingship (the domain it governs) is like the relationship between genotype and phenotype i.e. that the letter contains the information which is then expressed into its characteristic form.  I don't see a duality at work here they are both of the same ''materia'' but one is internal code and the other external expression.  This materia as I see it is not ''matter'' persay but Flux, a composite of time and anti-time (consciousness) - the letters are ''anti-time'' the expression of them are ''time''.  Anti-time is not different to time other than that it is reversing.

I am re-reading some of the Flying Rolls of the Golden Dawn regarding astral projection and crystallising some of my objections to their method.  In Ritual Magic of the Golden Dawn there is an account of a Russian dilettante (Natalia) who used an I Ching hexagram as a gate to project through and then, after describing a snowy wilderness, transformed into a wolf and began howling, barking and attacked someone in the room. Although they originally put this down to ''the race fantasies of a hysterical Slav'' upon later analysis they discovered that the hexagram she had been using talked about the ''superior man transforming into a panther or tiger'' something Natalia could not herself have known.


In a bizarre inversion of this approach the standard (Qabalistic) Golden Dawn practice is to memorise the formal (Golden Dawn approved) symbolism of a letter or Tarot card and then project into it and see the symbols you are ''meant'' to see as opposed to something more free-form like letting the letter speak for itself.  Since so much of the Golden Dawn symbol structure is obviously wrong this begs the question as to whether during this type of astral projection they are only seeing what they want to see as opposed to what is really there.  Besides the accounts of the Flying Rolls there are other examples of this forced astral distortion by authors such as DMK who after evoking the letter Tav, appeared to be having a vision of Luna (in my opinion the correct symbolism) and then who, through force of will, made himself see Saturn (this example is from the section in Modern Magick on Pathworking).


Natalia's story dovetails with my own experiences of astral projection through letters as gates which are now fairly extensive.  During the 5 year study of the SY it became clear in the early phases of research that there were fundamental problems with Golden Dawn/Thelemic symbolism especially the Double Letter to Planet associations.  This, coupled with a message from Raziel that said ''Abandon the Tarot, Focus on the Letters'', prompted most of us to conduct more free-form research into letters projecting in to, and from them, without preconceived ideas - the ''Natalia'' approach, if you like - then compared and contrasted with a mixture of different sources (including the Tao Te Jing). We found that our results were much more in line with earlier versions of the SY as opposed to later corruptions of it such as that found in the Golden Dawn qabalistic materials.  This speaks to an inherent power and presence, a kingliness, of the letter that can be papered over or diluted by a convinced enough, if deluded, will.  Taking this on board we used the symbol as a gate, saw into the mysteries of the letter and re-discovered them through open-ended inquiry.



The 5 year study of individual letters and their kingships culminated in two alternative arrangements - the ''Saadia'' version of the Tree of Life, a kind of default setting which shows a logical classical arrangement of the letters according to the rule of 3, 7 and 12 (sans G.D. baggage) and the Tree of Gates which is effectively each Sefira reimagined as the 231 Gates, where each Sefira can be rotated producing different letter-pairs as the paths between them.  Using the 231 Gates in astral projection (a mesh of interconnected letters on the astral membrane - the ispaklariot shown in the title image for the Hermetic Lessons) produced extraordinarily high quality astral experiences that almost always feel/felt like time travel - moving into a different time period and interacting with people there before being ''discovered'' and ''kicked off'' by (mostly) insectoid entities.  This astral work, amongst other things, led to the invention of the Time Phone, an astrological globe with three rotating rings inside that can be ''calibrated'' to different times, ostensibly as a means of communicating with the past or the future.  It is my opinion that the golem (GLM) is SY ''bird language'' for time traveller or ''prophet'' as the idea of time in the SY is expressed as gilgalim (GLGLM) circles* - through the Golem (and the letters of anti-time) we can slow down, stall, reverse (the effects of) and ultimately transcend time. Direct experiences that followed have convinced me that the search for the Philosopher's Stone, the Universal Medicine and Eternal Youth are so married to the notions of time and entropy that it is impossible that the geniuses of yesteryear would have missed it.

To come full circle one reading of the King sections of the SY, in response and addition to Io, is that it is directly referring to this ''cellular consciousness''esque approach to the SY, the Teli (Bola/Dragon) in the Universe are the genes in the nucleus (the king on his throne), the cycle of the year refers to the cell-cycle and therefore events in the cytoplasm (the king in his province) and finally the heart in the soul refers to how the cells interact/differentiate to form a realised body, the culmination of the genotype as the phenotype.  The letters are quite literally a force of anti-time since everyone of us can trace them within us to the dawn of life itself.  The 231 Gates arrangement itself sheds even more light on earlier and later verses.

O oysters, said the carpenter
You've had a pleasant run
Shall we be trotting home again?
But answer there came none,
And this was scarcely odd
Because they'd eaten every one.

Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

*CERN is a time machine.