My Musical Qabalah.

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
41

More to the point, perhaps, Crowley says:

“To attain the Grade of Magister Templi, he [the Adept] must perform two tasks; the emancipation from thought by putting each idea against its opposite, and refusing to prefer either; and the consecration of himself as a pure vehicle for the influence of the order to which he aspires.
He must then decide upon the critical adventure of our Order [i.e., crossing the Abyss.]” (“One Star In Sight”.)

The said two tasks correspond to the Lovers (or Brothers) and the Chariot, respectively. Yet elsewhere, Crowley writes:

“[F]or this is BABALON under the power of the Magician, that she hath submitted herself unto the work; and she guardeth the Abyss. And in her is a perfect purity of that which is above [i.e., Kether]; yet she is sent as the Redeemer [i.e., Tiphareth] to them that are below. For there is no other way into the Supernal Mystery but through her, and the Beast on which she rideth; and the Magician is set beyond her to deceive the brothers of blackness, lest they should make unto themselves a crown; for if there were two crowns, then should Ygdrasil, that ancient tree, be cast out into the Abyss, uprooted and cast down into the Outermost Abyss, and the Arcanum which is in the Adytum should be profaned; and the Ark should be touched, and the Lodge spied upon by them that are not masters, and the bread of the Sacrament should be the dung of Choronzon; and the wine of the Sacrament should be the water of Choronzon; and the incense should be dispersion; and the fire upon the Altar should be hate.” (The Vision and the Voice, “ZON”.)

There is no other way into the Supernal Mystery but through—Binah? No, the High Priestess! It’s not that the Exempt Adept attains to Binah by taking both the path from Minor Adept to Master of the Temple (the Lovers) and the path from Major Adept to Master of the Temple, but that he attains to Kether by taking the path from Adept to Ipsissimus… Yet again in Liber 418, the 3rd Aethyr, Crowley writes:

“The Seer was physically overwhelmed by the horror of this experience [not attaining to Binah, but beyond Binah, so to say]. It may seem surprising that such phenomena should occur above the Abyss. But this Lilith is a positive form created by the Magus; whereas, Choronzon is the breaking-up of all coherence. Here also is a mystery of mysteries. Lilith is truly Babalon, as imagined by this energy of Mayan [i.e., of the Magician].”

Precisely for this, that such phenomena shall occur above the Abyss, is the Magician set beyond Babalon, Will beyond Love, Supernal beyond Supernal;

“BABALON is thy fortress against the iniquity of the Abyss, for[!] the iniquity of that which bindeth her unto the Crown, and barreth her from the Crown; for not until thou art made one with CHAOS [Chokmah, Ginnungagap] canst thou begin that last, that most terrible projection, the three-fold Regimen which alone constitutes the Great Work.
For Choronzon is as it were the shell or excrement of these three paths, and therefore is his head raised unto Daäth, and therefore have the Black Brotherhood declared him to be the child of Wisdom and Understanding, who is but the bastard of the Svastika.” (op.cit.)

The Svastika symbolizes the number 4. Daäth would be the 1 that is not the 3 or the 2. It would therefore form a 2 that is not a 1 or a 3.

Now one may well think that, to the Black Brothers, the Tree looks like this:

D
5_4
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8_7
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But the whole point is that they don’t transcend duality. Therefore:

3_2
5_4
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The true Tree is actually like this:

1
5_4
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Or:

3
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Or:

2
5_4
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Let’s take the middle one, with the 3 on top. The Magician or Magus is set beyond the top to deceive the brothers of blackness. That’s how we get this:

3_2
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Or:

1
D
5_4
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This latter visualization throws light on the words, “then should Ygdrasil, that ancient tree, be cast out into the Abyss, uprooted and cast down” etc.:

10
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Note that this is not

10
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7_8
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4_5
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For then the brothers would have understood that

“…all the symbols are interchangeable, for each one containeth in itself its own opposite. And this is the great Mystery of the Supernals that are beyond the Abyss. For below the Abyss, contradiction is division; but above the Abyss, contradiction is Unity. And there could be nothing true except by virtue of the contradiction that is contained in itself.” (The 5th Aethyr, as quoted in Little Essays toward Truth, “Truth”.)

To be sure, it is also said there that

“[the seer’s] Kether is dissolved in Ain Soph.”

