Ye shall gather store of women .
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There are way too many posts to wade through to get up to speed on this thread, so fuck it. I'm just gonna jump in at the end as if I know everything that has already happened.
the full quote:
"But to love me is better than all things: if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the Serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all in that hour. Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices; ye shall wear rich jewels; ye shall exceed the nations of the earth in splendour & pride; but always in the love of me, and so shall ye come to my joy. I charge you earnestly to come before me in a single robe, and covered with a rich headdress. I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me!"
The list, "Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices; ye shall wear rich jewels; ye shall exceed the nations of the earth in splendour & pride" is hypothetical, and could be anything—store of men, match box cars, mountain climbing achievements, anything.
The important part for me is the injunction that no matter what you do, it must be a devotional act.
It's really not all that different from the advice given by Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna is about to start a war where brother will kill brother and the earth will be left burnt and broken. Arjuna has doubts—can this be the right thing to do? Krishna tells him he was born to be a warrior, that is his true will, so he should do it. The only thing he has to remember is not to lose himself in the act, but in all things, to love Krishna. This is one way of achieving non-attachment, working without lust of result, etc...
The list will be different for every man and every woman.
EDIT: the key for me is the phrase "with a pure heart." How is it possible to have this purity in this world?
Love and Will
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@Alrah said
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@Follower said
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@Middleman said
"Doesn't purity in this case mean 'singularity of intent'? Good thread."Another variant may be perfect balance."
Yet another variant could be a perfectly balanced singularity of intent.
"How big is big? This is the idea behind the 'in the world,' active yoga's—karma, bhakti. Much of The Book of the Law can be viewed as a Thelemic yoga along these lines—do what you gotta do, but do it this way.
Concerns about the political correctness of your actions are misplaced if your actions are unreservedly offered up to the goddess as so many boxes of chocolate and bouquets of flowers. I'm certain she likes flowers!
"...to love me is better than all things..."
So why be content to own the Cadillac for oneself? The real party begins after you sign the title over to her and she invites you back to her place for a drink!
Love and Will
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@Chris Hanlon said
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Crowley was a great poet. His prose sings like music, like an aria.
The goods are the riches and valuables that a woman is in charge of for the household. The head of the house, the châtelain, had the keys for all the storage of valuables of food and other things. Just another allusion to gviing up all for the kiss of Nuit, or the experience of the divine.
Think that's it?
"That helps me a lot. I had thought that it meant that one had to gather women as if women were chattel. This troubled me, and all I could think was to try to forgive some sexist attitude for his time period or something.
"Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices"
So the women are in charge of the goods and the spices, OK, that makes more sense and I feel better about it.
Thank you. -
@AliceNui said
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@Chris Hanlon said
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Crowley was a great poet. His prose sings like music, like an aria.
The goods are the riches and valuables that a woman is in charge of for the household. The head of the house, the châtelain, had the keys for all the storage of valuables of food and other things. Just another allusion to gviing up all for the kiss of Nuit, or the experience of the divine.
Think that's it?
"That helps me a lot. I had thought that it meant that one had to gather women as if women were chattel. This troubled me, and all I could think was to try to forgive some sexist attitude for his time period or something.
"Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices"
So the women are in charge of the goods and the spices, OK, that makes more sense and I feel better about it.
Thank you."But it doesn't make grammatical sense; it's a very strained interpretation. The expression "store of X" has existed for a very long time in the English language, and has always and only meant just what it seems to mean -- a collection of property at one's disposal. In this case, "women and spices" are the property. I wish we could white-wash this and other verses to make them more palatable, but I think we just have to be honest and admit a trace of residual sexism in our holy book.
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"Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices; ye shall wear rich jewels; ye shall exceed the nations of the earth in splendour & pride; but always in the love of me, and so shall ye come to my joy."
Of course, this is symbolic. This is a formula for worshiping Nuit. That's the essential point of this verse. You gather things of value (whether material or not), and then you exchange them for a spiritual blessing. You're transforming potential energy into kinetic energy. You're arousing the coiled serpent.
If we're talking grammar, then the question I have is why the verse says, "store of women" instead of just "women".
The term is probably more common as "store of value". Money, jewels, spices have each been at different times "stores of value" because a large amount of value can be concentrated in a smaller space. However, the actual value is not inherent; it is in what those things can be exchanged for.
If we're following the "store of" line of reasoning, then IMO "store of women" would be something be some concentrated essence of femaleness...
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93 93/93
I love this quote.
"The important part for me is the injunction that no matter what you do, it must be a devotional act.
It's really not all that different from the advice given by Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna is about to start a war where brother will kill brother and the earth will be left burnt and broken. Arjuna has doubts—can this be the right thing to do? Krishna tells him he was born to be a warrior, that is his true will, so he should do it. The only thing he has to remember is not to lose himself in the act, but in all things, to love Krishna. This is one way of achieving non-attachment, working without lust of result, etc...
"There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
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@AvshalomBinyamin said
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If we're talking grammar, then the question I have is why the verse says, "store of women" instead of just "women"."You make it sound as though "grammar" were some exotic and fringe way of interpreting a text
The text of the Book of the Law is undoubtedly symbolic, it has many layers of meaning, and to fixate on the literal meaning of any passage is to miss the point. Nonetheless, to get to the symbolic meaning, you have to understand the literal meaning.Suppose I have an image of a cross. Person A says, "That's a symbol of light," and person B says, "No, it's a symbol of sacrifice," then you have an honest disagreement. But if person C says, "No, that's not a cross; it's a Formula 1 race car" -- well, that person would just be wrong.
