Crowley Calls Bacchus the HGA
-
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
From Notes on an Astral Atlas:
None but Bacchus, the Holy Guardian Angel, hath grace to be God to this riot of maniacs; he alone can transform the disorderly rabble into a pageant of harmonious movements, tune their hyaena howls to the symphony of a paean, and their reasonless rage to self-controlled rapture.
Sad that its taken me this long to take up the Astral; all things in due time, I suppose.
The subject of this thread stuck me, of course. Though I do not intend to remove the quoted passage from its original context, I find the attribution in the statement simple enough to create a topic for discussion.
Has anyone utilized this Greek God and His Imagery in their aspiration towards K&C? Naturally, anyone who has met with any success on this is going to keep the details "close to the chest" (
), but I figured I'd ask and bring this to the attention of any concerned.Love is the law, love under will.
-
Liber LXI
"Should therefore the candidate hear the name of any God, let him not rashly assume that it refers to any known God, save only the God known to himself [...] let him reflect that this is a defect of language; the literary limitation and not the spiritual prejudice of the man P." -
(Av' hit the main point right on target, and...)
Yes - one of the commonly cited characteristics of the K&C of the HGA is ecstasy. Bacchus, at root, is ecstasy.
Thus speaks him once known as Frater Iacchus
-
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
@Jim Eshelman said
"(Av' hit the main point right on target, and...)
Yes - one of the commonly cited characteristics of the K&C of the HGA is ecstasy. Bacchus, at root, is ecstasy.
Thus speaks him once known as Frater Iacchus
"The jist of the passage he quoted from LXI is we are to rely on our own direct experience of what the God-Forms (in this case, Bacchus) represent, that any allegorical office conferred to any folk image is merely utilization of artistic convention, a convenient way to quickly convey very much indeed (a picture speaks a thousand words and all).
Also from Notes for an Astral Atlas:
"The Magician must not accept the Master Therion's account of the Astral Plane, His Qabalistic discoveries, His instructions in Magick. They may be correct in the main for most men; yet they cannot be wholly true for any save Him, even as no two artists can make identical pictures of the same subject.
More, even in fundamentals, though these things be Truth for all Mankind, as we carelessly say, any one particular Magician may be the one man for whom they are false. May not the flag that seems red to ten thousand seem green to some one other? Then, every man and every woman being a Star, that which is green to him is verily green; if he consent to the crowd and call it red, hath he not broken the Staff of Truth that he leaneth upon?"
I have to say then, my own interpretation of Bacchus is not very much one of "bliss" or "ecstasy." The only state he takes on that, to me, infers anything of the sort is as a babe in the virgin womb of Zeus's thigh.
Bacchus was "victim" to a tradition in Crete in which boys were raised as girls were until the time of their puberty. Upon revelation of the truth of his sex, he becomes a mad and drunken conqueror, a seemingly ruthless force of nature, spreading the cult of the vine.
Are there other myths from which you derive your notions of "bliss" and "ecstasy" that I have missed or is this more simply due to his association with wine? I do suppose loss of control could also be analogous with the attributes in question; a sort of "divine madness of the androgyne," if you will.
Love is the law, love under will.
-
Bacchus, at root, is wine and the intoxication thereof; and, by behavior, he is sex and the intoxication thereof.
In a spiritual context, he is spiritual intoxication from wine, sex, and things more subtle of which they are metaphors.
-
Perhaps this is a dumb question:
Have any of the men on her heard the names of female origin on the subject of the HGA; and vice vursa for the women on here? Qadesh is one that came to me. I took it as an influential force, but not, perse, of my HGA. Then, if the HGA is of such an element, I would suppose it surpasses, feminine or masculine in particular.... -
I don't think there is any inherent gender to the HGA apart from that which we require of it. Mine tends to be female because that is the form (as opposed to nature) by which I could comprehend it when the experience occurred. Names are a type of form. The name of an entity gives clue to its nature and allows you to work with it more.
Is what you're saying that you encountered a being who offered the name Qadesh? And wondering whether to attribute that to your HGA or not?
I wouldn't. Merely because we encounter lots of things in the astral, and most of them are not specifically your Angel. And when you encounter it, you will be a lot more certain of its identity than the above question makes you sound.
Back on the subject of Bacchus: I dig that association. There is a very euphoric, intoxicating quality to encounters with the HGA that seems (in hindsight) like being very, happily, drunk...and not caring.
-
"Back on the subject of Bacchus: I dig that association. There is a very euphoric, intoxicating quality to encounters with the HGA that seems (in hindsight) like being very, happily, drunk...and not caring. "
Might I add a feeling of being ina state of child-like, endless wonder and amusement too ?