User:Agathodaemon

(Revision as of 01:01, 19 May 2005)

On 18th November, 1898 e.v., Aleister Crowley was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He succeeded in uniting under the Schema of the Holy Qabalah, of which the Tarot is the greatest single element, all philosophical and magical systems soever, including that of the Chinese. This, and his Naples Arrangement are with little doubt his greatest achievements in scholarship.

(The Book of Thoth, a publication in class B, is also considered to be one of the most important works of this scholar by a great number of people. There is no doubt about it since The Book of Thoth is an extraordinary attempt to define the pictorial representations of the Tarot according to their true esoteric correspondences and under the ancient scheme of the Holy Qabalah). The Tao is exactly equivalent to the Ain or Nothingness of our Qabalah, because equally it must be comprehended as necessarily possessing a phase of manifestation. The conception becomes more objective as it is developed, so that both Tao and its hidden correlative Teh are formulated in a quite positive way as the Yang and the Yin, which correspond exactly to the Lingam and the Yoni. These being clothed about become the popular symbols of Father and Mother. In the macrocosm they correspond to the Sun and Moon; and, by further descent into matter, are, on the masculine side, Fire and Air; on the feminine side, Water and Earth. (In nature, there always exists the positive and the negative, the active and the passive, the masculine and the feminine. Wise men of old age veiled these twin forces in fables, in myths and in legends. Therefore we find out that The Persians had their Ormuzd-Ariman, The Egyptians had their Osiris-Typhoon and The Hebrews had their Abel-Cain. There exists both the good and the bad serpent but it is vital to keep in mind that they are one in essence, each one necessary to the other in the process of evolution, like the spermatozoon is to the ovule).

Obliged to describe Nothing, the only way to do so without destroying its integrity was to represent it as the union of a Plus Something with an equivalent Minus Something. One may call these two ideas, the Active and Passive, the Father and Mother. But although the Father and Mother can make a perfect union, when by returning to Zero, which is a retrogression, they can also go forward into Matter, so that their union produces a Son and a Daughter. The idea works out in practice as a method of describing how the union of any two things produces a third thing which is neither of them.

(Something similar may be the process in which the alchemists experimented in the manipulation of metals. They would take silver and gold for instance; gold being for obvious reasons the father and silver, the mother. When they combined these two metals they would give existence to a third kind of metal, in this case, argent-aurum, being the son, a metal that shares some of the characteristics of its metallurgic parents but does not partake of their purity any longer. It may be added that this type of experiment is considered as an act of magick because it was carried through the formula of Love under Will. In fact, all the processes of nature are magickal, because everything that happens in the Universe is in turn necessary and self-compensating).

The Union of the Father and the Mother produces twins, the son going forward to the daughter, the daughter returning the energy to the father; by this cycle of change the stability and eternity of the Universe are assured.

(The authors of the gospels were aware of the secret methods of nature and they represented them in the forms of The Holy Ghost as the father, Jesus Christ as the son, Mary as the mother and Mary Magdalene as the daughter.)

At first sight it would appear that the formula is the union of the extremely masculine, the big blond beast, with the extremely feminine, the princess who could not sleep if there was a pea beneath her seven feather beds. But all such symbolism defeats itself; the soft becomes the hard, the rough the smooth. The deeper one goes into the formula, the closer becomes the identification of the opposites. The Dove is the bird of Venus, but the dove is also a symbol of the Holy Ghost; that is, of the Phallus in its most sublimated form. There is therefore no reason for surprise in observing the identification of the father with the mother.

(Among the Greeks, Zeus was the Lord of Air and he was bisexual, and so as our Adam Kadmon, the primordial man. It has been re-discovered in the field of psychoanalysis that man is potentially bisexual because he has a female soul, which is called Anima while woman has another kind of soul called Animus, which is considered as being male).

The ultimate sense seems to be that the original god is both male and female, which is, of course, the essential doctrine of the Qabalah; and the thing most difficult to understand about the later debased Old Testament tradition, is that it represents Tetragrammaton as masculine, in spite of the two feminine components.

(Tetragrammaton is the name that the Hebrews gave to their demiurge who is some kind of bipolar and tyrant demi-god, a presumptuous slave driver with a sadistic tendency to tempt and deceive mankind. The Gnostics saw him as their mortal enemy.)

• The letter Yod is the first letter of the name Tetragrammaton, and this symbolizes the father, who is Wisdom; he is the highest form of Mercury, and the logos, the creator of all worlds. Accordingly, his representative in physical life is the spermatozoon.

• The letter He is the second letter of the name Tetragrammaton, and this symbolizes the mother, who is Understanding; the Universe is here resolved into its ultimate elements. Accordingly, his representative in physical life is the ovule.

• The letter Vau is the third letter of the name Tetragrammaton, and this symbolizes the son, who is the personification of Beauty; an interpretation of the father in terms of the mind.

• The letter He serves double duty, and so it is too, the fourth letter of the name Tetragrammaton. This symbolizes the daughter, who is the Kingdom; the Universe as manifested to our physical senses.

The Hebrew system is straightforward and irreversible; it postulates Father and Mother from whose union issue Son and Daughter. There an end. It is only later philosophical speculation to derive the Father-mother Dyad from a Unity manifest, and later still to seek the source of that Unity in Nothing. This is a concrete and limited scheme, crude, with its causeless Beginning and its sterile End.

(It is said that Moses had to climb Mount Sinai in order to receive the Qabalah along with the 10 commandments, but this aint so, since Moses came from Egypt, the place where he was accordingly trained and consecrated, the Qabalah being older than history itself, vulgar history, that is).

The Pagan system is circular, self-generated, self-nourished, self-renewed. It is a wheel on whose rim are Father-Mother-Son-Daughter; they move about the motionless axis of Zero; they unite at will; they transform one into another; there is neither Beginning nor End to the Orbit; none is higher or lower than another. The Equation Naught=Many=Two=One=All=None is implicit in every mode of the being of the system.

(In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found. Liber AL II; 3 Every number is infinite; there is no difference. Liber AL I; 4).

Zoroaster says, “God is he, having the head of a hawk; having a spiral force”. It is interesting to notice that this oracle appears to anticipate the present Aeon, that of the hawk-headed Lord, and also of the mathematical conception of the shape of the Universe as calculated by Einstein and his school. In this may be discovered the doctrine which asserts that the blindness of humanity to all the beauty and wonder of the Universe is due to this illusion of straightness. It is significant that Riemann, Bolyai and Lobatchewsky seem to have been the mathematical prophets of the New Revelation. For the Euclidian geometry depends upon the conception of straight lines, and it was only because the Parallel Postulate was found to be incapable of proof that mathematicians began to conceive that the straight line had no true correspondence with reality.

(Trough the right understanding of the formula of Tetragrammaton the magician will attain a more exalted perception of reality as well as a unique method and original way to manipulate those forces in which nature manifests itself to his physical and spiritual senses. Further meditation upon the Book of the Law will assist him in the dissolution of complexities and raise his self-consciousness to a higher level of non-dualistic existence experiencing every phenomenon of the Universe as a manifestation of himself to himself).

sorce: Aleister Crowley's: The Book Of Thoth