So the best visualization may be this:

5_4
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Or:

4_5
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01

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babalon#/media/File:Whore-of-babylon-blake-1809.jpg

42

“Every person, whatever his grade in the Order, has also a ‘natural’ grade appropriate to his intrinsic virtue. He may expect to be ‘cast out’ into that grade when he becomes 8°=3□ [i.e., a Magister Templi]. Thus one man, throughout his career, may be essentially of the type of Netzach; another, of Hod. In the same way Rembrandt and Raphael retained their respective points of view in all stages of their art.” (Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 7.4; cf. the first quote in this thread.)

It appears, and it makes sense, that one can only be cast down; in other words, that one’s natural grade can only be 10 through 4. (I’m just using single numbers, but I mean 1°=10□ through 7°=4□.) Thus Crowley, as far as I’ve been able to discover, only mentions Netzach (7), Hod (8), “Geburah; […] Tiphareth; and so on”; and Chesed (4) and Malkuth (10), though these not in so many words:

“The Order of the S. S. [Silver Star] is composed of those who have crossed the Abyss; […]
Every active Member of the Order has destroyed all that He is and all that he has on crossing the Abyss; but a star is cast forth in the Heavens to enlighten the Earth, so that he may possess a vehicle wherein he may communicate with mankind. The quality and position of this star, and its functions, are determined by the nature of the incarnations transcended by him.
[…] There are full accounts [of the Grade of Master of the Temple] in the Magical Diaries of the Beast 666, who was cast forth into the Heaven of Jupiter, and of Omnia in Uno, Unus in Omnibus, who was cast forth into the sphere of the Elements.” (“One Star in Sight”.)

The Beast 666 is Crowley himself. He is therefore speaking as someone who was cast forth/down/out into the Heaven of Jupiter, i.e. into Chesed, when he speaks of “Geburah; […] Tiphareth; and so on”. Thus: Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth, and so on; not Binah, Chokmah, or Kether. The sphere of the Elements, or the Earth, is Malkuth, by the way.

Lest Yesod (9) remain unmentioned, consider this thing I wrote almost eight months ago, which relates to my signature quote:

‘That passage from The Book of Thoth made me finally see that, since I crossed the Abyss (i.e, got through the dark night of the soul) in early May 2020, the sub-Supernal Sephira I’ve been “cast down” or “cast out” into (Crowley uses both terms interchangeably), is Yesod. And I understand this to mean my task is to repurify the message from Dionysos (Tiphareth), which has been partly distorted by scholarship (Hod) and partly by the pseudoscientific, the “spiritual” etc. (Netzach).’ (Source: see above.)

My putting “spiritual” in scare quotes enables me to introduce this next passage, which was actually the first thing I put into the draft for this post.

“Nefesh [the “soul”], as it is freely given and present in all men [indeed, in all animals], is said to come from the right side of the Tree of Life, the side of Chesed (mercy). The Ruach [“spirit”], is said to be from the left side, which is the critical/judgmental side. Here is where man can choose between following the path of Torah to God, or considering himself not under God’s Torah and moving away from Him.
This is where man’s yetzer hara (evil inclination) comes into play. (The yetzer hara is also said to come from the left side, which is also where evil emanates from.) When presented with God’s Torah, and its defintion of sin, man can give in to his yetzer hara and transgress the Torah, or can place his yetzer hara under subjugation, even using it to serve God. (Think of an athlete channeling natural aggressiveness into better performance.)” (Yashanet, A Study of the Book of Revelation, “Tipheret—The Image of the Eyn Sof”.)

The quotes in which I put “spirit” in my parenthesis to this passage are not scare quotes; just quotes. This is basically what Ludwig Klages meant by the word:

“[B]ody and soul are inseparably connected poles of the unity of life into which the spirit inserts itself from the outside like a wedge, in an effort to set them apart from each other; that is, to de-soul the body and disembody the soul, and so, finally, to smother any life that this unity can attain.” (Klages, Sämtliche Werke 1 p. 7).

Of course, it’s nonsense that it should come “from the outside”. Instead, it’s Plato’s “spiritedness” (thumos), Nietzsche’s “spirit of gravity”:

“Will—so is the emancipator and joy-bringer called: thus have I taught you, my friends! But now learn this likewise: the Will itself is still a prisoner.
Willing emancipateth: but what is that called which still putteth the emancipator in chains?
‘It was’: thus is the Will’s teeth-gnashing and lonesomest tribulation called. Impotent towards what hath been done—it is a malicious spectator of all that is past.
[…]
This, yea, this alone is revenge itself: the Will’s antipathy to time, and its ‘It was.’
Verily, a great folly dwelleth in our Will; and it became a curse unto all humanity, that this folly acquired spirit!
The spirit of revenge: my friends, that hath hitherto been man’s best contemplation; and where there was suffering, it was claimed there was always penalty.” (Zarathustra, “Of Redemption”, Common trans.)

As Harry Morris Neumann puts it,

“Moral indignation, anger at whatever frustrates the goal of desire (to secure what is good) is fueled by this frustration.” (Neumann, Liberalism, page 38.)

Thumos springs from the frustration of eros, desire for whatever is (believed) good for oneself. In other words, we have here Wrath and Lust, Mars and Venus, Geburah and Netzach… Not only is Netzach on the right side and Geburah on the left side of the Tree of Life, but they belong to different triangles as well. Netzach belongs to the aesthetic, sensual, lustful triangle; Geburah, to the ethical, (self-)righteous, wrathful triangle…

Netzach: lust of lust;
Hod: wrath of lust;
Chesed: lust of wrath;
Geburah: wrath of wrath.

What about the middle pillar (and, for that matter, the supernal triangle), though? Here we arrive at the third of Buddhism’s “three poisons”: let’s call it “delusion”. This is the opposite of understanding or wisdom, though not of knowledge (Daäth).

Netzach: lust of lust;
Yesod: delusion of lust;
Hod: wrath of lust;
Chesed: lust of wrath;
Tiphareth: delusion of wrath;
Geburah: wrath of wrath.

This still leaves out Malkuth, however. Being on the central pillar, it too must be delusion of something, but of what? Delusion of delusion?

Chokmah: lust of understanding;
Binah: wrath of wisdom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MEwQ69jnDg&t=269s
Jah Wobble, “Lonely London”.

Now in this commentary on Liber B vel Magi, it says:

" ‘Let Him beware of abstinence from action.’: This, at first glance, seems to completely contradict line 12 which states, ‘From all these actions must He cease.’ Nonetheless, ‘these actions’ from line 12 refers to those actions represented by the four Elemental weapons, Creation-Preservation-Destruction-Redemption, which are subject to the Wheel of Samsara, so to speak. Yet there is still an action of the nature of Spirit (as opposed to the four Elements) that is peculiar to the Degree of Magus, explained in the next sentence."
https://iao131.com/commentaries/liber-b-vel-magi-sub-figura-i/

I differ from this, in that I do not go from the 4 to the 5, but from the 4 to the 3. In this I follow, again, the 3rd Aethyr, where it says:

“I have just realized (after some days woodcarving) that the use of a knife is to fashion shapeless things into Beauty. This is then the task of a Magus which, in my then Grade, I could not see. […] Now I understand. It’s the fashioning I missed. All my life I have been cutting to destroy. Now I’ll cut to create.”

This suggests Destruction is dropped from the list, leaving only Creation-Preservation-Redemption…

“The Magus of the Gods, with His one Word that seems to overturn the chariot of Mankind in ruin, does not in fact destroy or even alter anything; He simply furnishes a new mode of applying existing Energy to established Forms.” (Little Essays toward Truth, “Mastery”.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1jwMC0rHg&t=389s
Astral Projection, “Let There Be Light”.

Kali-yantra inverted.jpg
Kali-yantra inverted.jpg1024×1024 147 KB

43

If it is all to woo a girl who is love, and she finds out you used magic rather than just asking the only God of love (the only God) what to do, she’ll drop you like a hot magic potato.

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That title quote is about “the ancient Whore that is throned in Eternity”, meaning Babalon. If any deity exists, it is She. Male gods are just exoteric inversions of Her. (Black and crimson are still the colours of Binah; my inverted yantra may have to be coloured grey and pure soft blue, respectively, instead.)

How’s your manhunt going?

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The symbols are cannibalistic.

#whyIamsingle

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Human sacrifice is indeed connected with the marital yoke:

(Source: https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2655258#p2655258)

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I’m not reading that. But. 2 becoming 1 still keeps 2 as individuals. Mutual self-sacrifice to build something greater together (like a next gen) … yada. But.

Ew why am I even discussing this.

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EW, MAKING BABIES!!

Anyway, in a way you’re right:

“The unity that logos discovers can be sounded but never without ambiguity, for day and night are still two. ‘The way up and the way down are one and the same,’ Heraclitus says (fr. 60), but there are still two contrary ways, and one has to go one way or the other, even while one knows they are one.” (Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre, page 87.)