I won't express an opinion as to the deeper meaning of "store of women and spices", but I doubt you will find the deeper meaning if you don't start with the surface meaning. These are ordinary English words arranged in an ordinary grammatical sequence, and yield an ordinary meaning -- something like "a collection or warehouse of women and spices that one has at one's disposal". It does not mean "spice that one has given over to the disposal of women" any more than it means "let's make a peanut butter sandwich."
This is important to me because The Book of the Law is my holy book, and I would like to think that all its images and metaphors are in accord with my personal ethical sensibilities, especially when I am presenting the book to somebody else -- but the fact is, they are not, and I have to deal with that. This particular passage bothered me so much, I looked up "store" in the online Oxford English Dictionary -- one of the most reliable and authoritative references for the history of English words and their use -- in hopes that the word had some special meaning that I was not aware of, but it does not. In fact, the phrase "store of (something)" is common enough in the history of English that it had its own little paragraph in the dictionary.
I apologize for going off for so long about something as boring as language, but language is very near and dear to my heart. And for Horus's sake, somebody's got to care! I realize I'm an old fogey and "spelling is defunct" and that thee wave uv thee fyuchur iz 2 hell with speling n' grammer n 2 rite n txt msg stile or like thee timple uv sickick L82r8s. But if you want to understand Crowley's writings, inspired and otherwise, you need to understand his language, which was not the English of the 21st century internet. He was educated in the 19th century and had a preference for the language forged by the poets and scholars of the 16th century. In other words, it was a bit old-fashioned even in his day, and today has to be treated to a certain extent like a foreign language. At any rate, it would pay the earnest Thelemite to learn to read Spencer, the King James Bible, etc., and to practice love under will with a good dictionary.
Okay, I'll shut up now.
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93 93/93
This deserves another post:)
"Wow, froclown, how does that post-Victorian mindset work for your sex life? I have to disagree with your idea of all that women want... I happen to be married to someone who I have never bought jewelry for or anything of any substantial dollar amount for that matter. She pays for all of her own things has her own interests and could probably wipe the floor with you magically and intellectually. You seem to be a full blow misogynist, are you in the closet about your sexuallity or simply trolling this thread? I think you need to get some confidence in your wand. BTW trying out homosexuality can be really fun and enlightening! "
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
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@AliceNui said
"That helps me a lot. I had thought that it meant that one had to gather women as if women were chattel. This troubled me, and all I could think was to try to forgive some sexist attitude for his time period or something.
"Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices""
Or, if it is your true will to be a pimp, the text speaks directly to that.
EDIT: couldn't pass this up...
"Crowley was a great poet."
This is a debatable proposition if ever there was one.Love and Will
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93,
In all this - I just re-read the whole thread - I liked Alrah's suggestion the best:
"If you take the time to try and understand each woman you meet, to mirror their cognition, to reflect upon their nature, to try and see a small part of the Goddess in every woman, and to store each woman in your memory, then the full essence of the Goddess will emerge."
I always took this passage of Liber L to refer to experiences, not possessions. I've simply never had the budget to wear rich jewels, let alone exceed the nations of the earth in splendour and pride on a physical level. So, I take the reference to women to mean experience with, and of, lovers in general, just as 'spices' is a word forming a neat simile for non-sexual, sensual experiences. That would include food, wine, good beer or spirits, fine art or furniture ... and anything that might constitute 'the spice of life.'
Someone who has truly savored and absorbed all the things that come his or her way would then have a particular glow, a notable aura, and would thus seem to 'wear rich jewels.' The most accomplished among such people would 'exceed the nations of the earth in splendour and pride,' and therefore would come closer than most of us to the joy of Nuit.
I just finished re-reading Hesse'sNarziss and Goldmund. Goldmund in the book is like this - he has gone through the world, and savored all it has to offer. His mentor, the ascetic Narziss, recognizes this quality in him, and sees how it enables Goldmund to create the beautiful wooden carvings that are his form of art.
Goldmund is also a devotee of the Mother throughout most of the book.
93 93/93,
Edward -
93 93/93
"I always took this passage of Liber L to refer to experiences, not possessions. I've simply never had the budget to wear rich jewels, let alone exceed the nations of the earth in splendour and pride on a physical level. So, I take the reference to women to mean experience with, and of, lovers in general, just as 'spices' is a word forming a neat simile for non-sexual, sensual experiences. That would include food, wine, good beer or spirits, fine art or furniture ... and anything that might constitute 'the spice of life.'
Someone who has truly savored and absorbed all the things that come his or her way would then have a particular glow, a notable aura, and would thus seem to 'wear rich jewels.' The most accomplished among such people would 'exceed the nations of the earth in splendour and pride,' and therefore would come closer than most of us to the joy of Nuit.
"I am blowed away by this. It just seems soooo right to me
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
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@AliceNui said
"I had thought that it meant that one had to gather women as if women were chattel. "
That's certainly how I like to interpret it.
@AliceNui said
"So the women are in charge of the goods and the spices, OK, that makes more sense and I feel better about it. "
Yep, she looks after the kitchen, I look after the tool shed. Just like the good old days.
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93,
For some reason this makes me think of a part in the Book of Lies:
The Brothers of A.'.A.'. are women, the Aspirants of A.'.A.'. are men.
Something like that anyway. I think it is Cap 3.939393
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93 93/93
@FiliusBestia said
"93,
For some reason this makes me think of a part in the Book of Lies:
The Brothers of A.'.A.'. are women, the Aspirants of A.'.A.'. are men.
Something like that anyway. I think it is Cap 3.939393"
Well, the MAAT is a woman and the Magus is a man...
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt
