ASINUS RUMINTIS

virtual pulpit

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:29:02 GMT

I've erected a digital ambo.

ZIDmas Carol

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:27:46 GMT

(Note that the unsung eleventh week fulfills the last remaining promise.)

In the tenth week of prayer, my angel promised me
a dew-written message to see.

In the ninth week of prayer, my angel promised me
two turtledoves,
and a dew-written message to see.

In the eighth week of prayer, my angel promised me
three brimming jars,
two turtledoves,
and a dew-written message to see.

In the seventh week of prayer, my angel promised me
four angles square,
three brimming jars,
two turtledoves,
and a dew-written message to see.

In the sixth week of prayer, my angel promised me
V.V.V.V.V.,
four angles square,
three brimming jars,
two turtledoves,
and a dew-written message to see.

In the fifth week of prayer, my angel promised me
six serpents wrestling,
V.V.V.V.V.,
four angles square,
three brimming jars,
two turtledoves,
and a dew-written message to see.

In the fourth week of prayer, my angel promised me
seven wheels a-whirling,
six serpents wrestling,
V.V.V.V.V.,
four angles square,
three brimming jars,
two turtledoves,
and a dew-written message to see.

In the third week of prayer, my angel promised me
eight notes to answer,
seven wheels a-whirling,
six serpents wrestling,
V.V.V.V.V.,
four angles square,
three brimming jars,
two turtledoves,
and a dew-written message to see.

In the second week of prayer, my angel promised me
nine satyrs capering,
eight notes to answer,
seven wheels a-whirling,
six serpents wrestling,
V.V.V.V.V.,
four angles square,
three brimming jars,
two turtledoves,
and a dew-written message to see.

In the first week of prayer, my angel promised me
ten nymphs reclining,
nine satyrs capering,
eight notes to answer,
seven wheels a-whirling,
six serpents wrestling,
V.V.V.V.V.,
four angles square,
three brimming jars,
two turtledoves,
and a dew-written message to see.

Interpretation of the Ten Weeks
10 = 1 Law for All: THELEMA
9 = 2 organs of generation: phallos & kteis
8 = 3 Great Ones of Liber Legis: Nuit, Hadit, Ra-hoor-khuit
7 = 4 Emanations of the Law: Light, Life, Love, and Liberty
6 = 5 ... that would be telling
5 = 6 reflected persons of ARARITA (see Ritual XXXVI)
4 = 7 sat chakras
3 = 8 Articles of the Creed
2 = 9, the Trinity of Triads
1 = 10 Secret Joys of the Master

still the reason for the season

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:04:10 GMT

The pole of the heavens generates the season according to the angle with which he penetrates the center of the earth.
S.A. Mackey, Mythological Astronomy (1827)
emphases added

Book Review: Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siecle Culture

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:31:33 GMT

If not so much as a pervert, I am at least on the record as an idolater. When I first saw this book, with its cover showing Salome with her charger, I was interested. A quick scan of the table of contents showed topics like: "Maenads of the Decadence and the Torrid Wail of the Sirens," and "Connoisseurs of Bestiality and Serpentine Delights; Leda, Circe, and the Cold Caresses of the Sphinx," and "Judith and Salome: The Priestesses of Man's Severed Head." I knew I would need to read it.

Bram Dijkstra is a comparative literature professor who specializes in the relationship of literature to the visual arts. Do not be misled about this book, though. It is a book about an ideology, and only concerned with art and literature to the extent that they express and facilitate that ideology. Now, I agree with Dijkstra in large measure regarding the interaction of ideology and culture. In particular, he insists that "by retracing the visual origins of the 'great' literary works of turn-of-the-century writers we tend to find ourselves uncomfortably back in a world of intellectual cliches which, in their written form, were elegantly obscured by the apparent profundities embedded in the necessary ambiguities of language." (150) He is also on-target when he remarks the many cases in which "To suggest, as cultural historians have been wont to, that paintings such as these were naive, unconscious images of archetypal sexual symbols whose real meaning the psychoanalysts were in the process of uncovering at just this time represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the anything but unconscious prurience of the nineteenth-century art world." (301)

Alas, it pains me to report, Dijkstra makes it difficult to agree with him. His presentation is so sententious and sanctimonious that it is decidedly off-putting. I am myself a feminist, and so I tended to sympathize with the values that motivated Dijkstra to the reams of condemnations which are the meat of this book. But he never explicitly offers and justifies those values: he just seems to think they go without saying, and that makes him appear to be exchanging an old form of moralistic bigotry for a new one. Perhaps an academic in California in the 1980s could afford to think of their perspective as the abundantly vindicated status quo, but that blinkered assumption doesn't play well when addressing a larger readership.

The author is a "man with a hammer," as the saying goes, and misogyny is his nail! There are certainly a few instances where he overplays his hand in the search for supporting instances. His appraisal of Leon Frederic's painting "The Stream" (1900) is a special case-in-point, with overheated rhetoric that is sadly typical of Idols of Perversity:

How nightmarish painters' dreams of infantile flesh could ultimately become is graphically demonstrated in Leon Frederic's monumental triptych 'The Stream' [VI, 25], in which this artist, ostensibly to illustrate Beethoven's 'Pastoral' symphony, created with insane literalness the ultimate representation of the familiar equation between water, women, and the world of the child in a carnal orgy of infant flesh. When images of this sort, of this extreme paranoia, arise in man's imagination, can Buchenwald be far behind? (197)

All right, then. I have been fortunate enough to see the original of "The Stream" at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. This digitization of the middle panel does it even less justice than the half-page black and white version in Dijkstra's book.

Water and children are certainly abundant in it, but I can't figure out where it makes any sort of statement about "women." And the impression it gave me was not one of threat founded in "paranoia," but simply joyful exuberance. It suggested to me a hope for and confidence in the future, emblemized by an irresistible force of humans-becoming. Honi soit qui mal y pense!

Here's another one: Dijkstra's gloss of "The Unknown" (ca. 1912) by John Charles Dollman.

He insists that this painting shows "how monkeys and women, equally childlike in their ignorant astonishment, tried to cope with the concept of fire in the primeval world." (290) Several details of the painting contradict this explanation. The sophisticated textiles worn by the woman disprove the notion that the setting is "primeval," and her imperious gesture makes it clear that, rather than being astonished by the fire, she is using her knowledge of it to dominate the monkeys. The lack of visible fuel for the fire even makes it seem as though she has just conjured it into existence.

Many of Dijkstra's assessments are perfectly reasonable, however, and his summaries of Victorian gender theory are clear, and probably valuable to 21st-century readers who have been sheltered from the likes of sexist savant Otto Weininger. For those who wonder how Aleister Crowley could consider himself a feminist, this book provides ample context. Dijkstra's analysis of the codified misogyny in Stoker's Dracula is precise and accurate, and his indictment of the vampire genre as a whole appears to be massively supported by the current Stephanie Miller Twilight phenomenon.

I had been hoping, throughout this long text, that Dijkstra might conclude on a more reflexive note, one that would observe the persistent chauvanism in late 20th-century Western culture, and how it could be grasped in terms of the earlier currents that the book studies. This hope was more than disappointed when he used his final chapter to "go full Godwin." Not content merely to apply every negatively-charged adjective in his thesaurus to the ideological male chauvanism of the period, he goes on to postulate a causative relationship by which it led to the ascendancy of Nazi power. He had already remarked in earlier chapters, duly and sufficiently I thought, on the eliminationist rhetorical elements in the "bio-sexism" (his term) of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. But to finish the book with a meditation on Nazi genocide seemed to me like it undercut his argument as a whole, and its relevance to the reader. The sort of exceptionalism that makes the Nazi Holocaust into the great demonstration of pure evil also seems to make it into an expiation, a sobering episode that has ensured that "we" not-Nazis won't take any of the ideological wrong-turns that were involved in Nazism.

Other than the dust jacket, there were no color reproductions among the many scores of art illustrations in the book. That was disappointing, but entirely in keeping with the authorial agenda to use these as evidence in a larger ideological thesis, rather than works of inherent interest. Strangely, the image on the front cover juxtaposed with the title Idols of Perversity is one of the few contextualizing counter-examples that Dijkstra provides. He points to Ella Ferris Pell's "Salome" (1890) as a conceptually feminist treatment of a literary theme that had been a staple of misogynist art. In fact, this passage, along with another in the first chapter where he contrasts the gender conceptions underlying 17th- and 18th-century couples portraiture with that of the 19th century, were among the most effectively argued in the book.

My own initial interest in this book stemmed from my attraction to the Symbolist, Decadent, and Academic Orientalist schools of aesthetics, and in particular the way that many of their originally misogynist productions have been later revalorized by proponents of female sovereignty, especially occultists, Thelemites, and neopagans. I did get some valuable pointers to artists and authors I might otherwise have neglected, but always in the context of another interminable sentence of "guilty." I'll take my guilty pleasures where I can find them, thanks.

la petite mort et son superieur inconnu

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:58:03 GMT

why do "resh"?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:04:53 GMT

Liber Resh vel Helios sub figura CCXX

666 remarked that advanced practitioners could use this ritual to draw on the spiritual power of the sun. In my experience, this ritual properly performed has the further effect of converting the power of the physical rotation of the earth--which produces the effect of the motion of the sun--into the practitioner's spiritual aspiration to (or communion with) his or her star, i.e. personal genius. It effectively induces a current through the continual observation of the circular motion of the outer world, propelling the ritualist on a linear path of interior initiation. "O my darling, I also wait for the brilliance of the hour ineffable, when the universe shall be like a girdle for the midst of the ray of our love, extending beyond the permitted end of the endless One." --Liber LXV, IV:64

The key to all this success can be found in the oft-neglected points 5 & 6 of the ritual.

The practice rests on the work of 666 in practical comparative religion, applying the most potent techniques of the religions of the Old Aeon to the Work of the New. Let us thus witness to the power of our Father the Sun openly in the marketplaces and secretly in the chambers of our houses.

BO OKs MD-RXd MJ

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:04:40 GMT

For crying out loud, what took this so long? I know a three-page federal policy directive isn't like writing a book review, but it's a simple, humane, cost-saving reform that the Obama DOJ could implement all on its own in a straightforward command hierarchy.

Well, it's some good news anyhow.

vegetation of the gnosis

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:41:14 GMT

The stages of vegetation pronounced by the Priest on the first step of the dais in the Ceremony of the Introit constitute a specific formula of magick that could be applied to nearly any human enterprise, since “Every willed act is a magical act.” But the text of Liber XV directs our attention particularly toward its use in the invocation of Love as an image of the divine. We might profitably consider what Liber Nu calls the “first practice of Intelligence”: the appreciation of the rim of the Stele of Revealing as described in the stanza of Liber Legis I:14.

Above, the gemmed azure is
The naked splendour of Nuit;
She bends in ecstasy to kiss
The secret ardours of Hadit.

The growing plant, from its hidden seed to its full fruition, desires the unattainable: union with the heavens. It expresses its nature as a centrifugal striving, outwards towards Infinite Space. And yet every growth of the plant is already in space. Nuit is “above you and in you.” (CCXX I:13) The Infinite curves itself in love around every point-of-view, and the Priest’s acknowledgement of love as the divine image, of love as the law, is an invocation that transports him to the embrace of heaven.

Happy Crowleymas

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:48:37 GMT

Not all the filth of London is thick enough to hide me from the Eye of God: & by that Ray I live.
--Aleister Crowley

There has been an update at Vigorous Food and Divine Madness, including materials from NOTOCON VII.

Special thanks to scarletstar777 and Kikhos ba-Midhbar, among other novices, whose conversations helped to prompt and inform the new Addenda to Advice for Deacons.

As a special bonus for the Lesser Feast of the Prophet, lammassu has completed the set of four Aum. Ha. Oasis Resh videos, with yours truly as imam.

Review: Occult America, by Mitch Horowitz

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:29:09 GMT

Occult America by Mitch Horowitz is engaging, entertaining, and educational. It is not, however--despite the assertion of its subtitle--"the secret history of how mysticism shaped our nation." For one thing, it is not a single history; it is a bricolage of tangentially-related sketches and investigations regarding a topic that Horowitz never manages to subject to any theoretical treatment, nor to encompass with a larger narrative. (An earlier attempt that did succeed in this regard is Catherine Albanese's A Republic of Mind and Spirit.) The closest he comes to answering his own initial question "What is the occult?" is to propose that it comprehends all those techniques and teachings that purport to put people in communication with an "unseen world." But surely many of the most common and non-"occult" of spiritual traditions do so as well.

Although the book starts with the 18th century and ends with the 1970s, the contents don't progress in a strictly chronological fashion. In one chapter for example, Horowitz spends the first half discussing the Theosophical Society, and then goes back to describe the advent of Spiritualism in the second half. He jumps forward from there to give the full century-plus history of the Ouija Board, before returning to the early origins of New Thought in the 1830s. This lack of organization in the book is somewhat surprising, since the author's own background is as an editor, and he is currently editor-in-chief at Penguin's Tarcher imprint for metaphysical books. He contributed to the publication of the "reader's edition" of Manly P. Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages and the trade paper issuance of The Tarot by Paul Foster Case, and when it comes to these figures, and to other trivia of American occult bibliography, Horowitz delivers fascinating and highly credible detail I have never encountered elsewhere.

In a treatment that appears to be attempting a comprehensive sketch, however, the initiatory orders of occultism are markedly absent. Horowitz derides them as being characteristic of the European occult scene, and writes as if they have had only sporadic relevance to America. The one to which he gives the most attention is the Golden Dawn, in his account of Paul Foster Case. But an otherwise-uninformed reader of Horowitz would likely get the impression that in Case's day the US only had a few fledgling Golden Dawn (really Alpha et Omega) groups, with the bulk of the Order still in England, when in fact the American membership may well have outnumbered the British at that time, just as O.T.O. (never mentioned by Horowitz) had its most populous organizing in America then--and ever since. Even AMORC, whose mail-order initiatory arrangement demonstrates so well the themes of popularization and commodification that seem to interest Horowitz, barely rates a few glancing mentions. This is a book purportedly about the deep traditions of American occultism, in which Paschal Beverly Randolph is given only passing notice, in reference to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor--itself only briefly mentioned as background for the astrological writer C.C. Zain.

Horowitz's disdain for initiatory orders and the objects of their secrecy puts into question his offer of a "secret" history. Still, one of the high points of the volume is the chapter on "Politics and the Occult," with sometimes surprising facts regarding the role of mystics on both the right and left in mid-20th-century US politics. Although he is willing to acknowledge the connection of the occult to political ideologies he finds distasteful, Horowitz seems to be whitewashing other key features of American occultism. He does not introduce his readers to figures like sex-guru Oom the Omnipotent or professed antichrist Jack Parsons, nor does he discuss the historical intersection of occultism and drug culture.

Horowitz concludes the book with a claim that the late 20th-century New Age synthesized the occult currents of America and successfully deposited them in mainstream religion and popular culture. The thesis that the New Age Movement was heir to occultism and esotericism has been amply demonstrated in Wouter Hanegraaff's magisterial New Age Religion and Western Culture, but Horowitz glosses over the more recent fact that the piecemeal adoption of "New Age" ideas and techniques by other groups and personalities has only helped to make superfluous an ostensible movement which was always a shaky sort of coalition.

While Occult America is clearly intended for a popular audience, I think the book's greatest value will be for those who already grasp the larger historical framework of American metaphysical religion that it doesn't really clarify. Its wealth of intriguing detail kept me thoroughly interested, and its neglect of the initiatory culture of American esotericism actually makes it a valuable complement to the reading usually undertaken by those of us who have an established interest in that field.

Review: Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:37:05 GMT

LaBerge's highly readable treatment of this interesting topic rightly gives it much greater significance than it is generally accorded. My 1986 mass paperback copy promises on the back cover a "systematic, step-by-step program" to cultivate lucid dreaming, but that's not a fair characterization of the contents. While LaBerge does insist that lucid dreaming is trainable, and he details a couple of the most useful procedures for that purpose, the book's scope is really much broader. The author provides a full summary of the state of research on the topic up to and including his own. At least one full chapter of the book is devoted to explanations of the function and meaning of ordinary dreams, and his conclusions on these lines are both flexible and well-reasoned. The information offered is founded in sleep lab research of the late 20th century, but the presentation draws on and discusses traditional lore such as Tibetan dream yoga and Sufi teaching stories.

I did find it surprising that a researcher addressing non-ordinary states of consciousness would take the sort of pre-Ericksonian view of "hypnotizability" that LaBerge does, when insisting that hypnosis will facilitate lucidity training for only a small minority of subjects. (172) But this quibble paled beside the quantity of good sense and healthy encouragement to be found in the volume. Another surprise was the final pages' appeal for funding and participants in LaBerge's "Lucidity Project," that gave the book a faint aftertaste of old-fashioned occultist organizing and self-promotion.

An initiated sister once remarked to me her unelaborated opinion that there was no difference between lucid dreaming and the occultist practice of exploration on the astral plane. At the time, I responded with blank disagreement, it seeming obvious to me that one should not a priori subsume one phenomenon in the other without having reasonably robust experience of both. In Lucid Dreaming, LaBerge makes a more extensive and philosophical argument for including "astral projection" as a subset of dream phenomena, but he understands the original scope of the term somewhat differently than I do. Although he is clearly acquainted with the history of occultist usage, at one point summarizing the perspective of Blavatskian Theosophy, his notion is evidently informed by the parapsychological school, with an emphasis on the OBE (Out of Body Experience) as the defining feature of the category. As a lab-trained skeptic, LaBerge rightly takes a dim view of the naive OBE theory, and consequently is able to present astral projection as a "misinterpreted lucid dream." In deflation of the OBE, he aptly points out, "it would seem reasonable to suppose that we never 'leave our bodies' because we are never in them." (244)

But LaBerge offers another distinction within his (very wide!) category of lucid dreaming, that I would use to distinguish it from the astral voyage. When discussing means of achieving the paradoxical state of lucid dreaming, he identifies two essential methods: waking while dreaming and dreaming while waking. The former method, evidently preferred by him and assumed as the standard in much of the other literature on lucid dreams, is to my mind fully deserving of the "lucid dream" label. The latter method, on the other hand, despite the similarity of its results, should be distinguished as a method, and can be conveniently tagged with such traditional language as "scrying in the spirit-vision," "astral journeying," or "clairvoyant travel." Occultists too have their own term for the lucid dream proper: the Sleep of Shi-lo-am, referenced by Randolph, Blavatsky, Crowley, and others. In fact, Crowley called that state somnus lucidus, and it would be interesting to know whether there was any influence common to or crossing between him and his contemporary Frederik van Eeden, who introduced the term "lucid dream" to psychological discourse.

In fact, the method of astral projection, or in LaBerge's parlance dreaming while waking, is of peculiar value to occultists, because it
a) facilitates programming of the visionary episode through ceremonial measures, and
b) may allow for visionary phenomena ("auras" etc.) to be superimposed on external perceptions.

Since having studied more widely (with LaBerge's book as a positive contribution), and having gained more of my own experience, I would now agree that while there is value in distinguishing the methods of astral travel and lucid dream, their highest results are likely to overlap to the point of indistinction. It is not on no account that the greatest occultist of the age, in his most recondite book of esoteric theory and technique, placed his discussion of "Astral Journeys and Visions so-called" sandwiched between multiple passages on dreams. And his verdict on them could apply equally to the lucid dream:

Whereas the Direction of such Journeys is consciously willed, and determined by Reason, and also unconsciously willed, by the True Self, since without It no Invocation were possible, we have here a Cooperation or Alliance between the Inner and the Outer Self, and thus an Accomplishment, at least partial, of the Great Work. (Liber Aleph 15, de via per empyraeum)

LaBerge observes that one of the greatest possibilities to arise through lucid dreaming is "surrendering control from you you think you are to who you truly are." (269) --And lo! thou art past though the Abyss.

Hail unto thee!

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:17:19 GMT

An ongoing project of terrestrial Thelemites: World Wide Resh, thanks to the industry of lammassu.

We've generated footage for three of our four Chicago Resh videos, and probably a good out-takes segment besides. Each time we shoot, we get curiosity from bystanders. (Or, conversely, the woman so intent on her cell phone that she has to walk through the middle of the shot, and reacts with unthinking hostility when someone tries to warn her away.)

After doing noon, we were approached by a fellow in a t-shirt that proclaimed him a devout Christian. I think he was a youth pastor or something of the sort. He asked what we were about, and I happily answered him that we were Thelemites enacting a ceremony prescribed by Aleister Crowley for daily devotion to the Sun.

"Do you think it hears you?" inquired the man.

"What? Uh, of course not!" I said. Had I been in cruel godstomping mode, I would have continued: "Oh, wait--you think Jesus hears you, right? Hahahahaha." But I was in friendly promulgating mode, so I explained to him that since we're residents of the Solar System, the Sun is He in whom we live and move and have our being. That the planets are sort of like sensory organs of a grand cosmic beast with the Sun at its heart. And that we are like the eyelashes of that god. We pause four times daily to reconnect with the solar center.

"So, you don't believe in the Bible," he ventured.

"What's not to believe in? I have a shelf of Bibles at home! I probably read the Bible a lot differently than you do, is all." I mean, whoever heard of somebody saying they "don't believe in" the Odyssey, or Blake's Jerusalem?

As he walked away, he assured us: "See, I wasn't afraid to talk to you!" That seemed rather a misconstrual of our motives.

Review: Satan Wants Me, by Robert Irwin

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:43:02 GMT

Irwin weaves a terrific tale of the "Summer of Love Under Will": a hippy college student in London gets into more occultism than he bargains for. The story is enchanting, revolting, hilarious, nostalgic, riveting, and pathetic by turns, and the magick, the drugs and the weird sex are all pretty credible--even as outre as they become.

The entire book is written as a diary, initially undertaken as a magical record in obedience to the "Black Book Lodge," a persistent old schism (of Irwin's invention) from Crowley's A.'.A.'. The journal format is not merely an homage to or evocation of classic horror fiction like Stoker's Dracula, it is a faithful representation of the sort of document that modern magical practice actually generates. It repeatedly inspired me with envy; would that my own diary were as witty and perceptive as that of Irwin's protagonist! In that sense, it can serve as a goad for working occultists today.

The author's 1967 photo portrait on the back inside jacket (also in the background of the paperback cover) provides further evidence for the idea--which must occur to any informed reader--that he drew significantly on personal experience in constructing this delectable yarn.

I was curious, and I found out

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:06:30 GMT

Persian language

...has no grammatical gender, not even "natural" gender,

...comprehends Farsi (Iran), Tajiki (Tajikistan), and Dari (Afghanistan) among its principal dialects,

...is an Indo-European language most often written in Arabic characters (with four bonus letters not found in Arabic),

...is written in a modified Cyrillic alphabet in Tajikistan, and

...is called Fingilish or Penglish when written in Latin characters.

The 1001 Nights was based on a prior collection in Persian, and only became "Arabian" in the 9th century e.v. (The Scheherezade frame-narrative seems to date from the 14th century.)

When medieval Persia fell under the rule of the Ummayad and Abbasid caliphates, Persian was banned in favor of Arabic, but Islam remained an elite religion of the rulers. Only after the revival of Persian language and literature in the 9th and 10th centuries e.v. ("Persianization") did Islam become a popular religion throughout the region.

Use of the unique Persian alphabet, or Old Persian cuneiform, did not survive Islamicization. Old Persian was a much more inflected language, with extensive grammatical gender and eight different cases.

Hidden Wisdom

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:32:58 GMT

Iranaeus describes Gnostic biblical interpretation as "dismembering the body of truth," implying that Scripture is like a "body" encompassing the totality of truth (soma tes aletheias). By their heretical, perverse mode of reading, the Gnostics "dismember," as it were, truth.
--Guy G. Strousma (2005),
Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and
the Roots of Christian Mysticism, p. 115

This volume, which its author admits to lack "conclusive results," doesn't overcome its origin as a collection of disparate papers and lectures on a common theme. All of the details are interesting, and often deeply considered, but there seems to be a shortage of overarching argument. At some points the book is strangely at odds with itself, most conspicuously when declaring that the "inner logic of Christian soteriology was fundamentally anti-esoteric," (133) while adducing in chapter after chapter persuasive evidence for esoteric mechanisms and doctrines in the earliest strata of Christianity.

Strousma looks at various cultural formations of late antiquity that could have been tied to (and in any case help to illuminate) the esoteric dimensions of early Christianity. Among these are Neoplatonist hermeneutics, Gnostic mythopoesis, Manicheanism, and esoteric Judaism. Strousma is especially insistent on the last of these, perhaps in (over-?) reaction to what he views as a neglect in the secular "history of religions" discipline, where the emphasis has been on Hellenistic pagan mystery cults. When he writes, "It is hard to believe in a Valentinian influence on Jewish circles," (198) my reaction is: why? Strousma himself very correctly demonstrates that "Judaism and Christianity in the second century can be perceived as sister religions, rather than standing in a filial relationship." (89)

The final chapter, new in the 2005 edition, is on "Judeo-Christian and Gnostic 'Theologies of the Name'." It should be of special interest to both ceremonial magicians and esoteric Freemasons.

The Feast of Giacomo Casanova

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:11:05 GMT

Casanova's exploits as a Freemason, faux(?)-Rosicrucian, alchemist and magical confidence-man all rest within a larger context, where the freethinker and libertine seems to have enjoyed a genuine conviction of the reality of his personal daimonic genius. Writing of his first hardships as a prisoner, Casanova reflects, "My Genius diverted himself in this fashion in order to give me the pleasure of making comparisons." The name of this Guardian Angel was
P A R A L I S.

Casanova reflects on the Mysteries.

confirming those baptized as adults

Fri, 08 May 2009 15:39:03 GMT

(promoted from a comment made in another journal)

Once in a while, I note that some people think our ceremony of confirmation in the Gnostic Catholic Church is superfluous or oxymoronic. As best as I understand it, the argument goes that since we don't inflict involuntary infant baptism on our members, they don't need to be "confirmed." I disagree with this critique, and not only (or even mostly) because of the tradition of confirmation as a cardinal sacrament of both apostolic Christian and Neognostic churches.

In primitive Christianity, adult converts went through a ceremony that included an initial exposure to the creed (and in which they also typically received bread and salt sacramentally), to inaugurate a catechumenal period in which they would prepare for full membership through baptism.

In EGC, our "baptism" takes the place of such a catechumenal ceremony, while our "confirmation" serves the role of the antique baptism, at least with respect to communal ties and individual status. It makes sense that we who are directed to "worship...with fire and blood" should have a solar and martial confirmation ceremony as the real admission to lay membership, while the watery and lunar baptism is a preliminary. (Of course, the old Piscean agenda would place the emphasis on water.)

shall we promulgate?

Fri, 08 May 2009 01:41:34 GMT

sphinxie and I are flogging the Law and our Order on the front page of Reality Sandwich.

National Day of Prayer (invoke often)

Thu, 07 May 2009 13:08:18 GMT

GLORIA PATRI RA
The lord and giver of life
Beams forth the world's nourishment
Ever-present, ever-radiant;
It is we who travel through Amenti
At nine hundred miles per hour.

GLORIA FILIO HOOR
With blood-stained spear and brilliant crown
The Child issues the decree:
Do What Thou Wilt!
The Law of the Battle of Conquest
Is a curse to be desired.

GLORIA SPIRITUI SANCTO KHUIT
The cooing of the dove
Opens the gates of Hell:
From deep within sounds the serpent's hiss,
Summoning us to joyful worship.
Our orison: HRILIU!

AUM HA

The Feast of Saint Sir Richard Payne Knight

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:24:15 GMT

Unto him may there be granted the accomplishment of his will!

The Greeks, and all the Celtic nations, accordingly, burned the bodies of the dead, as the Gentoos do at this day; while the Egyptians, among whom fuel was extremely scarce, placed them in pyramidal monuments, which were the symbols of fire; hence come those prodigious structures which still adorn that country. The soul which was to be emancipated was the divine emanation, the vital spark of heavenly flame, the principle of reason and perception, which was personified into the familiar daemon, or genius, supposed to have the direction of each individual, and to dispose him to good or evil, wisdom or folly, and all their consequences of prosperity and adversity.
(Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, ch. XI, pp. 191-2)

wow

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:19:31 GMT

Wow!
Wow?
Wow.

The Feast of Saint Algernon Charles Swinburne

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:05:27 GMT

Swinburne died ninety years ago today, at the age of 72. He had nigh slain himself in the fervor of his devotion to Our Lady during his early forties, but lingered respectably upon Mispec Moor long enough to be still living when bits of Atalanta in Calydon were hijacked for the Caxton Hall Rites of Eleusis, and when 666 sainted him in the writing and earliest publication of the Gnostic Mass.

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
(ll. 89-96)

goldbrixredux

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:50:13 GMT

Ali Sloper

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:03 GMT

I have a nice, large (2" or so) rose-cross pin that I wear on the lapel of my overcoat these days. For some reason, this insignia prompts strangers to blithely interrogate me about my religious status--usually while I'm preoccupied with, say, grocery shopping. Such conversations have become gradually more blunt as the exercise has been repeated, reaching a point of near-perfection on the train this afternoon.

Q. (out of the blue, without the merest hello) Are you a chaplain?

A. (flatly) No, I'm a bishop.

Q. A Lutheran bishop?

A. (with careful diction) No, a bishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church.

Q. Agnostic Catholic? That sounds like an oxymoron to me.

A. No, not Agnostic, Gnostic.

Q. Never heard of it. What's the difference?

A. (gravely) Historians typically consider Gnosticism to be the oldest and most terrible of Christian heresies.

Q. Um.

A. Good-bye! (The train has reached my stop.)

happy new year

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:08:31 GMT