In a way 2 is 1 and in a way it’s 1+1; hence the 3. But the “conjugal” example is particularly problematic:

“The despotic charms of women hoodwink man into a life of never-ending servitude. In this way, women assist the city in transforming natural men into citizens and gentlemen. Perfect gentlemen like Ischomachus are so oblivious to their chains that they believe themselves to be masters of their households. This is a form of self-deception native to gentlemen. […]
Strauss leads us to the conclusion that philosophers are ‘real men’ in Callicles’s sense of the term. They are natural men who have not been duped by the conventions of the city; they are free of the charms that hold other men captive, the charms that transform men into husbands and citizens, the charms that facilitate servitude, the charms that make men ‘obtuse’!” (Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, pp. 84-85.)

I especially like the word “hoodwink”. Get it, wink wink?

Anyway, so a “hus-band” isn’t really an individual; among men, only a philosopher is. Indeed, only a philosopher is a real man—a real real man.

quote-neurosis-is-the-inability-to-tolerate-ambiguity-sigmund-freud-10-28-07.jpg
quote-neurosis-is-the-inability-to-tolerate-ambiguity-sigmund-freud-10-28-07.jpg850×400 44.9 KB

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Freud hid the incest of the wealthy & was a coke addict. Js.

Whereas Socrates was married & mocked the socially acceptable practice of boinking young male students.

Anyway.

Don’t know Strauss.

Are you making fun of me, arsehole?

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Yes and no. I’m raising a serious matter, which is that almost everyone is neurotic. Among men, only perfect gentlemen and perfect arseholes, I mean philosophers, are not. This is because all others are divided between the philosophic and the unphilosophic eros, and the spiritedness that springs from it. In fact, there is no other way into the love of¹ wisdom but on that beast:

“[M]y proposition [is] that a lofty spirituality itself exists only as the final product of moral qualities; that it is a synthesis of all those states attributed to the ‘merely moral’ man [Mensch] after they have been acquired one by one through protracted discipline and practice, perhaps in the course of whole chains of generations; that lofty spirituality is the spiritualization of justice and of that benevolent severity which knows itself empowered [beauftragt] to maintain the order of rank in the world among things themselves—and not only among men.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 219 (end), translation Helen Zimmern.)

And yet, that monster is below Lady Philosophia Herself:

“[A] lofty spirituality is incompatible with any kind of worthiness [Bravheit] and respectability of the merely moral man”. (ib.)

Anyway, if the spiritualization of that severity is above it, why must it maintain the order of rank between them, anyway? :wink:

“Political philosophy is the part of philosophy in which the whole of philosophy is in question. For the three determinations that we have discussed thus far are, as it were, united into one in the fourth determination, namely, political philosophy as the locus of the self-knowledge of the philosopher. For the sake of his self-knowledge, the philosopher must make the political things the object of his inquiry and observation.” (Meier, “Why Political Philosophy?”, paragraph 16.)

¹ Cf. https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2888677#p2888677

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So… lofty… versus mere… triggers this:

C.S. Lewis on “The Weight of Glory”:

“If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

His “A Grief Observed” helped me let go of someone. I look forward to never having to let go of the supposedly living ever again.

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voca.ro/18UFIQdCqQOV

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In the spirit of the Musical Qabalah

voca.ro/14nw4Zh3ZoFw
voca.ro/1bnbNvKxf64r
vocaroo.com/1msyE2GKr7mF
voca.ro/1mWtjmqnfapM

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voca.ro/1o4Vp2UDCGGM
voca.ro/19RIinfzq9cM

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“the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, […] infinite joy is offered us”

Oh, that… Didn’t you hear? The Evangelists were just the Nigerian internet scammers of their time.

“The doctrines of creation and providence (and their modern Baconian counterparts of the mastery and possession of nature) had taught humanity to believe that it was the crown of creation and the reason for the whole of the natural order. For any natural understanding of things, any understanding of things that recognizes and accepts the hardness of the human condition, these are ruinous doctrines because they are so easy, so welcome, so reassuring, so readily believed: just the things to spoil a child.” (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 110.)

56

ok sure. Talking w puppets.

“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”

–C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

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To be sure, you have to smirch yourself much more badly than by making mud pies in a slum, in order to supposedly get that reward of infinite joy…

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_
When we remove ourselves from our intended path, we remove ourselves from the possibility of a state of constant infinite joy.

Did you have a family religion, growing up?

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Intended by whom?

‘I was raised astrologically.’

60

Correct. You have to say “not me” to weaker/lower desires and “me” to stronger/higher ones … to which you are unaccustomed, though naturally capable of “unlocking to fit”. God forgive/bless this crude analogy… you have to pop your virtue cherry. Lord, take this cup if there is a better analogy lol.