22 July (Fire) Liber LXV, 4:25
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25. For Thou art He! Yea, Thou shalt swallow up Asi and Asar, and the children of Ptah. Thou shalt pour forth a flood of poison to destroy the works of the Magician. Only the Destroyer shall devour Thee; Thou shalt blacken his throat, wherein his spirit abideth. Ah, serpent Apep, but I love Thee!
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25. For Thou art He! Yea, Thou shalt swallow up Asi and Asar, and the children of Ptah. Thou shalt pour forth a flood of poison to destroy the works of the Magician. Only the Destroyer shall devour Thee; Thou shalt blacken his throat, wherein his spirit abideth. Ah, serpent Apep, but I love Thee!
The first part about the ending of the cycle of nature and her transformation: Asi and Asar, and the children of Ptah, which I take to mean the end of generation—of gods and men—in general, seems to be a continuation of the thought from yesterdays selection.
Destroying the works of the magician with poison is clear enough, I think, and has to do with permanently overcoming duality, and echoes again the idea that nature is ended because the belief in an objective universe is transcended. After all, it's all one—god is one.
I find the last part odd, in part because I have gained a certain interpretive momentum from the references to the magician and the end the cycles of death and resurrection—the course of the sun—so that my mind is thinking about very high and remote realities. So the reference to a destroyer is confusing because so much has already been overcome and 'destroyed'—life and death, illusion... And who. I ask myself, now has the temerity to devour Adonai? What can this possibly mean?
It's either something much higher than I have any clue about, or something much lower than I would expect at this juncture of the text. But since I can only speculate about those things I cannot know or understand, that are beyond my understanding, I will focus on the lower end of the spectrum with the idea of grounding my interpretation in something more solid than baseless speculation. As such, I am reminded of a Yogic precept that goes something like this: the mind is the slayer of the real, slay the slayer. So maybe the destroyer is our old friend the Ruach. And it does in fact obscure and destroy Adonai in so much as by its attempts to define and conceive of Adonai it presents a dead thing, lacking all truth. In this light the mind is one of those starving demons from Buddhist mythology that can devour the whole of creation and still be hungry.
The crown of the mind is in Daath/the Abyss, or the throat, wherein his spirit abideth. But look, Adonai as Apep, manages to transform this destroyer, blackening his throat. Daath is the throat of Tree of Life conceived as the body of god, or the divine Adam. The black color is probably a reference to Binah, the acquisition of understanding; after all, poison is a water-based substance; but blackening is the result of fire. So I get an image of the mind being blasted and made black (blank/empty?).
Love and Will