Sacrifice
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There has been a thread here on animal sacrifice. I am wondering about sacrifices in magick rituals in general and how you people see it.
What is the thought behind sacrifices? Is it some sort of balancing out the energies? If you dont give anything in return, will something be taken from you? How to know what to sacrifice in a specific ritual? Would the lack of it make the request fail?
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Chapter XII of Magick in Theory and Practice answers this question quite well.
Dan
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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The most long term and sometimes hardest sacrifice is the amount of personal energy devoted to the Great Work. (Not being sure of your intention or goal with this question and therefor assuming that we are talking about long term development.) Personally and so far I have found that the more I change my life according to the vector that most definitely appears to be my true Will the more potent even the smallest practices become.
" Thou shalt drain out thy blood that is thy life into the golden cup of her fornication.
Thou shalt mingle thy life with the universal life. Thou shalt keep not back one drop."Knocking at the gates of Pyramid City or not. For me personally, this is a good pointer for progression.
Love is the law, Love under Will.
A
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Apophis, it is a quite open question. Interesting...I can relate to what you are saying. The more you are in line with the true Will ,the more potent outcomes or? I have made and is in the middle of making changes over time now..and it seems to awaken intuition, dreams and the feeling of being given what you need to get further. But, when obstacles arise its not always easy to know whether to fight or let go...often ending up wasting energy on negative feelings.
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That is how I see things. Not being an Adept I cant say I KNOW.
I think it helps seeing obstacles as lessons. Friction will occur until the vector is perfectly adjusted to true will.
The sacrifice in this being persistence. Even something that seems like a personal cataclysm might bring magnificent things in the end.
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@Apophis said
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I think it helps seeing obstacles as lessons. Friction will occur until the vector is perfectly adjusted to true will. "Very true. The best sort of education is accomplished through suffering.
As far as animal sacrifice in concerned, Liber Legis is very clear:
"Nor do I demand ought in sacrifice."
I don't have the book with me, so I can't assure the veracity of the quote or the verse, but that's the gist of it.
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I've been meditating a lot of sacrifice recently. I discovered that AL I:44 seems to describe what I now call sacrifice pretty well:
"For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect. "
Full of purpose, with no desire for result. Acting (or giving) without any hope of getting something in return. I see this in turn with Heru-Ra-Ha's dual nature: action (Ra-Hoor-Khuit), and then stillness (Hoor-Paar-Kraat). Pouring forth light, and then perfect silence, allowing whatever results may come to come without expectation or judgment. In other words, to me, "sacrifice" and Love are the same thing. Love under Will.
"If you don't give anything in return, will something be taken from you?"
The Tao Te Ching points out "Great hoarding ends in great loss. Love is the fruit of sacrifice. Wealth is the fruit of generosity". St. Francis said "For it is in giving that we receive." I say that if you try to hoard oxygen, without ever breathing out, you will die. I think breathing is a great metaphor for life.
"How to know what to sacrifice in a specific ritual?"
I think that's a great question. I could expand the question by asking how to know what to give at any specific time? I don't know what kind of an answer you're looking for, but I suspect that the answer to this one lies within your true will. We "know" what is the correct thing to do in any given situation through our true will. How to access that? I don't know, but I think being radically honest with yourself helps.
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To Sacrifice means to make sacred (that's the actual meaning of the word). It is only in this sense that the word should be used in connection with Thelema.
Sacrifice in the sense of surrendering something valuable has no place in Thelema except in one very specific instance which most of us will never encounter in our current incarnations.
Dan
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@ar said
"Sacrifice in the sense of surrendering something valuable has no place in Thelema except in one very specific instance which most of us will never encounter in our current incarnations."
I disagree, T. Sacrifice has deep and profound place in Thelema, especially in the sense of surrendering something valuable.
Its key element, though, is that it is surrendering something precious for something even more precious (though perhaps not previously understood as such). - I was going to write about this in response to the original question, but passed on the opportunity because proper attention to it would require discussion of its relationship to attachment, surrender, valuation, and other related topics... and I just don't have the time to compose that essay properly.
Liber Legis gives some clues, though. Your p.o.v. is perhaps best reflected in Nuit's statement that (seems to say that) She requires no sacrifice. But the word "sacrifice" appears one time in each chapter of Liber L. It has something a little different to say each time.
One might also say that Thelema particularly abandons (as impractical and silly) the most common category of sacrifice, which is that particular form of bargaining that pays a stupidly high price for free merchandise. Aleister Crowley's life was perhaps the best example of this, since he started the path by offering all of his health, wealth, love, etc. if only he would attain fully. Whatever gods heard this were quite happy to accept the donation and provide him with what he asked for... which, however, could have been his without paying the price. (There remains only the question of whether his psyche was so constituted that he could have accepted the deal without paying the consideration. I suspect there were karmic elements at play in his case.)